My last visit to the Buxton Festival was a mixed affair – John Casken’s new work The Shackled King, a music drama based on the King Lear story, was the main ‘second half’ work, and with it in the first half a compilation called “Brunnhilde’s Dream”, a sequence of songs by Wagner, Mendelssohn, Schubert, Schumann, Zemlinsky, Berg, Szymanowski, Henze, and Muller-Hermann, devised by Barry Millington. Impressively, both works featured Sir John Tomlinson, bass; and Rozanna Madylus, mezzo-soprano, with musicians from the group ‘Counterpoise’ – violin, trumpet, saxophone and clarinet, and piano.

The great treat in all this was hearing John Tomlinson, now well over 70, singing some of ‘Wotan’s Farewell’ from Die Walkure, accompanied by a piano. Beautifully sung, even though his voice is frayed and not what it was, this was unexpected and wonderful. I enjoyed the sequence of songs in Brunnhilde’s Dream, but they, or I, could have done with surtitles or at least flagging up where we had got to – I lost track some of the time and one really needed to know some of the details of what the Brunnhilde figure was singing about

‘The Shackled King’ was interesting, though that was only intermittently due to Casken’s music. John Tomlinson played Lear, and Rozanna Madylus a combination of Cordelia, Regan, Goneril and the Fool, using a combination of spoken, sprechstimme and sung voices. Tomlinson projected the spoken words of Lear excellently, and with real power, and Rozanna Madylus’s acting was energetic and full of interest. I didn’t always feel that Casken’s music was adding much to Shakespeare’s wonderful poetry, but (my ultimate test) if I was asked what of this will I remember in 12 months time, it would probably be The Shackled King  – so the work clearly made some impact on me!  

The programme was Rimsky-Korsakov’s ’The Tale of Tsar Saltan’ Suite;  Rachmaninov’s The Rock, and Stravinsky’s The Firebird: Suite (1945 compilation)

This was an enjoyable concert with two relative rarities. All three pieces were in a sense in the business of telling stories, with lots of brilliant sounds, evocative but with nothing that really chilled the soul or warmed the heart, or gave sustenance to the soul at this difficult time. They were great orchestral display pieces – and it’s always good to hear an orchestra being put through its paces – but maybe not ultimately very satisfying – though often thrilling. The Halle sounded very well and particularly in the ‘Firebird’ offered some beautiful woodwind and horn playing. It would be interesting to see some of the Rimsky-Korsakov operas performed in this country – maybe they have been, but I have never encountered a production. I saw a wonderful display in Moscow of some of the design models for the original sets of Rimsky’s operas’ first productions. If not in the UK, maybe I should try to see them performed in Moscow or St Petersburg. One day, perhaps………  

The Rachmaninov piece – written when he was 20 – is obviously prodigiously mature to be written such a young composer, but it is not, to be honest, very interesting

The programme was on the short side – about 75 mins – and so the Halle played the ‘Flight of the Bumblebee’ from the same Tsar Saltan opera as an encore

At the end of this sparkling well-put-together programme, brilliantly played by the Halle, I did have a ‘so what?’ question buzzing in my mind – if music has the ability to affect our emotions, intellect, and psychology, to assuage our loneliness or incite our passions, what was this concert doing? I’m not sure…..

Fleur Barron, the Singaporean-British mezzo who is clearly making a name for herself gave a very good lunchtime recital at the Buxton Festival. Entitled “Between Dark and Daylight”, it included works by Clara Schumann, Brahms, Ives, Dutilleux, Korngold, Cage, Chen Yi, Florence Price, Li Yinghai, Chinese Folksongs and Schubert.

I didn’t have access to the words so it wasn’t always clear what Ms Barron was trying to communicate, though she gave good snappy introductions to a number of the songs, and the over-arching theme is obviously highly relevant at this time

I particularly liked the Chines folksongs, the piece by Li Yinghai, and the Ives’ songs. But all were interesting to listen to and Ms Barron seemed to have a lovely voice, particularly in the lower registers. I came away from the hour-long recital glad that I’d gone and feeling at peace with the world (for a bit, anyway)

This was a performance that had two contrasting aspects. It was very well sung and played by the Early Opera Company under Christian Curnyn.  All the singers – (Galatea – Anna Dennis; Acis – Samuel Boden; Damon / Coridon – Jorge Navarro Colorado; Polyphemus – Edward Grint, and Chorus – David de Winter) were strong, clearly well versed in Baroque style and having no problems with the ornamentation. Each aria was a pleasure to listen to, and the authentic instruments gave glinting colours to the music, from the recorders, the oboes and other instruments, that you would never have heard from a conventional band .

However, Acis and Galatea is a Masque, in an early 18^th century pastoral vein. Its conventions are impossibly remote for an audience 300 years later, so clearly a production ‘angle’ that gives the work meaning for a modern audience is necessary. The approach chosen for this production seemed to be: set the work in a 1962 (why that date?) Mid-West University symposium on Handel’s Acis and Galatea and 18^th century conventions, entitled “The games we play: a study of worldly and unworldly love through Acis and Galatea”.  have the actors sitting round a bare black box stage waiting for their turn, and show some connected images and lecture points on a PowerPoint screen (disregarding the fact that they wouldn’t have had PowerPoint slides in 1963 !). Eventually, as Acis and Galatea become divine, all the characters on stage join them in their divinity amidst a field of golden corn, and the conference is abandoned. Regie-theatre is unfairly abused by many people and in general terms I support what many directors of operas are trying to do to rescue works from banality or over-familiarity. But this did seem to be incoherent. Granted this was another performance in a shoe-string, funding restricted by socially-distanced audiences. But there are so many things that could have been done with this work – a black box stage with thoughtful lighting, or with a backdrop of videoed images could have been an examination of what love means in this opera. Or you could have gone full throttle on the symposium concept and have gradually evolving , violent and angry confrontation – finally murderous  – among the participants. What we saw on stage just seemed to be incoherent, I’m afraid

So I felt I would have been better off closing my eyes throughout the performance. It seemed a bit of a wasted opportunity. I also – though again one wants the Festival to profit where it can – thought it jarred to have an interval after about half an hour of music

So not one of my better outings, I’m afraid

After a couple of weeks of seeing various, very worthy, but inevitably cramped, opera productions, with little money to spend on sets or costumes or concept, it was a bit of a relief and an excitement to experience a full scale all-stops-pulled major opera production, which Don Giovanni at Covent Graden definitely was. I think I last saw a production of Don Giovanni at ENO about 5 years ago, and around the same time I also saw a production in Vienna. This was a better performance than either of them.

Don Giovanni is a complex work, with, like the Marriage of Figaro, reflections on the nature of masters and servants which reminds you that the French Revolution was two years away when this was first performed in Prague in 1787, and also much to say what ‘liberty’ means and how ‘liberty’ related to living in community – an issue which is of course highly topical in the current Covid context. But this was more than ‘business as usual at Covent Garden’ for three reasons:

1. Some quite exceptional conducting by Constantin Trinks. As I have said in this blog many times, slower is usually better, and this was markedly less rushed than usual, with time for the music to breathe, and rhythms to be properly sprung and harmonies savoured, and the ROHCG orchestra responded with tight playing, offering delicacy and beauty (particularly in accompanying the big arias) when needed. The overture was a master class in how to conduct Mozart

2. A really interesting production by Kaspar Holten. The revolving tower/rooms set with video projections on them for the most part worked well in illuminating the characters and their movements, and there is something essentially seedy, furtive and enclosed about the way Don Giovanni behaves, an unwillingness to open up and embrace a wider world that seems to work very well with this approach to the set. The two times when I didn’t think this helped the meaning of the words and music were the party scene at the end of Act 1, which seemed incoherent and would be difficult for anyone who didn’t know the opera well to work out, because there was no space for the party-goers to gather in one place; also the point at which from a higher level the Commendatore extends his hand to Don Giovanni to invite him to dinner – because Don Giovanni was at a lower level than the Commendatore, the text was completely subverted. However I suppose that given that Holten’s view is that the Hell destined for Don Giovanni is one of isolation, of a perpetual lack of community and connection, maybe it makes sense. The end scene, with Don Giovanni pinned down by his own loneliness, and the impassive walls (almost like the Masons’ HQ in Covent Garden!) was very effective. The interactions between the characters seemed natural and well-done. I also liked the way Holten gave the female characters much more individuality than they sometimes have, much more ability to make their own choices – the women in this production know what they are getting into when they deal with Don Giovanni. I suppose the overall approach is a bit hyper-active, with all those white-veiled ladies drifting from room to room and the changing videos, but I liked it

Some much better than average singing and acting: Riccardo Fassi was an excellent Don Giovanni, with consistently beautiful tones and always acting well. The other stand-out star was Adele Zaharia as Donna Anna, whose big Act 2 aria was one of the best sung I have heard live – up there with Margaret Price, I thought.   Frédéric Antoun’s Don Ottavio was also very fine – a particular highlight being ‘Il Mio Tresoro’, and indeed he convinced me that Don Ottavio is not a total bore whose arias hitherto I have rather switched off to in my live listening in the past. I was less convinced by Leporello (Paulo Bordogna) whose acting seemed understated, and Nicole Chevalie, whose Donna Elvira sounded a bit shrill at times. But no-one was less than adequate and the overall impression was of a high standard of performance

This was a really up-lifting and fine performance which engaged everyone and was wonderfully heart-warming. I have heard this work twice before in live performance – a very good Glyndebourne production, which maybe was a bit too perfect in retrospect, but very beautiful to look at (and it may be that I had had too much Glyndebourne-related champagne to focus sufficiently on the memory of what it was like), and a performance a couple of years ago – see earlier in this blog – in concert with the LSO, Simon Rattle and the estimable Lucy Crowe as the Vixen and Gerald Finlay as the Forester , which was lovely, but not the same as a theatre show.

This production, done to a very tight design budget, was extremely effective. A recycling bin  – linking of course with urban foxes – stood in for the vixen’s lair, the bar of the pub and several other places. Children flying kites on long poles represented all the insects of the forest, and there were some quite clever masks for some of the creatures – the dog, the owl, the badger – while not giving the vixen and dog fox a mask.  The ending, where the Forester gazes into the forest and sees something of the divine in all the activity around him, was marvellously done, with very effective coloured lighting and a great blaze of brightness on the final note, together with dramatic use of the Holland Park House door, which was flung open to reveal a golden Vixen. There were some great sunflowers accompanying the Vixen’s marriage! Very good use was made of the opera ‘house’ space – children, actors came in at different times from all of the 6 or so ways into the auditorium available to them, and the singers were able to use the space in front of the orchestra as well as behind them.

There needs to be a real company feel to any performance of this work – there are a lot of children playing frogs, vixen cubs, insects etc, a cast of smaller characters, a chorus, and three singers with a big part – the Vixen, the Forester and the Dog Fox. That sense of happy company interaction, of people really enjoying themselves as part of a temporary community, came across very effectively. Of the three big parts, Jennifer France was outstanding as the Vixen – a powerfully sung, energetic even charismatic performance. Julia Sporsén was an excellent Fox. Grant Doyle was not the most poetic Forester (Thomas Allen on the old Rattle recording and Gerald Finlay on the new one make much more poetic impact with the words and the phrasing they give them) but was perfectly adequate while the stand-in Poacher of Ashley Riches got a big cheer from the audience. The work was sung in English but very little of it was audible, I assume because of the inevitably strange Holland Park acoustics – so thank goodness for surtitles

Curiously the orchestra sounded more together, louder and more expressive than the previous evening. Under Jessica Cottis, I thought they played really well, and the conductor seemed to have real expressive power in her gestures and beat that was getting across to the orchestra and positively energising them. The reduced orchestra was really not a problem, except perhaps in that final blaze of glory, which does need a full-bodied string sound (which a total of 9 strings isn’t going to achieve)

This is a strange work in many ways and one that really invites you to more listening – I shall look forward to what I hope will be the postponed ENO production happening in Feb/March 2022

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.