February 2020

February 2020 – still oblivious of the impending lockdown and of months without live music, I went to the Halle’s performance of Beethoven 9 with Mark Elder conducting. I thought the finale was super, but the slow movement was, I thought, too fast and the first two movements neither had the energy or the power they should have ideally done. But the Halle Choir etc sang brilliantly, and the orchestra played extremely well. Overall it was a good evening with some Beethoven rarities in the first half. I was listening the other day to a Beethoven 9 conducted by Furtwangler – the one that opened the Bayreuth Festival in 1951 – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dHDXdbSWu0E. Furtwangler is the only conductor I have EVER heard getting a slow enough tempo for the slow movement – it is marked ‘adagio molto’ but no-one seems to perform it like that. He’s an interesting case study in how art can never be ultimately divorced from politics – he tried to remain apolitical in Nazi Germany, but only succeeding in compromising himself (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2itdv1aEpG4   ). Of course he was in frequent conflict with Goebbels, personally rescued from certain death a number of Jewish people by calling in favours with 3rd Reich bigwigs, and in no way was a card-carrying Nazi (unlike, famously, I read, Karajan and Schwarzkopf) but nonetheless his continuing presence was an important positive point for the regime….He was lucky in the timing of his de-Nazification trial, which was when the Cold War was beginning to bite, and the Americans needed ‘solid’ Germans in the West. Reggie Goodall, who conducted the ENO Ring in the 70’s, was of course was a member of the British Union of Fascists before the war, and I believe was briefly interned as an enemy of the state in 1939 – it seems to me that people shouldn’t be demonised for their political beliefs, but one should know where they are coming from, and what that might mean in terms of their approach to the music. In the case of Furtwangler, right-wing views combined with a tendency to arrogance and not to listen to the views of fellow musicians, perhaps, and also to idealise one particular musical tradition – Bach, Beethoven, Brahms – at the expense of others. With Reggie, I am less sure…….And, of course, that’s a whole debate in relation to Wagner himself, but that perhaps is for another time…..

On Feb 27^th I had a lovely day – I saw my two grandsons in the morning in Sale, had a long lunch with an old friend in Manchester which went on till about 6pm, then went to a Halle Beethoven concert and finally, before getting the train back home, bumped into an old British Council colleague, Andrea, who’s a member of the Halle Choir, in the Briton’s Protection pub. The concert was the Halle performing Beethoven 8 with Ben Gernon conducting, and Mark Elder conducting Act 2 of Fidelio with an all-star line up of Simon O’Neill  – true heldentenor sound  0 as Florestan, Brindley Sherratt as Rocco, and Rachel Nicholls as Leonore, Rachel Nicholls, who gave us a talk a couple of years ago at the Wagner Society, was a wonderful Leonore, her powerful voice soaring across the Bridgewater Hall – it was altogether a very powerful 50 minutes or so and I rated it very highly