Conductor, Oksana Lyniv; Director, Dmitri Tcherniakov; Stage design, Dmitri Tcherniakov; Costumes, Elena Zaytseva; Lighting, Gleb Filshtinsk; Dramaturgy; Tatiana Werestchagina: Daland, Georg Zeppenfeld; Senta, Elisabeth Teige; Erik, Eric Cutler; Mary, Nadine Weissmann; Der Steuermann, Attilio Glaser; Der Holländer, Thomas J. Mayer, Bayreuth Festival Chorus and Orchestra

I reviewed this earlier in the year, in late March while sitting at home with Covid, having very much enjoyed the video made of last year’s new production. It’s now revived for 2022 but with Asmik Gregorian replaced by Elizabeth Teige (Ms Gregorian is currently apparently singing sensationally in Salburg) and John Lundgren, who was scheduled to reprise his performance, replaced by Tomas J Mayer after he called off through ill health. I hadn’t originally seen this was on in one of the ‘spare’ Ring days -I was able to book on line a (not very good) 3^rd row aeat at the back of the Loge – as it happened the first seat in the first row was unoccupied as the lights dimmed so the attendant was happy for me to sit there, and it made a big difference to the visuals and probably sound too

Seeing it live in the Festspielhaus, I was less than impressed by Tcherniakov’s concept  of the local man returning to his grim port town to take revenge on the society that killed his mother, who had an affair with Daland and then killed herself when she was rejected. While the concept of Senta’s obsession remains basically untouched, and Daland can be as greedy and horrible as he is seen to be in any conventional production, the concept of the Dutchman as revenger does not really make much sense of what the Dutchman sometimes has to say – e.g “ My doom is eternal!……..Never shall I find the redemption I seek on land! ……..Death never comes! This is the dread sentence of damnation. I ask thee, blessed angel from heaven who won for me the terms for my absolution: was I the unhappy butt of thy mockery when thou didst show me the way of release? Vain hope! Dread, empty delusion! Constant faith on earth is a thing of the past” . For many people this kind of language does not relate to their experience and is pretty meaningless. Surely the need is for the director is to ask – OK, so what would words like redemption, eternity, hell, faith etc mean in a modern context. The trappings of the sea and ghost ships aren’t particularly important, as Tcherniakov’s concept shows, to getting at the work’s inner meaning but he doesn’t reinterpret the essential problem of the Dutchman as anything other than revenge. There is also within the piece something about the Outsider – the artist as Outsider but maybe anyone as outsider. The riot in Act 3 Scene 1 may relate to this a bit in Tcherniakov’s work, as may the shooting of the Dutchman by Mary (though exactly why this happens is totally unclear ) but it’s not really built upon.

So, really, yet another piece of muddled directoral thinking redeemed (that word again) by some magnificent performances. Elisabeth Teige was a stunning Senta  – a thrilling big voice and able to convey the same sort of edgy teenager-iness as Ms Gregorian. Tomas J Mayer, not someone I’ve come across before, was an excellent Dutchman, with much less barking and more mellifluous singing than you’d get with some (he is also a Wotan in various houses’ Ring cycles). It’s also noteworthy that he took over only 3 weeks before the first performance from John Lundgren, who cancelled all performances in this summer’s Bayreuth Festival ‘due to the severity of personal problems. Georg Zeppenfeld was as good as he’s been in everything else I have seen him do live. The wonderful Chorus sounded as good as ever – and they have a lot to do in this opera. And Oksana Lyniv made the orchestra fizz and boil in a way that it just hasn’t with this year’s Ring (so far). The pictures below are in the main of last year’s performances

Fricka – Christa Mayer; Siegmund – Klaus Florian Vogt; Hunding – Georg Zeppenfeld; Wotan – Tomasz Konieczny; Sieglinde – Lise Davidsen; Brünnhilde – Iréne Theorin; Valentin Schwarz (director), Andrea Cozzi (designs), Andy Besuch (costumes), Konrad Kuhn (dramaturgy). Reinhard Traub (lighting), Luis August Krawen (video), Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Cornelius Meister (conductor

There was a good example in this production of Walküre where taking a new look at The Ring and doing something unconventional really works, and offers new insights. Wotan’s Farewell from ‘Der Augen leuchtendes Paar’ onwards becomes in this production Wotan singing in a monologue on an increasingly empty stage mainly expressing his misery at the mess he’s made of things. Brunnhilde has gone off (I’ll say more about that exit later on) and, for the Magic Fire Music, Fricka comes on to attempt a reunion, with a candle-lit tray of drinks. While it is true that Wotan still has to sing about his spear point, the clink of the spear on the ground is made by the sound of glasses when Fricka offers her glass to Wotam=n. Wotan takes not much notice of Fricka, she realises she’s failed and she goes sadly off stage to the sound of the long string melody and the brass and glockenspiels and woodwind. Clearly some people hated it and there was a fair amount of booing at the end, but it struck me as a clever way of showing us new insights into the characters and their motivations. Another good idea was having Hunding come as a suppliant to Fricka in Act 2 and being a very low class figure in this posh house

I was also thinking as I walked up the Green Hill about our current expectations of Wagner productions. We no longer expect to see Fricka’s rams or Grane (though we do see a kind of Grane in this production). We don’t expect to see Valkyries flying through the sky or even only rarely a dragon in his cave, or a toad pop up. So to what extent are we justified in our criticism of things being ignored or changed in this production?To me there’s a difference between those objects which have symbolic experience and meaning and those which don’t. A dragon does not, a sword or a spear do – but I will have to think more about this

Act 1’s Hunding house is a very rough looking place with lots of scrap metal, failing electricals and lumps of concrete all over the place. In the Prelude, Hunding, wearing  a cheap suit and a tie,  is trying to fix the fuse box when the curtain goes up. We immediately see that Sieglinde is already pregnant – this is presumably by Wotan. who tries to assault her later (if Hunding, this would be for me a production step too far in going off at a tangent, given the importance of Siegfried’s genealogy). The set continues unchanged until the door bangs and spring comes in.  New scenery comes down from the flies creating a kind of ideal young family home with plenty of toys, bright colours and two young children playing. This again I thought was a good insight into perhaps the two’s unrealistic hopes. After Sieglinde’s ‘Du bist der Lenz’ we go back to the ramshackle house. The glowing pyramid makes a reappearance when Siegmund sees Nothung in the fire (which wasn’t there) – there was a sudden glowing light from something Sieglinde is holding in her bedroom and when opened by Siegmund contains a revolver. So Nothung is a pistol, not a sword….. This remains consistent until Siegmund dies, though how badly it was damaged isn’t clear and how the forging in Siegfried will be handled is currently a bit of a mystery.  The staging of Act 1 is pretty director-proof in consisting of three individuals in a tense but clear relationship with each other. The person regie was fairly standard but still very moving

Act 2 is another part of Valhalla. Apparently, Freya’s funeral is taking place though there is no indication from on stage that this is who the coffin contains. The set remains the same throughout the Act. We meet Brunnhilde who has leather trousers and long blonde hair, and we also meet Grane who is a kind of personal servant much given to taking selfies – he helps a lot with Sieglinde’s baby (I’ll come on to that). Act 2 handling of characters on stage has some interesting touches  e.g Brunnhilde is much more nervous than usual in the Todesverkundigung scene and Wotan and Fricka are hovering around in the background at first. She’s touchingly excited to be disobeying Wotan. Shockingly Wotan tries to sexually assault Sieglinde at one point – he stops I think when the fight between Hunding and Sieglinde starts. The person to person handling was done, I think, quite well by the director

Act 3 opens hilariously in a upmarket plastic surgery clinic –  the Valkyries are all having plastic surgery and there are various comic moments that work rather well. This also paves the way for how Brunnhilde’s banishment by Wotan is handled – she is given a surgical coat by Grane and led off into the depths of the clinic to undergo some sort of suspended animation process. In this production by the time she comes on with Brunnhilde Sieglinde has actually had the baby and he arrives in a blanket carried by Grane. I don’t have a problem with this (it has always seemed rather daft to me that Brunnhilde should have to tell Sieglinde she’s going to have a baby – surely she should know……)

Musically, things continued to be of a very high standard (mostly). To start with the most positive , Act 1 must be the best sung I’ve ever heard in live performance. Klaus Florian Vogt’s and Lise Davidsen’s spring songs to each other were beautifully sung with very clear diction and pointing of words, and some lovely phrasing. Vogt also has the heft for the big scenes and moments – his ‘Walse’ was strong but also not overdone. Vogt’s singing in the Todesverkundigung scene was also very beautiful. Lise Davidsen heard live is quite something – her voice is massive but also beautifully controlled. Her ‘Oh hehrstes Wunder’ in Act 3 was one of the most amazing sounds I’ve ever heard in the opera house.    Iréne Theorin received quite a lot of criticism in the first cycle and she must be nearing the end of her time when she can realistically sing this role – she’s apparently been singing it for 17 years – but she sounded in bright and clear voice – high notes pinged, a warm central register; she sounded very good indeed. Georg Zeppenfeld was as usual a magnificently voiced figure as Hunding. Christa Mayer was very good as Fricka too. Tomasz Konieczny has a lighter voice than one might expect as Wotan, but he worked very hard to point words and achieved a great deal of variation in tone – some of his Farewell was sung barely above a whisper; I thought he was unusually effective and certainly had no trouble in commanding the stage when needed. He had understandable problems though with some of Cornelius Meister’s exaggerated rallentandos in Act 3 – after a fairly smooth and well handled Acts 1 and 2, Meister seemed to throw caution to the winds in Act 3 and introduced some rather heavily-done gear changes to point up a particular motif or climax that seemed unnecessarily heavy (and clearly caught Wotan out a couple of times . It seems unfair to be criticising someone who only stepped in to the role 3 weeks before the first night, when the slated conductor dropped out – whether through illness, ‘artistic disagreement’, or what, who knows..) but I have to tell it as it is, and some of the orchestra seemed to get caught out at times too. At the end there were huge cheers for Davidsen and Vogt and Zeepenfeld, considerable appreciation for Konieczny and Meyer and some boos as well as cheers for Meister

So…..high quality singing, a so-so conductor and a production which varies from the brilliant to the annoying. A day’s gap now before Siegfried……

Wotan – Egils Silins; Donner – Raimund Nolte; Froh – Attilio Glaser; Loge – Daniel Kirch; Fricka – Christa Mayer; Freia – Elisabeth Teige; Erda – Okka von der Damerau; Alberich – Olafur Sigurdarson; Mime – Arnold Bezuyen; Fasolt – Jens-Erik Aasbø; Fafner – Wilhelm Schwinghammer; Woglinde – Lea-ann Dunbar; Wellgunde – Stephanie Houtzeel; Flosshilde – Katie Stevenson. Valentin Schwarz (director), Andrea Cozzi (designs), Andy Besuch (costumes), Konrad Kuhn (dramaturgy). Reinhard Traub (lighting), Luis August Krawen (video), Bayreuth Festival Orchestra, Cornelius Meister (conductor)

This is the fourth time I’ve been to Bayreuth (1972, 1974, 2017 and now), and the second time I’m seeing The Ring here. As is to be expected on what has long been described in quasi-religious terms as a pilgrimage, my journey on 24/8 from London was fairly arduous, made more so by DB engineering works and a track-side fire. I finally got to my guest-house at 1030pm, after 15 hours by 5 trains and 1 bus, and going round in circles via Google-Maps in Bayreuth. I spent the morning of the next day remembering my bearings in the town – I am very usefully based near Wahnfried and Richard Wagner Strasse on this trip – and then walked up the hill to the Festspielhaus for a 6pm Rhinegold

Because I have to give a talk about this production to the Wagner Society in Manchester, I have been a bit more assiduous than I would otherwise have been about reading reviews of this new production, and preparing myself also by listening to the explanatory podcasts now on the Bayreuth Festival website. As readers may well have noticed, this new production has not exactly brought out fanfares of praise from reviewers – the blogs and newspaper articles I have seen have run from the ‘quite an interesting idea but rather muddled’ kind of approach to hysterical invective about ‘regie-theater’ gone mad.

A few points it’s maybe worth making before we start. The Ring of the Nibelung is one of the great pinnacles of western high art. As such, you’d really only expect for there to be many different ways of interpreting its story. Just because an interpretation is unusual, you shouldn’t just reject it out of hand. Instead,  you might use criteria like:

• consistency in the implementation of the concept
• how that concept relates to what the words and music are telling you
• the insights which the approach brings to the work
• also, you’d want to think about the quality of singing conducting acting and orchestral player. 
• So these are 4 criteria I’ll be basing my views of this Ring production on

Obviously I have now seen only one of the four operas so these are some tentative notes which I might expand or disown as the cycle proceeds.

You forget – or you do if like me you have only been to Bayreuth a few times – how magnificently large the Bayreuth stage is and the depth of resources it has for huge visual impact – whatever the merits of the production, with the right designer you can be assured of spectacle! We certainly got that here. I also needed to be reminded both of the wonderful acoustic, and the kind things it does to singers performing this music, and also of the quality of singers Bayreuth can draw on, who, moreover have been working together for a number of months on this production, and this really shows in the quality of the interactions they have with one another. This was an outstanding cast, I thought.

The basic concept of the production is the history of an extended family, gripped by the need for power and money, and a fondness for lavish display. The spectacular Valhalla set for Scenes 2 and 4 works on three different levels, with a very fancy drawing room for the gods, and a garage space for Fasolt and Fafner to drive in with their big SUV. The latter is one of the various moments where a bit of undercutting humour on Wagner’s sometimes rather loud and pompous music works rather well. The best example of the latter is Donner, a golf enthusiast, who tries to hit the giants with his club earlier on and uses his club again in the calling forth of thunder and lightning, with a little putt as the thunder rolls. Erda makes various appearances in Scene 2 and earlier in Scene 4 as, clearly, a girl friend of Wotan, which she undoubtedly is in the text, as the future mother of Brunnhilde. This is all good and creative stuff. Part of the extended family history is the fact that Alberich and Wotan are twins (again, perfectly justifiable from the text) and the Prelude is accompanied by beautiful images of foetal twins with an underlying message about the human capacity for good and evil which lies within both of them.

The main issue that is harder to get one’s head round is the concept of the Rhinegold being a child, and how this then plays out. Scene 1 is visualised as a swimming pool, presumably on Wotan’s estate, with the Rhinemaidens as nannies and a group of children playing in the pool and around the edges. Alberich’s increasingly desperate conversations with the Rhinemaidens is well-handled and the fact that they can splash him and push him face first into the water is a clever way of showing how humiliated he is. The concept of a child having the potential for good and evil also makes sense – and of course in many ways this is similar to how gold is seen. The Rhinemaidens’ lament at the end of the work is for the fact that there is no return to the innocence of childhood. But the concept of child-gold does bring with it a clear question – so what is Alberich renouncing and what is he taking on at the end of Scene 1? I assume he is renouncing love based on mutuality and respect and taking on the control of children to shape his future (which of course is what Wotan is also doing). Where I lost the plot a bit Is in Scene 3 and the early part of Scene 4. Here, instead of the usual miserable dwarves, we had a group of little girls, identically uniformed and obediently scribbling away, and looked after by a somewhat dubious and possibly pederastic Mime, within an airtight box. The stolen ‘Rhinegold’ little boy is engaged in being violent and disruptive towards them, and we begin to see that he is the young Hagen.

Four points relating to questions I had in my mind as I watched this:

• I suppose the little girls are another example of people – in this case Mime acting as Alberich’s agent – controlling others’ potentiality. OK,….
• But, why does one little girl come up to Valhalla in Scene 4 to ‘cover’ Freia (she is taken away by Erda after her warning to Wotan, and wouldn’t it have been better if all the little girls came up from Nibelheim?
• … why also would Wotan go down into Nibelungs’ kingdom to take possession of a nasty little boy – and why would Fasolt and Fafner want him? Is the idea that he is still a human being of infinite potential, and therefore ‘treasurable’. Or that he is just the sort of criminal mind in the making they need. I sort of get those two options, but remain baffled by the point above
• As several commentators have mentioned there’s also the odd glowing pyramid towards the end of Scene 4, which the Gods are very keen on. I didn’t think this was much of a deal – just the Gods indulging in a bit of New Age-ism as another way of trying to control the future

One of the writers in the programme book says that, because there are inconsistencies in Wagner;’s Ring, it’s OK for the director to create some more (I paraphrase)! I am not sure about this philosophically, but, all in all, though occasionally baffled, there was a lot more right than wrong about this production so far. I think my main concern is that, as a non-German speaker, although I have a reasonably good knowledge of the German text and what it means, it’s not detailed – I can’t feel viscerally what it means when a giant says ‘there’s a ring on your finger’ when a little school-girl is standing before Wotan. That is a limitation which will inevitably colour all my comments.

Musically, this was very, very good. There were really no weak links among the singers – the stand-outs were three excellent Rhinemaidens, a truly outstanding Alberich in Olafur Sigurdarson, and an excellent (dodgy lawyer) Loge in Daniel Kirch, But Egils Silins was also very fine as Wotan, utterly commanding the stage when he sang. A really great cast. I was slightly less impressed by Cornelius Meister, the late replacement conductor. Some of the music sounded a bit gabbled at a fastish pace (2 hours 20 mins), with some over-obvious gear changes. The orchestra sounded glorious for the most part, with a few bumpy bits when coordination went a bit askew (unusually for this orchestra, in my experience).

One gentleman shouted out something angrily during the performance, and there were a few boo’s as the curtain came down but also then an enormous cheer and stamping of feet from the audience as the cast took their curtain calls. There were a few boos for the conductor (unfair given that he stepped in at the last minute)

Anton Webern, Passacaglia, Op. 1; Six Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 6 (revised version, 1928); Claude Debussy, Ariettes oubliées arr. Brett Dean; Johannes Brahms, Symphony No. 2 in D major: Siobhan Stagg, soprano; Australian World Orchestra, Zubin Mehta, conductor

This was a very enjoyable concert. I only went to it because I had an evening to spare in London before setting off for Bayreuth the following day, but I am really glad to have gone.

The ‘Australian World Orchestra’ is a new one on me and a slightly daft name – but it has apparently been a going concern for at least 10 years. It is a collection of Australian musicians from all over the world coming together for ad hoc tours in the summer, and a pretty impressive bunch they are – many of the main German orchestras (Leipzig, Munich, Koln etc), the LA Phil, the Chicago Symphony, San Franciscom LSO/LPO/Philharmonia/BBC Symphony and leading Australian orchestras are represented among the players. They’re a big orchestra and this was their first UK tour – they sounded very fine, with a warm string tone, some beautiful woodwind and horn playing, and together a real ’heft ‘and weight of orchestral sound that sounded particularly fine in the Brahms.

I guess I must have seen Mehta conduct in concerts over the years, perhaps with the Israel Philharmonic, but the last memorable live event that I went to which I know he conducted was the famous production of La Fanciulla del West at ROHCG in 1979, with Domingo. I would not have been particularly excited in advance by the prospect of his conducting Brahms, but this concert proved me wrong!! He now looks very frail –he is after all in his mid-80’s  – and has a Haitink-like black walking stick and a seat at the podium, which he moves very slowly towards from the wings. But once seated he is fully in control and with few gestures gives the orchestra all the signals and impetus they need

The two Webern pieces sounded very well done. I have never forgotten Simon Rattle’s grouping about 10 years ago in a BPO Prom of the Webern 6 pieces alongside comparable works by Schoenberg and Berg with the request that we listen to these works ‘as though to a Mahler symphony’. And that is of course exactly the world they inhabit, albeit with an increasing abstraction that is sometimes seemingly far removed from Mahler’s intensely personal writing, and at other times seem simply an expressionist extension of it. I must listen to these beautiful works more often and get to know them as well as I might say a Mahler symphony.

The middle of the evening sagged a bit. Brett Dean’s arrangements of some early Debussy songs with words by Verlaine (and Brett Dean was one of the viola players in the orchestra [ex-BPO]) were slightly nondescript and uninteresting. They were well sung but one wondered what the point was.

But the Brahms was tremendous. This was an old man’s Brahms, much like the one I heard Haitink conduct in the Barbican in 2017 or what I remember of Boult’s performances of this work- serene, autumnal, full of a gentle melancholy. By this I mean that tempi were steady – even sometimes a bit slow – but allowing both a spacious unfolding of the main themes and a reflective approach to the many passages of transition from key to key, major to minor, so that you really felt you were falling into an unfolding of the piece rather than being driven through it. The first movement was beautifully textured, with many individual voices you don’t always here, and the finale was one of the most exciting I’ve heard, with a fine gradation of dynamics so that the blare of trumpets and trombones at the end sounded really quite cathartic. The steady tempi made for precise rhythmic thrust and articulation which added to the excitement. Throughout Mehta with small gestures showed just which orchestra sections he wanted to hear highlighted and his accentuated beat at moments of high drama unleashed forceful propulsive motion in the orchestra, which sounded thoroughly Central European and idiomatic

The encore was the first Dvorak Slavonic Dance and – as he is also a showman among other things – Mehta conducted standing up, clearly enjoying himself. I am sure the orchestra would have been happy enough to do a second encore but it did seem a bit rough on Mr Mehta……….

Bartók The Miraculous Mandarin – suite; Prokofiev Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major; Hannah Eisendle Heliosis (UK premiere); Dvořák Symphony No. 7 in D minor: Benjamin Grosvenor, piano; Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop, conductor

I went to this concert primarily because I’d never heard the Vienna RSO live before, as far as I can recall, and because the programme looked attractive ….and substantial, at a time when some concerts, not only at the Proms but RFH and elsewhere, only offer 60-70 minutes of music. This offered over 90, with a probable encore as well……It shouldn’t be a major factor, but somehow sometimes is. Having said that, I have had some fairly routine experiences listening to Benjamin Grosvenor and Marin Alsop in the past, so that was slightly tempering my expectations.

The hall was again very full – Choir, Side Stalls, Arena and Circle completely so, with a few spare seats in the central stalls, reflecting, as I have said before, the high pricing of this area by BBC/RAH. And all this was on a rail strike day!

Again, I found it difficult to comment on the quality of the orchestra from the first row of the Albert Hall Choir seats. There was some tight rhythmic playing in the Bartok, but sometimes inexact splurging in the Dvorak of some string passages. There was some beautiful woodwind playing in the Prokofiev and Dvorak, and some wonderfully soft horn playing in the Dvorak, but the strings sometimes didn’t seem to have enough weight in some of the more passionate passages in the Dvorak – and indeed it was a smaller string section than some – certainly in comparison to the Oslo band (6 rather than 8 doubles basses, 8 rather than 10 cellos etc). All in all, I thought they sounded similar in standard to the regional BBC orchestras – but I must listen to the broadcast and see if hearing them from the right perspective makes a difference.

Rather to my surprise, the work I enjoyed the most was the Prokofiev. Though I have a recording, I don’t play it that often, and I was absolutely gripped by the three very different movements – by the fertility of the musical ideas and by that strange melancholy feel you get in so much of Prokofiev, of wistful music from distant pre-revolutionary ballrooms, of a better time now passed. Benjamin Grosvenor played it very well, and, while appropriately hammering where needed, was also very good at phrasing the quieter elements in the score. There was an encore from Mr Grosvenor– appropriately given the 33C heat in London today) Ravel’s Jeux d’eau.

I also enjoyed the new piece by Hannah Eisendle, which was great fun – full of John Adams-like rhythms and sounding sometimes like something akin to minimalism, but more quirky and unpredictable than this infers, and with a careful blend of quiet and extremely loud elements in the score. The orchestra played it very well indeed, and very tightly, something which I think Marin Alsop is very good at achieving in the orchestras she works with.

The Bartok I always have a bit of a problem with – clearly it’s a seminal piece in all sorts of ways, but (a bit like my reaction to Tapiola, which was written roundabout the same time – maybe a couple of years earlier) I always find myself getting lost in trying to follow the story – which I know – in the orchestral sequences. It always ends at a point where I think the magician is still being killed, and I am always surprised at the abrupt finish! It sounded well in this performance but again without the rich underpinning of strong string sound in some of the more-rhythmic passages.

The Dvorak was lovely, though I always have an issue with these works. I hear them as essentially an assembly of glorious folky tunes, worked up and developed a bit, it’s true, but none of Dvorak’s symphonies seem very symphonic in any normal use of the word, and in the 7^th in particular I find the frequent references to Wagner (eg Walkuere Act 3) and Brahms 1 first movement a bit irritating. But the 7^th is great fun, and much of this was gloriously played. I happily swallowed my reservations for the duration – but Dvorak symphonies would be fairly low down on my extended Desert Island wish list (whereas Rusalka I rate much higher)

There were two encores – a contemporary (I think) Cats polka, with lots of feline noises from strings, brass and percussion, and the Thunder and Lightning polka – both very well done

Jean Sibelius, Tapiola; Franz Liszt, Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major’ Richard Strauss, Ein Heldenleben: Yuja Wang, piano; Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Klaus Mäkelä – conductor

Despite Norman Lebrecht’s lurid warnings (and I don’t deny his underlying thesis about the diminishing market for classical music) the Proms seems to be doing pretty well in terms of audiences as the season progresses – the last 3-4 concerts have been, as I understand it, pretty well-attended, and this Friday concert with the Oslo PO was absolutely jam-packed, with a full arena, circle and stalls. Part of that no doubt was the Yuja Wang factor – however, almost nobody left at the interval so the audience was clearly there for other reasons as well. It really felt as though pre-pandemic times had returned….

One of those other reasons might have been the much-hyped young Finnish conductor, Klaus Mäkelä. I was in a Choir seat near to the organ which is good for watching the conductor and his interaction with the orchestra, though imperfect for orchestral balance, with the horns immediately in front of me (all 8 in Ein Heldenleben) and the timps and percussion to my left. Thus I can’t really comment on Mäkelä’s competence in getting the orchestra to hear itself and to balance the different blocks of instruments effectively, but it’s obvious that he is a lively (indeed charismatic) presence on the rostrum – a very clear and elegant beat, acute attention to what the orchestra is doing, and a kind of rhythmic propulsion in his movements which supports and encourages similar energy in the orchestra. The latter were clearly enjoying playing for him and appreciated his presence very fully at the end.

Another reason for a large audience turning out might have been the Oslo Philharmonic, which has had a distinguished roster of chief conductors over the years – Blomstedt, Previn, Jansons, Vasily Petrenko and now Mäkelä. Though not in the Leipzig Gewandhaus class, they have a warm and polished sound, with a particularly good horn section and very solid brass – the woodwind on the whole didn’t seem to shine to the same extent in this concert. It was impossible to judge the string sound from where I was sitting, but my impression was – very good indeed!. Sitting close-up, I was aware of one or two orchestral mis-steps during the evening, but nothing very alarming or problematic, and totally understandable on a hot evening and in the middle of an extensive European tour.

‘Tapiola’ is a piece I tend to respect rather than warm to. This performance seemed to be very effective in conveying the brooding sense of the dark masses of Scandinavian forest, with very clear textures, though, as in other performances I’ve heard, I get a bit lost in trying to get my head round the piece’s structure. The violas in particular played beautifully at points (I point them out because they were to the right of the conductor so came across very clearly to me from my vantage point).

The Liszt concerto I always find an annoying and vacuous piece. But I have a lot of time for Yuja Wang, and she did her best with the concerto – though people can sometimes be a little sniffy about her, and make vaguely racist comments about ‘all-technique-and-no-heart’ etc, I have to say I find her playing not only (to the best of my understanding) technically extraordinary but also full of delicacy and contrast. I tend to think of the Liszt concertos as galumphing and strident rather than delicate, but Yuja brings out more of that latter quality than anyone else I’ve heard, and with some beautiful exchanges with some of the solo or near solo instrumentalists in the piece eg the clarinet. She almost made me like the piece. Should I mention….? (yes, I will) …….she was also wearing a stunning sparkly pink extremely short dress and extremely high heels…….(sorry). She gave two encores – some sort of variations or piano fantasias based on themes from Carmen and Gluck’s Dance of the Blessed Spirits. I have no idea who wrote the Gluck piece – conceivably it was by Liszt or perhaps Busoni; the Carmen was by Vladimir Horowitz, and they were both brilliantly and tastefully done. I think Yuja Wang is a remarkable artist – one of the finest pianists we have at present, from my admittedly non-technical knowledge.

The word I want to use for the Heldenleben performance is …exciting. It was a really thrilling performance. It didn’t have the exquisite sounds, or the ‘inwardness’ of the last 10 minutes or so or the orchestral clarity of the Gewandhaus performance I reviewed in May, but it was just tremendously gripping in all the big moments, and Mäkelä managed to keep up the tension even during the wandering violin ‘Pauline’ passages – aided by an outstanding leader of the orchestra and some very good orchestral soloists e.g. the horn. The battle scene made an enormous racket and the return of the opening theme was truly viscerally thrilling, while the ending, with its echo of the opening of Also Sprach Zarathustra, was spine-tingling. The music never seemed raucous or over-blown, which it can do in the wrong hands.

All in all, a very enjoyable concert. The orchestra did a lively encore which was vaguely familiar – I thought it was maybe a Hungarian dance by Brahms, but apparently it was the ‘Ritter Pazmann’ csardas by John Strauss II – quite why the Hungarian theme I’m not sure….
All in all, the Oslo Philharmonic thoroughly deserves its nomination for the Gramophone magazine Orchestra of the Year Award.

Doreen Carwithen, Bishop Rock; Grace Williams, Sea Sketches; Ralph Vaughan Williams, A Sea Symphony (Symphony No. 1): Elizabeth Llewellyn, soprano; Jacques Imbrailo, baritone; BBC Symphony Chorus, BBC National Chorus of Wales, BBC National Orchestra of Wales; Andrew Manze, conductor
My first Prom of the year….! After Norman Lebrecht’s dire warnings about ticket sales, I was wondering what the audience size would be for this concert. I had got down from the Peak District on a rail strike day to London by walking an hour and a quarter from my village to a bus stop and then getting a bus to Sheffield, after that taking one of the six trains running to London that day. I also forgot this was a 7pm start so I arrived at the hall 10 mins before the start somewhat breathless and concerned, but came in to a surprisingly full space – not sold out by any means but feeling comfortably full in the stalls. Only the high up circle looked a little bare. Promenaders were also less than might have been the case before the pandemic – whether because of the online-only standing tickets or Covid-induced fear of a sweaty close-together space, who knows…. I think also that, between the BBC and the RAH, they have over-priced many of the seats, being at Barbican/RFH levels when the peculiarities of the RAH acoustics should really necessitate some reduction in price.

There was a good buzz around in the audience, recognising that the Sea Symphony doesn’t come round too often in concert halls. Indeed, it’s yet another one of those ‘first in 50 years’ events for me…I have never heard Vaughan Williams’ Sea Symphony live before. It was, I suspect, thought deeply unfashionable by the Proms programmers of the 60s and 70s when I was at my most intense phase of Promenading, and has only been performed at the Proms a few times since the 1980’s.

Anyway, lovely to be back for a full-on Prom for the first time (given the complications last year) since 2019.

There were two works in the short first half. Sea Sketches by Grace Williams was easy enough listening and with careful contrasting to keep my attention, but not really very memorable. The only movement that stays in my mind 12 hours later is the one about lighthouse sirens. The first work in the programme, though, by Doreen Carwithen called ‘Bishop Rock’ was much more arresting – demonstrating a very clear melodic gift, sparkling orchestration, a really exciting short work, and though Walton-esque in some ways the piece still felt original. The composer was clearly talented – she apparently gave up composing though after 20 years once she married the composer William Alwyn, which is rather sad.

The Sea Symphony is a work I don’t know that well. Listening at home, I’ve always found my concentration dropping off after the magnificent first movement. it was a real thrill to be able to follow the whole work, all the words and in particular experience the beauty of the last movement. I found that that actually (dearly though I love them) this work is much less fusty and late Victorian in sound than the Elgar oratorios – it is constantly providing the unexpected in harmony and instrumentation, and the choral writing sounds in many ways more complex – while the opening is simply magical in the way the chorus mimics the sound of the receding wave. There’s much less of Wagner and Brahmsian influences in the VW work than there is in Elgar too – it has a real sense of sparkling originality, from a young man with plenty to say. Of course, the symphony also has many resonances with RVW’s folk song collecting, particularly in the form that found its way into the English Hymnal (several passages in the work eg the third movement closely resemble some of VW’s best hymns). I find Whitman’s poetry a bit wearisome, to say the least, and it is to the music’s credit that it doesn’t show the words up as the portentous waffle they can sometimes feel like when read

Andrew Manze led a performance of great energy and rhythmic propulsion. The opening was, yes, grand, the RAH organ pounding away, but also quite crisp and fast moving. The whole of the first movement went very well, choral and soloists’ diction being very clear at all times. The different episodes of the last movement hung together well ( the beautiful description of the earth hanging in space was particularly moving given the biodiversity loss and climate crisis we are experiencing). Manze was also very good at making the quieter parts intensely introspective and inward. Altogether, this performance made the work ‘add up’ for me in a way it never has before.

The massed choruses – there must have been 300 choristers – sounded wonderful. As usual you really have to stand in the arena to get the best sound – my side stalls seats, about level with the conductor, meant that some of the sounds were washing over to my left – but the choruses still sounded magnificent (though there were one or two moments of scrambling, when VW asks the chorus to sing a great many words fast and in unison – ‘A pennant universal’ was a bit of a mess). Elizabeth Llewellyn is a favourite singer of mine and she sounded glorious – poised soft high notes yet with the power to (as it were) sail over the orchestra (her ending of the first movement was quite spectacular). Jacques Imbrailo seemed rather as though he was having vocal difficulties in the first movement ( his voice cracked at one point) and he seemed to be prefixing some of his entries with an Italianate sob – maybe the movement was just too noisy for his voice) but he sounded much better thereafter, singing beautifully with Ms Llewellyn in the final movement). The orchestra I found it a bit difficult to assess, given my seating position. From where I was the strings sounded underpowered and thin, but I think this was an RAH issue. There were some distinguished wind contributions, particularly the first horn.

Altogether a great evening……. I am so glad I made the effort, despite all the travel hassles. I see Norman Lebrecht is now, following on from his previous Jeremiad, forecasting a general collapse of BBC orchestras, and a radical merging of other Arts Council funded ones, over the next few years – see https://slippedisc.com/2022/07/this-summers-proms-will-be-the-last-as-weve-known-them/ . I think he’s right, in fact – so, as the man says, best to enjoy it while we can. I’m going to 6 more Proms this season. Likewise, the gas crisis in Germany makes it imperative to get to as many events there as I can before things get very difficult.

Box-office leak: 3 in 4 tickets to the BBC Proms are going unsold – SlippediscSlippedisc | The inside track on classical music and related cultures, by Norman Lebrecht

This was the shock-horror headline being put out by Normal Lebrecht’s Slipped Disc website this morning.  Although Norman enjoys his shock and horror, I am sure his informant is correct. There are several and local reasons for this – Covid, rail strikes, heat wave, cost of living and also (big contributor in my view) the reduction in tourists. But I think there is a more general problem. Since the 1960’s the classical music ‘industry’ has allowed itself to take on more and more of the attributes of the wider culture of consumption and economic growth that we all live in.  There are simply more concerts, more opera performances, more chamber music recitals than ever before, and more musicians coming, highly trained, out of the music colleges and universities. The industry, as in any other market, has diversified – more ‘country house’ opera, a whole range of resurrected music from Baroque opera to medieval plainchant, for instance.  It has created new attractions – the ‘star’ conductors and soloists. But I think we are now at saturation point. There are simply too many professional orchestras in the UK, and they are playing insufficiently diversified programmes. There are too many Mahler 1’s, Tchaikovsky 4’s etc. The nudge of Covid has brought calamity to the industry because people are having to think about and justify why they are going to particular concerts. Yes, I will go to the operas I love, performed to a level I know to be high, and I will go to the LSO’s concerts and those given by ‘star’ conductors and soloists I admire – eg Vasily Petrenko, or Mitsuko Uchida. I go to something between 60 and 80 musical events a year so I think I am relatively uncritical in my affections. But why on earth should I plod into a provincial city on a wet Wednesday evening to hear an unknown conductor perform a Brahms symphony with an orchestra who can be inspired but can also lapse into routine with an indifferent conductor. I am just not music-starved enough to bother

So…..I fear the answer is probably as it is in the wider economy. Forego instant gratification, and having everything available. Reduce consumption, so that you really value what you listen to. And accept that the number of orchestras etc will have to reduce. Naomi Klein, in her book “This changes everything’ reckoned that we would have to go back to the 1960’s to have a sustainable lifestyle –and I am old enough to remember this was a perfectly enjoyable way of living. So should we do the same with classical music – ENO back in Sadler’s Wells, some provincial touring, more UK artists?  And combine this with a massive attempt to bring in new audiences, without which the whole enterprise is doomed anyway

Conductor, Lothar Koenigs; Production, David Marton; Set Design, Christian Friedländer; Costume Design, Pola Kardum; Lighting, Henning Streck.  Die Gräfin, Diana Damrau; Der Graf, Michael Nagy; Flamand, Pavol Breslik; Olivier, Vito Priante; La Roche, Kristinn Sigmundsson; Die Schauspielerin Clairon, Tanja Ariane Baumgartner; Monsieur Taupe, Toby Spence

I have never heard Capriccio live and I thought this looked like a good cast, headed by Diana Damrau and with our own Toby Spence taking the role of the prompter. It’s a 50 min trek from my hotel to the Prinzregententheater so I arrived, on this very hot day, rather sweaty and uncomfortable.  I was thinking that here in Munich I am only 600 miles or so by road from the Ukrainian border, or 1000 miles from Kyiv, and everywhere in Europe at present there is evidence of increasing climate change. The other works I have seen and heard during my trip to Munich and Leipzig have addressed important aspects of the human condition, and created new perspectives on them. By contrast the subject matter of Capriccio  – do words or music matter more in opera – does not, really, address those fundamental human concerns. You might say it’s inherently trivial……..plus it’s not, as a work for the theatre, in the same league as the great Hofmannsthal operas: it’s got too many words, people talk/sing too much and there’s not enough action. The cleverness of this production is that, by setting it in the 1930’s, and having – see below – some definite Nazi references – it does ask questions about the piece that wouldn’t normally get asked

The set was essentially a vertical cut-through section of a theatre  – half a stage, half a set of stalls and half a surrounding set of walls. The Countess and Count move between a box on one of the walls, the auditorium and the stage. The stage also provides space for some of the conversations between Flamand, Olivier, the Countess, Count and others. The auditorium walls maybe look as though they have seen better days. In addition to the unfolding of the various love efforts by Flamand and Oliver, and the overall plot, there is something else happening in the stage auditorium. M. Taupe, the prompter, is dressed in a long faun mackintosh, and wears glasses; he is writing constantly in his note book. At first we see him inspecting and measuring a ballerina, then he’s doing the same with a couple of the ballerinas (see picture – here more obviously measuring noses) and some other people, and after this inspection they are sent out of the theatre as outcasts, marched off by M. Taupe. He tries from the prompt box to listen in on the conversations of the Count and Countess. During the final glorious soliloquy by the Countess, surely one of the most beautiful 15 minutes in all music, he is lurking in the shadows of some potted plants. And on the final chord, the lights are suddenly switched on in the ‘stage’ auditorium and we see 10 men, identically dressed to M. Taupe, in all the boxes looking on threateningly. In her final soliloquy, the Countess is addressing someone who I think is one of the ballerinas who was sent off by M. Taupe, an older, weakened, saddened, maybe grieving woman. Finally also, as the Countess sings her soliloquy there is a lady (I may have been imagining this, but I don’t think so) in one of the boxes being served coffee who repeatedly takes it in a way that, by means of light and shadow, creates a fair sideways view of Adolf Hitler. So, there is clearly a commentary here which connects this work with the difficult issue of Strauss and the Third Reich, and the timing of the first performance  – 1943. It relates the work to the removal of Jewish artists and performers from German culture after 1933, and Strauss’ role in that for a time as the President of the Reichskammer for music (till, to be fair, he was sacked by Goebbels for not whole-heartedly following the Nazi line).

In many ways this was the finest of all the performances I have seen in the last 8 days in Germany. Not a weak link in the cast, intelligent direction and immaculate performances. Unfortunately I can’t say how much more resonance and reinforcing connection there was between the text and the 1930’s/NSDAP slant which this approach was proposing, because the combination of lighting on stage, the fact I was in the penultimate back row and maybe small typescript meant that I couldn’t read the surtitles which – as always with the Bayerische Oper – are in German and English. Obviously I have listened to the work on record and I know the outline of the plot but it meant that I probably missed a lot of the interplay the director intended between what was being sung and his view of the work. So I wasn’t really clear at the time how the NSDAP angle changed the meaning and emotional impact of the Countess’ final soliloquy, or the whole words/music debate. I think I remember the Countess kissing the Jewish older ballerina at the end…….The beauty of the last 15 minutes found its objective correlative on stage not in the plight of the countess, torn between two lovers and words v.music, but in the plight of the Jewish artists and performers who were thrown out of work after 1933 and the terrible fate of many of them , in which Strauss, even with his Jewish daughter in law, who he did his best to protect, was to some extent complicit. But were we being invited to consider the Countess as a cosseted irrelevant aesthete or someone coming to full understanding of what was going on around her? I’m not aure, and maybe that’s as much left hanging in the air as the words/music debate. As a footnote, having had a quick look at the words, I have since realised that the final scene involves the Countess talking to herself in the mirror in the libretto – ‘Do you want to be consumed between two fires? You mirrored image of Madeleine in love – can you advise me, can you help me find the ending for the mirror. Is there one that is not trivial?’, so the Director has cleverly used this idea to have the Countess talk to the Jewish artist (unless it is really Madeleine as an old woman – but I don’t think so, given the two pictures of the lady below – one having her nose measured, one with the Countess). And there is justification in the text for the characterisation of M. Taupe – ‘I am the invisible ruler of a magical world……….Only when I sit in my prompt box does the great wheel of the theatre begin to turn.”

I had forgotten how much gorgeous music there is in this work, and so much of it was toe-curlingly luscious and beautiful that I kept giving myself hugs of pleasure, metaphorically. The orchestra – another part of which was at the same time performing The Nose by Shostakovitch at the National Theatre – played magnificently; there was a stunning horn solo marking the beginning of the Countess’ final 15 minutes. Lothar Koenigs, the conductor, is a name I had heard of as a conductor, though I couldn’t remember where or when – a brief Google reminded me that from 2009 to 2016 he was Music Director at Welsh National Opera.

Diana Damrau was simply stunning. I am amazed that her website said this was her debut in the role – she is an absolute natural for the Countess. Effortlessly beautiful tone, stunning soft singing, lovely silky line, all the projection you could want – this was a simply amazing performance. But all the male principals were strong – though oddly the whole business of the rivalry between Flamand and Olivier seemed to get less and less important as the work went on, and M. Taupe’s monitoring of everyone became more obvious.

The audience cheered and stamped wildly at the end and there were even cheers for the director and his team, an unusual event in the land of regie-theater

I was so focused on going to Parsifal, which I booked first, about a year ago, that I didn’t really look very closely at what else was going on in Munich this July. Had I foregone Parsifal, I could have made a slightly later trip and seen Capriccio, Der Rosenkavalier, Die Schweigsame Frau and Die Frau ohne Schatten, as well as the Cunning Little Vixen. Oh well, another time…..But first another ambition has to be met – to go to the Salzburg Festival!……….That’s for next year or the year after (I am also going to a Mahler Festival in Leipzig in May 2023 covering all the symphonies including Das Lied von der Erde!)

Christian Gerhaher, Anna Lucia Richter, Pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz: Wolf, Italienische liederbuche.

My planning for this Munich trip was done a long time ago and at one point I wasn’t going to the Sunday performance of Capriccio. Hence I ended up not planning in advance anything to do on the Friday and Saturday evenings. On the spur of the moment I took a cheap seat at the Nationaltheater for another aspect of the Munich Opera Festival, their series of song recitals. Christian Gerhaher, and Anna Lucia Richter were singing Wolf’s Italienische liederbuche.

Wolf has completely passed me by – I have never really listened to his work except a few snippets which I decided 40 years ago I didn’t like. This was the first time I have ever really heard and focused on Wolf’s music. As there were no translations and surtitles for the most part I had no idea what the two singers were singing about, but I was very impressed by a number of the songs – haunting, lyrical, having a quiet beauty that made me want to listen to them again. The two singers sounded wonderful, particularly Gerhaher in the quieter lyrical passages.

This was rather a revelatory evening….! I’m buying a recording – working out whether it is one that Gerhaher made 10 years ago or Janet Baker……