In mid-December 2019 I went to a keenly awaited concert  – Omer Meir Welber conducting his BBC Philharmonic in Bruckner 7 and Sofia Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello and bayan. A greatly interesting programme choice, with a religious element to both of them – Gubaidulina focuses in her piece on the number 3, obviously representing the Trinity. I really liked her piece – it’s not easy listening but constantly, glitteringly, absorbing and never boring. I felt I wanted to hear it again, and indeed did so via I-Player. On the Bruckner I was less sure – particularly when I had heard the massive and – by the sound of it – overwhelming VPO Bruckner 7 with Haitink from the Proms, albeit on my inadequate alptop speakers in the South Hebron Hills on the West Bank. I thought the first movement, though fastish, was poetically and sensitively conceived, but the slow movement was too fast, particularly the rocking second theme. The third and fourth movements were bright and forward-moving. I thought the reading interesting, but it didn’t grab me.

Before Christmas, of course, there were lots of carols…. I am always struck by the contribution of Vaughan Williams to the carols’ tradition – On Christmas Night (Sussex carol), O Little Town of Bethlehem, This Endris Night, are all based on folk tunes collected by Vaughan Williams. There is an exciting tradition around where I live in the Peak District and also particularly around Sheffield – of local carols. They’re usually sung in pubs in the weeks leading up to Christmas – and, although there is a core of carols that are sung at most venues, each particular place has its own mini-tradition of carols handed down by word of mouth, and often quite competitively cherished and guarded. I have been to one or two of these in different places – the repertoire at two nearby places can vary widely -some are unaccompanied, some have a piano or organ, there is a flip chart with the words on in one place, a string quartet (quintet, sextet, septet) accompanies the singing at another, some encourage soloists, others stick to audience participation, a brass band plays at certain events, the choir takes the lead at another; but, whatever the occasion, there is always a warm welcome and a willingness to help the newcomers with words and tunes. A lot of them seem to be mainly of 18th century origin but some go back much further – e.g. the Castleton Carol, again collected by RVW – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-wqg-9bJV0.  I find the continued existence of these traditions really exciting . There are quite a few places with regular weekly sing-alongs before Christmas in the area: Castleton, Hathersage, Eyam, Foolow, Bamford and Upper Denby. ….

Once back in the UK my first live musical event was in mid-November – Opera North’s Giulio Cesare, at the Lowry. Trying to remember it 14.5 months later, the main things that stick in the mind are the excellence of the singers and the sheer fertility, variety and inventiveness of the musical numbers – almost like ’The Messiah’, every number is a ‘hit’ and a joy to listen to. I think I saw Swedish contralto Maria Sanner as Cesare and, without being Janet Baker (and I have an MP3 of JB singing extracts from this from the ENO production in the 80’s), was impressive and varied in her tones, as well as having the necessary dexterity of voice, if that’s the right word. Coloratura soprano Lucie Chartin was Cleopatra, and she, I recall, was a star, her arias delivered with power and precision. The others I don’t recall so well, nor do I remember much about the production

I had to be in London for a week at the end of November 2019 and rather gluttonously (and also anti-socially, given that I was meant to be with a group of other people debriefing on Palestine), I went to three operas in a row – Gluck’s Orpheus, Glass’ Orphee and Death in Venice  Glass’ Orphee was I recall quite a good evening but to be frank 14.5 months later I have almost totally forgotten what it was about or the details of the impact it made. Gluck’s Orpheus was more memorable – some excellent singing from Alice Coote and Sarah Tynan and above all the dance work / direction of Wayne McGregor, which made for some very striking images on stage. Having said that, it is rather a stationary work – classical unities, I suppose – and the music with the obvious exception not that memorable. Of the three Death in Venice is the undoubted masterwork. I heard it during its first London run in the early 1970’s – maybe there was a Proms performance then as well – both with Pears. This was a new production by David MacVicar which was unobtrusive and true to the work. Mark Padmore was the excellent Aschenbach and Gerard Finley the Traveller / Elderly fop / Old gondolier / Hotel manager / Hotel barber / Leader of the players. I was entranced and gripped by the different colours Britten produces in the orchestra for the different scenes, and just thought this was 5 star material – Mark Elder was the conductor.

On November 30^th I went to see the CBSO performing Falla’s Three-Cornered Hat Suites and Stravinsky’s Petrushka – good vibrant performances – and a rarity Strauss  Duett-Concertino for Clarinet and Bassoon. Jaume Santonja Espinós was the conductor

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