Cast: Mark Le Brocq Gustav von Aschenbach;  Roderick Williams The Traveller | Elderly Fop | Hotel Manager | Hotel Barber | Leader of the Players | Voice of Dionysus; Timothy Morgan  Voice of Apollo; Antony César Tadzio; Diana Salles The Polish Mother. : Leo Hussain Conductor; Olivia Fuchs Director; Nicola Turner Designer; Robbie Butler Lighting Designer; Tom Rack Circus Consultant

The critical rave reviews for this production brought a completely full-house to Oxford at the New Theatre. I am wondering when the last time I was in that theatre – I have a feeling I saw Janet Baker perform Maria Stuarda here in the mid-1970’s, but certainly I haven’t been there for many years. I suspect some of the crowd had come from London to see this (I saw Ed Gardiner picking up a ticket), and I realised that I should have booked a hotel in Paddington and returned late back to London – a much better use of time……..

I saw Death in Venice first in 1973, during its first London run after the premiere in Aldeburgh that June, and with the same cast, including Peter Pears as Aschenbach, and I saw another performance (?production) again in 1992 with Phillip Langridge. I have listened to extracts since, from the recording I’ve got, and maybe one or two broadcasts, a number of times. So I know the work relatively well, and have always felt, right back from 1973, that in listening to the work, I am in the presence of something which will pass the test of time – as I did, also in 1972/1974, listening to performances of Shostakovich’s 14^th and 15^th symphonies. And here we are, more than 50 years later…….! I still remember my response in 1973 to the magic of the song about Phaedrus, the eeriness of the ballet music for Tadzio and his friends, the glorious sweep of the Venice motif and the bell-like music, the ominous dragging music for the gondolier’s progress, and how immediately they spoke to me.

Listening and seeing it again in 2024, I still found it a gripping experience. The one area where things might drag – the ballet sequences, as conventionally presented – were transformed by the collaboration between WNO and the circus company NoFit State. The latter offer a kind of choreographed set of circus acts, focusing not only on the technical ability and spectacle involved in performing extraordinary movements at the end of a rope or in mid-air, but also on the beauty of movements and sequences. The company provided Tadzio and, I think, three/maybe four of his friends/family members, but obviously Tadzio also has to act, as well as look statuesque and beautiful, and be an amazing circus act, and he did this very well in his non-verbal subtle acknowledgement of Aschenbach’s presence on stage.

Death in Venice is one of those works where directors have limited options for trying to impose a concept on a work, and, happily, Olivia Fuchs didn’t try to. The costumes and props made it clear this was set immediately before World War 1, and the production ran very clearly and smoothly, and for the most part intelligibly. The only part that I couldn’t quite understand was the very end – as far as I remember in the Colin Graham production, this had Aschenbach, as in the Visconti film, sitting on a deck chair, dying, and Tadzio continuing to dance, as a remote image of beauty, in the background; in the WNO production, Aschenbach collapses face downwards and Tadzio some way off performs a writhing motion also on the ground. The part that I thought was particularly effectively handled was the Apollo/Dionysus scene, where both contend for Aschenbach’s body – this was genuinely scary, and made very real the difference between those two approaches to being an artist which is at the heart of the opera. The set was straightforward – an effective video screen with images of water, oars, Venice, a library and so forth at the back; black sides and two sets of ladders on either side of the stage for the circus performers – but also on occasion the singers –  to climb.

I found Roderick Williams’ performance in the seven or eight roles he has quite brilliantly done – I hadn’t, having seen him much more on the concert platform, expected him to be so lithe, so mercurial, in stage, and he very clearly presented the menace of the composite character he was playing, with excellently clear diction, and close attention to nuance and inflection of text.  About Mark Le Brocq I was slightly more ambivalent. He’s tall, commands the stage effectively, and has the stamina to cope with being essentially in full view of the audience for over two hours (he also looks curiously in the part like Ian Duncan-Smith). By any normal standards his was an excellent performance of the role. However he is portraying an artist, and an important way he’s got at his disposal to do that in an opera is how he sings  – quality of voice and sensitivity to text and song. Le Brocq’s voice is quite tight and dry – he did a lot with it to shade the text, varying tone and volume, but couldn’t quite summon up poetry in his voice and caress the notes in the way I have heard others, notably, of course Pears, do. The New Theatre essentially doesn’t have a pit – the orchestra almost – but doesn’t – obscures the stage. So it was a particularly excellent aspect of Leo Hussain’s conducting that he kept the orchestra tightly controlled so that words and singing always came across clearly.

It is part of the greatness of this work that it operates on so many different levels. It is a study of personal disintegration (I suspect that’s how most of the audience would take it); also of course a tale with close autobiographical relevance for Britten as well as Mann (who lived in constant fear during WW2 that the Nazis would find and publicise secret diaries left in his abandoned Munich house which recorded his homo-erotic fantasies and encounters with young men); and finally, if we are not in an age now which values the Dionysiac more than ever, , and which may lead to its collapse, I don’t know what the word means………It was great to see it again

Conductor: Christian Thielemann; Director, David Bösch; Stage design Patrick Bannwart; Costumes Moana Stemberger; Lighting Fabio Antoci; The Emperor Eric Cutler; Empress, Camilla Nylund; The Nurse, Evelyn Herlitzius; The ghost messenger, Andreas Bauer Kanabas; A Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple, Nikola Hillebrand; Apparition of a Young Man, Martin Mitterrutzner; The Voice of the Falcon, Lea-ann Dunbar; A voice from above: Christa Mayer; Barak, Oleksandr Pushniak; Barak’s wife,  Miina-Liisa Värelä

I have only ever seen Die Frau ohne Schatten in one production, and that almost 50 years ago. I saw it conducted in 1975 by Solti at ROHCG, with James King as the Emperor, Heather Harper as the Empress, Helga Dernesch as Barak’s Wife, and Donald McIntyre as Barak, and then again in 1976 with almost the same cast but with Walter Berry as Barak.  Both were wonderful performances that have remained vividly in my memory. 

The thirty one year old Fritz Reiner conducted the second ever performance run of Die Frau at the Semperoper in 1919 so there is a real sense of history in a performance of this work here in Dresden. 

This was the first night of a new production, so there was nothing in the way of easily accessible press commentary to find out what line the director might take – and this being the sort of work it is, I would imagine it is a veritable playground for directors to carve meaning out of what is sometimes a confusing symbolically-overloaded plot. It was a great merit of the production that it focused on good story-telling and (just like the Magic Flute) offering a box of magic tricks – it was surprising, in this, the land of regie-theater, to find a clear focus in a production on narrative, and letting the music and words sort out the meanings for themselves. Although I know the music fairly well, I had been wondering what it would be like to see this on stage after so long  – would I think it simply a rather silly work with lots of glorious music. In fact, I think that, despite the portentous supernatural trappings, it is a moving work, a profound work, and I was utterly gripped by it from start to finish, and this was a very good production of it.

For starters it is both exciting and extraordinarily tuneful musically – it must surely have a claim to be Strauss’ greatest work (that would certainly be my view). The orchestra is huge – Wikipedia claims 164 instruments are involved (not players of course): the percussion section includes glass harmonica, 4 timpani, 5 Chinese gongs, cymbals, snare drum, rute, sleigh bells, bass drum, tenor drum, big field drum, triangle, tambourine, 2 castanets, tamtam, whip (slapstick), xylophone, glockenspiel, 2 celestas). The beautiful string upswelling in the orchestra telling of Barak’s affection for his wife in Act 1 was magical, with Thielemann bringing out more passion from the strings than you would have thought possible at the climax of that passage. The duet expressing absence and abandonment by Barak and his wife at the beginning of Act 3 is one of Strauss’ finest creations.  The Nightwatchmens’ chorus at the end of Act 1 is wonderfully moving. The Emperor’s soliloquy in Act 2 with its marvellous solo ‘cello part was another lovely piece of writing. The final sequences of orchestral blaze in the last 10 minutes of Act 3 during transitions between scenes are some of the most exciting pieces of music I know, and the orchestra sounded quite glorious playing them on this occasion – Thielemann seems to have an unerring sense of when to let the orchestra rip to maximum effect. The music of the falcon is among the bleakest and most melancholy I know, while the ‘Water of Life’ music is fascinating, very ambiguous, giving a sense both of beauty and danger. The solo violin music just after the Empress refuses the Water of Life was beautiful – and wonderfully played (though marred by an almighty crash caused by some hidden piece of scenery going into destruct-mode). I wish I could have gone to another one or two performances of this run – it’s such a wonderful work. 

The production had two basic points of reference – the spirit world, with white gauze curtains closing off parts of the stage, and a very down to earth Barak’s kitchen / living room, with wedding portraits on the walls and some splendid dying vats and a washing machine, as well as a couch and a bed. Behind them both is a screen onto which can be projected videos – e.g. fishes for the frying fish sequence and the attractive young men summoned up by the Nurse for the Dyer’s Wife (why doesn’t she have a name?), while in the spirit world there are falcons, gazelles, feathers and human images – but many more as well . There are also some objects/prop, sometimes tongue in cheek where the spirit world is concerned – the Messenger of Keikobad has a cigarette before a ‘difficult conversation’ with the Empress, and there is a rather dodgy lift  which moves between the spirit world and the human world. There is also what could be a comic but in fact is terrifying, puppet falcon, huge, with a wingspan extending across the stage, with blazing lights for eyes, who carries in Act 3 the almost-stone body of the Emperor. There’s plenty of dry ice and on occasion individuals or couples are swallowed up by sudden gaps in the stage. Barak’s house splits into two at the end of Act 2.  The passage where The Dyer’s Wife is being sold a life of untold luxury was brilliantly done in Act 1. Dresses came down on hooks from the flies alongside elegant young women  in approx. ?1920’s Party gowns. But there is no real sense of any alternative reading here – just lots of inventive detail. The only real production ‘alternative reading’ was at the end. The last scene moves from the spirit world to Barak’s house and both couples now appear in ‘human ‘ clothing to sing the final pages.  As the unborn children start singing, after the last orchestral climax, Barak’s house splits apart – in fact with Barak and the Empress on one side and the Emperor and the Dyer’s Wife on the other. The void between the two split parts of Barak’s house contains the Nurse who remains there until the end of the piece looking enigmatic and staring out at the audience. I thought it could mean several things – that peril, and difficulties, and ‘negative experiences’ don’t just stop when you have children; or could it mean that there will be some people who are just not interested in having children and find their fulfilment in other ways. Either way, it’s a perfectly reasonable way to stage the ending. 

Costumes are varied – possibly 1920’s/30’s for Barak and his wife, white cool dresses and suits for the imperial couple, and a cloak for the Nurse.  

What’s it all about? The good thing about this production is that you didn’t need to worry about that – here were two couples with a rather nasty manipulative individual messing with their heads, but all comes out right in the end. That, and some stage magic, was all that was needed to get into the story. But the other reason the opera works is because the characters and what they say and do are deeply believable. Barak is a big, maybe slightly slow, man with simple, strong views; the Dyer’s wife (here with a cigarette never far from her mouth, sharp-tongued, conflicted and also vulnerable); the Empress – privileged but empathetic and in love with her husband; the Nurse, bitter, sarcastic, dismissive – a strong malevolent presence – and the Emperor, more of a cypher than the others, perhaps, but in love with his wife. One thing for sure – someone, whether Hofmannsthal or Strauss, writing this has had a difficult relationship to deal with – the work is a very deeply realistic picture of how poorly men and women can behave – it’s profoundly painful. And that’s what makes it a great opera – its truthful depiction of human emotions and, in the context of 1919, a profound hope for the future represented by the unborn children and all the hope that’s in them. True, there are also time-specific views about how male/female relationships work, and it’s hardly into diversity – but there is enough in the opera that goes beyond passing cultural norms to express something unchanging in human nature that will always be relevant.

The Semperoper cast list had some people in it whose names I hadn’t come across before – e.g. the man playing Barak – but also a number of well-known singers – Camilla Nylund, performing in the Tristan I’m seeing at Bayreuth this summer, and Miina-Liisa Värelä who I heard singing Isolde in the Glyndebourne Proms Tristan performance nearly 3 years ago.  There were three complete triumphs in the 5 major roles and 2 very good performances  – which may have something to do with the way Strauss and Hofmannsthal characterised them. Both for her singing ability and her acting the star performer for me was Miina-Liisa Värelä, who gave a moving account of this character in all her contrariness, her affection and yet irritation with her husband, and sang it fantastically well. Barak was another singer absolutely absorbed in his role, looking every inch the part and shambling his way round the kitchen, and with a warm, rich voice. The Nurse has a lot to do, and sing, and Evelyn Herlitzius was tireless, physically and vocally, performing this character, with great diction and strong projection. I found Camilla Mylund’s voice a bit on the small side for the Empress, but she sang well – beautifully so in Act 3. Her encounter with her father was gripping. Arguably the Emperor doesn’t have that much to do – the usual thankless Strauss tenor role – but he has the power and presence to do what’s needed.

Thielemann and the orchestra were just overwhelming – no other words……………….

A great evening!!

R. Strauss 1918

Conductor: Johannes Fritzsch, Director, Josef E. Köpplinger, Stage design Walter Vogelweider, Costumes Dagmar Morell, Choreography Ricarda Regina Ludigkeit, Lighting Fabio Antoci. Cast: Sarastro, Dimitry Ivashchenko; Tamino, Joseph Dennis; Queen of the Night, Aleksandra Olczyk; Pamina, Elbenita Kajtazi; Papageno, Michael Nagl; First Lady, Roxana Incontrera; Second Lady, Sabine Brohm; Third Lady, Michal Doron; Monostatos, Simeon Esper; Speaker, Martin-Jan Nijhof; Papagena, Christiane Hossfeld

 My journey to Dresden this time was surprisingly uneventful, given that my previous visit to Germany in November was a bit of a nightmare; DB strikes turned what should have been a 14 hour journey into a 27 hour one to Berlin. I arrived in Dresden this time to the minute on the timetable, after a 14-and-a-half-hour journey from London, covering some of the beautiful Saxon countryside from Eisenach to Erfurt as I travelled. On the morning of this performance, I walked around the old town in Dresden, wandered through some of the large number of Baroque buildings there, and had a very nice waldfruchtcrepe in lieu of lunch. Most of the singers in this performance were new to me, but I think I have heard both Michael Nagl and Aleksandra Olczyk before in these roles at ROHCG

It was a great pleasure to hear this work in the Semperoper – it has beautiful acoustics, which support the singers in giving them a bright forward sound, and which, despite the wide shallow pit, allows them to soar over the orchestra without straining their voices, while at the same time giving that orchestra a warm but clear sound (though we’ll see how the acoustics cope with the performance tomorrow) . The fact that the orchestra is the Dresden Staatskappele in another guise of course helps too – some wonderfully refined playing…..

The work has I think been deliberately chosen to be scheduled at the same time as the run of the new Die Frau ohne Schatten production – two fairy tale operas together, and there is indeed a talk in German on that issue. But I suspect the audience was probably different to that of the following evening – there seemed to be lots of people taking pictures of themselves in the opera house, and groups waving to each other across the auditorium. The audience felt a bit restrained early on, as though it was unsure how to react, but got more into things in Act 2, with more applause and laughter.

The opera begins and ends, and has for the most of the interval sitting in front of the curtain a boy – maybe 12 – with a flute, dressed like a young Tamino. Is this meant to suggest that ‘it’s all a dream’ – a rather tired idea if so? Because of what happens at the end, I thought maybe that the boy is meant to be a Rousseau-like character, emphasising that aspect of the Enlightenment which valued ‘back to nature’, ‘the natural’, the cult of feeling, as against some of the focus on form and wit in the earlier 18^th century.

The set is a bare main stage, with blacked out sides and a large video screen at the rear. There is a profusion of video images – sun, moon, trees, leaves, and of course water and fire for the trials. They are attractive to look at and don’t get in the way. There are some splendid props and dressed up actors – particularly the ostrich when Tamino is playing his flute, and the two giant puppet guards during the trials (why the latter?). There is a snake at the beginning, handled, as in some other productions, like a Chinese New Year dragon with men carrying different parts, and a nice flying cart for the boys. Thus the pantomime element was well catered for and clearly pleased the audience. Rather more obscurely Sorastro’s temple seems to be well-equipped with fluorescent lights which frame both the proscenium and also a cage where Tamino and Papageno have their early trials. The fluorescent lights go alongside a screen with three words on it which came down at intervals in the temple scenes– Nature, Wisdom and something else I couldn’t translate. Tamino’s flute is also fluorescent – a bit like a light sabre, as are Papageno’s bells. Costumes were mainly modern, but with 18 century ball gowns for the three ladies and the Queen of the Night, and a bizarre Afro-like pink wig for Pamina – Papagena has a greenish similar one. The Three Boys have curious pointy hats and shorts.

The director’s Big Idea is that, at the end, Tamino and Pamina shed their newly acquired temple gear and run off together (like the Berlin Meistersinger I saw in November). This fits in with the Rousseau idea and obviously gets round the problem of Sorastro’s misogyny and general over-bearingness – but, like the Berlin Meistersinger, makes me uneasy in that it also negates a lot of the good aspects of Sorastro’s temple. As I’ve said before, what I’d really like to see is Sorastro having a real change of heart on stage about women, but that wasn’t there in this production. They and the two priests did ‘offer the hand of friendship’ to the Queen of the Night and her three ladies, but this was indignantly rejected.

All in all, an effective enough production and with more of a sense of zaniness than some, mostly in good taste and good fun, but not really tackling some of the more difficult aspects of the work – in fact, running away from them, you might say…..

The biggest cheers of the evening, cast-wise, were for the  Queen of the Night, Papageno, and , to a lesser extent, Pamina. As usual, audiences tend to get things right and I was in agreement, though Sarastro was very good too, I thought. Aleksandra Olczyk was superb as the Queen of the Night – note perfect and she made it sound easy! Michael Nagl as Papageno as a genial presence – he didn’t ham the role up but projected warmth and humanity, and had a rich baritone voice as well.  Dimitry Ivashchenko as Sarastro I thought had a very fine voice. Elbenita Kajtazi as Pamina wasn’t as memorable as say Lucy Crowe 5 years ago at ENO but she projected the words well, varied her tone and her ‘Ich fuhls’ was very good in its musicality.  Joseph Dennis as Tamino I thought had almost too large a voice for the role – it didn’t really sound ‘Mozartian’ in the way Stuart Burrows, for instance, used to – and occasionally his voice sounded a bit frayed. But – really – all the cast were very good and I would happily have heard any of them again in their roles. Johannes Fritsch is a Conductor Laureate at Dresden and has pursued a flourishing career in Australia for the last 20 years ago. His Mozart was lively but not rushed, with a clear articulation of all the notes and with a real spring to the rhythms.  

Keri-Lynn Wilson, Conductor; David Alden, Director; Charles Edwards, Set Designer; Jon Morrel, Costume Designer; Adam Silverman, Original Lighting Designer. Jennifer Davis, Jenufa; Susan Bullock, Kostelnicka; Richard Trey Smagur, Laca; John Findon, Steva; Fiona Kimm, Grandmother; Darren Jeffery, Mill Foreman; Freddie Tong, Mayor; Madeleine Shaw, Mayor’s Wife

It was fascinating to experience a theatrical version of this work so soon after Rattle’s January performance. While the LSO played superbly, there’s no doubt that seeing this live in the theatre adds a whole extra dimension to the experience, even if this performance took until after the interval to catch fire – but when it did so was gripping to watch and listen to.

The setting was Eastern Europe Soviet-bloc era – shabby rooms, rectangular multi panelled windows and drab street-fronts in murky greens, greys and off whites, appropriately claustrophobic. There was a white screen at the back in Act 1, behind closed windows in Acts 2 and 3. The window panels rattle violently with the storm as the Kostelnicka returns from killing the baby in Act 2, and the angry crowd bursts through them violently in Act 3 in response to news of the dead baby – both very effective coups de theatres. There was very effective use of sidelighting in Act 2 and 3 to create a sense of menace.  Costumes were 1960s or so with a splendid leather jacket and motor bike for Steva.

As indicated, there was some lack of tension in Act 1 – I am not sure what the problem was, but it was somewhere between or composed of the fact that Laca’s outburst at the end of Act 1 was less violent than it should have been, Jenufa seemed a bit characterless at first, maybe the orchestra was a bit understated and lacking in dynamism, and there was some distinct lack of coordination and precision among chorus and orchestra in the first peasant songs – also the set itself seemed not to “do’ much – it provided a space but not much more. Things improved massively in Act Two which was gripping. Jenufa was very moving as she realised her baby was dead, the set and lighting fully supported the sense of stark horror and darkness in what was happening, and the Kostelnicka was compelling in all she did. Laca was very believable in his mood swings, and seemed much, much less of a cipher than he had done in Act 1. The tension continued at the same level in Act 3, with some superb playing by the orchestra, particularly at the end . Perhaps at the end of the day the recent ROH production is better in terms of its set and direction, but this was still a compelling performance, made more so by being sung in English, which sometimes adds a visceral impact there’s no substitute for.

And ENO had got an excellent cast together for this performance. Like Katarina Dalyman in the Rattle concert performance, Susan Bullock is an ex-Brunnhilde, and it shows in the declamatory power she can bring to bear on the Kostelnicka’s agony after she murders the baby, but she was also capable of singing beautifully quietly as well. Jennifer Davis impressed me as Elsa in Lohengin in Berlin in November (as well as at ROH 2 years ago) but then I found her acting a bit dull, though she was excellent musically. Here she seemed to possess the role in a much fuller way – she projects very easily but powerfully a very ordinary young woman who gradually allows herself to get into a tragic situation and both has the spiritual and emotional strength to cope with it and then rise above it, with compassion for her murdering mother. She was very moving.  Both Richard Trey Smagur, an American tenor, as Laca, and, pleasingly, John Findon, given another big part as Steva, are very big men, which helps with their stage presence. John Findon was perhaps a bit straight-faced and unrelaxed as Steva (by comparison with Nicky Spence, say) but sung the role very well indeed, as did Trey Snagur.  As you would hope with ENO, there were all sorts of excellent singers in the smaller roles, each contributing their part well – not a weak link there. Quite why Keri-Lynn Wilson, a US conductor, was there, I am not sure – she did, as I say above, do a good job and galvanised the orchestra in Acts 2 and 3, but, at the risk of sounding grumpy, there are many British conductors who could conduct this work just as effectively – Leo Hussain, Alpesh Chauhan, and many others – and probably at less cost

Wagner: Die Walküre: Ride of the Valkyries and Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music; Huldigungsmarsch; Das Rheingold: Abendlich strahlt der Sonne Auge; Götterdammerung: Prologue: Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey; Act I: Duet; Act III: Siegfried’s Death and Funeral Music, Brünnhilde’s Immolation and Finale; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude to Act I and Was duftet doch der Flieder.  Vasily Petrenko, Conductor; Rachel Nicholls, soprano; Peter Wedd, tenor, Derek Welton, baritone

This was a concert designed to recreate one set up by Wagner in 1877 as part of a fund raising effort in the UK to make a dent in the huge debts built up in order to put on the first performances of The Ring in Bayreuth in 1876. Unfortunately, though deemed a great artistic success, the London venture was problematic financially. Only 8 concerts were given, and though the whole London festival made a profit it was only a small one and did not do much to reduce the debts Bayreuth owed.  Wagner had some fairly mind-boggling meetings – he met George Eliot, for instance, and Cosima sat for a portrait by Burne-Jones (which was never finished). Wagner had intended to conduct the first half of each concert but had problems with the tricky acoustics of the RAH and in the end handed most of the conducting over to Hans Richter. However, fearing that the audience would react negatively to not seeing Wagner ‘live’, when he was not conducting, he was put in an armchair at the side of the orchestra looking ‘sphinx-like’ at the audience.

Some of the singers, internationally very well-known, were changed in the months leading up to this concert. Irene Theorin and Andreas Schager – both Bayreuth veterans, whom I had heard in 2022 in the Ring in Bayreuth – were replaced by Rachel Nicholls and Peter Wedd. Rachel Nicholls is a good friend of the Manchester Wagner Society and has given two talks for us – I even had lunch with her once! She was a particularly welcome replacement. Peter Wedd has had a sizeable international career in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, singing roles like Siegmund and Lohengrin. Derek Welton has recently performed Alberich for ENO and I heard him sing Klingsor in 2017 at Bayreuth.

A Wagner concert wholly devoted to the famous ‘bleeding chunks’ is something of a first for me. It is an odd experience to rush with relatively little time to pause (and not much time for audience reaction) from Sachs singing in Act 2 of Meistersinger to the end of Rheingold to the Ride of the Valkyries to the end of Act 3 of The Valkyrie. However – it was precisely listening to recordings of bleeding chunks that got me into Wagner 55 years ago, and the large audience – and of course, this being the RAH  that means LARGE – seemed different to the types usually to be found attending the Barbican for instance – younger, more diverse. Maybe the RPO has made a point of cultivating such audiences over the years and certainly there were people there who clearly both hadn’t heard much of the music before and were knocked out by it,  particularly Brünnhilde’s Immolation scene.

What did I enjoy about it? I think, foremost, listening to Derek Welton and Rachel Nicholls. Welton in particular was outstanding in the extracts he sang, and by that that I mean not only that he had a firmly grounded, big but also beautiful voice, but also that he sang with a lovely sense of legato – no Bayreuth bark here. He has the Rheingold and Wanderer Wotans in his repertoire, and is singing the Walkure Wotan at the Deutsche Oper Berlin this season. Rachel Nicholls, with her right arm in a sling (which can’t help her expressive potential, as she is someone who uses her whole body in singing) was a diminutive but powerful figure. She sounded as though she was not yet fully into her stride during the Act 1 Gotterdammerung duet and in that piece had quite a wide and heavy vibrato, but the Immolation Scene was very movingly sung – the wobble cleared, the words were clearly expressed and she was very noble and touching at the ‘Ruhe du gott’ passage (despite some idiot’s phone going off at that point). She has of course the power to ride over orchestral climaxes easily and thrill with her top notes, securely delivered – all in all I was very impressed by her performance. Peter Wedd, who I haven’t heard before, was perhaps more routine as Siegfried, but his was a perfectly serviceable performance and frankly I am not sure Andreas Schager would have been that much more effective (thought the latter has fantastic stamina and energy)

I have a great deal of time for Vassily Petrenko and admire hugely the performances I have heard him give of Elgar, Rachmaninov, Shostakovich and others. He has also built up the profile and sound of the RPO since he took over as chief conductor 3 years or so ago. I didn’t think Wagner was territory he’d fully got to grips with, though. Tempi were often fast to the point of notes being smudged and not always being clearly articulated and he didn’t always seem to draw out the full power of a Wagner-sized orchestra (having said which the closing moments of Gotterdammerung were tremendous). I hadn’t thought of him as an opera conductor but he does in fact have over 30 operas in his repertoire and has conducted in Munich and the Met, among other places.

Given the audience, I felt perhaps the evening needed a compere giving a bit of explanation and links between the pieces –  perhaps referring to that shadowy figure sitting in an armchair to the extreme left of the stage……

So – an odd and not always wholly satisfying evening, but with some great performances in it to listen to, too, And I did hear a work by Wagner for the first time – the  Huldigungsmarsch written for King Ludwig in 1864 and sounding very much a hack piece, with stray references to Tristan and Lohengrin but mainly a military march.

Bruckner Symphony no 8; Halle Orchestra, Mark Elder

As I have said elsewhere in this blog, I have been lucky to hear several very fine Bruckner 8s live over the years. This performance was the equal, at the very least, of nearly all of them, as I experienced it.

Astonishingly, this run of performances with the Halle is the first time Elder has ever conducted the work. I remember reading somewhere that he felt for a long time he had little to ‘say’ about the work that would warrant his conducting it – though back in 2011 he was saying in an interview that he thought it was one of his 5 favourite symphonies.  It’s very difficult to express what I found so special about this performance but here are some thoughts:

1. Clarity of sound.    It was interesting to see Sir Mark’s arrangement of the orchestra for the Bruckner 8. On an elevated level, there were 3 harps at the centre back, timpani next to them, horns, Wagner tubas and bass tuba to the left and trumpets and trombones to the right. The harps come into startling prominence as a consequence, in the second and third movements. Critically, the splitting of the violins opens a whole new sound world and I heard details of the string writing I’ve never heard before. Likewise, I noted several occasions when Elder was dampening the sound of brass and strings to allow the woodwind to shine through and I heard in general far more of the woodwind inner voices than is normally the case eg in the 2nd movement. The brass wings sounded both distinct from each other because of their raised and varied position when needed and were at the same time able make a gloriously homogenised sound when required. Another instance of clarity was at the very end of the work – the final Wagnerian blaze can sometimes seem a bit of a sonic soup but here the various strands were clearly audible.

2. Narrative. This is difficult to explain but Elder somehow conveys a real sense of the relationship between the different segments of the music as they veer between heaven and something approaching hell in this symphony – which means you feel you are following a deeply involving story. I have rarely felt so deeply the ‘heavenly’ vision of the start of the third movement and the tragic yearning of the second subject of that movement. The whole of the third movement had an arc of narrative I have rarely heard live before and which made it deeply absorbing

3. Shaping. Over the years the Halle and Elder in the late Romantic repertoire have developed an instinctive phrasing of the melodic material of these large works (Wagner, Mahler, Elgar etc) which gives them a sound that blooms and flourishes. The transitions involved in the melodic arcs are often beautifully handled – often a slight rallentando is used as players lean into a melody.

4. Affinity.  There is something very special about the way Elder and the Halle have grown to understand each other.  As you would expect Elder had an open score in front of him, and his conducting is not overly demonstrative, yet he was utterly in control (I heard one very minor early entry, from one of the first violins, throughout all 85 minutes or so)

5. Tempi. These to me sounded spot on – flexible, not mannered, not lumbering, nor too fast. Actually – listening again on the radio on Tuesday 5/3/24 (on I-Player for a month) to the Bridgewater Hall performance, a couple of days before Newcastle, I realised the tempi were in objective terms quite slow and measured. But they came across in Newcastle as exactly the right ones to be using, and didn’t at all drag.

I was pleased that Elder was using the Haas 1939 edition of the work. This allows a couple more minutes of music  to be heard not in the Nowak edition

There was a huge ovation at the end – I heard from comments afterwards that this had been a very special occasion for many. All in all, my day at the big Bruckner Glasshouse weekend was really rewarding, even if it meant afterwards negotiating my way through the crowded Saturday night streets – Newcastle on a Saturday evening is quite something………!

Bruckner Mass No. 3 ‘Great’: Royal Northern Sinfonia; Chorus of Royal Northern Sinfonia; Durham University Choral Society. Thomas Zehetmair conductor. Elizabeth Watts soprano; Hannah Hipp mezzo-soprano; Thomas Atkins tenor; Mark Stone baritone
The Big Bruckner Weekend involved not only two concerts but also the Chorus of the Royal Northern Sinfonia singing a selection of Bruckner’s motets on the Concourse at 6.40pm.
I have never been to the Glasshouse (ex-Sage) Newcastle so it was interesting to go to two concerts there. I arrived in Newcastle after a tedious journey from Sheffield of about 5 hours (including a three and a half hours’ coach journey). However,,,,the concert hall itself feels warm and resonant – certainly in the same league as the Bridgewater Hall and Symphony Hall in Birmingham. There’s lots of cafe space and great views of the Tyne and city landscapes, though it looks like a project which ran out of money – while the Hall is all there the surroundings are a set of fenced off building sites.

I’ve never heard the Bruckner Mass before live. John Suchet of Classic FM, who seem to be associated with the weekend, described it as being as great a work as Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. This is nonsense – there are various points at which Bruckner is treading water and the work is less than consistently inspired, particularly in the Gloria – but the finest bits are very fine indeed. They include the lovely Benedictus and a lot of the Credo, particularly the quite amazing and blazing ‘ Et Resurrexit’, which really IS up there with the equivalents of Beethoven and Bach.
It’s not clear whether the Mass was ever heard or performed in its church-context – ie placed at 5 different points in the service. Certainly Bruckner was commissioned “to write a new Mass for the Burgkapelle’ but as I read the documentation on it, it was only ever performed as a concert piece. Whatever the context, one does wonder what modern audiences are experiencing when they hear a ‘great composer’ Mass. The Mozart and Schubert masses are still envisageable in a liturgical context, but this one certainly isn’t. When I hear something like this, I can relate it to my faith, but I wonder what others make of it – particularly in a performance where the programme didn’t carry the words of the Latin Mass. Is there an inherent sense of drama that comes across?

The Northern Sinfonia under Thomas Zehetmair sounded impressive – able to perform the rapid string ostinatos without any smudging and they made a powerful sound at the climaxes. I thought the combined choirs sounded fabulous and they sang tightly, with no tiredness showing in what is a long work (just over an hour), with the choir on their feet nearly all the time. The soloists sounded fine but have a relatively small role to play
The Northern Sinfonia part of the choir later before the Bruckner 8 performed 3 Bruckner Motets in the lobby, including the famous Locus Iste (see photo below)

Brahms, Violin Concerto; Shostakovich Symphony No 4. Sir Simon Rattle conductor; Isabelle Faust violin; London Symphony Orchestra

This was a very generously planned concert. It is ages and ages since I sat down and listened intently to the Brahms concerto. My abiding memory from my teenage years of listening to this work is of Ida Haendel playing it for several years in succession at the Proms – although she can only have been in her mid-40’s, she looked very formidable and as though emerging from a different era.

Though tinged with melancholy the Brahms violin concerto is a work of great inner peace which ‘the world’ does not intrude on too much. It’s of its time, of course, as any work of art is, and maybe the assumptions and culture of 19th middle class Germany which underpins it were already setting that culture on its way towards an abyss. But the violin concerto nevertheless stands as one of the great musical creations of that era. The LSO made a glorious warm sound, rich and mellow, with the lower strings being coaxed carefully by Rattle, who scarcely glanced at the first and second violins throughout the whole piece. Tempi seemed just right, with the third movement having just the sort of energy and bounce it needs without turning it into a scramble. The oboe playing at the beginning of the slow movement was exquisite but not mannered. Isabelle Faust is a great violinist – and she has all the energy and dexterity the piece needs in the first and third movements.  I felt – but this is a very personal reaction – that sometimes she wasn’t realising the introspective nature of some of the music fully  – I could have done with more shading, some more slowing down at points. But others would probably disagree…and I have much less of an ear for outstanding violin playing than i do for outstanding pianists.  It was lovely to hear this work again after do many years.

I have heard Shostakovich 4 just once before, performed by the Halle and Mark Elder in 2017 alongside a muti-media presentation of the symphony’s context – of the Great Terror. I have kicked myself repeatedly for not going to a Prom about 10 years ago with Haitink and the Chicago Symphony performing it. But this performance by Rattle and the LSO was about as good as I shall ever hear in the time left to me. The orchestra were magnificent – fantastically disciplined strings, wonderful woodwind playing (bassoons particularly) and powerful brass. Rattle was very good (in a work that is very, very noisy) at grading the climaxes, which helped in shaping the work to the extent it is meant to have shape. Simon Rattle conducted in a way that offered fine detail amidst the raucousness. In the climactic march in the finale maybe Rattle was slightly too fast- as a result the timpani ostinato took a couple of bars to get into the right rhythm. But that is a very minor point. The performance made it very clear that this work’s uncompromising nature would certainly not have come anywhere near satisfying Soviet cultural bureaucrats !

It is extraordinary that the Shostakovich piece was written only 55 years or so after the Brahms. If you were to project 55 years back from the Brahms you’d be in the era of late Beethoven and Schubert. There is a recognisable trajectory from the music of the 1820s to the 1870s but Shostakovich was writing in utterly different ways from Brahms. Here the world outside and the individual artist, the public and the private, are both present and often hostile to each other. There are certainly influences from older composers – Mahler (a direct quote from the 3rd movement of the 2nd symphony in the finale), obviously, and Stravinsky – but also a unique voice that tells you immediately – this is by Shostakovich. 

The work is not without form – It has a structure which can seem unbalanced and sprawling. It moves quickly from pomposity to stillness, from dreaming to force; there is a sort of sonata form in the first movement and the by turns trite and sinister music of the middle of the third movement is framed by the two enormous major key marches. But broadly the work is a wonderful example of uninhibited creativity and wild energy, sequences tumbling out one after the other, sudden mood swings, a kaleidoscopic variety of material, and you just have to go with the flow and celebrate the diversity of the material (I am sure there are ways the thematic material is connected but you’d need a score and specialised knowledge to see this). This is the ultra-talented young Shostakovich showing what he can do. But at the same time there is a constantly looming menace in the background over the whole work, breaking out particularly in the military marches of the last movement, with their terrifying power – you can almost see the jack-booted soldiers; oppressive power, and you definitely feel the private response of the glacial terrified ending. I’d forgotten the equally disturbing ticking percussive ending of the 2nd movement, used again in the closing moments of the 15th  with sinister effect as Shostakovich faces death.

A memorable evening!!

Director, Tim Albery; Set Designer, Michael Levine; Costume Designer. Constance Hoffman; Lighting Designer, David Finn; Movement, Philippe Giraudeau; Conductor, Henrik Nánási. Cast: The Dutchman, Bryn Terfel; Senta, Elisabet Strid; Daland, Stephen Milling; Erik, Toby Spence; Mary, Kseniia Nikolaieva; Steersman, Miles Mykkanen

I saw this production in 2015, conducted by Andris Nelsons with, as this time, Bryn Terfel as the Dutchman, and Senta sung by Adrianne Pieczonka. I remember it for 2 reasons – one, the sweep and passion, the fire, of Nelsons’ conducting, which was first-rate, and, secondly, for using the version of the score which plays it as one continuous piece without an interval (good) and does without the ‘redemptive’ ending, concluding in sound and fury (in my view at the time, disappointing). Of the singing and production, I have little memory. The current Bayreuth Tcherniakov production is the other one I’ve seen in recent times. The key thing to get across in any production of the Dutchman, it seems to me, is (1) the difference between the Dutchman’s/Senta’s search for ‘redemption’ / ‘eternal life’ and the placid bourgeois world of Daland and the townsfolk; (2) some modern translation of what ‘redemption’ might look like for modern audiences.

It had never really occurred to me before that, even at this relatively early stage of Wagner’s career, the Dutchman as a work focuses on the Schopenhauerian concept of a human being bound to a life of recurrent suffering, a wheel of fire from which the only escape – in Wagner’s take on the issue at this point – is human love/ sexual ecstasy, putting the Dutchman alongside, with some variations, Tristan and Parsifal. And of course Senta too is also bound upon her own wheel of fire, seen as a commodity by her father, and oppressed within a highly patriarchal society. The great merit of this production is that it doesn’t mess with this core theme and lets the text and music speak for themselves quite clearly – unlike the clever but ultimately annoying current Bayreuth production, though the religious references – angels, the Devil – are likely to confuse audiences, as are the Dutchman’s crew of ghostly sailors, and divert them from this message of the relief we must all seek from endless suffering.

The core element of the set was a large ramp, pointing downwards from the back of the stage to the front. With effective lighting this becomes a beach, and Daland’s house. Two or three big hawsers pulled by the chorus or by the Dutchman and chains represent the boats (there’s also a gangway for Senta and the Dutchman to move up and down on in Act 3). Additions are a set of sewing machines and tables which come down from the flies for the spinning chorus, and an opening at the bottom of the ramp to focus the dancing of the ‘townsfolk’ chorus, and the sinister presence of the zombie crew of the Dutchman’s ship in Act 3. The end of the opera has Senta crawling along the ramp now lit to be looking something like a desert, maybe dying or maybe entering again her own eternal wheel of fire. There’s a model of a ship instead of the portrait of the Dutchman (as there are no walls). There’s water at the front of the stage – in 2015 at the dress rehearsal the water spilled over into the pit, apparently, and the performance had to be paused. It gets sploshed in in the final act but all in all I am not sure why it’s there. The dress of the cast is modern, to no particular effect. The lighting creates pools of darkness and all the key singers are quite difficult to see without shadows over their faces = at least from the Amphitheatre, anyway. I think the aspect of the work which the director could have done more with is emphasising the insularity, the complacency, and the narrow-mindedness of the community (to whom of course the Dutchman is Other).  The emphasis on bleak open mythic spaces militates against handling this aspect, maybe. Also the extent of Senta’s being a commodity in Daland’s eyes could have been more emphasised. My own idea of how to produce this would be to use video screens to project a burning wheel of fire for the Dutchman’s Die Frist ist um and Senta’s ballad, then have two circles of fire intertwining in the big duet, and then have them separated again at the end. That, and something much like the staging here, would be ideal, I think!!!

The two outstanding performances were by Bryn Terfel and Toby Spence. I had assumed that Terfel might by now be sounding a bit frayed, and maybe in a dress rehearsal might be marking. Not a bit of it…..his voice filled the auditorium and easily rode over the orchestra at climaxes; there was some outstandingly warm sensitive soft singing in ‘Der Frist ist Um’ and the big duet with Senta. His diction was extraordinarily good, his lowering presence utterly believable. I felt it was a privilege to be listening to Bryn Terfel in this performance  – he made so much of the words and music. Toby Spence made the best possible case for Erik with strong assertive but also sensitive singing.  Normally Erik comes across as a bit of a drippy figure compared to the stronger stage presences of the Dutchman, Senta and Daland but here Spence held his own and had a good stage profile.

About Elisabet Strid  as Senta I felt more ambivalent. Possibly she was marking at times. She was never less than good but seemed to lacked that ability the best opera singers have to grab the audience’s attention with her stage presence – her Ballad was not that distinguished and could have done with more wonder, and narrative passion. All in all she didn’t quite project the degree of intensity – even madness – needed for Senta. Her voice didn’t quite have the cut-through quality needed, nor was her phrasing as sensitive as Terfel’s. Stephen Milling was, again, perfectly competent as Daland but not distinctive. On Nanasi and the orchestra I was in two minds, partly because I was high up in the Amphitheatre, where the sound is never great. The orchestra seemed rhythmically precise for the most part (a few glitches aside) but at times a bit plodding and not all the big moments quite caught fire as they should have done. The chorus sounded excellent when in full throttle though there were again a few bits of slipped ensemble (which is understandable for a dress rehearsal). Again I wonder why the ROH cannot employ young British singers in the minor roles such as Mary and the Steersman – certainly the people on stage singing these roles weren’t particularly distinguished.

All in all a good though not great performance but Terfel’s Dutchman will stay in my memory for a long time……

Britten Sinfonia, Guy Johnston cello: Beethoven Grosse Fuge Op.133; Bartók Divertimento for String Orchestra; Tavener The Protecting Veil

This, by contrast to the previous concert, did not seem to be a clear model of coherent programming. Other than the fact that all the works are focused on the use of a string chamber orchestra, I failed to find any clear connections between the pieces, though maybe the point is the difference between the knotty, struggling, ‘difficult’ pieces in the first half and the serenity of the second half. The Britten Sinfonia of course was notoriously savaged by Arts Council cuts in November 2022, despite being the most prominent orchestra in the East of England, so I felt duty-bound to go along to support the Manchester leg of their 2024 tour, despite the slight oddness of the programming.   

The Britten Sinfonia sounded a very fine band, but I thought their self-presentation to the audience needed a bit of attention. It’s good that they don’t have all the flummery of conductors to deal with and they made creative use of lighting, particularly in the Tavener piece, but I felt a bit of a spoken introduction would have helped before each work – certainly with the Beethoven and Bartok. Guy Johnston did a great interview in the Guardian about Tavener and I am sure a way might have been found to let him talk about his clear love for the work without destroying the aura the Sinfonia wanted to create at the beginning of The Protecting Veil.

I felt the Beethoven performance lacked something. It may be that the Grosse Fugue just sounds more visceral, has greater instrumental attack, when played by a quartet. Somehow this performance sounded a bit soggy, not quite as sharp as it should have been, and as though it needed a conductor to bring coherence to the relationship between the quieter passages and the frenzied fugal elements.

The Divertimento for String Orchestra is Bartók’s last work composed just before he fled Hungary and emigrated to the United States at the outbreak of World War II. It’s in three movements – an opening allegro with gypsy music influences, a molto adagio, and a finale that’s very quick. It uses the concerto grosso format, as I wrote on this blog when I last heard it in a dynamic performance by the LSO and Tony Pappano in October. The Sinfonia’s Bartok I thought was superb. The slow movement was utterly gripping in its menace, resignation and drama and the finale had all the energy and thrust needed. The first movement was also extremely well played, though as with the Pappano performance I found myself getting lost halfway through this movement. The Sinfonia sounded utterly together and at ease without a formal conductor.

Tavener is an interestingly wayward figure in the UK’s classical music history of the past 70 years. 20 or 30 years ago there would have been one or two first performances a year of large scale orchestral/ choral works by him, with long Greek or latterly Sanskrit titles. Whereas Arvo Part, another key figure in the field of holy minimalism, seems still quite widely played – possibly because his works vary more in nature, instrumentation and length – since Tavener’s death I have come across few instances of his works being performed, outside some choral classics – ‘ The Lamb’, ‘Song for Athene’ and so forth. Maybe there is going to be a massive re-evaluation of his output at some point, or maybe most of it will slide gently into oblivion. The Protecting Veil as a quasi-cello concerto has obvious champions in the various cellists who have put it in their repertoire and perhaps therefore stands more chance than most of his works of surviving. Having said which, there was a pretty full audience for this concert, and I got the sense that it was slightly different to the usual crowd who would turn up to BH concerts – so maybe there is a big Tavener fan club out there waiting for more performances of his works…….

As Tavener himself observed,  The Protecting Veil is a sort of lyric ikon and stands as much as an aid to meditation as a structured piece of music in its own right. It has a glorious signature melody and some wonderful orchestration. It is utterly itself and without apology – and that must be a virtue! Maybe it slightly overstays its welcome, but I was impressed listening to it again (though I have never heard it live – I have a CD of it somewhere but haven’t listened to it for years). Guy Johnston played it superbly.

I’m glad I went to this concert!