Still March 2019 On Wednesday I went to a Halle Orchestra rehearsal in the afternoon, – from 1400 to 1645 – a perk of giving them some money on a regular base. The conductor was a young Brit called Jamie Phillips, who seems to be gathering a reputation working with regional German and French orchestras and the pieces being rehearsed were a new trombone concerto piece by John Casken, a local Manchester composer, and Prokofiev’s 5th symphony. This was I think the final rehearsal, so bits of the works were being focused on and I can’t really say anything much about the Casken piece, as I didn’t really hear enough of it – though what I did hear showed me how much better Salonen was as an orchestrator – even though the Casken piece had probably more percussion pieces and players, the sonorities were much less interesting. I was struck – never having been to a professional orchestra rehearsing before – by how tough the conductor’s job is: listening to the orchestra, picking up not just the technical mistakes (someone’s come in a bar too early), but also issues of phrasing and volume, plus having to manage the relationship with the orchestra and project a collegiate but dominant presence (based on knowing exactly how you want the piece to go, and being able to respond to every orchestral query on phrasing and dynamics immediately – plus, in your own time, working out the tempi relationships in the work, and what you want to bring out in terms of orchestral colour when it’s not obvious). Impressive…..They didn’t really play much of the second movement of the Prokofiev; I thought the finale was too fast in the basic tempo he set, and he was then getting a bit agitated with the percussion at the end ( there’s an enormous battery of percussion at the end, a terrible automotive sound). The problem was in the speed he wanted it played at, I thought, which meant that the percussionists were having to sacrifice noise for accuracy and getting all the semi demi quavers in.
I was very saddened by Andre Previn’s death this week. I have great memories of him in the early to mid-70’s. I particularly treasure – I think I’ve said this before – his performance of Walton 1 and also the first uncut recording of Rachmaninov’s 2nd Symphony, which I also seem to remember going to in a live performance. I don’t think I ever saw him conduct after that time – a pity, as, from the obituaries, he seems to have done some excellent work with the VPO on Richard Strauss, and even conducted a Bruckner cycle – the last person I would have associated with Bruckner. I suspect I always put him a bit in a box – as the snooty comments of the critics put it, recorded in the obituaries – as a ‘first rate conductor of second-rate music’, which probably does fit his attachment to Walton but is inappropriate for a whole lot else. He was clearly someone both amazingly talented and able to shine in many different spheres in his life – and how extraordinary to start off in Weimar Germany in 1929 and end up as a global citizen.
I went to Katya Kabanova last Thursday – an Opera North show at Salford Lowry theatre. The only other time I’ve seen this opera live was in the 70’s – Josephine Barstow and Charles Mackerras (of course a Janacek specialist) – at the ENO, where it made a big impression. 40’ish years on – and though I have the famous Mackerras recording with Soderstroem and the VPO, and listen to it off and on – I was less impressed by the work as a whole, listening and watching it live. The story essentially concerns a dominating mother-in-law, the Kabanicha, a weak son, who’s married to Katya, the son’s foster sister, who’s perkier, and her boyfriend, plus a dominating merchant called Dikoy, and his nephew, Boris, who falls in love with Katya. Katya essentially has an affair with Boris and then goes mad with guilt, and ends her life as an outcast from the community. There are strange echoes of Peter Grimes, though I cannot think either Britten or Montagu Slater could have known the work, as it wasn’t performed in the UK until 1951 – an outcast and individualist against a small, provincial, petty-minded community, people coming out of church, a mad scene towards the end, an offstage chorus as part of that mad scene…..I think the combination of production (the director was Tim Albery), the length of the work and some of the singers somehow didn’t quite gel.. What really makes Katya Kabanova worth going to see is the quirky, often wonderful music – based on the tonal modulations, the melodic curves of the Czech language. In fact, that was another problem with the performance – it was being sung in English, which sometimes sounded a bit stilted, and would probably have been better off with Czech and surtitles. The music is not a set of straightforward tunes, or even through-composed with leitmotifs in the way of Wagner or R Strauss – musical ideas come and go, glint and vanish, but there are a few which recur, without necessarily having ‘meaning‘ attached to them, which are very haunting. There are also some folk music elements. The attached youtube link gives a sense of all this in the music – it’s the Prelude.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7gASnXyskI . The second scene in Act 2, where the lovers finally meet, is particularly beautiful. In the performance on Thursday, the Opera North orchestra, under Sian Edwards, was a bit scratchy, though that might have been because of where I was sitting (side stalls). The director and designer had updated the work to the 1920’s – fine, that worked OK, though without adding a lot. The set was basically a wallpapered box, with a square hole in the middle, that provided the space to a ‘beyond’ – that became a little unvaried after a while. The main problem, I thought, was the structure of the work – it’s only an hour and three quarters of music and in this production was played without a break. If you think La Boheme involves speed dating in the first Act, this work trebles the speed! The romance between Boris and Katya all happens ridiculously fast in the opera, and means Boris is scarcely sketched out as a character. There’s more of Katya, but I am afraid I was unimpressed by the singer, Stephanie Corley. Her voice was quite ‘tight’, and didn’t seem to have the flexibility to provide colour and nuance, while she seemed too cool and sober as a person on stage – and too much waving of her arms about to compensate (one of the first rules of acting – keep your arms at your side and don’t whirl them around). She also had some problems with the top notes in the role. The best portrayal and singing was by Stephen Richardson, as the evil merchant, Dikoy, and he had both stature and a big bass voice – he reminded me of John Tomlinson. The Masetto/Zerlina- like characters were also very good – and the Kabanicha was magnificently evil! I think too there was a bit of a failure of direction. Katya’s focus is essentially on ‘sin’, the ‘sin’ of having an adulterous affair. Now, while sin might mean something to me, as a Christian, it’s essentially a fairly meaningless word to most people, and therefore the drama lacked credibility. The director should have been seeking to address this problem – if for instance he had made Boris more exploitative in his relation with Katya, then that might have provoked more sympathy in the audience for Katya. As it was, it became a period drama, a thing of its time, rather than something which speaks to us and our problems, directly. However, it has to be said that some of the published reviews were a good deal more enthusiastic about the show than I have been. Though there are no subtitles, it seems to me that the current Opera Vision version from Naples, with an all-Czech cast, might be better – though I have only just glanced at it. Certainly, the set looks more effective, in representing an oppressive present and a ‘beyond’.
Two days later I went to the St John Passion at Sheffield Cathedral. This was a local performance I don’t know of many more unsettling openings to any piece of music than the echoing oboes, and anxious tread of the strings in the opening chorus, with the shouts of ‘Herr’ from the Chorus. I have always thought – not that I have listened to it straight through that much – that St John’s Passion was a bit of an also-ran besides the Bach Matthew Passion, and it doesn’t have any absolute show-stoppers on the scale of ‘Erbarme Dich’. But it’s got, I found listening to it live, many moments of beauty and interest and I thoroughly enjoyed the performance. The Sheffield Bach Choir, singing in English (with the congregation allowed to sing along in the chorales), was, as far as I could tell in the rather muddy but also flattering acoustics of the Cathedral, excellent, as was the orchestra. The soloists were a mixed bunch, the best being a baritone originally from Uganda, Terence Ayebare, and a very good soprano, Philippa Hyde, who’s got quite an impressive track record of international as well as UK work. A few years ago, going to Leipzig, I heard a Bach cantata in St Thomas’ Church on Saturday in the early afternoon before a concert, and, being there on a Sunday, I went along to the morning service at St Thomas’. I found the whole experience of being in THAT church, and being there for a service, to be very moving….there was the boys choir (whom of course in his time Bach was responsible for), the Lutheran chorale tunes dating from the 17th and 18th century, the interplay between the professionally trained choir and the congregation; all of this amounted to a contemporary illustration of how Bach’s cantatas and passions might have worked, and all those German words – erbarmen, ewigkeit – which play such a big role in Bach’s works resounded throughout the service. I resolved that if I was ever going to learn German I would buy Luther’s Bible as something to work through. Somehow, I really felt the presence of the master in that place, and just felt out of this world about it. I have to say I liked Leipzig, which is, much more than nearby Dresden, a city that lives up to your clichéd expectations of what a German city should be like. There’s a famous bierkeller (referenced in Goethe’s Faust, where Auerbach’s bk is one of the places where Mephistopheles tempts Faust); there are fine old buildings in the German style (rathaus and so forth); the city makes a big thing of its famous orchestra – it’s all over city centre billboards – and there’s numerous street bratwurst sellers. Very different from the rather depressing Dresden. I went to a very good chamber concert in the excellent Bach Museum on the Sunday afternoon – and afterwards ate a remarkable concoction of meat, beer, potatoes, dumplings, sauerkraut, mushrooms, and berries at the aforesaid bierkeller. Going back to Sheffield, I do think, as I have said before, that there is a rich tradition of amateur choral singing in the UK, enabling large-scale choral works to be put on in Cathedrals and concert halls in towns up and down the country with professionals and not very much full-line-up rehearsal time, which is really something to be celebrated.
I also went to another cinema showing – this time Walkure from the Met. I enjoyed iy very much Despite the history of critical grumblings, mainly I think on account of the noise ‘the machine’ has made in the past, I thought the basic set was quite effective – and at least ensures the stage doesn’t have masses of symbolic clutter as at Covent Garden (though I also think that the ROHCG end of Act 3 and the Magic Fire there is one of the great coups de theatre I have seen in recent years, and much better than the Met’s version). The costumes were for the most part OK, though I do think the head ‘wings for the Valkyries were a bit silly. Where I think the CG production was much better was in the time and attention Keith Warner had clearly given to working with the artists in their roles, and ensuring they acted credibly. Other than Eva-Marie Westbroek, who I think is a very different quantity when you see as well as hear her, and who I thought was fantastic as a singing actress, whatever niggles one might have about her voice, only Christine Goerke and Jamie Barton really tried to portray their character on stage with any real insight. There was too much routine sword and spear waving and semaphore acting. Wotan was a bit of a cypher, SS was going through the motions acting wise, and Hunding was fairly neutral as well, using that silly leer overmuch rather than acting through presence and voice. I did think there were some special moments on stage though – Wotan’s farewell to Siegmund at the very end of Act 2 was very well done, I thought, and also Wotan and Brunnhilde’s goodbye to each other was more than usually moving on stage. SS was having problems with moving – getting up from a prone position looked a bit like someone with stiff knees in their 60’s – but I don’t think there are that many Siegmund’s who have phrased as sensitively as he does at several moments in Act 1 – I was reminded of Remedios. I thought Gunther Grossboeck was very good indeed, vocally, and could be a fantastic Wotan (it sounds as though Bayreuth are signing up several Wotans – Ian Paterson has also been reported to have been offered Wotan in 2020). Christine Goerke I heard at ROHCG in Turandot in 2017 and I thought she was excellent, with some sensitive thoughtful phrasing, and also more thinking than usual going into Brunnhilde’s ‘teens’ (as she put it) behaviour in this opera. Greer Grimsley I thought was good – an untiring voice – but I thought he was a bit bland; very little variation in tone, and very little meaningful reaction to other characters on stage. From a cinematic perspective, his eye patch and long hair meant that he couldn’t really use his face expressively, even if he wanted to. But I would want to stress that all of the above is fairly minor criticism of something that one’s just profoundly grateful for seeing, and especially seeing in the cinema live……the Met Orchestra I thought was superb but Philippe Jordan’s reading seemed a bit episodic at times; things speeded up and slowed down a bit illogically, and there were a couple of times when I thought he was going too fast, particularly in Act 1 . I think part of the Wotan soliloquy in Act 2 was cut in the Met version – there’s some text about Alberich and the armies of the night that I don’t think I caught on Saturday
John's musical journey 