Schoenberg, String Quartet No 1 in D minor op. 7; Beethoven, String Quartet No. 14 in C-sharp minor op. 131. Belcea Quartet

 It’s been raining for most of the day and I still have two whole days after this one for touristy stuff before evening performances. So I wandered around and went only to the Cathedral – massive and ornate white and gold Rococo as you might expect – and Mozart’s birthplace, which is obviously a tourist trap of a major kind but doing its best to be serious for those interested. I was particularly struck by the large oil portrait of Constanze, dating to 1802, showing a very determined lady who managed Mozart’s posthumous reputation and documents very well – see photo below. And I had forgotten that her husband, von Nissen, eventually wrote the first biography of Mozart with all sorts of help from his wife. A pity that it doesn’t appear to be available in English currently.

And so on to Schoenberg and Beethoven – a very serious programme……….And I hadn’t realised that Schoenberg had actually written 4 quartets – I know the one with the voice, but this is the first time I have ever heard Op 7.

I should mention first something about Salzburg dress codes, or lack of them, incidentally. I was told beforehand that the Festival was much more formal than Bayreuth. In fact at the Weinberg opera there were a few DJ’s but a lot of the men were wearing dark suits. I was wearing suit trousers and an open necked white shirt and so were a few other other men, so there was some variety, thank goodness, and I didn’t feel conspicuous. But at this concert – inevitable perhaps given its content – anything was OK: there was a guy in tennis shirt and shorts, lots of short sleeve shirts, Hawaii shirts, a guy with a baseball hat and some in jeans. Good!!……………..Unfortunately the other inevitability of this concert was the curse of Schoenberg on the box office – the downstairs part of the Grosse Saal was full but the upstairs ‘Rang’ was empty. Nevertheless those who were there were very vocal in their appreciation.

The Schoenberg piece is one of his pre-atonal works, and in fact it has a very identifiable main theme at the beginning that is subject to umpteen transitions, variations and changes in the course of 40 minutes or so (I originally wrote slow – Freudian slip). I had read that it had 4 movements but got lost fairly on. It is an extraordinary piece – there are elements that sound like Mahler, others sounding like Brahms, there’s certainly some Viennese pop dance music, but all mixed up in a whirl of intersecting instruments that make it sound quite as dense as the Pelleas I heard 4 weeks ago at the Proms. I just couldn’t get the emotional narrative here, and yet I felt there probably was one – with a peaceful – or numb – ending.

The first movement of the Beethoven is almost as dense as the Schoenberg – it sounded startlingly modern in this reading – but what the Beethoven has is a clear – well, pick-upable – narrative trajectory: from sadness to humdrum daily routine, to (after a prelude) a core 4^th movement that copes with suffering, moves us to a joyful 5^th movement, and after a turn-around 6^th movement prelude, ends in toughness, some grief but also resilience and hope. I thought the Belcea Quartet played it very well indeed – more characterful than Ensemble 360 in Sheffield – but I did think, from a quibbly point of view, that they took the 5^th movement too fast, so that notes got elided.

So enthusiastic was the audience response that there was an encore – the wonderful 3^rd movement – ‘Solo’ – of Britten’s 3^rd Quartet, with what sounds like the flutterings of a soul released from earthly life

Brilliant concert………….

Oleg Ptashnikov, replacing Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla Conductor; Krzysztof Warlikowski Director; Małgorzata Szczęśniak Sets and Costumes; Felice Ross Lighting; Kamil Polak Video; Claude Bardouil Choreography. Bogdan Volkov, Prince Lev Nikolayevich Myshkin; Ausrine Stundyte, Nastasya Filippovna Barashkova ; Vladislav Sulimsky,  Parfyon Semyonovich Rogozhin; Iurii Samoilov, Lukyan Timofeyevich Lebedev; Clive Bayley, Ivan Fyodorovich Yepanchin, general; Margarita Nekrasova.  Yelizaveta Prokofyevna Yepanchina, his wife; Xenia Puskarz, Aglaya Ivanovna Yepanchina; Jessica Niles, Alexandra Ivanovna Yepanchina; Pavol Breslik; Gavrila (Ganya) Ardalionovich Ivolgin. Herren der Konzertvereinigung Wiener Staatsopernchor; Vienna Philharmonic

This is only the 3rd production in this work’s history, apparently, at least in the West, though web sources mention performances at the Bolshoi and Marinsky Theatres as well.  There was also a reduced orchestra theatre performance in 1991 in Moscow while Weinberg was still alive but the first full premiere was not given until 2013 in Mannheim National Theatre under the musical direction of Thomas Sanderling. The Austrian premiere took place in April 2023 at the Theatre an der Wien in Vienna, and now we have this Salzburg production by Krzysztof Warlikowski and under the musical direction of Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (though she was ill for this performance, and the conductor was her musical assistant in this production)

The story takes on only certain parts of the Dostoyevsky narrative and focuses on a quartet of four people – Prince Myshkin, who suffers from epilepsy, and is Christ-like; the dark-eyed beauty Nastasya, who Myshkin loves unreservedly. His love for her forces the upright Myshkin into a relationship with his rival for Nastasya, the rough Parfion Rogozhin, a rich merchant’s son. At the same time Myshkin is held in deep affection by Aglaya, the youngest daughter of the Yepanchins, but to whom he is unable to engage in real commitment. In Pavlovsk, Nastasya gives her seemingly irrevocable commitment to the prince, but flees to Petersburg and marries Rogozhin. In the end Rogozhin stabs Nastasya and kills her. Myshkin finds Roghozhin lying aside the dead Nastasya and strokes Rogozhin’s head.

Let me say first I felt thrilled to be at what was essentially the first ever major international set of performances of this major work, with singers like Volkov and Stundyte, and with the Vienna Philharmonic in tow – a remarkable evening. And I do think it IS a major work. The music doesn’t have arias (nor in a sense does Mussorgsky) but does have motifs. It has a huge range of expression and musical devices – ostinato rhythms, thunderous climaxes, tolling bells, lyrical moments, and some folk song. It doesn’t have hummable tunes on first hearing but it is very accessible. The most important points for me were that 1. It is absolutely gripping and immersive (on the much shorter Part 2 see below); 2, although Weinberg composed massive amounts of music for films and even children’s cartoons, this is not a film score with voices – it is a properly thought-through opera with voices and orchestra working together as equals. For the life of me I cannot understand why this is less of an important work than anything by Tippett, or Henze or others in the 2^nd half of the 20^th century. Very little of it sounds derivative. It has to be said it is a long evening – maybe 3 hours and 20 minutes of music, and could maybe do with a bit of judicious cutting in the 2^nd half: I was left shattered by the first half, which was two hours, but the last hour has some domestic moments at the Yepanchins that dragged a bit, and maybe a bit less of Aglaya’s stress would also have helped. But this is for the future – on such an occasion this HAD to be performed complete. One wonders – and this might be part of the compulsiveness of the score – whether Weinberg unconsciously self-identified a bit with Myshkin; by all accounts he was an unworldly figure, who accepted even his temporary imprisonment in the late 1940’s with seemingly good grace, and remained eternally grateful to the Soviet Union and the Red Army for taking him in to the USSR when the Germans invaded Poland in 1939 (he was the only member of his Jewish Polish family left alive after the war)

There is a good deal of flummery and rather high-falutin’ gnomic talk in Warlikowski’s account of his production in the programme booklet, but for me the important points were that it involved brilliant stage craft, clear story-telling, utterly convincing personen-regie and clever updating.  The production has to take account of the enormous width of the Felsenreitchule stage (I knew about the size of the Grosse Festspielhaus stage, built into the rock cliff, but this is just as enormous), and did this cleverly by having three acting areas across the stage, with some aspects of those areas being able to move from one area to another (like the train seats near the beginning). The setting is moved from Tsarist Russia to contemporary Putin era Moscow and St Petersburg, and this allows Rogozhin and his circle to be seen as oligarchs. But this is not overdone, and simply updates what is already there in the story. Despite its enormous size, the theatre is kind to voices so it was perfectly possible to hear the singers wherever they were positioned. The acting areas included a kind of bar area, extreme stage right, a bedroom / reception area associated with Nastasya, stage right. What was essentially the Yepanchins home, centre stage and slightly stage left, and a sort of waiting room/park area stage left. This is the trailer The Idiot • Salzburg Festival 2024 (salzburgerfestspiele.at)  which gives a further idea of the sets. It will be interesting to see how Peter Sellars deals with this space on Tuesday. A curious aspect of the area just slightly stage left is a whiteboard with various equations on it – I think this is meant to suggest Myshkin’s otherness, and an inability to be as others are – for good or ill, but I could be wrong. This is really the only bit of Warlikowski’s production that I’d call gnomic.

Bogdan Volkov as Myshkin was an immensely impressive high tenor with the power to fill this huge auditorium yet able to convey the sadness and isolation of this unworldly figure; Ausrine Stundyte was outstanding (and of course back in January she was a very impressive Elektra with ROHCG) and dramatically compelling as Nastasya, while Vladislav Sulimsky was an ideal dark-sounding Russian-style bass as Rogozhin.  Xenia Puskarz was very good as Aglaya, though maybe more differentiation between the sound of her and Stundyte’s voices might have been helpful – however that’s a casting issue, and nothing to do with the singing. Orchestra and chorus were wonderful

This was a great and inspiring evening. I have been exploring Weinberg’s symphonies and quartets for some time now, and to hear this opera is to offer exciting possibilities for further exploration. I really must go to ‘The Passenger’ somewhere soon – it can be quite frequently seen in Germany and Austria, according to Operabase

Mozart: Six German Dances K. 509; Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major K. 364; Divertimento for strings in F major K. 138; Symphony in D major, ’Paris’ K. 297. Clara-Jumi Kang, violin; Timothy Ridout, viola. Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, Andrew Manze Conductor

This was a nicely balanced programme with several work of Mozart’s earlier years (one a masterpiece – the Sinfonia Concertante) and the German Dances.

As far as I can work out, this orchestra is a subset of a larger Salzburg regional orchestra, and their strings have a traditional Austro-German sweetness and rich warmth of sound, Though I could be doing them disservice, nothing I could see or hear suggested in their Mozart guise this is a period instrument band, and I suspect they have probably been playing Mozart in much the same way for a very long time. The acoustic of the hall is quite a lively one – the sound is almost overwhelming when the trumpets, horns and timpani pile into the orchestral texture. I thought that Andrew Manze did very well to keep the textures of these works clear and not muddied, so you can hear the underlying shifts in harmony – helped by splitting the violins, and also to keep these works at speeds which makes them animated but  without the gabble that that sometimes mean. I thought he did a very good job with an orchestra that probably seems them come and go all the time.

The Sinfonia Concertante, which is by far the best of these pieces, was particularly effective. The two soloists were obviously listening closely to each other and responding to each other’s intuitions. The slow movement in particular was treasurable  

Schubert: Piano Sonata in G major D. 894; Die schöne Müllerin – Song cycle, D. 795. Julian Prégardien Tenor, András Schiff Pianoforte
…..and so, on to Salzburg, neither the Festival nor indeed the city of which I have ever visited before, after the sadly usual rail chaos (train arriving late in Munich so missed my scheduled train, got another one which sat at the station until it was announced to have a defect….anyway I’m here)
Andras Schiff, always one for spoken introductions, introduced his piano, which was an 1828 model from Vienna – ie made in the year of Schubert’s death and therefore having the sort of piano sound he would have been used to. That sound is much lighter and flexible, less clangy and allows for an extraordinary lightness of touch.
Before getting down to playing D894 Schiff played two openers, both I think from Schubert’s repertoire of dance music, one of which featured a Hungarian tune (as Schiff pointed out). The excellent biography of Schubert by Lorraine Bodley I am reading at present describes how important dance music was both to his pocket -that was where a lot of his income came from – and his friendship group/social circle and I reflected during this excellent performance how much of Schubert’s other work derives from dance rhythms and styles. His piano sonatas also include elements from the improvisatory aspect of Schubert’s musical life – as I listened to D894 you could hear that move towards improvisation in how the music moved forwards. There was in Schiff’s performance an extraordinary delicacy which he / the piano created in the middle part of the slow movement and the whole of the third. Using the piano for this work doesn’t bring you grandeur in the first movement but it does give extra shade and colour to other parts – it was a very different experience to listening to Paul Lewis on a concert grand just over 6 weeks ago; this performance was lighter, more lilting. I loved it…………………..
I know Die Schoene Mullerin fairly well as a work though I’ve not heard many live performances. Although I haven’t come across his name before Pregordien is clearly a major figure in the Austro-German musical world, inhabiting what one might call the ‘Peter Schreier repertory’ – Mozart tenors, Evangelists and lieder. That the performance was technically excellent goes without saying, and it was lovely to hear the work again. I have to say though that I found Pregordien’s approach a bit mannered, with exaggerated dynamics – at times only the front 3 rows could have heard exactly what he was singing. He also at times went into a falsetto voice I disliked. Interestingly, he was also adding a lot of grace notes to some of the songs which I didn’t recognise from my Fischer-Dieskau recording, whether this is historically informed performance practice or a new critical edition, I’m not sure. Curiously the haunting last song was almost jaunty in tempo. Still, these are minor quibbles
The Stiftung Mozarteum Grosse Saal is a nice auditorium but very cramped to get in and out of – I wouldn’t like to be caught in the hall with the fire alarm sounding (or an urgent need for the loo for that matter)

Conductor, Nathalie Stutzmann; Director, Tobias Kratzer; Stage design, Rainer Sellmaier; Costumes, Rainer Sellmaier; Lighting, Reinhard Traub; Video, Manuel Braun. Landgraf Hermann, Günther Groissböck; Tannhäuser, Klaus Florian Vogt; Wolfram von Eschenbach, Markus Eiche; Walther von der Vogelweide, Siyabonga Maqungo; Elisabeth, Elisabeth Teige; Venus. Irene Roberts

This is one of those Bayreuth productions that has gone from being universally execrated on first appearance to being a loved and memorable production for many in the space of 5 years (how universally loved it is in Bayreuth was clear from the number of curtain calls – far more than for Tristan and Parsifal – and no boos). However from a distance, carping continues – a recent well-known commentator on Wagner giving a talk I heard was expostulating on the outrage of this production, as he saw it, committed on the work ‘Tannhauser’ and how it was full of black lesbians……(???!!! -sic) – of course, he hadn’t seen it

This was a very good but not one of the very best Wagner productions I have ever seen – it’s not completely up there with the Bayreuth Kosky Meistersinger from 7 years ago, for instance, or even that very fine Alden Lohengrin at ROHCG. I’ll explain why later, but the basic premise of the production is to replace the Wartburg / Venusberg dichotomy of the opera with one that involves the actual Bayreuth Festival performing the opera ‘Tannhauser’ on the one hand, and on the other a group of anarchic travelling players/musicians including Heinrich Tannhauser and Venus, Oskar, the small drum-wielding person from the novel The Tin Drum, and the black drag queen Le Gateau Chocolat, who together tour Germany in a camper van.  Tannhauser is an out of work opera singer. The evening not only involves three acts of the opera but also an Act 1 interval cabaret show with Le Gateau Chocolat, Venus and Oscar down by the lake in the Festspielhaus Gardens, where LGC among other things sings Ol’ Man River and Dich Teurer Halle………….

The production uses the Dresden version of the score, I assume because it fits better with the video element that plays such an important part of the production.  The first two acts are a triumph in terms of rethinking the opera. Half way though the overture we fly over the Wartburg in a video and as the Venusberg music starts we see a camper van speeding along an empty country road, with Heinrich dressed as a clown, Venus. Oscar and Le Gateau Chocolat . As the overture  and Venusberg music continues, they stop at a Burger King and to siphon off ie steal some petrol from a garage.  Accidentally they knock over a security guard while stealing the petrol. Heinricb is unsettled. When they stop in a kitsch rest area with elves around them to have their meal, to put on their Burger King paper crowns, and to put up some revolutionary posters quoting from Wagner’ essay on Revolution. (Free in willing, free in doing, free in enjoying),  Heinrich decides to leave. He finds himself deposited near the Festspielhaus, in the gardens, and sees the pilgrims passing by (who are visitors to the Festspielhaus performance we are attending……!). He then meets (we are now into the opera proper) some of his old colleagues from the opera house and joins an upcoming very traditional production of Tannhauser. He also sees someone who is obviously his ex-girl friend who will be singing Elisabeth. She slaps his face!

In Act 2, we see at the beginning a video of what’s happening back stage as Elizabeth makes up and prepares to go on stage. Heinrich is late but eventually appears. During most of Act 2 the stage is split – the upper half is the video screen, the lower half the opera stage and 1950s style production, which we the audience are actually watching. As the crowd marches in on stage for the song contest we see via video Venus and Co slipping into the Festspielhaus, first of all to put up a poster as in the photo below and then to go backstage. Venus joins the female chorus, creating mayhem in the process. In the meantime there is brewing tension between Elizabeth’s other boyfriend, the singer playing Wolfram, and Heinrich. The opera proper and play within a play become impossibly confused….eventually Le Gateau Chocolat and Oscar start disrupting what’s going on on stage and we see a video of Katherina Wagner calling the police. All the disrupters ate arrested though not before LGC drapes a gay pride flag over the onstage harp.

So far so brilliant. The third act takes place in a junk yard where Oscar is seen making a solitary meal on his camper stove outside the now derelict looking camper van. LGC has left them and we see a huge billboard with his picture advertising expensive looking watches. Wolfram comes on looking for Heinrich, who has disappeared, and he ends up having sex with Elizabeth (who’s also out looking for Heinrich). The pilgrims passing by are essentially scavengers and go off holding various auto parts. Tannhauser comes on, a ragged dishevelled figure, totally an outsider, and does his Rome narration; Venus appears, and the rest of the opera carries on as normal. There is a gleam of hope at the end, to frame the final triumphant chorus about the Pope’s staff sprouting. Elizabeth and Heinrich are seen riding off into the sunset in a van – maybe a vision, maybe the reality, it’s not clear whether Elizabeth is dead or asleep at the end.

The problem with all this is that throughout the third act of course the original language and words of sin, expiation, grace, mercy, redemption , Rome,  angels and Pope are being used.  There is no connection between what is happening on stage and implied by the staging, and what the libretto is telling us.   I guess this is yet another example of directors being unwilling to grapple with Wagner’s focus on these things. The contradictions perhaps bother.me less in Bayreuth than they would elsewhere because there are no surtitles and I have only a generalised understanding of what is being said. But there clearly is a gap. So this is in contrast to say the Kosky Meistrrsinger which is consistent and coherent from beginning to end. Act 3 here has to be comparatively a failure.

It’s been great to see probably the two foremost heldentenors globally in the three works I’ve seen in Bayreuth. Klaus Florian Vogt is singing Siegfried as well as Tannhauser. I find his voice well grounded, powerful and lyrical, though not everyone feels the same. He was up for every aspect of the role in this production and threw himself into it with Schager-like enthusiasm.  Irene Roberts has to do a lot more than any other Venus in this role – fooling around in the second Act, appearing running round the lake in the cabaret as well as her slated moments in Acts 1 and 3 – she showed terrific energy as well as having a very good voice. Elizabeth, who in the nature of things even in this production is a bit wilty was very well sung by Elizabeth Teige, if not at the Davidsen level. Gunther Groissboeck was excellent as the Landgraf and Marcus Eiche (not a name I’ve come across before) was very good as Wolfram.

I have been sitting fairly far out to the right in the auditorium – seats 2, 5 and 7 in rows 7, 18 and 21. I have to say that there is a more balanced and warmer sound from the orchestra in the further-away tiers in the auditorium- row 18 sounded ideal, and Nathalie Stutzmann got the strings sounding glorious in the Act 3 prelude. She let the music flow naturally and wasn’t trying to make points – just allowing the orchestra be the best they can be. The Bayreuth chorus sounded wonderful throughout.

This probably has to be the highlight of my Bayreuth trip this year and I shall look forward to seeing (live for the first time though I did see it on TV during lockdown) Kratzer’s Fidelio at ROHCG in two months’ time. It also makes me realise I should like to see what happens in his Rhinegold in Munich next year.

One final thought – I seem to remember Gergiev conducted this when it was a new production in 2019 – the mind boggles as to what he made of it all……………….

Conductor, Semyon Bychkov; Director, Thorleifur Örn Arnarsson; Stage design, Vytautas Narbutas; Costumes, Sibylle Wallum; Lighting, Sascha Zauner. Tristan, Andreas Schager; Marke, Günther Groissböck; Isolde, Camilla Nylund; Kurwenal, Olafur Sigurdarson; Melot, Birger Radde. Brangäne, Christa Mayer

 Tristan is the Wagner work I have seen least in the last 7 years or so. I saw the last but one Katharina Wagner production at Bayreuth in 2017, conducted by Thielemann, which I thought was a good production, impressively conducted, with a quirky view of Marke – a domestic bully and abuser who takes Isolde back into his abusing household after the Liebestod – which is nonetheless given credence in various ways by the text and scenario (the Tristan was the late Stephen Gould and the Isolde Petra Lang). I saw a concert performance of the Glyndebourne production in 2021 at the Proms, and that’s it………There seems to have been an interim Tristan production for a couple of years at Bayreuth after the 2015 K. Wagner one – well-regarded – and now there’s this one, presumably with a run of 4-5 years.  Reviews were mixed on the production in the press – enthusiastic about the musical aspect,  less so about the production (inevitably, perhaps).

As I walked from my hotel up the ‘Green Hill’, the churches in Bayreuth were going bonkers, with multiple bongings for the Virgin Mary’s birthday. This jubilantly festal atmosphere was not replicated at the top of the hill – as I sat in a still stifling Festspielhaus, I found myself reminded of that late poem by Yeats, where he reviews some of the poetic themes he’s used in his life, and then writes:

 Those masterful images because complete

Grew in pure mind but out of what began?

A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,

Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,

Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut

Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone

I must lie down where all the ladders start

In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.  (‘Circus Animal’s Desertion’).

This production to me felt as though it was expounding the thought that all relationships fail before the accumulations in that ‘rag and bone shop of the heart’, and that we die alone, encumbered by our things and our memories, perhaps never having loved though we think we have. Several aspects of the production emphasised this point:

• The sets for Acts 2 and 3 resemble giant junk yards. Act 2 is particular is everyone’s version of the ultimate attic nightmare  – portraits, boxes, statues, crumpled bits of paper, broken bits of machinery everywhere. Act 3 seems more like an abandoned ship yard (which might make sense for Kareol), though I did wonder whether in fact many of the strewn-around items were actually giant parts of string instruments. Anyway both seem to represent an accumulation of things which somehow block the relationship between Tristan and Isolde.. And of course it is the past in their lives that both prompts and destroys the two lovers – Tristan’s ill-fated voyage to Ireland and Isolde’s meeting him there, knowing that he had killed her lover, Morold. And Tristan retreats into his past in going back to Kareol, and of course in being reluctant to re-encounter Isolde on the boat going back to Cornwall
• In Act 1, Isolde is encumbered by an enormous dress which (apparently, though you wouldn’t know this without reading about it) has written on it words from the libretto, as though Isolde is programmed to repeat the tragedy she is clothed in. On occasion she tries to write on it, but, as far as I could see, does not succeed
• Ropes are a feature of all 3 acts – in the first, I assumed they were just part of the suggestion of a ship, but in fact I think they may suggest routes out of the junk yards which the couple don’t take (the ladders of the Yeats’ poem)
• Tristan and Isolde hardly touch throughout the work – perhaps briefly towards the end of the Act 2 love duet. Obviously there are practical reasons why opera singers can’t be too much wound around each other, but this production really emphasises the distance between the couple. And of course, while they sing about dying together, they actually do die alone in Wagner’s version of the story. Marke of course too is alone. Kurwenal doesn’t die in Act 3 but remains sadly alone on the sidelines to the end.
• Curiously Tristan and Melot don’t fight either – Tristan is unwilling to touch another even in anger
• There is no sense of elevation, of a different level of being, during the Liebestod, nor of any mystical reunion with Tristan, Isolde sings mainly on the floor, not differently lit to the rest of the stage, and at the end of the work she is just plain dead and alone, like the others

The theme of Night and Day is also prominent in the production – piercing spots lights range the audience and batteries of lights suddenly dazzle  when Day makes its major appearances – the arrival in Cornwall, and Marke’s discovery of the lovers – while most of the opera is lit to be only sem-visible, particularly in Act 3, where the junk seems to be obscuring where the people on stage actually are. Again the darkness of unknowing seems to emphasise in this production separation, not union.

So, not exactly a bundle of joy and I found, perhaps in consequence, that I was unmoved at points I would normally have expected to be moved at. That’s an interesting contrast with Parsifal the previous evening – this Tristan was by far the better production (brilliantly executed, thoughtful, coherent) whereas Parsifal was, in retrospect, more than a bit muddled, but also far more moving. I found myself gripped with excitement by the Act 2 love duet in Tristan, which was wonderfully sung and played but I was only really moved by Brangaene’s two interventions, again emphasising aloneness and the danger of the illusion of unity.  Or perhaps I was just too uncomfortable in the considerable heat within the Festspielhaus,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,    

Musically this performance was very good indeed. Hats off to Schager for another powerful portrayal, and remaining fresh sounding even by the end of Act 3 – and being more musically varied and sensitive than most of the heldentenor breed. I hope Bayreuth have a view on who to replace him with when he finally decides he has had enough, but long may he continue………….Christa Mayer was excellent as Brangaene, a big voice but one also capable of subtlety. Gunther Groissböck, who was the subject of critical reviews after the first night, sounded ideally sonorous as King Marke, while  Olafur Sigurdarson was among the best Kurwenals I have heard. About Camilla Nylund there have been various views, and who knows if she could really sustain the role so effectively in a less forgiving acoustic – however, while slightly shrill, and with an occasional wobble, she sang thoughtfully, was not over-powered by the orchestra and (though at times I kept hearing in my mind what other singers had done with certain phrases) gave a thoroughly musical account of the role.

I have been lucky with the Bayreuth Tristan conductors I have heard – Kleiber in 1974, Thielemann in 2017 and now Bychkov. The latter started the Act 1 prelude very slowly and beautifully, picking up in passion as it went along (though perhaps not with the intensity of the other two conductors). The performance seemed well paced, not hard driven, sensitive to the singers and with very effective dynamic control.

Frenetic cheering afterwards and not a boo in the house, unusually for Bayreuth (and welcome – given the history of intolerance in this place, booing always to me seems to have a particular edge and resonance)

Conductor, Pablo Heras-Casado; Director, Jay Scheib; Stage design, Mimi Lien; Costumes, Meentje Nielsen; Lighting, Rainer Casper; Video, Joshua Higgason. Amfortas, Derek Welton; Titurel, Tobias Kehre; Gurnemanz, Georg Zeppenfeld; Parsifal, Andreas Schager; Klingsor, Jordan Shanahan; Kundry, Ekaterina Gubanova

After a, by now almost normal, rather chaotic performance by DB I arrived in Bayreuth last night only an hour or so later than I had planned – my train to Frankfurt was late by 30 mins but then so was the train to Nuremberg!) So now, in extreme heat, I am in Bayreuth for 3 days to hear Parsifal, Tristan and Tannhauser. The Festspielhaus shimmered in the distance as I approached it, and most men had their jackets off.

I went to the previous Parsifal production when in Bayreuth in 2017 with some of the same personnel – Schager, Zeppenfeld and Welton – and thought it very effective, though musically quite fast (Haenchen).I saw video clips from this current Parsifal when it was a new production last year, and thought it, from the extracts I saw and heard, both musically well-led by Heras-Casado and  an interesting production which, whatever its quirks, did not deviate too radically from the settings and context laid out by Wagner, and warranted a closer look – all the fuss about the special augmented reality glasses being a bit beside the point for all but a minority of the audience. There were hostile critical reviews, though – the Financial Times was particularly upset: “None of the fundamental questions (who are these knights? What kind of society have they created? Who is Kundry? What is the Grail? What is redemption?) are addressed” in the production. So it’s as good a way as any of starting this review by seeing how I responded to those questions, having experienced the production live.

There are two preliminary point to be made about the production. The first is that, unlike some regietheater productions this is pretty faithful on the whole to Wagner’s stage directions – if Wagner says there are fallen heroes in Act 2, there they are, gruesomely beheaded; there is a grail and a spear, and a full set of ritual accompaniments – various bowls and relic-holders, plus a full acted out reception of the Grail, with processions; though the setting of Act 3 Scene 1 is very far from a sunny Good Friday woodland, some flowers are brought in for the Good Friday music.  These are just a few of many examples. The second is the extensive use of a live video-cameraman on stage, throughout nearly all of Act 2 and large portions of Acts 1 and 3, the video being then shown live on the huge back wall of the stage. Clearly there are points here the director wants to make, which we’ll come onto, but it is a very effective way of enlivening long relatively static scenes such as the encounter of Kundry and Parsifal in Act 2.

So….what of the Financial Times’ questions. It’s a mixed bag, I think. The society portrayed in Act 1 is a technological one – the setting is almost like some sort of quarry, with bright steel poles and a monstrous gleaming steel-sided Tower of Sauron affair, which flashes like a light-house during the Grail scene. The poles crackle when Kundry first approaches. The Grail Knights are military in appearance – large men, shaven heads – and wear camouflage uniforms. The latter may indicate that they are unable to show their true feelings to each other – life is transactional. Or it may be that they are people evading reality The extensive (maybe half of Act 1 Scene 1) filming of the repeated bandaging of the oozing blood from Amfortas’ wound shows they have compassion in terms of what to do with wounded bodies (or a wounded swan, who gets the same treatment)  but not in relation to wounded minds. The reference to wounded minds here mainly relates to Kundry, who is much more centre stage throughout the work than is usual –  she is there through the first grail scene – but it also refers to Gurnemanz: the prelude to Act 1 has a videoed encounter he has with a young woman in a dream sequence, who he is obviously deeply disturbed by. She appears at moments throughout the opera in a white gown – she is in the Grail Scene and she arrives as some sort of page to Parsifal in Act 3 scene 1 and remains on stage for the rest of the performance. So it’s fair to say that the knights have a problem with women (in particular no-one understands or can sympathise with Kundry) and that religious ritual is more important to them than real relationships……….Maybe also the video cameraman (who is dressed in military camouflage) is suggesting through the videoing something about people seeing themselves through social media and selfies rather than through the mirror of human relations. A pool of water is there in all three acts in the sets, perhaps representing a more honest way of life and the power to transform.

Act 3 shows a society that has undergone climate catastrophe – a stagnant green pool (perhaps an image for the knights themselves) in Act 3 Scene 2, though still alive for the baptism in scene 1)l there is a rusty piece of machinery in the quarry. Everything seems dead.  The woman Gurnemanz saw in his dream brings on the flowers for the Good Friday music

So far so good-ish. Where the problems come is in trying to see what ‘redemption’ means in this context. The director’s answer to this is to have Parsifal, once he has reunited spear and Grail, is to smash the Grail (which is a large maybe hexagonal stone – fair enough since this is how it is described in some of the sources). He and Kundry then wade into the pool and raise their hand towards the gas ring object that floats above it/the temple, maybe in recognition of something ‘above’ beyond religious ritual. Tentatively, Gurnemanz and the other woman also come together and acknowledge each other. So by this is the director saying that redemption is about restoring ambulant heterosexual relationships and (as one of the directorial team puts it in the programme ‘trying to be a bit friendlier with each other’)? This does not sound like a full understanding of the word redemption to me, and the director really doesn’t really get to grips with the religious element of the work – religion is not necessarily just about being nice to each other, though it should include that. It’s significant that the point of the text of the Good Friday music felt mainly ignored in this production. So much could have been done with ‘Entsuendigte Natur’ in a climate catastrophe context.

What’s good about the production is the increased focus on Kundry, on her humanity, on her being someone definitely different by the end. The crux of understanding her is in Act 2, and here also there was to me some confusion, perhaps inintended but brought to my mind by the fantastic performance of Elena Gubanova and the close up images from the video – so real does Kundry’s passion become that I lost the sense that she is doing what she does in Act 2 under a spell; it seemed to come from a genuine part of her nature. How then she becomes the penitent figure of Act 3 is then unclear. Meanwhile in Act 2 Parsifal’s T shirt has ‘ Remember Me’ on its back. Is this about Amfortas, or the rather solipsistic world Parsifal is still in? Again, apart from being naturally instinctive and not camouflaging his feelings, it is a bit difficult to understand Parsifal’s journey in this production

These comments are inevitably a bit unfocused, scribbled down during and after the performance, but I hope you can see something of the merits and problems of this production – the major defect being to remove it from the sphere of religion and what we might mean by ‘redemption’ in a modern context. The major achievement of the production is the way it focuses on the journey made by Kundry. One other thing to highlight is, as ever with Bayreuth, just how spectacular and colourful the sets and costumes are – they are extraordinarily good

Musically this performance was wonderful. The five major roles all performed magnificently – Zeepenfield (maybe his voice a bit drier than when I heard him last in this role 7 years ago) articulated the words clearly and sang sensitively; Derek Welton has a marvellous voice and deployed it well; Jordan Shanahan was maybe less distinctive than others but did all that was required of him as Klingsor; Ekaterina Gubanova was (as I think the director intended) the star of the show, and I have never heard Act 2 sung better or been more gripping (eclipsing even the version given by Opera North a couple of years ago); Andreas Schager does what he does with all his heart and soul – I have never heard ‘Amfortas, die Wunde’ more strikingly sung on stage – and quite often with sensitivity too. You can’t but worry though about the amount he takes on at Bayreuth and in fact he was off last week with an infection. We’ll see how he gets on in Tristan tomorrow. There were some signs of wear and tear on his voice. Heras-Casado I was as impressed by as I was listening to last year’s performance on video – flexible, always bringing climaxes to a full conclusion, moving the music along but with sensitivity. He was full-throatedly cheered and stamped for by the audience at the end, as were all the singers except for the poor Flower Maidens for whom there was some silly and quite unjustified boo-ing in the worst Bayreuth fashion. There were a few over-the-top people around in the audience, including the chap in front of me who upbraided the Mum of a teenage daughter in front of him for the girl’s fiddling with her phone during Act 1 (I think the poor girl was just trying to follow the plot), muttering ‘Unmoeglich’ several times.

On to Tristan tomorrow

G. Williams Concert Overture; Sir Karl Jenkins Stravaganza  (BBC commission); Farrenc Overture No. 1; Beethoven Symphony No. 7 in A major. Jess Gillam soprano saxophone, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Nil Venditti conductor

 This is a concert I went to because I had to be in London in the evening in order to be ready for the early Eurostar train to Brussels and onward to Bayreuth, and I thought it would be a good way of entertaining myself. It wasn’t a concert I was articularly interested in, and I thought it would suffer by comparison with the magnificent Barenboim EWDO performance of Schubert 9 I heard from the Proms via BBC Sounds the previous evening – which was magisterial, wonderfully structured, Klemperer-like in its inevitability, and possibly the finest performance I have ever heard of that work.

The reality of this concert though confirms the excitement of live music and the special atmosphere of the Proms. I was standing in the Arena for this, leaning on a bar at its edge and confirming to myself again that the Arena offers the best sound in the RAH, full, balanced and sharp. It was a highly enjoyable event and despite its being the hottest day of the year in London, not too steamy in the RAH. I cooled myself in the Arena bar in the interval…. And the Hall was packed, which always helps in terms of atmosphere, if not always in terms of steaminess……………

Part of the pleasure was seeing the young Italian/Turkish Conductor Nil Vendetti. She has a very clear expressive way of using stick, arms and body to give the indications to the orchestra and the audience of what she wants- particularly when, in the Beethoven, she conducted without a score. She is also- without doing it to excess – a very physical conductor who crouched down and leaped up as the music demanded. And she got results- the BBCNOW played exceptionally well for her. Though I have never heard of her, she is clearly getting good gigs with good orchestras and her career is advancing quickly, with a well known agent in tow. 

The concert did get off to a rather lukewarm start with the Grace Williams overture, which was fun enough in a sub-Waltonian way but really not very memorable. The Karl Jenkins piece was a very different affair –  jazzy, very enjoyable, lyrical as well as punchy, and in 3 or maybe 4 varied movements. The BBCs relentless promotion of Jess Gillam as presenter and personality has always set my teeth on edge a bit – Northern, not posh and therefore, it feels sometimes, fulfilling a diversity quota – but she is a fantastic and gifted musician whose soprano sax made extraordinary sounds through her skills. I was in awe of what she was achieving by the end and how she effortlessly provides an engaging stage presence to complement her playing, swinging to the beat. This was great music-making….

The Farrenc Overture after the interval I think I’ve heard before played by the Halle (?). I thought better of it this time round – a clear structure and themes no less distinguished than say Schumann might offer. The Beethoven 7 was the polar opposite of the Barenboim performance the day before – fast, energetic verging on frenetic, exciting. ‘Rollocking’ someone near me said to a neighbour. It was not a great performance – the slow movement was simply too fast, so that many of the underlying harmonies were lost, and the outer movements moved at speeds that didn’t allow the climatic moments towards their end to make their maximum impact. But it was a young person’s reading, revelling in the propulsive rhythms,  and I found it very gripping and was very happy to hear it live.

A good evening! Now – on to the hallowed portals of Bayreuth…….

Erkki-Sven Tüür, Aditus; Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, ‘Emperor’; Bruckner Symphony No. 1 in C minor (1877 Linz version, ed. Nowak) Yunchan Lim piano, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Paavo Järvi conductor

I am trying, in my intensive July and August live concert listening, to pay particular attention to works I have scarcely ever heard – Prokofiev and Weinberg operas in Salzburg, the concert I reviewed last week at the Proms (Schoenberg and Zemlinsky), Ma Vlast (apart from Vltava I have never heard any of this), and Suk’s Asrael Symphony at the end of August, the Handel opera in Buxton – and this concert. Apart from Florence and The Machine, this was one of the first Proms to sell out. Initially I wondered why – Bruckner 1, which I have never heard live before, I was looking forward to hearing but it is scarcely a crowd-pleaser. And the Emperor concerto crops up all the time. Paavo Jarvi is undoubtedly a fine conductor, but he’s a fairly regularly visitor to the UK, and to the Proms. Then I realised that the big deal was Yunchan Lim, who is a 20-year-old South Korean pianist. At 18, he was the youngest pianist ever to win the prestigious Van Cliburn International piano competition in Texas, and he is now regularly referred to in the classical music press in hyperbolic terms (‘the most exciting pianist on the planet’, ‘Yunchan Lim’s playing is so good you think you’re dreaming’; ‘Is this 20-year-old the greatest pianist of our times? ; Yunchan Lim, the Korean about to electrify the Proms’ (The Guardian) etc). So I wondered how I would find his playing….

The house was, as indicated above, packed. First up though in the programme was a short work by Erkki-Sven Tüür (not a name I have come across before, a 64-year-old Estonian composer, who ran a rock band at one point in the 80’s). The work performed, ‘Aditus’, was in memory of his teacher Lepo Sumera (8 May 1950 – 2 June 2000) who was an Estonian composer and teacher. An ‘Aditus’ is the opening to some interior space or cavity. This first work seemed to consist of a series of vortices  – a strong statement followed by a gradual dissolution of sound. There were maybe 4 or 5 such attempts, including a much faster rhythmic section, all eventually ending in silence. It did not, at 9 minutes or so, outstay its welcome and I shall listen to it again on I Player.

Mr Lim is a diminutive figure who barely looks at the audience and seems utterly wrapped up in his playing. His playing of the Emperor concerto, as you would imagine, was immaculate technically. That sounds as though it is to be followed by a ‘But’ but it won’t be. There were wonderful poetic moments of feathery lightness; phrases lovingly sculpted. Many passages I felt I was hearing for the first time, particularly in the second and third movements and these two were probably the best elements of his reading. He also had magnificent support from the orchestra and Jaarvi who offered a propulsive performance, full of energy, nice pointing and bounce, with a hard stick timpanist adding to the excitement. What I did feel is some distance between what the orchestra was doing and the vision of the pianist – his playing suggested a more Schubert, maybe Schumann, – like grace, lyricism and melancholy that just didn’t seem to gel with the more robust approach of the orchestra. Of course the Albert Hall sonic experience can always be a factor but this was certainly not sounding to me like a barnstorming performance, and I thought maybe Lim might have needed maybe more time with Jaarvi to establish a common approach. Lim played beautifully a Bach transcription by Wilhem Kempff as an encore.

There were significant numbers of Koreans in the audience out to support the young pianist in the first half  and it was great that nearly all of the packed Albert Hall audience  returned for the Bruckner in the second half. The Bruckner symphony is in some ways a tentative piece from a famously late-starting composer- he was 44 when he wrote it- but nevertheless many of the characteristics of the later symphonies are there: the enormous full-stops-out brass passages followed by silence, the quirky woodwind inner voices, the folksiness in the Scherzo, the obsessive repetitions of phrases, the slow movement climax. What’s perhaps surprisingly not there so much is memorable melodic material in some movements. The Scherzo is the section most closely aligned with those of the later works, and the most memorable – a thumping tune, exciting brass and building to thrilling climaxes. The first movement starts with a trudging Schubert-like melody and follows the mature Bruckner pattern of having three subjects. I didn’t find it easy to follow the flow of the argument of the development section  but it has an exciting ending! The slow movement is slightly different to those that follow it in the later symphonies. Perhaps influenced by the previous, on the whole, gloomy first movement it starts in disarray – phrases that fall in on themselves, sounding as though they are about to break into song and then collapsing. The main theme enters tentatively – perhaps a gradually emerging faith – and gradually builds up to a thrilling climax and beautiful calm coda. The finale, as often with Bruckner, sounded to me the weakest movement, with a repeated 5 note motif thumped out, rather undistinguished melodically second and third subjects, lots of brass and a major key ending which is glorious.

I haven’t heard much of the BBC Symphony Orchestra in recent years and when I do I am always perhaps unfairly surprised by how good they are. In particular the trumpets blared out with utter precision, there were some beautiful woodwind solos (bassoon particularly distinguished)  and the strings in the slow movement glowed richly. Jaarvi pushed the music along at quite a pace, which I think is right with this work – it’s not one for Celibidache-like luxuriating.

All in all this was a deeply satisfying evening!

Schoenberg Pelleas and Melisande; Zemlinsky The Mermaid. BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Ryan Bancroft conductor

This was a concert I was looking forward to – two massive late Romantic pieces with a huge orchestra. The Zemlinsky piece I have a recording of but the Schoenberg work I have only heard once over the radio, I think, and I had little memory or knowledge of it other than that it was one of his pre-atonal compositions. Both works were originally premiered at the same concert in Vienna in 1905, and both have the fin de siecle/Freudian pre-WW1 Viennese obsession with sex and death. Both hover, though Schoenberg more obviously so, on the edge of tonality, with the impending collapse of the old world Austro- Hungarian order in plain sight.

It was great to be back in the Albert Hall even though the audience was sparse (Pappano in his recent book says that having Schoenberg on the programme of a concert – whatever the piece of music – immediately reduces your box office takings by 20%). Still, the Arena was fairly full and had plenty of enthusiasm for this music – much cheering at the end of both halves. And- for the Schoenberg – the orchestra WAS huge -Wagner plus: I counted 10 horns, quadruple woodwind, 2 sets of timpani and so forth, not least a massive collection of percussive instruments. Almost as large, the Zemlinsky orchestra had a mere 7 horns and one set of timpani. The BBC NWO – from what I could hear in the front row of the choir – played superbly (I counted a couple of slightly ragged entries throughout the evening, an impressive achievement given the size of the orchestra and that probably no one in it had ever played these works before). I was also impressed by Ryan Bancroft’s conducting – he doesn’t use a stick but his hands and body movements very clearly sculpt what he wants from the orchestra and he had an impressive sense of control, structure and clarity in this music.

The Schoenberg piece is dense, full of foreboding, at times dissonant, and I need to listen to this performance again on the radio. The various leit- motifs – for Golaud, Melisande, Pelleas – become identifiable after a while (a chap in the loo in the interval was even whistling the Golaud theme as he peed) but I can’t say the familiar story was immediately clear from the massively complex entangled score, though the passionate run up to Golaud’s discovery of the lovers was glorious and obvious. What IS immediately apparent is Schoenberg’s mastery of the orchestra and his uncompromising vision of what he wants to achieve. You just feel a bit exhausted by the end ………..but are also clear this is the work of a great composer.

By comparison, Zemlinsky’s piece is much more crowd- pleasing, and is helped by being in 3 movements. It is perhaps at times derivative (I wonder whether I heard Rimsky-Korsakov or Tchaikovsky on occasion, not to mention Rhinegold at the beginning, and the Straussian overtones common to both works) – the melodies are more identifiable and memorable, the great arcs of sound harmonically more obvious. The piece’s got some wonderful moments, particularly in the first and second movements, some beautiful violin and cello solos, shimmering strings, but somehow I don’t think it’s really a work which, having heard once, I’d actively want to seek out again. The Schoenberg piece by contrast I feel I do want to get to grips with