Another good piece of happenstance…….Covid pinging or the increased number of cases overall is now beginning to make quite a big impact. There were three trains cancelled going down to London from my rail station ‘because of a shortage of drivers’; I was originally going down to London for a trustees meeting, two operas and a new play about Bach with Simon Russell Beale, as well as seeing ‘As You Like It’ at the Globe Theatre. First of all the trustees meeting reverted to Zoom, because the hosts didn’t want us to meet face to face on their property; then the Bach play was cancelled because someone in the cast had Covid – I then quickly booked for something else at the Wigmore Hall to replace it; then, on the train down to London (in addition to having 5 minutes notice to book for the opening of ticketing for the Birmingham Opera Company’s’ Das Rheingold’ ) I had an email from the Wigmore Hall saying that that concert was cancelled. Scrabbling around on my phone, I discovered that there were a few tickets left for the opening night of L’Amico Fritz by Mascagni at the Holland Park Opera, including ONE single ticket. I snapped it up!

And I was very happy with my purchase. Apart from Puccini’s operas – which I love, so I can’t be accused of being snobbish – a lot of the minor verismo composers don’t really turn me on. I have never actually been (I’m pretty sure) to a performance of Cav and Pag…….So my expectations weren’t high for this performance . But I have to say I really enjoyed it……

The story is slight – originally the setting is Alsace Lorraine, where a large proportion of France’s Jewish population lived in the 19^th century. Fritz is a local businessman whose good friend is the local Rabbi. Fritz is disinclined to marry, and thinks love’s all a load of nonsense; the Rabbi is determined to prove him wrong. Suzel, a Jewish girl whose father is a friend of Fritz’s, brings some flowers to Fritz when he’s having a birthday dinner with his friends – including David, the Rabbi, and they fall in love, but spend the best part of an hour and a half deciding whether they are going to make their feelings clear to each other. It’s a preternaturally silly opera plot, but actually lovely to watch and listen to. This is because:

• The music is appealing, and characterful. A number of the arias and musical interludes have some tinge of Eastern European Jewish themes. There are a couple of big number – the Cherry Duet is Act 2 is lovely
•  In this case, all the singers were credible in their role, good actors and sung well. Suzel was Katie Bird and she projected a vulnerability which was touching, and sung her big numbers sensitively but also with power where needed. Fritz was a genuine Italian tenor,  Matteo Lippi, who did all that was required of him and was absolutely idiomatic. The Rabbi had probably the best voice of the evening, a beautiful bass baritone sound from  Paul Carey Jones, who is clearly someone to watch (he is to be Wotan in the projected Longborough Ring, and he is also a very good actor, totally confident and at home on stage). All the supporting roles were well done
• The production didn’t get in the way. It was vaguely 1940’s-1950’ish, and was without gimmicks. It simply told the story clearly, making use of the peculiar Holland Park environment where the singers can be both in front of and behind the orchestra. There was no scenery, except for the backdrop of the side of Holland Park House itself, a few cafe tables and chairs, and a number of ladders to represent cherry trees and cherry – picking

The orchestra was Covid-and financially restricted, and the strings sounded a bit strangulated for this sumptuous music.  Beatrice Venezi seemed to have everything under control as conductor

All in all I really enjoyed this. To my left I realised after a while I was sitting next to the Guardian classical music critic, Tim Ashley. It will be interesting to see what he writes about the performance in due course – he was busy scribbling notes in his programme……An extraordinary footnote (see photo below) is that all the chairs ion the Holland Park auditorium have been donated by other opera companies from current or past sets – I could have been sitting in a Rosenkavalier or Traviata chair!

This was a very good concert (Strauss’ Metamorphosen, Barber’s Adagio and Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht). Because again of commercial constraints the numbers of players had been reduced to 7 (6 for the Schoenberg). But – there is evidence that Strauss was originally thinking of a septet, before receiving a commission from Paul Sacher for his string orchestra, and the Schoenberg had originally been written for 6 players. All were very rewarding performances – I have listened to the Strauss many times on recordings and on the radio but I can’t remember ever going to a live performance – the Schoenberg I think I heard with the Halle maybe 10 years ago. The playing of both works carried utter conviction and my attention never wavered for a moment (I had had concerns about that, having treated myself to a splendid lamb jalfrezi and a large bottle of Cobra beer before the concert at the local Buxton curry house). I can’t say the reduced numbers led to any lessening of the complexity of the musical lines in the Strauss though there was sometimes a bit of a lack of heft at certain points of romantic sweep and passion. I just sat awed by the gradually changing shapes of themes and the poignance of some of the constantly evolving musical fragments in the work, and how the complexity of the work is in a sense an answer to the despair at the shattering of German culture in 1945 which Strauss felt, being itself a standard-bearer for the continuation of that culture and its links with the past glories of Beethoven, Bach and Mozart, whatever the Nazis had tried to do to make those links their own. This is one of the few Strauss works which contradicts his famous self-portrait of not being ‘a first-rate composer, but ….a first-class second-rate composer”!

I found myself listening closely too to the Schoenberg and picking up on the gradual transformation of the main themes. By the side of these two great masters, at different ends of their career – Strauss coming up to 80, Schoenberg 24 or so – the Barber piece felt to be in a different division – not as rich and complex, not evolving in the same way. Famous as the tune is, much less happens to it…..

The concert closed at about 10pm with the whispering in the high violins and the rocking rhythms of the other strings closing the Schoenberg with transfiguring moonlight. A wonderful way to leave the church and walk into the dusk…….

The programme was Malcolm Arnold’s Piano Trio (1956), a Piazzolla selection of two movements from his ‘Four Seasons in Buenos Aires’ and Smetana’s Piano Trio. Another Arnold work, which made me think a bit more about this man’s music……. I remember Arnold conducting at the Proms when I was a teenager – a rather sweaty overweight figure in his 50’s. This must have been before 1978 when he was treated as an in-patient for several months in the acute psychiatric ward at the Royal Free Hospital, suffering from depression and alcoholism. The problem seems to be that while the poor man had more than his fair share of demons – he tried to kill his wife shortly before admission into hospital  – this doesn’t always seem to come through into his music in any creative way and it can, then, remain relentlessly facile and never give a full sense of any depth of emotion behind the swirl of notes. Obviously, music cannot describe in the way a novel can exactly what that depth of emotion might be occasioned by, but it can describe more powerfully than words ever could what that emotion feels like, and it can also convey conflicting emotions much more clearly and powerfully than words can. When you compare the Arnold Trio with Smetana’s (written – see a previous blog – after the death of two daughters) you can sense how Smetana can make you understand and feel how he is feeling, whereas the Arnold work remains opaque, at least to me.  However, I don’t know that much of Arnold’s work, I have to say, and I have been genuinely surprised and pleased to get to know the 5th Symphony – in which Arnold seems a bit like an English Shostakovitch.

The Piazzolla pieces highlight another inadequacy of the Arnold work – in Piazzolla’s case, a sense of the unexpected, a feeling that you are never quite sure what is going to happen next, and which, within the ‘tango’ framework, seems to provide huge variety – the second of the pieces ended with a pastiche Baroque tune, for instance.

Again, my seat wasn’t brilliant for the sound- or sight for that matter – but Trio Rouge seemed to give a good account of all these works. An enjoyable concert!!   

I think it’s great to hear new things and I increasingly try to do that when planning my concert-going. I therefore made a bee-line for this when the BIF brochure came out. However, as is only logical, going for the unfamiliar is sometimes a bit of a hit-and-miss affair. While there are masterpieces that either you have never discovered or the world hasn’t,  there are also good reasons on some occasions for a work’s being overlooked……

‘The Dancing Master’ is a one act 75 minute opera which was written for BBC broadcast, then rejected by them, and has never been professionally staged.  It’s essentially based upon a Restoration comedy by William Wycherley, the 1671 play The Gentleman Dancing Master, and in the libretto by Joe Mendoza a sense of the 17^th language is retained, along with some updating. It follows the usual Restoration comedy obsessions with virginity, fops, absurd foreigners and the inheritance of property/money.

How to stage it is one problem. The production team decided on the clever idea  – also saving money of course in the socially-distanced Covid context – of making the setting of the opera the first BBC broadcast of the opera (which of course never happened). Everyone is therefore in 50’s dress The stage setting is a central tall microphone and 7-8 chairs around the stage. There are some quietly amusing gags around sound effects the cast produces – kisses and coconuts, as it were. The obverse side of this decision is that there is an inevitable tendency towards rather a static stage picture, though the cast try to be as animated and energetic as they can when they are up out of their seats

But the other problem is a more serious one – the music itself if not really very interesting. Arnold is a composer who produced quantities of music in every genre. Here there just seemed to be too much of an easy facility about the music – not enough variation, not enough insights through music into the inner life of the characters. It flowed along mellifluously enough but seemed to me to be entirely unmemorable, I’m afraid – very different from say the 5th symphony which is a genuinely memorable, interesting even disturbing piece.  All the singers were excellent – I’d single out Fiona Kimm as the heroine’s aunt, and Graeme Broadbent (as the heroine Miranda’s father, Don Diego). Mark Wilde (her fiance, Monsieur) was excellent in keeping up his absurd French accent for a hour and a quarter The orchestra played well for John Andrews. Sadly this is a first and last outing, I suspect.

The programme was Haydn Piano Trio in A Hob.XV/18 and Beethoven’s Piano Trio in B flat Op.97 “Archduke”. The concert from my perspective was a bit of happenstance that worked well. Originally this was to be a violin and piano recital – Beethoven and one of the violinist’s own works – by Jennifer Pike and Martin Roscoe. Jennifer Pike pulled out and it was changed to the programme above with the Martin Roscoe Trio. Then Martin Roscoe pulled out and the final line-up was Tim Horton alongside violinist Fenella Humphreys and cellist Jessica Burroughs!

The piano trio by Haydn was – as you would expect from previous comments in this blog – appreciated and enjoyed. There was a quirky final movement that had folk music overtones which I particularly liked. I was at the back of the body of the church and the sound wasn’t great – it could have been where I was sitting, but the violinist seemed to be playing less assertively than she should have been  – at some points it sounded more like a cello sonata with a violin occasionally interpolating…..but, as I say, that was probably the acoustics.

It is years since I sat down and listened to the Archduke Trio – I had a vinyl recording of it as a teenager but I am sure I have never heard it live……. I remembered the first two movements but the slow movement – a theme and variations – I must have skipped as a teenager, perhaps being over-impatient or feeling that it was boring. What a wonderful movement it is. The performance struck me as very good and got lots of cheering and stamping of feet at the end. Listening the next day to my recording of the Trio with the Beaux Arts Trio, I thought that maybe in the Roscoe Trio’s performance there was insufficient wonder and not as much of an almost religious awe to that slow movement that you’d find in some performances. But this is from a very high set of standards – Tim Horton and colleagues’ performance was excellent

I really enjoyed this, and rather wished I had booked to see it a second time, as there is a lot to take in in what feels like a very concentrated hour and 40 minutes or so. The basic story is a follow on from the familiar tale of Dido and Aeneas as told by Virgil, and enshrined in Purcell’s opera  – the sequel comes from 50 lines of an Ovid poem where Dido’s sister Anna is found by Aeneas abandoned on the shores of his new kingdom. He takes her back home and his wife Lavinia becomes very jealous and wants to murder Anna – as events play out, the characters have to deal with memories that don’t conveniently disappear. The ghost of Dido returns to haunt Aeneas and warn her sister that Lavinia intends to murder her. Anna runs away and becomes a river goddess.

The set is simple, and I guess reflects the uncertainty about whether the performance was going to happen, and the losses involved in a socially distanced audience – a seated separated chorus took up much of the stage at the back right, and there was a raised bedroom / theatre to the left with a chaise longue. Three chairs were to the right for the ‘court’ scene. A bluish gauze curtain brought singers to the front of the stage and separated them from the chorus (it also functioned as the river). The curtain didn’t look great from up in the gallery, but probably looked better to others. lower down The set was otherwise black or grey.

Musically, according to the programme notes, it started as a concept of a play-within-a play. Errollyn Wallen’s score (she spans contemporary classical, jazz and rock in her output) would provide the prelude and the aftermath, and parts of the Purcell opera would be re-enacted in the middle. What the work ends up with is more of a reframing, and an expansion, of the Purcell and what seems at first to be quite distinct gradually seems more and more to be merging from one to the other seamlessly. The Wallen score is performed on period instruments, with the addition of some percussion (including drums) and a bass guitar. I liked her music a lot – there was some beautiful vocal writing, and I loved the bit where Anna’s turning into a river goddess was described. But some of the Purcell was reconceived too – thus it was Aeneas who sung the famous Lament rather than Dido, and ‘remember me’ gained new resonance in this context, as Aeneas increasingly feels despair about his life, and moves from the heroic to the introspective. Thus the whole opera becomes a reminder of how the past haunts the present and it also re-orients you to familiar music in new and different ways.

John Butt and the Dunedin Consort sounded great throughout.  I thought Matthew Brook as Aeneas was excellent – a really sensitive performance (including falsetto in the Lament, which didn’t seem at all out of place – more an expression of vulnerability . Nardus Williams as Belinda was also good. Lavinia (Jessica Gillingwater) was a bit strained but her fury and anguish was well-captured. The Dido/Anna role had originally meant to be Idunnu Munch; she was indisposed and so her understudy, one of the chorus members, Isabelle Peters, took over. I thought she did well – I don’t know how much notice she had – but her voice sounded rather tight and small to my ears and didn’t really have the resonance and the depth you’d want for the role. I may be in a minority here – the ‘Guardian’ liked her performance, I note. The chorus sounded excellent, and they also provided two splendid witches.

The side-titles in the Buxton Opera House are a nuisance – they are far too small and I was squinting from the Gallery trying to read them. This is something they ought to be able to do better.

The programme was Louise Farrenc’s Overture No.1 in E minor, followed by Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, and then Schumann’s Symphony No.1, ‘Spring’. The Halle was conducted by Tomáš Hanus, and the violinist was the indefatigable Alina Ibragimova, who stepped in at short notice to replace a self-isolating Chloe Hanslip.

Louise Farrenc was recognised as an outstanding concert pianist, a gifted composer, inspirational teacher and distinguished scholar in her day. She was professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire for 30 years, the only woman in the 19th century to hold such a position. I have to say this overture wasn’t particularly interesting – it was sort of sub-Schumann, and, reflecting in tranquillity, there’s not much I can say more than that. Before 2000, its last performance seemed to be in 1840…..

The Mendelssohn was a very good performance indeed – Alina Ibragimova has the gift of really giving a personal touch to the music she plays without seeming to make that overdone or egotistical. There were beautiful touches to her playing – the way the second subject of the first movement was phrased for instance, and some of the transition passages were delicately done, plus she gave us some beautifully soft sustained high notes – while at the same time there was a zest, an energy that made the performance really exciting as well. Alina got a big ovation at the end, deservedly. I had previously thought, among modern players, that the performance I’d heard a few years ago by Isabelle Faust was the benchmark, but this one supplanted that. I do actually enjoy the Mendelssohn concerto – it has a wider mood range than some of his works. Norman Lebrecht once argued, I seem to recall, that the first movement’s main theme had influences from Eastern European Jewish music and was disturbingly angst-ridden.

The Schumann 1 I enjoyed (and I don’t think I’ve heard a live performance of this in 50 years of concert-going)  but I think Schumann’s symphonies really need a conductor of quite unusual interpretative skills and insight to really make them live: a Furtwangler, a Bernstein; I heard a very impressive 2^nd Symphony conducted by Haitink a few years ago. My favourite has always been No 3, the Rhenish, and indeed originally the Halle were going to play this. This performance of the 1st wasn’t really in the Bernstein etc class, and I am afraid to say my attention drifted a little at points. But it was a perfectly decent performance, well played by the Halle and, as I say, I enjoyed it thoroughly

The final event of my weekend in London was an unexpected delight. The Aquinas Piano Trio were performing Haydn’s Piano Trio Op. 40, completed during the final few weeks of Haydn’s second and last trip to London in 1795. The other work was Smetana’s only Piano Trio.

It is always exciting to hear a work for the first time which makes an immediate impact. In 1854 – 55, the Smetanas lost two daughters in quick succession to tuberculosis and scarlet fever.  The Trio was one product of Smetana’s reaction to the losses – he wrote “The loss of my eldest daughter, that extraordinarily gifted child, inspired me to write the Trio in G minor in 1855.” I thought this was a wonderful work – sweepingly emotional, a haunting melody – and the Aquinas Piano Trio really dug into the work, particularly in the last movement. I’ve made an immediate note to myself to buy an MP3 recording of it.

There’s so much chamber music I have yet to discover. When I think that I could be dead in 5 years quite easily, and that some of the works I am hearing now I may never hear again in live performance before I die, it does provoke me to hear more and more!

The other work, the Haydn, was, as usual, engaging and fun, but the Smetana was a real knock-out. They offered a small encore, a melancholy tango-ish piece by the Argentinian composer Piazzola.

Sorry, this is a bit of a grumble. Yes, I know these are difficult times and that we should be grateful for any live music happening anywhere, but this was still – by the recent standards of the Halle, CBSO and LSO – a remarkably short concert  – just over an hour’s music, Beethoven 2 and the first Mendelssohn Piano Concerto. And, I’m sorry to say, I don’t like the majority of Mendelssohn’s music. ‘Music flows from Mendelssohn like water from a public fountain’ said Wagner, somewhere, and while he might have had a particular animus about him, I can sort of see the point, though the Midsummer Night’s Dream music is wonderful and despite myself I do enjoy the violin concerto.  The hall wasn’t full, even by socially distanced standards and it all had a rather depressing feel. The LMP played well enough in the Beethoven, and had I not heard Tabita Berglund’s Beethoven two weeks earlier I might have been more excited, but I felt this was an under-characterised performance that didn’t do much for me.  The pianist in the Mendelssohn was Isata Kenneh-Mason, who I think is very special – I heard her in one of the Halle Orchestra’s live-streamed Winter concerts performing Beethoven’s 3^rd piano concerto and thought that was an excellent sensitive performance. Here in the Mendelssohn she introduced many little touches of colour, as well as offering some spectacularly nimble playing in the jolly (up to a point) last movement of the Mendelssohn. She was great, but the piano concerto didn’t really deserve her! (grumble over, and I might have been influenced by the fact that for some reason I was sitting at the extreme left of the stage at the front so could see really very little, next to over-prominent strings!)   

I had been intending to go to a performance at Kings Place of the Bach B Minor mass in the evening but that got postponed till October a few days earlier, so I was scrabbling around for other things to go to on Saturday at the last minute. Though I would never have gone to it in a million years before lockdown, I thought I should go to a ‘Vivaldi by Candelight’ late afternoon concert at St James’ Piccadilly. They were performing Pachelbel’s Canon, obviously Vivaldi;s Four Seasons and Bach’s  Piano concerto no.4 BWV 1055.

And these are the guys at the sharp end of lockdown, I guess – free-lance musicians, not a salaried furloughed group like some of the big orchestras (OK, I know some are free-lancers, like the LSO), and probably no-one’s making a packet exactly in normal times – these were good musicians who have had a very tough time over the last 18 months. Apparently the Piccadilly Sinfonietta was formed only three years ago and had a packed schedule of concerts in 2019-20 in London, Manchester and further afield. I had actually – I realised – missed an opportunity to hear them in Sheffield Cathedral when I was at ‘Fidelio’. Anyway, I am glad they are working and that there was a decent crowd for the first of two concerts they were giving in London. The pianist was  Warren Mailley-Smith, who heads up the group and they had a guest leader, Matthew Jones

Strangely, I don’t think I have ever sat down and listened to the Four Seasons, let alone heard it live in the concert hall, and I have to say I really enjoyed it – I hadn’t realised quite what a big role the lead violin has, and Matthew Jones was really very good. There were one or two momentary blips in ensemble, but really, this was a thoroughly enjoyable, thoroughly competent performance that made me enjoy this work afresh. I was glad I went. The slow movement of Winter’ I put alongside the ‘theme’ of the Goldbergs in my head as I walked across from Piccadilly to my next concert at the Cadogan Hall.