I laid out a not inexpensive but thoroughly worthwhile £19 or so on a digital link to the Melbourne Opera recent performance of Das Rheingold which they were streaming for a few days – I had been interested to see it as a result of emailed conversations on Manchester Wagner Society business with its conductor and his wife.

I really enjoyed this – I don’t always focus as much as I should on streamed opera on a small computer screen, but I found this very absorbing. Somehow the excitement of a huge challenge for a relatively small company, who’d not tackled the Ring previously, conveyed itself in the performance and made this a very absorbing and indeed moving experience.

The sets and lighting I thought were good – see picture above- particularly for the Valhalla scenes – the Rainbow Bridge ending looked genuinely impressive. I was less convinced by the Rhinemaidens’ luminous swings and the extra floaters – again, see picture – but they weren’t disastrous or detracting. There didn’t really seem to be any Rheingold in the first scene, which felt a little odd. The work of the director on the interaction of characters was less impressive, I thought – there was too much of eyes-to-the-front and semaphoring. I liked the costumes – Russian giants, glitzy minor gods and goddesses, particularly

There were some good singing actors, particularly the Loge (a gift of a role if you’ve the right temperament – James Egglestone had). Simon Meadowes as Alberich had a powerfully projected and sensitively sung approach, and I was also struck by Lee Abrahmsen as Freia. The Mime seemed to be forcing his voice quite a lot. Eddie Muliaumaseali was a bit of a cipher as Wotan, and seemed to get drowned by the orchestra occasionally – I didn’t really get much sense of what Wotam was about from him . I thought the orchestra and the conducting were excellent – it was quite a fast moving performance that fitted the straightforward narrative-focused style of the production very well. On the recording the snarling brass and timpani came across particularly well!! Perhaps there were a few moments of orchestral uncertainty occasionally, but the whole musical approach had an impressive sweep.

I felt I would much rather have listened to this than Radio 3’s re-run of the ROHJCG Rheingold from the Ring cycle in 2018

I spent an hour and a half (!) yesterday with a Youtube video of Sergiu Celibidache and the Munich Philharmonic performing Bruckner 5 in 1985. (260) Anton Bruckner Symphony No 5 in B-flat Major – Sergiu Celibidache, MPO, 1985 – YouTube

This is a VERY slow performance, a full 9 minutes longer than Abbado, also on Youtube, who is himself no speedster in the Bruckner stakes. But for the most part I thought it worked extraordinarily well. The visual image of Ceibidache conducting from memory and keeping a very close eye on what the orchestra’s doing is matched by the sense of concentration in the sound of the orchestra which makes you hang on every note in at least the first three movements, and relish the – not always heard – combinations of instruments at the slow speeds chosen. The slow movement big theme at 27.30 is quite overwhelming, in its string phrasing and clarity, and is as moving as I have ever heard at the speed Celibidache chooses. My usual approach re Bruckner is to say ‘the slower, the better’, but I am not quite sure that quite fits the needs of the last movement of the 5th Symphony, which, in Celibidache’s approach, does fall apart a bit. I lost concentration at several points during the fugal doodling, but the ending is very fine. Certainly this is better than any live performance I’ve ever heard, and maybe is as good as it gets in what is a not wholly convincing finale.

I hadn’t quite worked out who Celibidache was, I’m afraid to say., until I looked him up. I got mixed up with the other distinguished Romanian conductor Constantin Silvestri, who had a long period in Bournemouth………Celibidache by contrast, clearly a very able man, a composer, and a mathematician as well as a conductor, was chief conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic after the war, before Furtwangler was de-Nazified and took back the reins, and subsequently spent periods of time as chief conductor in Stockholm and Paris before ending his days as the chief conductor in Munich. He was into Buddhism and spiritual practices – maybe Bruckner spoke particularly directly to him as a result.

Anyway, recommended!

This was broadcast on Radio 3 at the end of January – I think it’s also on Youtube. The I-Player link is BBC Radio 3 – Radio 3 in Concert, To the memory of an angel. I was interested to hear this as, had the pandemic allowed, I was supposed to see this concert at the Barbican on 7 January at 3.30pm. In the event I cut out the Berg Violin Concerto, interesting and moving work though this is, and just listened to the Schubert.

It’s years since I listened attentively to Schubert 9. I bought the LSO/Josef Krips recording when I was about 13, and remember in the 1970’s wonderful live performances (on several occasions) by Sir Adrian Boult (who, I’ve just discovered can also be found on Youtube conducting the work – (263) Franz Schubert “Symphony No 9” Sir Adrian Boult – YouTube), and also a memorable concert with the LSO and Karl Bohm, his first concert in London c1971 since …?before the war/ever? I remember the grandeur of the ending of the first movement in Bohm’s reading, making it sound like Bruckner (my brother who was at the same concert – Mozart 29, Strauss Don Juan and the Schubert – compared Bohm’s reading favourably to Bruno Walter’s recording from the 1950’s), and I seem also, thinking back, to recollect the spring and the bounce of rhythms which Boult’s slightly slow pacing generated. I also remember some intensive listening maybe a little later in the 80’s to a Furtwangler performance on record but in terms of live performances since the 70’s I don’t think I’ve ever heard it again and sat all the way through it.

This of course was a recording but it felt ‘live’ – I suppose partly because, without the pandemic, it would have been so and I would have gone to it, and also partly because it felt very ‘live’ in several senses of the word as a performance. It was recorded in LSO St Lukes, and, while occasionally there were some smudges, these seemed to make it more of a live occasion. I guess because of the acoustic of St Lukes, the woodwind sounded very forward, the strings quite backward (that may also be because there were less of them than usual). I found lots of interpretative nuances in the performance and things to enjoy – particularly a real Viennese swing in the waltzy bits of the third movement . The first movement prelude started off very fast and I wondered whether that was right, but Rattle and the LSO persuaded me it was fine, and the transition to the first movement proper worked well. I was blown away by the second melody of the slow movement – beautifully played, and it took me back to when i played my Krips/LSO record in 1967 and reflected, as I listened to that movement, on the school journey I had just been on to France (Grenoble), on how liberating that had felt and how dismal it felt coming back to Hackney! Right at the end Rattle and the LSO were sprightly, and didn’t give the full weight a Furtwangler would have done to the Don Giovanni / Commendatore 4 knocks on the door – but after all, this is still a young man’s work, for goodness sake, and the LSO brought out all the energy, bite, passion and nuance you could want. I really enjoyed this!

Picture of Karl Bohm below for the memory.

Remarkably I have never seen or heard a note of Wagner’s Rienzi beyond the overture. While it’s not too much of a disgrace for a Wagnerian in the UK to say they’ve never seen a live performance, it is available to watch on Youtube, and on Friday I decided to take the plunge – 51 years after I saw my first Wagner opera – and,  empowered by lockdown, actually watch Rienzi, albeit in a heavily cut production. Here is the link   (242) Wagner – Rienzi (Pinchas Steinberg) – YouTube. This was a 2018 Toulouse Opera production. I have to say it is difficult to say exactly why – other than Der Meister’s say-so – Rienzi isn’t performed at Bayreuth and at the same time The Flying Dutchman and Tannhauser are. There are definite very clear stylistic connections between the three operas, and to be frank I would still prefer to watch early Wagner than early Verdi. With a suitably paced and well performed performance, as this was, it seems, without being a masterpiece, a very watchable and listenable work. I recommend it, and have to say I quite enjoyed it. But I may be in the minority – other critical comments through the ages have included (apart from von Bulow’s jibe about it being ‘Meyerbeer’s best opera’), ‘Meyerbeer’s worst opera’ (Charles Rosen), ‘an attack of musical measles’ (Ernest Newman), though apparently Mahler reckoned it ‘ the greatest musical drama ever composed’ (hmmm). Cosima Wagner recorded Wagner’s own comments in her diary for 20 June 1871: “Rienzi is very repugnant to me, but they should at least recognize the fire in it; I was a music director and I wrote a grand opera; the fact that it was this same music director who gave them some hard nuts to crack – that’s what should astonish them”

Next stop – Das Liebesverbot, also on Youtube

I have been catching up on parts of my MP3 collection that I bought a while ago and haven’t really listened to much. Amng them are some collections of music by Gerald Finzi. His large scale works – Clarinet Concerto and Cello Concerto – I know fairly well and I really like them – melancholy, introspective, obviously first half of the 20th century English, but an individual voice that sounds different to the more robust Vaughan Williams. I have particularly enjoyed listening now though to this below, which is an excellent collection of

smaller pieces – Finzi seems to have had a habit of starting works and not finishing them off, so that the piece entitled ‘Eclogue’ on this collection is actually the slow movement of a not-completed piano concerto, and ‘Introit’, another piece which is the surviving movement of a violin concerto dropped from any list of opuses.

I’ve also been listening to ‘Dies Natalis’ – which I enjoyed – and ‘Intimations of Mortality’, which I haven’t really got into yet. All his music is worth exploring – an individual and interesting voice…….. (which sounds patronising but is my gut reaction)

One of the books I got for Christmas was ‘Wagnerism’ by Alex Ross – Wagnerism: Art and Politics in the Shadow of Music: Amazon.co.uk: Ross, Alex: 9780007319053: Books

I am now about 75% of the way through it – it is a fascinating, if exhausting, read. Essentially it is a history of European culture from the 1880’s to the 1930’s, and the omnipresence of Wagner’s influence in almost all aspects of that culture – Conrad, Virginia Woolf, TS Eliot, Joyce, Mann  – you name them, they have a place in Ross’s book. Occasionally it begins to be a bit list-like and repetitive, and its structure is very much of the “…and then…..and then….and then….” variety. But every reader will discover things they didn’t know – I am still boggling (and maybe Ross is being playful here) over the provenance of the French processed cheese brand – “Le Vache Qui Rit”, which apparently was an ironic French 1^st World War nod to the German habit of naming their military defences with Wagnerian terms – Siegfried line, etc. “Le Vache Quit Rit, Valkyrie, geddit? Hmmm, not sure……

Anyway., a thoroughly recommended read for all Wagnerians

I can’t resist putting in another youtube link to this blog – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2EeQVwp1WY. This is the Reggie Goodall / Remedios / Linda Esther Gray Tristan from the ENO / Coliseum c 1981. I went to it, but have never heard a recording – I haven’t listened to this yet. The Brangaene is Felicity Palmer…….! There’s also a Newsnight feature about the Tristan  – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fLJSy91_gwc  . Wouldn’t happen nowadays…….

I gave my talk via Zoom to the Wagner Society Manchester on Wagner and Revolution. It wasn’t an  academic study, though it did make use of a number of different books by people who are academics which I alluded to at the end of the talk – rather it was a summary for the interested lay person of issues around this subject, from the reading I’d done over the past few months.. There were four parts to the talk:  1. Wagner’s thoughts about the concept of revolution, and the background to that; 2. Wagner’s actual engagement with revolutionary activity; 3. Wagner’s operas and revolution; 4. Wagner’s impact on other revolutionaries . It was my  overall thesis that Wagner held utopian socialist views in the 1840’s and early 1850’s, and that, though they later became less all-determining in his thinking, they contribute important elements to the development of The Ring, and remained with him till the end of his life. How to regenerate the modern world was throughout his life an abiding concern – though his operas have very different answers to those questions both in relation to each other and even within the one work. The literature on this subject is vast, and people’s perception of the importance of utopian socialism in the development of Wagner’s art is partially tinged by their own overarching political perspectives. In the talk I tried to retain a balanced perspective. I found lots of good books on the subjects – Mark Berry was particularly impressive, and Bryan Magee. A wonderful essay in the Wagner Companion from the 1970’s by Michael Tanner too – I used to be one of the ‘select’ group of undergraduates at his Sunday afternoon events listening to Wagner, the room at ?Corpus Christi dominated by huge blow-up photo portraits of Furtwangler, Nijinsky and Wittgenstein.

The talk seemed to go quite well – though it over-ran time-wise – and people said nice things afterwards…………About 40 or so people came along online

I always used to think that Vaughan Williams had a limited range and some rather irritating and repeating musical tics, and that most of his music could be fitted into the ‘cowpat’ tradition, with a dash of Ravel or Tudor thrown in for good measure. But when you read Ardritt’s book, and think about the totality of what he achieved, it is much, much wider than that – the Tallis Fantasia and the 9th Symphony are barely recognisable as the same composer’s work. In fact I recall reading somewhere that, while Pierre Boulez had no time for Elgar, he admired VW, as someone who constantly was learning/thinking/changing his approach. My favourite pieces are Symphonies 1, 2,3,4,5,6, Job, Tallis Fantasia, The Pilgrim’s Progress opera, The Lark Ascending, On Wenlock Edge – and there’s still masses to discover – quite exciting. It’s touching to read in Ardritt’s book that Elgar, who was initially wary of RVW, seeing him as a member of the musical establishment (relative of Darwin, wife a cousin of Virginia Woolf), eventually got quite pally with him and enthused over RVW’s Sancta Civitas – which of course is very much the Last Judgement oratorio which Elgar didn’t write
I am going to try and get to the Three Choirs Festival this year – picture below.

One of the most moving RVW performances I have been to was a Proms performance in 1975 of VW5 conducted by Sir Adrian Boult – this great work had been premiered in the RAH 32 years earlier and Boult, who conducted many Vaughan Williams’ premieres, conducted it first there in 1944. It was an interpretation I shall never forget. And I have been lucky enough to hear two performances of Pilgrim’s Progress in the last 10 years – the ENO production and a production at the RNCM – which envisaged the Progress as the dream of a fevered soldier.

I’ve just been reading a biography of Vaughan Williams – by Keith Alldritt – Vaughan Williams: Composer, Radical, Patriot – a Biography. I really enjoyed reading it – occasionally it’s a bit irritating with the historical recaps, and references, but it tells well the remarkable story of this man’s artistic journey from approx 1905 to 1955,and it is very good on the culture in which VW was brought up, and musical life before and after WW1 – plus the complexity of his relationships with women. More in a second post