Another great concert (I’m sure I’ll come across some duds at some point, but this wasn’t one of them). The Chiarascuro Quartet was playing two works – the Haydn String Quartet in B minor, Op. 33 No. 1, and the Beethoven String Quartet No. 13 in B flat, Op. 130 (so, one of the ‘late quartets – the one that was originally meant to end with the Gross Fuge but which formidable movement Beethoven eventually set aside for a gentler less awe-inspiring ending).

I had heard of – but not heard live  – the Quartet, but I was surprised to see they are quite old-stagers, starting life as a quartet in 2005. The things that’s really interesting about the way they play is that they are using period instruments, with gut strings and historical bows. This does make a real difference to the way they sound – they seem, I thought, to be able to create marvellously soft , whispered, pianissimos, and the balance of the instruments sounded somehow warmer and some of the textures more transparently beautiful than with conventional instruments. I was right at the front of the audience with the first violin, Alina Ibragimova, very nearby, and therefore the sound wasn’t necessarily as balanced as other people might have heard it, but I was very struck by the sheer virtuosity and leadership Ms Ibragimova gave to the quartet– she is of course a well known soloist as well as playing chamber music.

The Haydn quartet was, as I have said about others of his quartets, always quirky and interesting. Nothing is ever quite what you expect – the second movement is a scherzo in this particular quartet, rather than a slow movement, and the third movement is a D major Andante, but which also retains something of this sense of the traditional scherzo as well. And the finale is quite dark and edgy, rather than a light-hearted scamper. The Chiarascuro Quartet played it brilliantly, I thought.

With the Beethoven Op 130, the Quartet seemed to make more sense of this work than any other performance I have heard – I think the way they played the complex first movement made me understand the structure a lot more clearly, and in fact the programme booklet was quite helpful in suggesting that the origins of the form of these last quartets could lie in the ‘Divertimento’ tradition much used by Mozart rather than the more traditional form used by Haydn and indeed Beethoven in his earlier quartets. This made me fuss less about having essentially two scherzos and two slow movements in this work and wondering about how each movement related to the others. The playing in the wonderful ‘Cavatina’ was quite beautiful – and helped by the soft tones of those period instruments.

And, poor things – because of social distancing, and having played energetically and with all their hearts and minds for us for 80 minutes, they had to play the same programme again 20 minutes after they’d finished performing for us!! The picture below has a male who wasn’t actually playing as second violin – I am not sure who this was (but she was very good!)

This was a recital of piano music by Knussen, Mozart, Prokofiev and Schubert. Ms Suhanova is a Latvian, UK-trained, pianist in the early stages of her career. None of these works were familiar to me, except the Schubert. I particularly enjoyed the Mozart (K311), which was graceful and fairly swift – there were interesting quirks to the musical flow in the first movement which Ms Suhanova brought out well and she didn’t try to over-romanticise the piece – there are angsty moments in Mozart, but they musn’t be overdone; her phrasing had many little touches of sensitivity and colour. The Schubert Impromptu (D935 no 3) I thought was the least successfully done of the four pieces she played – the initial tempo was too fast and the resulting variations/sub-themes were over–clangorous and without that melancholy and introspection – whether occasioned by his sexuality, disease, or just the sense of an impending early death – which all Schubert piano music must have. I was reminded of a maxim I made up myself, but which I read the other day also in Humphrey Burton’s memoirs ’In My Own Time’ – the maxim being, ‘most music sounds better when played a little slower than you initially think it should be played’. The Prokofiev Op 94 sonata was really a bit too much to take in on a first hearing but certainly sounded a significant and powerful work, and one which, as far as I could tell, Ms Suhanova played well  – I’d like to hear it again. Finally the Stuart Knussen piece about prayer bells seemed sonorous and impressive.

An interesting recital – I’m glad I went

This was a truly absorbing concert, booked-ended by extracts from the Creatures of Prometheus ballet by Beethoven, a piece new to me for string orchestra by Sibelius – Rakstava –  as well as two pieces by Ades – one a UK premiere – and Janacek’s Concertino

This is the sort of concert I probably wouldn’t have stirred myself to go to before lockdown, but a year and a quarter of being deprived of live orchestral music, and with further lockdowns being quite possible, makes a big difference in what you appreciate and are motivated to go to. And Ades is someone I’ve admired since I heard Asyla about 10 years ago and saw a cinema showing of the Exterminating Angel at Covent Garden – plus the first performance of ‘Dawn’ at the virtual Proms last year. I also have heard and enjoyed ‘Polaris’. As I have probably said somewhere before, ‘classical’ music in the UK seems to have gone off track for about 50 years. Composers born after Britten, and until those born in the mid-60’s, seem to have been obsessed by serialism and atonality to an extent that has made their works pretty difficult to understand and appreciate. I have repeatedly tried to find ways into Birtwhistle and Maxwell-Davies and not really succeeded very well (though Maxwell Davies Symphony No 5 maybe offers me a way in). Composers like Ades, MacMillan and Turnage seem not to feel bound by the orthodoxies of the 50’s and 60’s and are much more accessible, as well as having a much more eclectic approach to their sources of musical inspiration and assumed traditions.  And, maybe, there’s more interest in some of the figures like Malcom Arnold and Robert Simpson from those ‘lost’ years who were sidelined at the time or not regarded as sufficiently on-message with contemporary developments. Anyway, the new Ades piece – ‘Shanty – over the sea’ – I will want to listen again to; it was an absorbing 10 minutes or so, a bit like Polaris in a sense, in that there was a repeated melody with all sorts of changes in texture and decorative background. The other Ades piece was Concerto Conciso – tougher music written when he was in his mid-20’s but very absorbing; one of the musicians described it as being constructed like a Swiss watch – small moving parts intricately inter-twined, and with two separate lots of beats in the bar happening simultaneously. It must be a nightmare to play!. I loved the bonkers Janacek Concertino, full of those repetitive phrases and rhythms you find in his late operas. Quite a lot of the music sounded like the Cunning Little Vixen! I was less struck with the Sibelius, which was pleasant enough but not very memorable, and seemed to meander somewhat. The Beethoven was performed very well by the Britten Sinfonia, who did some impressively fast and accurate-sounding string work in the overture; the final movement from the Beethoven, employing a theme that was reused in the last movement of the Eroica Symphony, bounced along very ….infectiousiy, if I may use that phrase…… And Ades also bounced on and off the stage for his various curtain calls very energetically, as though to show us 50 is the new 30. A really enjoyable concert!!

My first concert back in the Bridgewater Hall since Feb 27 2020! I also went to the rehearsal, open to patrons of the Halle, on Wed 2 June, where the focus was on the Glinka and the Elgar.

The Halle sounded wonderful for the most part, despite, like the LSO (see a previous blog entry) having a reduced number of strings. The stage had been extended and the orchestral brass were placed in the Choir area.  Again, I was struck by the sheer power of such an orchestra, even though not at full strength, after not hearing one close-up for such a long time. Sir Mark Elder explained in an aside to the invited audience during the rehearsal how the orchestra needed extra ‘courage’ in emotive moments like ‘Nimrod’ in the Enigma Variations – the strings, in particularly, because they have to sit separately and distanced from each other, and they’re not two to a desk, hear themselves play in a way they haven’t been able to before. They need extra courage to have the confidence to play out at big emotional moments and not be self-conscious

The Ruslan and Ludmilla overture was taken at quite a speed, and the violins’ quick-fire runs at the beginning were tremendously exciting. The Petrushka ballet music was next – and this I thought was a wonderful performance, a little slower than I have sometimes heard it which made it at times a lot closer to the Rite of Spring than some performances and accentuated the rhythmic drive. Woodwind and brass were all in great form – a world-class performance.

The ‘Enigma’ Variations is a Halle/Elder speciality, and I have heard them perform this piece several times over the past 20 years. It had been fascinating during the rehearsal seeing Sir Mark work with the strings on details of phrasing earlier in the piece, which made them wonderfully together and effective – and with some real portamenti coming in at the beginning. This whole performance was beautifully phrased – a really whispered start to ‘Nimrod’ and a crescendo at the end of that variation which was not brass-heavy and overbearing. The performance had tremendous bite in the fast variations….until the last movement, the Elgar self-portrait (though arguably the whole work is a self-portrait of a complex man). Here I felt Sir Mark took things a bit slowly at times, and this gave rise to one or two slight wobbles in the orchestra – they seemed to want to go faster at points, or some of them did (and it’s interesting that Elgar himself, in his Royal Albert Hall Orchestra recording of 1926, takes that last movement quite fast – though that could be because of the constraints of fitting music to the requirements of 78RPM discs. Against that, the nervous energy and intensity of the man you can see in those You-Tube’d 1920’s videos of Elgar with his dogs suggests that sort of faster speed)…….  But this is to cavil – it was a great performance and a moving occasion – speeches, a standing ovation from the audience and the orchestra clapped the audience for their support during the pandemic. Memorable….Someone said that the real underlying ‘Enigma’ that Elgar spoke of as being the underpinning of the variations was perhaps the enigma of Elgar’s own personality. I think that makes sense.

This (evening) recital was enjoyable – the quartet were playing Haydn (Op 33, no 5), Schumann (Op 41, no 3) and some Scottish folk song pieces written by one of the Quartet players, Duncan Grant. I particularly enjoyed the Haydn; within the perhaps limited frame of reference and the scope of elegance and wit that 18th century musical entertainment demanded, Haydn is always finding new things to say, so that I feel a sense of anticipation as each movement starts – so, OK, how is he going to deal with THIS! The finale in particular of this quartet is counter-intuitive and not the usual romp one might have expected. The performance was seemed sensitive to the different elements of light and shade in the work, and sounded, as far as I could tell, not knowing it well, very good – the musicians seemed to really dig into the work with understanding and enthusiasm. The Schumann  – I have to say I find this quite often with this composer –was a bit of a bore; the combination of obsessively repeated short phrases and rather droopy early Romantic themes sent me drifting off to sleep at the end of both the second and third movements – or maybe I was just exhausted after the LSO performance, but I can never imagine doing this with Haydn. The recital finished with the Scottish folk tunes, which were lovely, and interestingly arranged – the string quartet was genuinely adding something to the music beyond what a couple of folk musicians could reasonably offer (which is not to disparage folk musicians but they would find it {happy to be proved wrong} difficult to match the complex sonorities of a string quartet). Interestingly I’ve just bought a recording of the Maxwell Quartet of Haydn’s Op 74 quartets who seem to have got there first – I’ve just been listening to their arrangements of folk songs like the Burning of the Piper’s Hut for string quartet coupled with the Haydn!

My first foray live into a concert hall since February 27 2020! It was a programme I might previously have thought to be too familiar – I don’t think I will ever take such concerts for granted again.  The Barbican felt comfortably full, despite the socially distanced seating, and indeed the show was a sell-out (one of three with the same performers and pieces).

This was a concert in two parts, in terms of the quality of performance, I thought. The Rachmaninov (Piano Concerto No 2) I found to be very good indeed. There is a racist trope you sometime hear that says all East Asian-origin performers can be technically brilliant but lack ‘soul’ or ‘real’ sensitivity. Yuja Wang gave I thought a wonderful performance that had masses of sensitive nuances and grace – occasionally I felt she was too quiet against the orchestra, but that could have been because of where I was sitting…….I was moved to tears by her rendering of the second subject of the last movement. The LSO sounded glorious – how remarkably LOUD live orchestras are  – and the strings , despite being severely reduced (only 4 double basses for instance), really dug into the big tunes. I wasn’t quite sure why the strings were so reduced – it wasn’t Covid seating on stage, since there was plenty of space left over; maybe it was simply cost. I always find it to be a good indicator of the quality of an orchestra as to how confidently the horns and woodwind play out – the big German orchestras sound like this, such as the BPO, BRSO, LGO etc, but only the LSO does among British orchestras; the horn playing was particularly distinguished

Beethoven’s Fifth was very well played and enjoyable to listen to, but sounded a bit, somehow, podgy. The finale was taken at a slowish speed and, unlike some of the historically-informed performances, Tilson Thomas didn’t really bring out the dynamic inner string parts which push the movement forward rhythmically – the contrast with Theodor Currentzis and Musica Aeterna at the Proms a few years ago (see 2018 blog) was huge. The performance could also have benefited from a timpani player using harder drum sticks. The sound was a bit too smooth and brass/woodwind dominated and the inner voices got lost – the whole effect was just slightly sedate. But…it was still wonderful to hear the trombones and trumpets in the finale, and the fist three movements – particularly the second – were very well played indeed.

A great occasion!!

So – it finally happened! After 14 and a half months, yesterday I was at a full scale opera again , at Covent Garden. The last time I heard an opera, or indeed an orchestra, was the Marriage of Figaro, given by Opera North on 14 March 2020 at the Salford Lowry Theatre……..Since then – in September and October 2020 – four string quartet concerts, two song recitals and a solo violin performance…..only……

I thought the performance of La Clemenza di Tito I went to on Sunday May 23 at the Royal Opera House was tremendous. Mark Wigglesworth kept the music moving and lively, yet always with enough space to appreciate the inner voices in the orchestra. It was wonderful to hear an orchestra again, and the seats we were in – front row of Amphitheatre – offered really good sound, with a nice thwack from the timpani when needed. The voices, after months of tinny laptop sound, seemed extraordinarily loud and – well – real.

But above all the production by Richard Jones kept me constantly engaged and watching what was going on on stage. The production was set in what looked like Fascist Italy – possibly Titus as a Mussolini-type. I haven’t seen Clemenza since the famous ROHCG performances in the mid-70s’s with Colin Davis, Janet Baker, Lucia Popp, Yvonne Minton and Frederica von Stade. Despite all these stars, I found it a dreadful; bore – I kept looking for the wit and vitality of the Magic Flute, or Cosi Fan Tutte, and not finding it. In a classical traditional production (John Copley, I think) that 70’s production seemed to emphasise the rigidities of opera seria. I think I understood that the music by itself was often beautiful, and had many of the numbers been found within Don Giovanni or Marriage of Figaro they would be well-loved showpieces of the repertoire, but the plot and context wholly undermined the work. Richard Jones and his designer produced a context that emphasised the cramped and boxed nature of the life the leading characters were living, and the ridiculousness of the classical forms / the anger lying hidden behind the facades – there were some very sinister figures in hoodies who appeared from time to time. The senators following Titus looked like fascist or communist small-town politicians, while Titus himself seemed gradually to exchange genuine compassion and pity for an exalted view of himself that, at the end, had him running round the stage in gleeful celebration of his own compassion, while the rest of his retinue suddenly drew their knives, the reality of power behind the façade of the ‘good’ Emperor. The other characters were carefully drawn, their emotions real and understandable. Sextus and Servilia seemed to be working class people – footballer and pasta shop girl – elevated by the whims of Titus to be a friend/a potential bride of the Emperor. Vitellia was also understandable, her bitterness and anger clearly expressed

But all this would have been rather besides the point if the singing had been indifferent. But it wasn’t – though the stand out star was Emily D’Angelo as Sestus, all the singers without exception were never less than good, and both Nicole Chevalier as Vitellia and Edgaras Montvidas were particularly impressive.

A really tremendous performance, then…… Fingers crossed there will be others over the next few months – I am going to Don Giovanni in July.

After months of hibernation, I have booked a whole range of concerts and operas to see in May, June, July and August. We’ll see how much of this actually happens. I’m – in theory – ready to spring into action as below, and plan to go to:

ROHCG – La Clemenza di Tito

Halle Orchestra – 4 concerts and a rehearsal

LSO – concert Yuja playing Rachmaninov PC 2 and MTT conducting Beethoven 5

Opera North-Fidelio

Thomas Ades 50th Birthday – Barbican

Bach weekend – King’s Place

Mirga conducting CBSO in Weinberg

ROHCG Don Giovanni

Plus masses of Buxton Festival stuff. including Handel’s Acis and Galatea, Northern Chamber Orchestra (a fine concert with Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht and R Strauss’ Metamorphosen) and a new musical piece called Brunnhilde’s Dream with Sir John Tomlinson)

ENO Tosca in August

And Holland Park Opera – Cunning Little Vixen, and Hansel and Gretel

Plus, possibly, the Proms…Goodness!!

I’m poised…but will it happen?

We shall see – and I shall report……

At the Manchester Wagner Society we had a great talk last week about Sir Adrian Boult and ‘what might have been’ if he had been given the chance to conduct more Wagner. The talk was given by Adrian Brown, a student of Sir Adrian’s, a finalist in the von Karajan conducting competition and a very experienced conductor, mainly of orchestras in the London area.

I guess this is in part a generational thing. If you were say under about 58, or not living in the UK, you would have been unlikely to have seen Sir Adrian conduct ‘live’ – his last live performances were I think in about 1978 at the age of 89! – and you would probably know him principally for his many recordings of 20th century English music. For those older than that, you might have seen his imperturbable calm presence on the rostrum, flicking his long baton at the orchestra, and extracting extraordinary performances of, yes, Elgar, and Vaughan Williams, but also Brahms and Schubert and other Romantics. His background was impressive – as a young man, he was at the first performance of Elgar 1 in Manchester, he conducted the first credible performance of Elgar 2, he gave the first performance of many of Vaughan Williams’s works, and he observed and learned from Nikisch and others before the First World War, who themselves in their youth had received directly from Brahms, Schumann or Tchaikovsky instructions on how particular works should ‘go’. He was still passing, Adrian Brown said, information to British orchestras on how Schumann wanted a particular passage of his 4^th symphony to be phrased in the mid-1970’s! However, I had no idea Boult had ever had much of a history with Wagner. But he had! Adrian Brown explained that he had conducted a number of staged Wagner performances in the mid/late 1920’s and early 1930’s, mainly of Valkyrie and Parsifal. Beyond that, he had visited Bayreuth a number of times before the First World War, and had decided views on the quality of the productions there. “Boult came in, reeking of Horlicks,” was Beecham’s dismissal of his notoriously abstemious colleague but the Tristan Prelude Adrian wanted us to play was full of passion and energy. It seems sad – though Boult might have been bound by his BBC contract, and of course by the circumstances of WW2, not to get much involved in non-BBC opera from the early 30’s to his ‘retirement’ at the age of 60 from the BBC – and extraordinary that he was never asked to take on a full Wagner performance between 1949 and 1978, nearly 30 years of conducting life beyond retirement. Even with Reggie Goodall waiting in the wings, was there really going to be more fire and life to a Wagner Ring cycle from Karl Rankl or Kubelik in the early 50’s at Covent Garden than from Boult? It seems an inexplicable mistake by both ROHCG and ENO.

But there we are – apart from the EMI recordings of Wagnerian bits and pieces that we dipped into, there are no extant Boult recordings of Wagner. Adrian Brown’s talk showed us clearly that we had all lost as a result

I listened the other day to the Wigmore Hall live stream of the Bach Goldberg Variations played by Pavel Kolesnikov  (271) Pavel Kolesnikov – At Wigmore Hall – YouTube

I find this an endlessly absorbing work. I am not qualified to comment on Kolesnikov’s pianistic competence but it seems to me a fine performance. I love the work because:

• Its original theme, unlike that of some variations, is memorable
• Its structure is very clear – a Canon every 3 variations and a still centre in variation 15, half way through
• for the most part, it is possible for me as a lay person to be able to relate each variation with the original theme and work out how it ‘varies’ from it
• I love the underlying melancholy of this work, like so much of Bach’s output. Yes, I know there are gigues, gavottes and whatever, but there is a quiet sadness at the heart of this work which I find deeply appealing
• Above all I love the 30th variation – ‘Quodlibet’ – and the transition to the repeat of the original theme

The recording I’ve got on MP3 is the 1981 Glenn Gould version – very good but with a lot of groaning and muttering thrown in…………..

The only time I’ve heard this live was a performance by Andras Schiff in about 2018 at the Bridgewater Hall. Very memorable, although also a very long concert, and I almost missed my train!………