August 2019 All the blogs about live events from here on are memories after the event and not written at the time. Anything in 2021 and going forward is live!……….

Late August 2019 I went to Jerusalem for a break from Yatta and the South Hebron Hills, the surrounding villages of the West Bank, and the never-ending tension of the Israeli occupation of that area –  it was nice to be able to sit in the hotel room and listen to the Proms on I-Player and read as long as I wanted to, and I enjoyed that almost as much as any of the tourism – although the Temple Mount is very special; calm, beautifully landscaped, and lovely to sit in (or would be if the temperature weren’t 30+ degrees).  I managed to listen to the Proms I-Player Rattle Belshazzar Feast, which I thought was a bit fidgety, wayward in tempi, and not quite ferocious enough in the bits that need oomph; the Nelsons Bruckner 8 with the Leipzig Gwendhaus was, I thought, very fine indeed, though I notice some critics weren’t so enthused; I also enjoyed the Mirga CBSO Elgar/Weinberg concert. Critics were a bit sniffy about Sheku’s Elgar performance but I thought it was very sensitive, perhaps introverted, but that’s a perfectly reasonable reading of the score) – and I really enjoyed the Weinberg 3^rd Symphony. I listened on I-Player to Stuart Skelton and Das Lied von der Erde – this was a little earlier on my last night in the UK – I toyed with the idea of checking into my hotel at Luton Airport in the mid-afternoon and then going back down to London to see the concert live. In the end I thought it was too much hassle and that I would listen in the hotel room. I listened to about 10 bars, but the whole experience sounded so painful I switched the music off and went to another sort of bar…I listened to the Martha Argerich Tchaik PC 1 too – great if wayward performance!…….

Later in October, again on a 3 day break, I went to Nazareth – wonderful fusion food, I gorged myself, and again had lots of beer, something  we’re not allowed in the West Bank – and played Bruckner on Amazon Music

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Normally I would go to 8-9 Proms but I only saw a few Proms this year, as I was starting my 3 months volunteer human rights observer work in Palestine from 2 August 2019. I got to see:

Haydn’s Creation – which was in some ways the most enjoyable evening, because it was a really joyful performance of a work which I have never really been that interested in; I have a recording of course, but it must be years since I played it. I remember going to one performance about 8-9 years ago at the RFH – starry names (I think the OAE and Rattle) and leaving after the first half because I was so bored. This one was much less starry  – the BBC Phil, soloists who were competent but not outstanding. The people who made the concert special, I thought, were the ad hoc choir, called The BBC Proms Youth Choir, essentially the choruses of various music colleges and universities, and the BBC Phil’s new chief conductor, Omer Meir Welber. The latter directed from the harpsichord (which, mysteriously got changed at the interval, I thought, but a review said it had been changed to a fortepiano – not sure why!) but, despite what I would have thought was a handicap to expressive control, he led a really rhythmically tight, punchy performance that moved sprightly along; he also encouraged some both energetic and, at times, beautifully phrased quiet moments – when moon and stars appear, and when the birds start singing, for instance. Most of the time he was almost using his elbows to conduct, as he bounced up and down doing the continuo bits. The choir(s) – 4 different groups – was/were large, and sounded amazing, and not at all either stodgy (which might have been the case with an older group of similar size) or hesitant (as young singers). I have to say I was totally gripped by this work in a way I never have been before.  Much of it I suppose is standard Haydn, but illuminated by many hundreds of little touches of genius in the accompaniment and inner voices of the orchestra (the strings of which in this performance incidentally seemed to be playing without vibrato). Apparently and I suppose appropriately David Attenborough was in the audience though I didn’t spot him!

The two concerts with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra and Yannick Nezet Seguin were on the whole extraordinarily good. The orchestra’s sound is very refined – beautiful woodwind and string playing, with lovely dove-tailing of sound from instrumental group to another. But, crucially – and perhaps this was also the effect of Yannick – it was a beauty that always seemed to be serving the music and the intentions of the composer, not just a beautiful ‘sound for sounds’ sake’ such as I’ve complained about with Rattle and the BPO. At the same time the playing was also very energetic and powerful when it needed to be, particularly in the finale of the Shostakovich – brilliant trumpet and timpani playing. The performance of Beethoven 2 was very good but I thought the conductor was wrong in the (too fast) tempi chosen for the first movement, which the BRSO could well keep up with well enough but (a familiar theme of mine) which diminished the power and energy of the music. Although I seem to have heard a lot of Shostakovich 5’s in recent years – including with Gergiev and his Maryinsky orchestra – this I thought was the best of them – a particularly moving slow movement with the wonderful BRSO strings hardly whispering at times in grief and then building up to an enormous climax (the dynamics of the performance were extreme, but , again, not in a self-indulgent show-offy way but enhancing one’s understanding and appreciation of the piece). And the balance achieved – whether this is Yannick or what the orchestra naturally does I am not sure – was extraordinary; details I had never heard before in the Shostakovitch came across clearly in beautifully layered sound.

Much the same in the second concert – a superb performance of Sibelius 1, a light extremely well crafted Prokofiev VC 2, and a riotous orchestral suite from Der Rosenkavalier (I need to look up who compiled the suite – it had more ‘numbers’ in it than some).

Before the second performance of the BRSO a rather extraordinary thing happened – in the 70’s I used to go to the Proms (and other London musical events throughout the year) with a group of University friends. In particular there were two guys from the same Cambridge college as me. I last saw the one in about 1988 and the other about the same time. Then all of us lost touch with each other, disappearing into domesticity. Amazingly both of them – the two had made chance contact at a concert a few years ago – turned up next to me in the Proms queue. We had a riotous reunion in the pub afterwards, reminiscing (one of them was the other ‘official’ of the Cambridge University Wagner Society apart from me) about the dinner we had with Friedlind Wagner (myfriend reminded me she clammed up when he asked her about what it was like growing up with Cosima, but, as I recall, was fairly open about her mother wanting to murder her), and a Wagner Society coach journey to see the first night of the Goodall Siegfried in April 1973, when someone hit the emergency button on the bus trying to demonstrate Siegfried splitting the anvil….Anyway, we have vowed to keep in touch

I went to a screen showing of the Glyndebourne Barber of Seville recorded in 2016, in Sheffield. The star of the show was definitely the conductor,  Enrique Mazzola, who produced a very zippy, energised and crisply articulated sound from the orchestra; very different from the slightly ploddy and muddy sound I remember from the Coliseum orchestra in the 70’s. They really energised the performance, and the percussion added to the fun rather than overwhelming it. I do think it is a great work, if escapist and ‘light’, and any performance of this standard is going to be hugely enjoyable – and it was. I did have some question-marks though about some – well one – of the singers, though. Almaviva is a bit of a cypher in Rossini but Taylor Stayton did his best, and he handled the decorative elements of the singing very well. Alessandro Corbelli was brilliant as Bartolo – he is a very skilled comedy performer and every gesture, every facial nuance counted.  The Figaro was Bjorn Burger – I thought a bit pedestrian in nuance but did the articulation of his arias very effectively. The most well known singer was Danielle de Niese as Rosina, and I thought her portrayal of the role was a bit over the top – so arrogant, so cross that she became a not very sympathetic figure. The coloratura elements of the singing were done brilliantly  but there wasn’t much lightness and subtlety. The production was decent, but didn’t really do more than play the obvious gags; it wasn’t really very original. Lots of good ensemble work but you couldn’t help feeling it could have been a bit better

I went to see The Tao of Glass in Manchester. The performance I went to was fantastic!!!  It’s a difficult thing to describe – a play with music is a starter, but the ‘play’ is really more of a set of meditations by the actor and director Phelim McDermott on the nature of his relationship with Philip Glass, and some themes of Buddhist and Dao-ist philosophy. He was obsessed by Glass’s music as a teenager, and had a vision of one day working with him; decades later, directing on Broadway, there was a plan to collaborate with Glass and the children’s writer Maurice Sendak on one of the latter’s stories – but Sendak died before this really could get underway. McDermott then sold Glass the idea that we experienced today in the theatre – 10 scenes, each accompanied by a piece of newly composed Glass music. Some of the scenes relate to stories from the Rig Veda or Dao-ist literature and the writings of Lao-Tsu; some of the scenes are from McDermott’s own life, sometimes funny, sometimes almost trivial, but each with a relationship to the underlying ‘going with the flow’ Dao-ist thinking. The scenes in McDermott’s life are enacted with the help of three puppeteers who operate puppets, but also do wonderful things with sheets of plastic, creating with three sheets for instance a credible image of Lao-Tsu walking through the streets and being challenged by a student. I found the most moving of Glass’ music was in response to McDermott’s friend’s theories about their being three levels of consciousness – an everyday, crowded, rational one; a dream level, and a level where ‘the One’, where some sort of unity in the world, the ‘divine’, in Western language, is manifested. The particular scene envisaged someone in a coma, at that third level, and Glass’ music was responding to that; it was actually very moving, despite Glass’ very limited musical ‘vocabulary’. I attach some photos

There were 4 musicians – piano, violin and clarinet and percussion. There was also a self-playing piano revolving round the stage, towards the end,  playing Glass’ own recording, while the musicians supported.  This attracted a very different crowd from the normal Manchester opera/concert scene, and all the better for it

On Thursday I went to Dvorak’s ‘Rusalka’ at Glyndebourne, which was, I thought, very good indeed – 5 star stuff. It’s a fairy tale, with a mermaid creature giving up her tail and ability to swim to fall in love with a human, who then betrays her. I find  it a very haunting work – the music is understated but quietly and beautifully lyrical, and the translation used in the surtitles made the work sound contemporary-  a damaged young woman looking for affection and being exploited, with some measure of forgiveness for the man at the end that he may or may not deserve. In terms of the production, while there were plenty of directorial touches that expressed an engaged and creative presence, the basic approach was to ‘tell the story’, and leave the implications and undertones to speak to the individuals watching the opera. The only other time I’ve seen ‘Rusalka’ before was at the ENO in the early 80’s when the staging had been as a giant Victorian Nursery, with quite heavy Freudian overtones, from what I can dimly recall. I doubted during the performance if I would ever see it again and felt it was a relief it was a straightforward presentation – but I’ve just realised there’s a new production at ENO in March 2020 – well worth going to see, though how the production will be, goodness knows – the same mezzo sings the Witch in both productions. It is the sort of work Directors can get very carried away with. There were strange echoes – certainly in words and drama, occasionally even in the music – of the Rhinemaidens and Erde (the latter relating to Jezibaba the Witch). Mahler apparently liked the work and conducted it in the early 1900’s – it comes from that Viennese/ Secession / Freudian world, I think. It’s very far removed from the happy folky world of Dvorak’s 8th symphony, say, although there are a couple of folk dances within it.

The basic set was for Acts 1 and 3 a curved set with a symbolic pool at its centre and the second act used a kind of catwalk downstage and a rectangular box at the rear for the marriage celebrations.   Costumes were standard East European folky for the most part, with some almost-can-can dancing wood sprites, but Rusalka had a modern tight short dress and her father glowed an unearthly green. There are some spectacular coups de theatre – eg Rusalka’s sisters, who descend from the flies with 20 ft tails.

Sally Matthews, as Rusalka was a fabulous singing actor  – looking youthful, moving well, and she projected the sexual desire in the role effectively – at one point she rips off her knickers to have sex with the Prince on the floor of the wedding celebrations, before shamefacedly having to put them on again when the guests arrive. A strange aspect of the role is that with the Prince she hardly speaks/sings – her, and the opera’s, most famous aria, The Song to The Moon, comes in the first 10 minutes of the work, when she is still part of the mysterious natural world – and so that puts a big focus on the person playing Rusalka to put across her passion for, her obsession with, the Prince, by body movements alone, for most of the 2nd Act.  Hers was a totally credible portrayal and very moving – also very good was the Witch, Patricia Bardon, thought a bit soft in tone so that the voice didn’t always ride over the orchestra. The other people I hadn’t heard of – Evan Le Roy Johnson a good Prince, though using a bit too much of the ‘head’ tones at the end, and Alexander Roslavets as Rusalka’s Father, a warm and flowing voice.

The house is surprisingly large – it seats 1200, and has a warm acoustic; a lot of wood. I’ve been there only once before – I found that voices come across clearly; the orchestral sound is warm but doesn’t overwhelm the singers for the most part.  I don’t really know the work but Robin Ticciati and the LPO seemed to perform it well, and the music ebbed and flowed in the way it needed to; some beautiful woodwind playing, particularly from the flutes.

I find the Glyndebourne ambience outside irritating – I think for women it’s better; something smart seems to be the only criterion, and that’s fair enough for a festival context. For men, my view is that the emphasis on dinner jackets and black ties is ridiculous – I don’t have a DJ and I don’t want one, and I’m certainly not going to buy one, and there were a few other – though very few – people also, like me, dressed in lounge suits. I am past caring if I stand out….The atmosphere is rather forcedly jolly  – a lot of people seemed rather self conscious and I wondered to what extent they were there for the opera, and how much for being ‘seen’. That said, I did hear some informed comments about this and other operas, and there was a refreshing lack of people taking selfies and scrolling down their phones all the time. My friend, like most people, makes an enormous fuss over the picnic with champagne, glasses, plates, folding table and chairs etc etc; completely over the top, in a good way. My heart went out sympathetically to two middle-aged German women sitting next to us who were sitting on a rug, and eating Pret sandwiches; this struck me as far more sensible (and to be fair, didn’t look particularly eccentric in context – Glyndebourne seems pretty tolerant). The weather was beautiful, which helps, of course; the other time I’ve been there it was cold, with occasional lashes of rain, and the wind was blowing in a way that meant you had to clutch your champagne glass for dear life.

When something is done as well as this, you do feel it’s on a different level from standard repertory performances at ENO or Covent Garden; the cast just has more time to work together and know each other, and that comes across in the unforced detailed nature of the acting and the cast interactions- Bayreuth has that same feel…

I saw Boris Godunov last week at Covent Garden. I thought the performance was a mixed affair really. Part of the problem is the multifarious editions of the music – this was supposedly the original, which doesn’t have a Polish Act, and doesn’t have the extra colour of Rimsky-Korsakov’s edition. It ends with Boris dying, unlike the Shostakovich version, I think, which ends with a chorus lamenting the eternal fate of the Russian people to be poor and downtrodden. The orchestration is much sparser than either the Rimsky or Shostakovich versions, and occasionally I missed touches both provide, like the multiple gongs of the Coronation scene. In this version it was an opera in 7 scenes, played without an interval, and felt, inevitably a bit episodic, as all versions of Boris probably do. I have only seen Boris once or twice live, and all those performances were a long time ago, in the early 70’s, with Boris Christoff as Boris and using the Rimsky version. This performance didn’t quite match up to my memories of 45 years ago, even though Christoff was really a terrible ham – but he was just riveting to watch!

The production had, I guess, its moments – an extremely colourful coronation scene, and a very clever iconostasis effect (see attached photo), where the noblemen plotted, and where multiple versions of Dmitri’s murder were shown, in the shadows. Less effective was the way in which Richard Jones, the Director, brigaded the chorus (enlarged) in straight lines (I suspect this is a feature of his work – I see to remember something similar happening at the ENO Mastersingers 4-5 years ago) which, in a context where different parts of the Chorus are often asking each other questions and responding to them, didn’t always make sense. The setting of the Inn scene seemed odd – a huge bare stage, a preposterously long bar, and no use of the chorus or extras. The costumes of the boyars looked more Regency than early 17^th century shaggy Russian nobles– again odd – although Boris had a big bear-like furred white coat. A bit of a mixed bag then, visually.

Vocally, however, things were much better.  For a start, there was John Tomlinson as the drunken monk Salaam, sounding in excellent voice, with a spoon tapping sidekick. David Butt Philip was a good False Dimitri, whose voice sounded stronger than I would have expected in a big theatre. And of course, Bryn Terfel…… Obviously he is not your standard dark -voiced Russian bass (as say Christoff was). But he has a much wider range of colours in his voice than the aforesaid Russian basses, and there was some beautifully soft and warm singing from him. He could summon up also considerable reserves of volume for the Coronation scene. The last scene, with Boris’ collapse and death, was very moving.  The augmented chorus sounded magnificent.  I have given up on ever hearing a warm enveloping orchestral sound at ROHCG – its acoustic is at the opposite remove to the Coliseum’s. I scarcely noted what was happening with the orchestra – not sure whether that is a good or bad thing….The conductor was Marc Albrecht (I note he’s conducting a Wagner evening at the Proms this year with Christina Goetz) who certainly didn’t do anything positively wrong, in terms of tempi etc, but whose contribution seemed somehow a bit faceless. So some good moments, but not entirely a convincing or memorable evening, I’m afraid to say…..

I went to a – very good indeed – Mahler 5 with Rattle and the LSO at the Barbican in mid-May. This seemed to me to work well – unlike his conducting sometimes with the Berlin Phil, Rattle was not trying to over-beautify it, and the Adagietto felt moving rather than simply sounding lush and wonderful. At the same time, the LSO were ferocious in their attack in the first few movements, and the moment in the third movement when you hear the chorale tune for the first time was profoundly affecting. A five star show! There was also as a bonus an extremely impressive performance of the Britten Sinfonia da Requiem in the first half

And a few days later in Sheffield  the Novosobirsk Orchestra played the Rachmaninov Symphonic Dances thrillingly – the best performance I’ve heard, the players really leaning into the music and playing with precision and passion. They were conducted by Kurt Sanderling’s son, Thomas, and sounded like yet another star Russian orchestra – there are so many of them!

The Halle Mahler 2 in May was a bit of an oddity – it was very impressive and compellingly played for most of its length – indeed for 99% of it. However, at the end, there was one of the only two times in over 50 years of my concert-going, that a professional performance has completely fallen apart. The other occasion was the LSO in about 1971, with Erich Leinsdorf conducting Beethoven 7. He was taking the finale at an incredibly fast pace and somehow two parts of the orchestra got out of synch with each other so that one part ended up about half a bar in front of the other at the end. While the audience applauded, the orchestra seemingly ignored them and were carrying on a furious discussion about who had messed up. On the Mahler 2 occasion, just before the climatic ‘Auferstehn’ cry from the chorus, something happened…..the brass wobbled, one or two tentative voices in the chorus started and stopped, there was an embarrassed silence for about half a second, then Elder got everyone back together and the performance concluded. One person said to me that this might have been when Sir Mark suddenly had a major neck problem that subsequently required him to have 4-5 months off resting – I’m not sure. But somehow, everyone for a moment stood on the abyss of total collapse. I’m afraid it spoiled the whole performance for me.

And, then Stockhausen, and ‘Donnerstag’ aus ‘Light’. in late May This was one of two performances in the Festival Hall, with a French, UK, Swiss cast of singers and musicians. I went there feeling I ‘ought’ to go, as a big event and a major work, but not expecting to enjoy myself or feel engaged. I have to say it was very absorbing, always worth listening to and afterwards, with the brassy Farewell played from the RFH balcony over the Thames, as I walked back in the sunset over Hungerford Bridge, I found the music memorable and wanted to hear more. There was actually an abridged version over ?10 hours of the whole of ‘Light’ a few weeks later in Amsterdam, which I now would have liked to go to, but unfortunately it clashed with my Palestinian human rights 2 week briefing.

I thought the Janacek Cunning Little Vixen performance in late June with Rattle and the LSO at the Barbican recently was extraordinarily good. It was semi-staged, with direction from Peter Sellars, who has a bit of a reputation for whacky and not always fully effective stagings. This one to my mind, within the limits of a concert hall, and the Barbican at that, seemed very good  -there were some effective, sometimes funny, videos of scenes from the natural world when the frogs, badgers, grasshoppers etc were talking to each other, and the characters reacted sensitively and well to each other.  I could imagine some grumbling about the relevance of some of the videos – when the Forester was at home there were pictures of well-heeled mansion flats in ?Maida Vale or upmarket bits of Berlin – but I wasn’t too fussed. The children on stage, sometimes the vixen’s cubs, sometimes animals in the forest, were particularly well-drilled. The strange sexual overtones of the vixen’s relationship with the Forester were well brought out. I have only seen one production of this live before, which was at Glyndebourne and very beautifully staged – though the shortness of the work, the longness of the interval and the quantity of champagne my friend had brought, meant that some of the details were a bit foggy. The general tenor of the LSO production emphasised the misery of the Forester, and his quasi-redemption at the end. The scene where the three men – Forester, Schoolmaster, Parson – regret the passing of time and their increasing age was very moving, and, in that context, the sexual explicitness of what the Vixen and the Forester got up to towards the beginning the more startling – a lot of heavy petting. The Barbican is not a sympathetic hall for voices, I felt, and people like Lucy Crowe, whom I know to have a voice that sounds wonderfully colourful, big, warm and resonant in a place like the Coliseum, and Gerald Finley, another beautiful singer, sounded constrained and small in voice. Nevertheless, Lucy Crowe’s performance of the Vixen was magnetic – well-acted, sung with many shades and variations of colour, and extremely energetically portrayed; she leaped about the stage and there was a very funny video of her chomping away greedily at chicken kebabs as she tricks the chickens. Gerald Finley’s part isn’t enormous, but he was very moving at the end as the Forester, when he surveys the twilight sun in the forest and the beauty, and self-renewal, of nature.

Perhaps inevitably in the context of a performance in a concert hall, though, it was the orchestra which took centre stage and Rattle himself was sometimes part of the action with the animals of the forest – he conducted from the edge of the stage, and occasionally moved into the centre of it all. There were wonderful fluttering sounds from the orchestra at the beginning as the forest stirs, a crisp rhythmic punch in the folky bits, and a great blaze of sound at the end, the more powerful because the orchestra had been subtle and subdued for much of the performance. There were lots of microphones around, so unclear whether it will be on Radio 3 or just recorded for future CD release – if the former, a ‘must-listen’.  It is in many ways a bonkers work which really shouldn’t come off on stage, but I found it more credible as a stage work than the more conventional Katya Kabanova.

I also went to Billy Budd at Covent Garden, in May. I treated myself to a seat in the stalls at CG. Some critics grumbled about the set but I thought that, in a severe way, with a stylised below and above deck performance area, it looked sufficiently naval to be credible; I think a production that completely ignored the naval context would be misguided, to say the least. The set also very effectively gave a claustrophobic and oppressive feel to the action. I thought Toby Spence was mis-cast visually as Vere; he looked far too young, and though his singing was fine, he really couldn’t manage to convey any sense of the older Vere reflecting on his younger self, and things that happened long ago; oddly, there seems to have been no intention on the part of the director to make him look older, which was odd. Jacques Imbrailo absolutely looked the part and sang it beautifully. I heard different views of Brindley Sherratt’s quite unusual Claggart – some people thought his sinister bespectacled and balding presence jarred with context and time, but I thought his appearance was very effective, and he was good at getting across the homo-erotic elements in a fairly subtle way, without hamming it. The orchestra was very good, and indeed, during the gun battle with the French ship, managed to produce the loudest noise I have ever heard in the theatre since Goodall’s Siegfried Funeral March at the Coliseum!

I listened via I-Player to the performance by Haitink and the LSO of Bruckner 4, which I thought was really excellent – there’s also an LSO video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00JMlBYgc7k is the 4^th movement. IMHO, Bruckner is a tricky mix of Schubert, Wagner and God: if you produce a sound that’s too lyrical and light, or too frenetic and pulled around, or too portentous and heavy, it doesn’t fully work. Haitink’s performance seemed to get those elements very well balanced. The first movement was an ideal example of the ‘right tempi’ being used – perhaps in part because Haitink at 90 is not – and anyway never was – a podium dictator, and so allows the music to flow naturally and build up into climaxes without exaggeration or undue emphasis – you just get a sense of someone who conveys pleasure in the music to his orchestra, and that is also conveyed by how the different sections of the orchestra respond to each other in , say, the slow movement. Quite a slow pulse in the first movement, and in the second a surprisingly swift one, but again, sounding absolutely ‘right’. In the first movement I noted a couple of orchestral fluffs, suggesting H’s beat might be getting a bit hard to read, but in general the orchestra sounded amazing, particularly the horns and brass. The fourth movement, again, I thought was absolutely right in tempo, to give both the impression of mystery and endless space and silence where needed, and also the necessity of onward momentum – the handling of the music around 2.hr 13 mins  on I-Player was especially fine, and from 2.32 onwards. I went – I think I mentioned it a few emails ago – to a very fine Bruckner 4 at the Proms three years ago with the Berlin Staatskapelle and Barenboim. I wouldn’t have said the Haitink performance was better, but it was in the same, very considerable, league. I remember DB doing something extraordinary with soft string chords towards the end so that they sounded like the ticking of a clock – Bruckner was an OCD sufferer, and VERY keen on clocks – and it gave the whole ending an extra doom-laden feel up to the final triumphant blaze of sound.

Later in the week, I went to Haitink’s Mahler 4 at the Barbican. I had heard a very beautiful, but ultimately not very engaging, performance by Daniele Gatti and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw at the Proms a couple of years ago, and after the performance I was asking myself – why was this unengaging? And likewise, after the magnificent Haitink Mahler 4 last Thursday, I asked myself – why was this so much better as a performance, with two equally fist rate orchestras involved? What exactly was it that makes the difference? I think it has something to do with telling a story, being objective and not getting too bogged down in ‘sound for sounds sake’. The Haitink performance was definitely showing the interplay of lightness and darkness in our lives through the music, and somehow the instruments – the burbling clarinets, the jaunty flutes – were part of telling that story, as were the dynamics (very, very quiet at the beginning of the slow movement and even quieter at the end of the finale) rather than ‘creating something beautiful’. That was particularly the case in the first movement which starts off happily and simply, and gets darker as the movement proceeds, It was the vividness of characterisation that was particularly telling here, the LSO and Haitink gradually drawing the listener ever deeper into the symphony’s interior world. There’s something too about allowing a measure of freedom to your players so that the conductor is setting a framework rather than seeking to dictate the interpretation of every detail. The first half of the concert was a lively, sensitive account of Dvorak’s Violin Concerto, with Isabelle Faust (a frequent Haitink collaborator – there was a Prom a couple of years ago where she performed a Mozart VC with him) and very characterful woodwind playing in particular. I guess it might be the last time I ever see the old boy – I have been going to listen to him conducting since the late 60’s, so he has been part of my life for a long time. I still have an LP of his performances of Mahler 3 and Mahler 8 from the 60s. More recently I heard him with the VPO in Mahler 9 – about 10 years ago at the Proms – and a very memorable Mahler 3 a couple of years back also at the Proms. Mahler 4 was something I really grew up with, that defined my adolescence. Saying goodbye to Haitink meant saying goodbye to a bit of my felt experience over 50 years.

And a busy April too…..Nielsen 5, The Magic Flute, Parsifal Act 3, Tippett Piano Concerto…….

The Halle concert featuring Nielsen 5 was conducted by Johannes Debus – not heard of him before – and also had the excellent Pavel Kolesnikov playing a sensitive account of the Mozart Piano Concerto No 22. The account of Nielsen 5 was the first one I’d heard which really made sense  – where sequences followed one to the other logically, and the work had a cumulative power – I grew up knowing and loving Nielsen 4 but never quite understood the 5^th as well – so this was a memorable occasion for me

The Magic Flute was at ENO and was one I’d seen before – with the artists and engineers at the side drawing some of the stage design and doing sound effects visible to the audience as the work proceeds. I enjoyed it hugely – the undoubted star was Lucy Crowe, whose voice soared across the orchestra and filled the very large spaces of the Coliseum effortlessly. Thomas Oliemans was a well-projected Papageno , and there was luxury casting with Brindley Sherratt as Sarastro. The one disappointment was Julia Bauer, whose Queen of the Night seemed a bit effortful and small-voiced

I rushed up to Edinburgh to help my younger daughter pack her things before leaving for Cuba, but in the middle of that took a train to York, and over-nighted, to go to Evensong at York Minster and then attend a performance of the Prelude to Act 1 and the whole of Act 3 of Parsifal with Mark Elder and the Halle. What most impressed me about the performance was Nicky Spence’s Parsifal – I hadn’t realised his voice could be that strong and sensitive. Elder’s complete Parsifal at the Proms in 2013 was one of my great listening experiences of the last two decades. Here, the acoustics of the Cathedral got in the way rather badly – even though I was sitting near the front, it all sounded very muddy and the singers sounded as though they were in a different space altogether. Gábor Bretz was Gurnemanz – not that memorable and occasionally submerged by the orchestra. Michael Kraus was a good Amfortas. It must be said though that the ending, with the Hallé Choir, singers from the Royal Northern College of Music and the University of York, resonated beautifully in the Minster and the whole event seemed worth it for the last 10 minutes, which radiates a peace achieved artistically at the end of a turbulent, sometimes unbelievable, life.

After Easter, I really enjoyed hearing Tippett’s Piano Concerto – Steven Osborne, Andrew Davis, BBC Philharmonic – I’d never heard the work before but found it extremely approachable, in his Midsummer Marriage rather than later phase, and I immediately went and bought an MP3 recording.

Still March 2019 On Wednesday I went to a Halle Orchestra rehearsal in the afternoon, – from 1400 to 1645 – a perk of giving them some money on a regular base. The conductor was a young Brit called Jamie Phillips, who seems to be gathering a reputation working with regional German and French orchestras and the pieces being rehearsed were a new trombone concerto piece by John Casken, a local Manchester composer, and Prokofiev’s 5^th symphony. This was I think the final rehearsal, so bits of the works were being focused on and I can’t really say anything much about the Casken piece, as I didn’t really hear enough of it – though what I did hear showed me how much better Salonen was as an orchestrator – even though the Casken piece had probably more percussion pieces and players, the sonorities were much less interesting. I was struck – never having been to a professional orchestra rehearsing before – by how tough the conductor’s job is: listening to the orchestra, picking up not just the technical mistakes (someone’s come in a bar too early), but also issues of phrasing and volume, plus having to manage the relationship with the orchestra and project a collegiate but dominant presence (based on knowing exactly how you want the piece to go, and being able to respond to every orchestral query on phrasing and dynamics immediately – plus, in your own time, working out the tempi relationships in the work, and what you want to bring out in terms of orchestral colour when it’s not obvious). Impressive…..They didn’t really play much of the second movement of the Prokofiev; I thought the finale was too fast in the basic tempo he set, and he was then getting a bit agitated with the percussion at the end ( there’s an enormous battery of percussion at the end, a terrible automotive sound). The problem was in the speed he wanted it played at, I thought, which meant that the percussionists were having to sacrifice noise for accuracy and getting all the semi demi quavers in.

I was very saddened by Andre Previn’s death this week. I have great memories of him in the early to mid-70’s. I particularly treasure – I think I’ve said this before – his performance of Walton 1 and also the first uncut recording of Rachmaninov’s 2^nd Symphony, which I also seem to remember going to in a live performance. I don’t think I ever saw him conduct after that time – a pity, as, from the obituaries, he seems to have done some excellent work with the VPO on Richard Strauss, and even conducted a Bruckner cycle – the last person I would have associated with Bruckner. I suspect I always put him a bit in a box – as the snooty comments of the critics put it, recorded in the obituaries – as a ‘first rate conductor of second-rate music’, which probably does fit his attachment to Walton but is inappropriate for a whole lot else.  He was clearly someone both amazingly talented and able to shine in many different spheres in his life – and how extraordinary to start off in Weimar Germany in 1929 and end up as a global citizen.

I went to Katya Kabanova last Thursday – an Opera North show at Salford Lowry theatre. The only other time I’ve seen this opera live was in the 70’s – Josephine Barstow and Charles Mackerras (of course a Janacek specialist) – at the ENO, where it made a big impression. 40’ish years on – and though I have the famous Mackerras recording with Soderstroem and the VPO, and listen to it off and on – I was less impressed by the work as a whole, listening and watching it live. The story essentially concerns a dominating mother-in-law, the Kabanicha, a weak son, who’s married to Katya, the son’s foster sister, who’s perkier, and her boyfriend, plus a dominating merchant called Dikoy, and his nephew, Boris, who falls in love with Katya. Katya essentially has an affair with Boris and then goes mad with guilt, and ends her life as an outcast from the community. There are strange echoes of Peter Grimes, though I cannot think either Britten or Montagu Slater could have known the work, as it wasn’t performed in the UK until 1951 – an outcast and individualist against a small, provincial, petty-minded community, people coming out of church, a mad scene towards the end, an offstage chorus as part of that mad scene…..I think the combination of production (the director was Tim Albery), the length of the work and some of the singers somehow didn’t quite gel.. What really makes Katya Kabanova worth going to see is the quirky, often wonderful music – based on the tonal modulations, the melodic curves of the Czech language. In fact, that was another problem with the performance – it was being sung in English, which sometimes sounded a bit stilted, and would probably have been better off with Czech and surtitles. The music is not a set of straightforward tunes, or even through-composed with leitmotifs in the way of Wagner or R Strauss – musical ideas come and go, glint and vanish, but there are a few which recur, without necessarily having ‘meaning‘ attached to them, which are very haunting.  There are also some folk music elements. The attached youtube link gives a sense of all this in the music – it’s the Prelude.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7gASnXyskI . The second scene in Act 2, where the lovers finally meet, is particularly beautiful. In the performance on Thursday, the Opera North orchestra, under Sian Edwards, was a bit scratchy, though that might have been because of where I was sitting (side stalls). The director and designer had updated the work to the 1920’s – fine, that worked OK, though without adding a lot. The set was basically a wallpapered box, with a square hole in the middle, that provided the space to a ‘beyond’ – that became a little unvaried after a while.  The main problem, I thought, was the structure of the work – it’s only an hour and three quarters of music and in this production was played without a break. If you think La Boheme involves speed dating in the first Act, this work trebles the speed! The romance between Boris and Katya all happens ridiculously fast in the opera, and means Boris is scarcely sketched out as a character. There’s more of Katya, but I am afraid I was unimpressed by the singer, Stephanie Corley. Her voice was quite ‘tight’, and didn’t seem to have the flexibility to provide colour and nuance, while she seemed too cool and sober as a person on stage – and too much waving of her arms about to compensate (one of the first rules of acting – keep your arms at your side and don’t whirl them around). She also had some problems with the top notes in the role. The best portrayal and singing was by Stephen Richardson, as the evil merchant, Dikoy, and he had both stature and a big bass voice – he reminded me of John Tomlinson. The Masetto/Zerlina- like characters were also very good – and the Kabanicha was magnificently evil! I think too there was a bit of a failure of direction. Katya’s focus is essentially on ‘sin’, the ‘sin’ of having an adulterous affair. Now, while sin might mean something to me, as a Christian, it’s essentially a fairly meaningless word to most people, and therefore the drama lacked credibility. The director should have been seeking to address this problem – if for instance he had made Boris more exploitative in his relation with Katya, then that might have provoked more sympathy in the audience for Katya. As it was, it became a period drama, a thing of its time, rather than something which speaks to us and our problems, directly.  However, it has to be said that some of the published reviews were a good deal more enthusiastic about the show than I have been. Though there are no subtitles, it seems to me that the current Opera Vision version from Naples, with an all-Czech cast, might be better – though I have only just glanced at it. Certainly, the set looks more effective, in representing an oppressive present and a ‘beyond’.

Two days later I went to the St John Passion at Sheffield Cathedral. This was a local performance   I don’t know of many more unsettling openings to any piece of music than the echoing oboes, and anxious tread of the strings in the opening chorus, with the shouts of ‘Herr’ from the Chorus. I have always thought – not that I have listened to it straight through that much – that St John’s Passion was a bit of an also-ran besides the Bach Matthew Passion, and it doesn’t have any absolute show-stoppers on the scale of ‘Erbarme Dich’. But it’s got, I found listening to it live, many moments of beauty and interest and I thoroughly enjoyed the performance. The Sheffield Bach Choir, singing in English (with the congregation allowed to sing along in the chorales), was, as far as I could tell in the rather muddy but also flattering acoustics of the Cathedral, excellent, as was the orchestra. The soloists were a mixed bunch, the best being a baritone originally from Uganda, Terence Ayebare, and a very good soprano, Philippa Hyde, who’s got quite an impressive track record of international as well as UK work. A few years ago, going to Leipzig, I heard a Bach cantata in St Thomas’ Church on Saturday in the early afternoon before a concert, and, being there on a Sunday, I went along to the morning service at St Thomas’. I found the whole experience of being in THAT church, and being there for a service, to be very moving….there was the boys choir (whom of course in his time Bach was responsible for), the Lutheran chorale tunes dating from the 17th and 18th century, the interplay between the professionally trained choir and the congregation; all of this amounted to a contemporary illustration of how Bach’s cantatas and passions might have worked, and all those German words – erbarmen, ewigkeit – which play such a big role in Bach’s works resounded throughout the service. I resolved that if I was ever going to learn German I would buy Luther’s Bible as something to work through. Somehow, I really felt the presence of the master in that place, and just felt out of this world about it. I have to say I liked Leipzig, which is, much more than nearby Dresden, a city that lives up to your clichéd expectations of what a German city should be like. There’s a famous bierkeller (referenced in Goethe’s Faust, where Auerbach’s bk is one of the places where Mephistopheles tempts Faust); there are fine old buildings in the German style (rathaus and so forth); the city makes a big thing of its famous orchestra – it’s all over city centre billboards – and there’s numerous street bratwurst sellers. Very different from the rather depressing Dresden. I went to a very good chamber concert in the excellent Bach Museum on the Sunday afternoon – and afterwards ate a remarkable concoction of meat, beer, potatoes, dumplings, sauerkraut, mushrooms, and berries at the aforesaid bierkeller. Going back to Sheffield, I do think, as I have said before, that there is a rich tradition of amateur choral singing in the UK, enabling large-scale choral works to be put on in Cathedrals and concert halls in towns up and down the country with professionals and not very much full-line-up rehearsal time, which is really something to be celebrated.

I also went to another cinema showing – this time Walkure from the Met. I enjoyed iy very much Despite the history of critical grumblings, mainly I think on account of the noise ‘the machine’ has made in the past, I thought the basic set was quite effective – and at least ensures the stage doesn’t have masses of symbolic clutter as at Covent Garden (though I also think that the ROHCG end of Act 3 and the Magic Fire there is one of the great coups de theatre I have seen in recent years, and much better than the Met’s version). The costumes were for the most part OK, though I do think the head ‘wings for the Valkyries were a bit silly. Where I think the CG production was much better was in the time and attention Keith Warner had clearly given to working with the artists in their roles, and ensuring they acted credibly. Other than Eva-Marie Westbroek, who I think is a very different quantity when you see as well as hear her, and who I thought was fantastic as a singing actress, whatever niggles one might have about her voice, only Christine Goerke and Jamie Barton really tried to portray their character on stage with any real insight.  There was too much routine sword and spear waving and semaphore acting. Wotan was a bit of a cypher, SS was going through the motions acting wise, and Hunding was fairly neutral as well, using that silly leer overmuch rather than acting through presence and voice. I did think there were some special moments on stage though – Wotan’s farewell to Siegmund at the very end of Act 2 was very well done, I thought, and also Wotan and Brunnhilde’s goodbye to each other was more than usually moving on stage.  SS was having problems with moving – getting up from a prone position looked a bit like someone with stiff knees in their 60’s – but I don’t think there are that many Siegmund’s who have phrased as sensitively as he does at several moments in Act 1 – I was reminded of Remedios.  I thought Gunther Grossboeck was very good indeed, vocally, and could be a fantastic Wotan (it sounds as though Bayreuth are signing up several Wotans – Ian Paterson has also been reported to have been offered Wotan in 2020). Christine Goerke I heard at ROHCG  in Turandot in 2017 and I thought she was excellent, with some sensitive thoughtful phrasing, and also more thinking than usual going into Brunnhilde’s ‘teens’ (as she put it) behaviour in this opera. Greer Grimsley I thought was good – an untiring voice – but I thought he was a bit bland; very little variation in tone, and very little meaningful reaction to other characters on stage. From a cinematic perspective, his eye patch and long hair meant that he couldn’t really use his face expressively, even if he wanted to. But I would want to stress that all of the above is fairly minor criticism of something that one’s just profoundly grateful for seeing, and especially seeing in the cinema live……the Met Orchestra I thought was superb but Philippe Jordan’s reading seemed a bit episodic at times; things speeded up and slowed down a bit illogically, and there were a couple of times when I thought he was going too fast, particularly in Act 1 .  I think part of the Wotan soliloquy in Act 2 was cut in the Met version – there’s some text about Alberich and the armies of the night that I don’t think I caught on Saturday

March 2019

More cinema opera in Sheffield this week – the Covent Garden Traviata on Wednesday, which was great! Obviously, I couldn’t compare it visually – either in terms of acting or sets – with the Met one, but I did think Ermolena Jaho was absolutely amazing as an actor, and with the sort of beautiful soft toned and nuanced singing that I haven’t heard so often these days. Obviously, there are vocal pyrotechnics she can’t do so well, and Damrau can (did DD hit a high C at the end of Act 1 or thereabouts?) but I am not that bothered by the lack (at a very, very high level) of dazzling coloratura – EJ clearly lives the part and looked shattered at the end. A great singer (and I am embarrassed to say I have never heard of her before)! The Twittersphere was buzzing – see https://twitter.com/ErmonelaJaho . And I was very struck – I think the tenor made the point – by how much Verdi achieves with what seems at first hearing to be such slight effects – a jogging rhythm on the strings, maybe a bit of woodwind accompaniment. Everything is focused on the vocal line and for the singer to lead on. For me it was a bit of an embarrassing revelation as to how much I have been missing by not listening very much to Verdi over the years. The tenor was fine – not a brilliant actor I thought, but doing all that was needed vocally – and, yes, Placido Domingo was brilliant.  At 78, he is definitely a complete phenomenon. You could tell he’s a bit short of breath now and then, but the voice sounded – at least in the cinema – amazingly powerful, and how wonderful to hear that voice again ringing out in all its warmth and richness. And, as you say, he has a marvellous stage presence. The voice just sounded back down the years to the Tosca I think I heard him sing in 1971, and the Fanciulla in 1979 (plus the Otello with Kleiber). It’s a huge pity that all my programmes from that era were left in an attic in the 1980’s in Maidenhead (maybe they are still there). I do somewhere have diaries from that period (not mega-essays, just notes of where I’ve been and what I’ve done, so one day when I have the time I might be able to check and know for sure….)

And so, to the St Petersburg concert on Friday. I’ve heard them a fair amount over the years, starting in? 1970, when their chief conductor Yevgeny Mravinsky (conducted many Shostakovich premieres from the 1930’s onwards) brought them to the Proms to perform Shostakovich 5 (there’s a great Youtube programme about him – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mlDFdo3BXvo  ).  Digressing slightly, the cemetery shown in the film unfortunately is not the same as the one I went to in St Petersburg in 2018, which is a wonderful treasure trove of 19th century Russian cultural figures – Dostoyevsky, Mussorgsky, Borodin and (with the largest memorial) Tchaikovsky – in the grounds of a monastery. Russians have an endearing practice of laying flowers by their cultural heroes every death anniversary, and Tchaikovsky’s was positively festooned with lilies and so forth. They put these often on everyday statues in the big cities – someone had put a cheap bunch of supermarket flowers at the foot of a statue of Prokofiev in the streets behind the Bolshoi Theatre, I noticed.

The St Petersburgers are a wonderful orchestra – the Gramophone a few years ago rated them as 16th or 17th best in the world out of the top 20 (shamefully there’s only one UK orchestra in that list, the LSO – while there are 3 Russian ones), but they do tend to play safe when touring – although I suppose 19th/early 20th century Russian music is what the punters want to hear them play. It was a decidedly unimaginative programme – Prok 1, Rachmaninov PC2, and Tchaikovsky 5 – but marvellously played, in Manchester. And – I do mean marvellously…. the solo horn in the 2^nd movement of T5 was beautiful, the soaring strings in the same 2^nd movement breath-taking, and the sheer power and velocity/precision of the orchestra at breakneck speeds in the finale of the same was really quite something.  The final peroration of the symphony can seem banal and trite if taken too fast – somehow, the orchestra / conductor took it at exactly the speed that makes it moving and an emotional release. The conductor, sadly, was not Yuri Temirkanov (Mravinsky’s successor), now 80, who was ill, but a very competent replacement Vassily Sinaisky (who used to be based in Manchester with the BBC Philharmonic). And the encore was the Khovanschina Prelude, with soft shimmering strings and an outstanding clarinet solo – in a different league, sadly, from the Halle performance a few weeks ago. The soloist in the Rachmaninov was Freddy Kemp – again, a good and sensitive musician, superbly underpinned by the orchestra. Russian orchestras – I remember hearing this for myself at the Proms in 1971 and you can hear it also in the old Melodiya recordings -. used to have some very distinctive sounds – a very nasal, thin, oboe sound, whining, vibrato-y ‘French’ French horns and rasping brass. A lot of that, sadly, has gone now – the horn sounds standard for instance in the T5, but I was pleased to hear the oboes still making a distinctive sound, a lot harsher than UK or German equivalents.

I do admire Russia’s commitment to a high standard of musical culture, even with so many social and political problems to deal with. Although all the big orchestras and opera companies were still on their summer holidays when I was in Russia, I did get to the season’s opening concert by the Vladimir Philharmonic Orchestra (Vladimir is about 200 kiloms from Moscow, which, to my ears, sounded just as good as some of the UK regional orchestras (and of course there are 100’s of such orchestras in Russia). They were performing Beethoven 3, very competently – and they did have more of the vibrato-type horn sound, and piercing trumpets!

Is Russia’s commitment to a high standard of musical culture truly supported nowadays or am I romanticising?. I am not a Russia expert at all, and can only say what I saw – which was:

• A very vibrant musical life; not just the big companies, but plenty of specialist orchestras eg for Baroque, and alternative opera companies
• The one concert I did go to had plenty of young people and all the local dignitaries
• Plenty of funding for the arts – whether from the State or oligarchs, who knows, but all the big concert halls and opera houses that I saw the outside of looked well-maintained.

There’s a really absorbing book – another one by Orlando Figes – called Natasha’s Dance, which I really recommend, as full of insights into Russian culture. The Elizabeth Wilson book about Shostakovitch is very good too – I was less impressed by the Julian Barnes one, which again, seemed to rehash the familiar incidents. But I suppose the Barnes book is an interesting exploration of how all of us are compromised, in one way or another.

More March 2019

The Damnation of Faust performance at the Bridgewater Hall was very fine – not in the Colin Davis class, though (I have his recording with the LSO which I guess is about 15 years old, and which, hearing it after the performance, gives new insights and dimensions to the work through the careful tempi chosen, and perhaps also the balance achieved between the sections of the huge orchestra). But I had forgotten totally what a wonderful work it is – I can’t have listened to it from beginning to end for 30 years, though obviously things like the Hungarian March turn up in concerts, sometimes as encores. The Halle and Elder threw everything at it – there were three adult choirs, for starters, and then at the end, with the angelic chorus coming on, they had the 100-strong Halle youth choir all dressed in red coming down the aisles through the audience. Bachtrack calculated 332 people involved – I was too taken up with the performance to count! A wonderfully ‘big’ sound, anyway – there was also a full sextet of harps, four timpanists and an ophicleide, . I loved the big mezzo arias – the King of Thule song, and the ‘D’amour l’ardente flamme’ with the beautiful cor anglais solo. Rachel Kelly was a late substitute for Marguerite, an Irish mezzo – I thought she didn’t have a particularly outstanding voice but used what she had very thoughtfully and intelligently, really feeling what she was singing.   David Butt Philip was Faust – not a great communicator, and rather oddly in the duet with Marguerite having to resort to falsetto at one or two points, though I guess it is a very demanding role. I have always thought of him as being more a classic oratorio sort of singer, but he has apparently done a lot of opera.  But it was really the chorus and the orchestra that made this performance so powerful. Laurent Naouri was a very idiomatic and totally idiomatic Mephistopheles – much the best singer, objectively, and projecting the text very well – he captured a very French aspect of this particular Devil. I need to spend time listening to more Berlioz – I have never really listened that much even to Les Troyens, even though I have one of the Davis recordings. And I must read the Berlioz Memoirs again – a very racy read (Actually it has to be said that Wagner’s Mein Leben is also quite fun, though one feels it’s more fiction than fact)

Somewhere I picked up on Stephen Johnson book, published last year, called ‘How Shostakovitch Changed My Mind’, which I bought on impulse via Kindle, and, actually, DID read, for once. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it as a must-read – it rehashes pretty well known incidents in Sh’s life. But it is really about SJ’s severe bipolar disorder, and how listening to Sh’s music helped him through that – and it is quite moving about the impact and the reality, ‘somewhere’, of music on people’s lives and minds – how it becomes a communal experience, like the Greek explanation of tragedy, a shared catharsis. Given how omni-present music of all kinds is in our lives, it is in a sense strange that it’s very difficult to say what it is and what it does. Music is not a fact or an object in the world, but something whose meaning is generated by us as human beings, and I guess the same problem I have with trying to describe a piece of music’s impact on me would also be felt trying to describe a relationship, or what someone is really thinking. I was also thinking of Tom Service’s BBC TV programme in 2016 about the Leningrad Symphony. I noticed it was on again –

https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b06vkbcs/leningrad-and-the-orchestra-that-defied-hitler

It has some wonderful interviews with the 4-5 old people who actually went to the first performance of the symphony in Leningrad. Maybe it’s on YouTube?

More early March 2019

The Salonen/Philharmonia concert I went to at the RFH was very good indeed. First of all, it was really rewarding to hear S’s new ‘cello concerto. I think in my lifetime there has been a real shift in contemporary music. In the 60’s-80’s, there was an uncompromising modernism, often from composers based in universities (and therefore with a steady income) or with commissioning from quasi-State entities such as the BBC, who could be doctrinaire about what did or did not pass muster for funding. I have always found people like Boulez, Birtwistle and Maxwell-Davies pretty difficult to get to grips with, and that still continues – Barenboim gave a premiere of HB’s latest piece at the Proms in 2017, and I still found it an impossible ‘listen’. But with the advent of the minimalists, on the one hand, and the younger composers like Turnage, who were unafraid of using rock or other idioms, things have begun to change. I find people like Ades, and now Salonen, are very much more in the great 20^th century traditions of Mahler, Shostakovitch, Britten, Tippet, and Messiaen than the Birtwistles of this world. It doesn’t mean their (Ades/Salonen/Turnage etc) work is massively accessible – it’s still quite tough – but it does offer a way in, a point of comparison, that is just not there, for me, in the work of much of the 60s and 70s. However, I am always willing to give the latter a go – I have signed up to a complete ‘day’ of Stockhausen’s massive 7-day opera – ‘Licht’ – in May at the RFH (the whole thing is on in June in Amsterdam but it clashes with something else I am doing). The ‘day’ is Donnerstag, focusing on the Archangel Michael, and about 4 hours long. We shall see….

Back to the Salonen work….it was very enjoyable. There were some beautifully quiet meditative parts for the cello, some marvellous harmonies, a lot of orchestral colour (as you would expect from a conductor like Salonen) and some quietly effective loop-backs of cello sound recorded electronically, that could have sounded a bit contrived but didn’t. There were lots of fresh sounds, from the chugging, twinkling orchestral ‘chaos’ of the opening pages to some of the louder passages with percussion in the third movement. Salonen refers to asteroids, comets and astronomy as images for what he is trying to say in music – I think probably the emotional trajectory of the music is something I didn’t understand fully and would need to listen to the piece again to think more about that. I thought the first and second movements ‘spoke’ to me more clearly than the third, perhaps the second most of all, and the way the ‘cello was used in balance with the orchestra created a real concerto-like dialogue. I am not sure the bongo drums were a good idea…..But I loved the ending! Much of the music put me in a quietly meditative space, and with a sense of wonder, that I very much appreciated – and some of it did sound a bit like Sibelius at odd moments. And I have the chance to listen to it again – it was broadcast on Monday 25^th at 7.30pm on R3!!!

Also, there was a superb performance by the Philharmonia and Salonen of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra – again, see what you think. This is a work I know well from recordings, but certainly, experienced live, it sounded up there in the Solti class. Salonen has a reputation as an excellent programmer, and you could see some similarities, both in terms of sonorities and also a certain enigmatic quality, between the cello concerto and the Bartok – which is sometimes folksy, sometimes opaque, sometimes bleak (particularly the unsettling 3^rd movement), and occasionally humorous (the famous Leningrad Symphony quote).  I don’t think I’ve heard it much live since the 70’s and I appreciated almost as though listening to it for the first time how much of a concerto for different parts of the orchestra it really is – you have to have top-notch woodwind and brass sections to bring it off effectively, and they all have their moments to shine. Again, the emotional trajectory is unclear, and you end up (perhaps the same is true of the Salonen) not trying to make a verbalised ‘sense’ of it, but just enjoying the textures / glimpses of melody as they pass by. I was struck in the performance again by that judicious use of the ‘right’ tempi that allow momentum to be maintained but gives clarity to the inner voices in the orchestra – particularly in the first movement – and I also felt that I was hearing things I don’t normally hear – ie that Salonen’s sense of orchestral balance was acute, bringing out the woodwind almost as equal partners with the strings at times. At the beginning of the 3^rd movement I was reminded of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle…..perhaps that’s intentional on Bartok’s part……the lake of tears and his feelings about exile

I went to a cinema showing of the Berlin Philharmonic’s New Year’s Eve concert – Barenboim performing a Mozart Piano Concerto (26) and conducting as well, plus 4 Ravel pieces, played one after the other – almost, as Barenboim said, like a Spanish Symphony– the Rhapsodie Espagnole, the Alborado del Gracioso, the Pavane, and the Bolero. I loved the whole concert – the Mozart was full of delicate shades and subtle pointing, and the woodwind and DB collaborated happily in matching and varying the themes. It was not, I suppose, a ‘historically-informed’ performance – but so what? the speeds were perhaps leisurely but they allowed the orchestra and DB really to give each phrase its due. And the Ravel was superbly done – it must be the first time I have really enjoyed the Bolero, as each wind lead sought to phrase the tune more individually and subtly than the last. The climax was terrific!

 I also listened to Thielemann conducting the VPO New Year’s Day concert on TV………Thielemann is not somebody overflowing with bonhomie, or extrovert showmanship and, conducting the audience in the Radetzky March, he managed to look fierce rather than jovial, I thought…But it’s always good to hear a fantastic orchestra like the VPO being put through its paces on one of the fast Strauss polkas, and, though I wasn’t listening that attentively, the Blue Danube waltz sounded more shaded and varied, and also slower, than it sometimes does. Someone from the BBC Symphony Orchestra once told me how difficult the J Strauss stuff is to play, for an orchestra. The classic New Year’s Day concerts I’ve come across are by Kleiber – I have the 1989 one on CD. There’s a lovely Youtube video of him conducting Die Fledermaus overture –  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7HDmIFT0pHY.

The Met’s recent La Fanciulla del West was on Radio 3 over the Christmas period, and I listened to it on I-Player. I was again struck by the beauty of the music. Kaufmann has a beautiful warm, rich tone, and great sensitivity to line and text, but sometimes makes me a bit nervous – his voice can waver and crack I find on occasion when he gets into his upper range, and that happened once or twice in this performance, although there was much beautiful quiet singing. Also, Eva-Maria Westbroek sounded a bit squally and approximate at the top of her range, I found. Incidentally I came recently across a new ‘singing-related’ word I’d never come across before….’squillo’. This was in a talk given by a soprano who sings heavy roles – Wagner and Strauss- and is also a singing teacher. She described it as that quality in a voice which allows it to ‘ping’ and to enable it to ride over a big orchestra in Puccini or Wagner or Strauss. I’ve never come across the term before…Westbroek certainly has it!!

Early January 2019

I went to an LSO/ Rattle concert at the Barbican of Sibelius 7, Nielsen 4, and ‘Let me tell you’, by the Danish composer Hans Abrahamsen, who was there for the performance. I thought it was a very enjoyable but not overwhelming concert: the Nielsen benefited from the bite, energy and the precision that Rattle brings to this sort of music, and the strings of the LSO in the slow movement were very moving (the LSO strings in my view are the only British orchestra’s which stand comparison with the best European and American orchestras). But somehow the great blaze of brass glory that there should be at the end of the first movement and the finale was taken a bit too fast, and to me the manic timpani interruptions sounded a bit too polite. But anyway – that’s just my view… The Sibelius I have always found a bit difficult to listen to – there are so many ideas in a single 20 min movement that I find it a bit tricky to work out how they all relate to each other – but it was very well performed, though the final crunching chord didn’t sound as ambiguous as it sometimes does. In many ways, the biggest surprise and enjoyment was the Abrahamsen piece – broadly tonal (in fact some of it wouldn’t have been out of place in Das Lied von der Erde) but with beautiful and subtle sounds from the orchestra – glinting and sharp, ice-cold some times. The words were in the programme, which helped, and are inspired by Hamlet’s Ophelia (apparently, they all come from the play, but reordered and re-imagined). It has to be said that Hannigan’s singing was completely impenetrable, as you found, if you didn’t have the words in front of you. The words aren’t on the Internet as far as I can see – an indication is given here from Section 5:

You have made me like glass

Like glass in an ecstasy from your light

Like glass in which light rained

And rained and rained and goes on

Like glass in which there are showers of light

Light that cannot end

I really liked this piece, particularly.

And Hannigan’s range and tone were amazing, and really captured, in the last section, the text’s sense of fading into snow. The audience was very enthusiastic about the performance, and there was a chap behind me in the Balcony standing up and shouting ‘Bravi’ at fortissimo levels.  And in fact there were a few empty seats after the interval, so some people had clearly come for that work alone. There were some echoey bits which apparently are the Monteverdi stile concitato, the repeated-note emphases, that are used with the text throughout, but particularly about snow coming down in the last movement. I’ve bought the Nelsons recording!!

I had had recommended to me the Cantus Arcticus by Rautavaara a few months ago and there it was, conducted by Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla and the CBSO on Radio 3 last Thursday evening on I-Player. I did enjoy listening to it – I thought the mix of bird cries and orchestra could have been a bit ‘naff’, but in fact it was very moving, particularly the ‘migrating swans’ movement. I’ve bought a recording!  ‘Mirga’ is very talented and she has a real ability to bring out orchestral voices and colours and opting at the same time for very judicious tempi to do so– see for instance En Saga in the same CBSO BBC-recorded programme (for instance 51.00 to 1.05.00 and onwards), so that there is a kind of inner momentum (can’t describe it but it’s when you somehow get the tempo of a piece absolutely right so nothing is rushed or lingered over too much – I think it’s particularly important with Mozart…..). And beautifully built up to the climax as well….. Had I been listening to this in isolation I might have thought the clarity of orchestral sound had more to do with where the BBC places its mikes, but I heard the same thing happening live when she and the CBSO performed Debussy’s La Mer in Sheffield, a few months – which as I said, was the best I’ve heard live. An exceptional clarity in the orchestral sound….. I also enjoyed – coming back to the Mirga concert last week – the broader than average selection of Peer Gynt music.

I didn’t in the end go to Berlioz’s Beatrice and Benedict in Manchester, and, having heard it on I-Player, I rather wish I had. I am sure I have never heard the work before – it’s a late work and seemed to me to be very sun-lit and somehow expressing Berlioz’s fulfilment as a composer in its approach to the story. There’s a beautiful nocturne at the end of Act 1, in particular. There’s very little anger or violence or conflict, only bright, never cliched, music, sometimes sounding a bit like Mozart. I really liked it. There seemed to be some strange soft music for chorus – I was left trying to work out whether the chorus was hopelessly out of tune, or Berlioz was doing something very innovative  – probably the latter.  Incidentally, I still remember a wonderful performance of Much Ado about Nothing by the RSC with Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack in 1982, with some of the most memorable stage music I have heard in Shakespeare play. It made me almost skip out of the theatre with joy.  There’s still so much Berlioz I don’t know – Benvenuto Cellini. Les Troyens, Lelio (although the latter does sound quite heavy going) and I don’t even know – apart from the famous chorus – L’Enfance du Christ! But I would recommend the Te Deum. Here’s a link to a memorable young-ish Abbado recording on Youtube in St Albans of all places – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QupRUy353oA  with the EU youth orchestra (though not that youthful).  There’s another Abbado performance with the VPO ten years on also on YT, but somehow English choral singing is always special, and makes the earlier one a better performance. And the boys are giving it the full welly in their bits, which is always thrilling to hear. I doubt if Berlioz was a conventional believer, possibly not one at all, but, in particular, the last movement, with the ‘In te domine speravi non confundar in aeternum’ (In you, Lord, is our hope: and we shall never hope in vain) and ‘iudex crederis esse venturus (We believe you will come to be our judge)  being thumped out, in Berlioz’s military band style, in sheer terror  – at ‘non, non confundar’ – with an envisaged future of judgement and personal accountability  – is very powerful indeed.  And actually, whether it involves red devils with horns and tails, or Beckett-like endless recurrence of past failings, the concept of some sort of final judgement, however absurd in scientific terms, does make a sort of emotional sense and a frame for one’s life, as Berlioz shows us through music (and maybe our contribution to climate change is part of that judgement).

Also went to see the Met’s Adriana Lecouvreur at the cinema. After some travel traumas, in the end I managed to see all but the first 10 minutes of Adriana Lecouvreur. I have to say I loved it – silly and fundamentally meretricious though it is. As the commentators said, it depends on stars, and stars with stardust and I thought Netrebko was really superb in playing it for all it was worth. She’s no great actor, but in a sense, the more you ham up the role, the more it’s appropriate to the overall theme. And actually, the end bit struck me as quite moving.  She sang beautifully. AN has gone up considerably in my estimation! And Piotr Beczała was really good – he was Bayreuth’s Lohengrin this year, when Alagna stepped down at the last minute. Critics were making a big fuss about Anita Rachvelishvili and she sounded great – but I was surprised how little of her role there is – her presence could have been hammed up a lot more by Cilea and his librettist. Overall, I am really glad I went – and the cast were clearly having fun together, and with a hugely supportive audience. It struck me as a very good case for opera on screen – I would never have bothered to see this live, but in the cinema and for a fraction of the price it was really worthwhile

Early February 2019 I went to hear the Halle in Sheffield last Friday performing Rachmaninov 3. I’ve always liked this work when I’ve heard it, but it’s years since I listened to it in a concentrated way, and I don’t think I’ve ever heard it live – certainly not since the 70’s. While it’s got some gloopy, succulent, Rachmaninov tunes, a lot of it is very unsettled – and also unexpected; there are lots of false starts. It sounds very much like the music of exile, not so much because of the trademark melancholy, but because all is so tentative and exploratory. And brilliantly orchestrated.  I remember last summer going to Tolstoy’s town house in Moscow (well, it was outside Moscow at the time, but is now just by one of the big ring roads) and seeing, in this modest wooden house, a music room where Rimsky Korsakov, Rachmaninov and other luminaries used to listen to chamber music together in the early 1900’s with Tolstoy – what a fantastic contrast in twenty five years from being there through Revolution, and a complete upending of all he’d known, to being an exile on tour in America and (I think) Switzerland……The Halle, I thought, were in great form – the first movement didn’t linger, the slow movement (with a scherzo within it) was at the heart of the performance, and the last movement (which can drag) kept my attention. I’ve heard it said that R3 is one of the three great A minor symphonies of the early 20th century – the others being Mahler 6 and Sibelius 4. I think that’s right…..The conductor was someone called Daniele Rustioni who is the person in charge of the Opera in Lyon  -he seemed unfussy and clear in his leading of the orchestra. There was a very good performance of the Tchaikovsky  Violin Concerto before the interval – a ferociously competent performance by someone else new to me, Francesca Dego, which I thought was very good but maybe a bit too extrovert in her approach (a lot of thwacking of strings) for what is really a quite intimate piece. And before that the Prelude to Khovanschina – ah, another one of my enthusiasms. I went to a wonderful concert performance conducted by Semyon Bychkov a couple of years ago at the Proms, but never caught up with the recent Welsh National Opera production. It makes the plot of Palestrina seem very straightforward…but there’s some wonderful music, alongside the usual textual wranglings of what Mussorgsky did or didn’t intend at various points.

More early February I went to another very good concert this week in Manchester – the Halle, again, performing VW’s 7^th Symphony – the Antarctica one. The first half was a bit dire – though very well played by Stephen Hough; this was Saint Saens’ 5^th Piano Concerto, which fluttered along but really was of no consequence at all and pretty boring – in fact I almost fell asleep, which is unusual for me in the concert hall. The best thing in the first half was the encore Hough played – Debussy’s Girl with the Flaxen Hair, which was beautifully judged, full of ripples and colours, and sounding very different from when I’ve heard it hammered out as part of teenage music-making. But the second half was special – this was a bit of a revelation for me. I have never heard the RVW 7^th live before and indeed have scarcely listened to it at all, though I have it in CD and digital form – I think I’ve dipped into it once or twice, and found it very grey and unyielding, and with too many VW tics, that make it sound like the 4^th or 6^th Symphony all the time. But actually, I now appreciate I was wrong – while there are a few places where the music sounds as though it’s just landed from somewhere else (e.g an enormous gong crash followed by stomping organ chords, which you get in ‘Job’ (do you know ‘Job’? – one of my favourite pieces), there’s a lot that sounds unlike anything else he wrote, and it has, while not entirely escaping its film music origins, an emotional trajectory that is about much more than imperial delusions in the snow – perhaps something about (from VW’s perspective, though I don’t agree) the ultimate futility and meaninglessness of human life, in the nuclear Cold War/aftermath of WW2. Anyway, it was premiered by the Halle/Barbirolli 65 years ago, and they did it proud this week – indeed, it’s just about possible that there might have been one or two people, in their 80’s at the performance last night, who were at the premiere!  People in Manchester are very tribal and proud about the Halle, so it’s quite possible.

And…..I went to another cinema screening – this time the new Covent Garden Herheim Queen of Spades – So – I asked myself, setting aside the standard question, ‘was this a reasonable interpretation of the opera Tchaikovsky wrote?’,  instead, ‘was this an absorbing 3 hours spent in the cinema/theatre?’, and my answer was a resounding ‘yes’. Unfortunately, I had to leave about 15mins before the end, to get back for a church service.  Clearly it’s not something that makes the plot very clear to someone who’s never seen it before (I’ve seen it once – see below), but to me, there are three sorts of operas – the type which work well on their own, traditional, terms, which directors would be ill-advised to meddle with too much eg most Puccini, Traviata, Eugene Onegin; the type which need help to be dramatically interesting in our own time, or, at the very least, not look silly; and the type – eg Wagner, Mozart, Britten, Fidelio – that are masterpieces that work well on many different levels, and are capable of many different interpretations. This is all very crude and facetious, of course, but I do think QoS is one of those works which needs a helping hand and could easily seem ludicrous to a modern audience; also it’s got that problematic half hour of Mozart pastiche which doesn’t really move the story forward at all, and which you have to do something about as a director. So I was on the whole very taken by Herheim’s approach – it does illuminate the spirit of the music at many points and there are some really effective coups de theatres – as when Tchaikovsky appears holding a gun, or thrusts away Lisa as his new wife. Hermann and Lisa seem to me slightly cardboard cut-out and not very rounded characters so it made sense to me to have Tch, moving around stage with them.  And also when the music is at its most intense, it seems somehow to be speaking to you and moving beyond the characters on stage – it almost seems to need some sort of ‘meta’ narrative. There were some silliness’s – the over-frequent use of the glasses of water – and I was not very taken in by Tch.’s attempts to play the piano and conduct. But on the whole it worked – although the critics seem to have panned it. I though Eva-M Westbroek’s voice was very well suited to the Lisa role, and a slightly wild voice goes well with Russian singing, maybe. I thought by far the best singers on stage were Lundgren, the Yaletzsky/Tch figure and the young contralto who sang Paulina/one of the dancers – and Felicity Palmer of course. I thought the orchestra was super. I would have given it 4 stars if I had been a critic.

BLOGS FROM 2018

More early December 2018: So…. I had an enjoyable evening watching ‘War and Peace’, after a rather dire scramble through the Birmingham Christmas Market, which seemed to focus overmuch on the beer and sausages aspect of that particular cultural artefact.  This was a Welsh National Opera production, directed by David Pountney, and felt very much like a ‘team’ effort – lots of people playing 3-4 roles. It’s not a masterpiece – it’s 40 years since it was last on in the UK, and will probably not recur in my lifetime (nor probably would I want to have a second visit to this production…which is not a criticism of the show, far from it, but just a reflection that it’s not a good enough work really to be seen at regular intervals). The basic set was a concave wall, with the opening in the middle used for video images – some specific to this production, such as a hall and chandeliers, and some taken from a 60’s Soviet film of War and Peace, for the battle of Borodino, Moscow going up in flames and the retreat from Moscow. A building exterior wall with large windows dropped down from the flies gives an alternative perspective into the more intimate scenes, such as Andrei’s last illness. The work plods sometimes – some of the 1^st ‘Peace’ part, dealing with Andrei, Natasha and Pierre, is very moving and sensitively scored, but a lot of the ‘War’ half is pretty routine, and even Prokofiev’s film scores are more inspired sometimes than some of the ‘War’ scenes – in fact things like Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky cantata are great pieces of music.  And yet…it’s also wonderfully orchestrated and there’s often something interesting going on in the orchestra even when the basic material is a bit bland.  And there are some stirring tunes – Kutuzov’s hymn to Mother Russia – and, all together, I was never bored, always gripped by what was happening on stage and it makes for a good absorbing evening.  The chorus – and chorus members also perform some of the many minor roles (there are about 70 in all) – was outstanding. The stand-out solo performance for me was Mark Le Brocq as Pierre, whose part is less cardboard cut-out than Andrei and substantial enough for him to get into what is a meaty part – I’d not come across his name before but he’s clearly pretty experienced – see http://marklebrocq.co.uk/biography. The Natasha was Lauren Michelle, an American soprano, who was pretty good – lyrical and some lovely soft singing but also able to project (she seems to have both Susanna and Elektra in her repertoire, which sounds a bit unusual).  Another Bailey, Simon, was good as Kutuzov, but doesn’t really erase memories of Norman, whose presence and voice in the role I have definite memories of. The orchestra was first rate. Definitely worth quite a long trek for the second time in 40 years.  I sat in the second row of the stalls at the side (not good for looking at the surtitles) but had a fantastic view of the stage and also the orchestra, with whom I was more or less nose to nose. You could observe two dramas at once, in fact – what was going on on stage, and the happenings in the orchestra (someone filing their nails while counting the bars, someone’s string breaking, someone else arriving late). Fascinating …….I’ve just thought of another obscure Prokofiev work, which Gergiev and the Maryinski  Orchestra performed at the Proms in 2017. This was P’s Cantata for the 20^th Anniversary of the Revolution – a setting of texts by Lenin and Stalin. It involves a chorus, enormous orchestra including klaxons, and there’s a wonderful moment when the chorus have to replicate the stamp of marching proletariat feet. Poor Prokofiev never heard it performed – the censors kept getting cold feet about the settings of Stalin’s words, and, not able to stamp them, didn’t want to commit themselves to OK’ing it for performance.

Early December 2018: I saw Mark Elder conducting the Halle in the Rite of Spring, Schoenberg’s Verklaerte Nacht, and Satie’s Parade in December 2018. It was great to hear the Rite live – I did hear it in a too-fast and slick performance by the NYPO under Maazel (an over-rated glitzy maestro) at the Proms about 10 years ago but otherwise have not heard it since performances by Boulez in the 70’s. It is an amazing piece, still, and this performance particularly played up the alternately burbling and wailing woodwind. What struck me is how much it is a summation of the past rather than anything looking forward – there’s a fairly obvious link with the Rite back to Rimsky–Korsakov and Scheherazade, I would say, and actually it was the experience of exile that changed Stravinsky’s musical style after the Rite. I went to Russia on holiday earlier this year, and one of the things I’ve never heard properly before are Russian church bells – the combination of high, small multiple bells, and one or two large bells. The interaction between the two sets of bells, operated through strings and pedals by one person, produce complex rhythms, and the first time I heard them I thought – ‘goodness, this is where the rhythms of the Rite of Spring come from’. And Stravinsky was part of the Russian version of the Arts and Crafts movement in Russia at the turn of the 20^th century.  Verklaerte Nacht is a work that is worth an occasional listen, and very beautiful at some points, but I sometimes think, as I did at the concert, that it goes on for too long and is far less impressive than Metamorphosen in how its themes develop and change.  In many ways the most ‘modern’ piece was Parade. This is famous for its odd ‘instruments’  – two typewriters, gun shots, tombola whizzer and tubular bottles – but the music is curiously deadpan and ‘meaningless’ – seemingly without any emotional content.           Satie was such a unique character that it’s difficult to be sure if he’s being totally serious – you never know if he’s quietly smirking in the background.

Late November 2018: I went to a great concert last night. The Halle and a Japanese conductor performed Shostakovitch 10 – this is a tricky work to bring off, arguably more so than the 5^th, 7^th or 8^th, and particularly the third movement, which can sound oddly lightweight. And equally the first movement can drag towards the end. I have heard several performances over the last few years, notably one at the Proms  with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw conducted by Mariss Jansons. But this one was better than that, primarily because the conductor seemed to pace it so deftly and the 3^rd movement had real emotional depth, with the horn tune 12 times repeated calling from another more innocent world. There was a very good talk beforehand by a Shostakovich academic, on the mythologies attached to the symphonies. She wasn’t debunking the one about the 10^th – Death of Stalin and freedom – but adding new comments – particularly Sh.’s obsession with Bach at the time, which comes through in a lot of the contrapuntally-based music in the first movement, and the fact that he had written quite a lot of the first movement as a never-completed 9^th Symphony in 1944, which he then abandoned, the manuscript of which has only recently been discovered. As if that wasn’t enough the first half included Paul Lewis performing Beethoven PC2. It must be years since I have listened to this work, and I have always thought it fairly slight and 18^th century. PL played it to have a lot more emotional depth. The amazing thing about his playing – very much like his mentor, Alfred Brendel – is its crystalline clarity – the enormous precision of the runs, and the consequent sensitive dynamics, changing sometimes from bar to bar.

Early November 2018: I’ve remembered I never sent off my Bayreuth tickets application this year. A very immersive experience, Bayreuth……I went there twice in the 70’s as a student and then not again until 2017. Highlights in the 70’s were seeing Parsifal in the original 1951? production by Wieland Wagner conducted by Eugene Jochum, and Tristan conducted by Carlos Kleiber. I unfortunately have no strong memories of the Kleiber performance but the Parsifal was very special – I can still remember the way the knights emerged out of the darkness in the Grail Castle. James King was a very good Parsifal. And the way Parsifal sounds in the Festpielhaus is unique. Indeed when I went back to Bayreuth in 2017 I had forgotten -ahem as well I might, not having been there for 43 years – how wonderful the sound is, with the wooden infrastructure meaning that you actually feel the orchestra with your feet as well as hear it – and because the orchestra is covered, the sound wells up, with a wonderful bloom on the strings.  In 1972 I also went to a Ring cycle – again, few memories (Thomas Stewart was Wotan, James King Siegmund, Gwyneth Jones Brunnhilde). There was a new production by Gotz Friedrich of Tannhäuser, which caused a lot of fuss (it was a socialist production and the old Nazis hated it. Whether in my imagination or for real, I have a mental picture of Winifred Wagner leading a ring of protestors at the performance I went to). In 2017 I went to Parsifal, Tristan and Meistersinger. The Meistersinger, a legitimate exploration of Wagner’s anti-Semitism, was the most thoughtful, innovative and musically sensitive performance of Die Meistersinger I have ever been to as a total experience, even with the Goodall Meistersinger under my belt from ages past. It was fantastically clever, well-rehearsed, and with great word conscious singing, and the Bayreuth dedication of a team focusing on a production for several months really worked on this occasion. As with a lot of the recent Bayreuth productions, you can find it on YouTube. The Hans Sachs was Michael Volle, the Walther Klaus Florian Vogt. The Tristan was enormously rewarding musically – conductor Thielemann with the orchestra on fire, and with Stephen Gould and Petra Lang in the title toles. I wasn’t that keen on the production – it made King Mark into a thug rather than a hurt old man. Parsifal was very satisfying musically and dramatically – set in the contemporary Middle East, and with the excellent Georg Zeppenfeld as Gurnemanz. It was conducted quite swiftly by Helmut Haenchen but beautifully and sensitively played.

The whole Bayreuth experience is pretty immersive – the 4pm start means that you don’t do much else other than go to the opera , and to a talk or the excellent museum at Wahnfried beforehand… I bought a black Festspiele tee-shirt saying ‘enthullet den Gral’ – ‘uncover the Grail’……….

Early November 2018: I’ve just come back from excellent performances of Porgy and Bess at the ENO and a concert performance – but really semi-staged – of Vladimir Jurowski and the LPO performing the Rake’s Progress. It’s over 40 years since I last heard the RP live and I’ve never heard P&B live before, The ENO P&B was energetic, with some great singing – particularly the Porgy, Eric Greene. It was, as Gershwin requested, a black cast, in this case US, South African and UK. I thought, seeing it live, that the libretto was a bit clunky – the 1st act meanders and there’s too much of the ‘now it’s time for a song’ kind of cue. But the energy, the orchestral sound and the tunes win out.  The Coliseum was packed – good to see – and a hugely warm reception from the audience to the performance. Oddly enough I occasionally felt there were odd resonances with Peter Grimes – the same emphasis on a closed community and a similar storm scene – I wonder if Britten ever saw it in the States. I was sitting on the Balcony which is my favourite place in the Coliseum – I hate places with overhangs (they cut off the sound) so it’s either the Stalls or the Balcony for me, and the Balcony is cheaper. I found the 1930’s version of black American speech – apparently required by the Gershwins (‘Mebbe dat’s all de breakfast I got time for’ etc) – on the surtitles a bit hard to take, but there we go…., but, even sitting in the Balcony, which is some way away from the stage, you sensed the great waves of energy coming from the cast. ‘Porgy and Bess’, I suppose, is not something you need to ‘interpret’ as a director There’s another interesting issue coming out of the P&B experience for me, which is the question – is there something called ‘opera’ which is different from ‘music-theatre’ or a ‘musical’? To me, and you may disagree, there is simply something called ‘music theatre;’ and everything, everything from ‘Les Mis’ to Parsifal, is on the same continuum, all using words and music to entertain, to instruct, to give a view of life, to change lives with a compelling vision. The criteria one uses to sift the wheat from the chaff would be the same – is this a compelling dramatic experience? are the music and speech working together or against each other? Are the characters on stage believable; do the music and words together make up something that is more than a play with tunes, or a musical piece with words? Am I changed/enriched etc by the experience? How is it sung? How is it played?  Is it subtle – is it rich and multi-layered or essentially flat?  I can’t for the life of me see more than one art form in the ‘musical’, the ‘opera’ and so forth – but you may not think the same……..But I agree ‘music theatre’ at its best is an amazing art form.The Rake’s Progress at the RFH was great – the only problem being that I had a seat near the stage and got a crick in the neck looking upwards trying to follow the surtitles and the wonderful Auden/Kallman libretto. There was an excellent young Puerto Rican / American soprano called Patricia Burgos and Tom was Toby Spence. All cast members acted fully, with minimum props – Baba had a beard etc. It’s a work I really need to listen to more closely   – to understand more about the interface between the pastiche 18th c and the modern, the puppetry and the real….

Late October 2018 – I saw the Walkure from Covent Garden relayed in the local cinema in Sheffield. I thought it was excellent – although Emily Magee maybe wasn’t on quite the same level as the other leads. The Wotan, John Lundgren, I was very impressed by – I hadn’t heard him before. And Nina Stemme is the best Brunnhilde around at present. Stuart Skelton is phenomenal – I saw him about three weeks earlier handling the terribly difficult tenor part in the Glagolitic Mass with ease. I thought the long scene in Act 2 between Wotan and Brunnhilde was acted and sung as well as I have ever heard. I saw the ROHCG Ring production live in 2012 when my reaction was the same as seeing the screening on Sunday – I was gripped by the way that Keith Warner really gets the singers acting and reacting to each other, while at the same time being mystified by some aspects of the production, like the purple wigs. But the magic fire music is one of the more impressive coups de theatre I’ve come across………The orchestra sounded terrific but sometimes I felt a certain stop-start motion to Pappano’s vision of the music – things seem to slow down and speed up in a way that is at times viscerally exciting, but doesn’t always feel ‘organic’. But this is at a high level of interpretative complaint….

Memories from earlier than Autumn 2018

TO BE WRITTEN……….