Roaring our heads off

...for these two, Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles (which also means the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra), in a shatteringly great Proms Salome. No need to add much to the rave over on The Arts Desk but I wanted to include a few more of Chris Christodoulou's photos, which arrived as usual punktlich not long after I got back from the Albert Hall last night.

The above came from him after I'd asked for a landscape of Nina, preferably with Donald, to lead. Before he fired them back, I'd already cropped the money shot, and unless he objects don't want to replace it. Hence the second home. There were also others I couldn't use over there. Doris Soffel, having made little impression on us as the Countess in the Zurich Queen of Spades, really had a ball with Herodias, and Runnicles let her hold on to her top A at 'schweigen!' for what seemed like an infinity. Here she is with Stemme.

I mentioned the shame about the slight dependence on scores and music stands from most of the men - Samuel Youn's Jokanaan honourably excepted - but this shows that character tenor Burkhard Ulrich wasn't beyond acting it out as Herod.

Cheers, too, for the Narraboth, Belgian Thomas Blondelle

and Ronnita Miller from St Petersburg, Florida, now a Deutsche Oper principal, as a lustrous 'Page'.

It was a company show, no doubt about it: what a team Runnicles has in Berlin. But ultimately it had to be Nina's night. Doesn't she look, in relaxed mode, like our own intense non-singing (as far as I know) actress Olivia Colman?

Oh, and if you're curious to know who the boors were behind us, shouting 'sit down!' when I rose unhesitatingly to my feet after the shield-crushing, I'll go so far as to say that the only one of them I recognised - and they were all obnoxious in their self-expression before the invisible curtain rose - was a distinguished and, by all accounts, Mensch-like singer who must have welcomed a few standing ovations himself in his time. Shame on them.

1/10 As outlined in a comment below, this was everything the following (last) night's Elektra was not. Ed Seckerson expresses everything I felt in his review for The Arts Desk, not least so eloquently nailing the problem of Christine Goerke's upper register. And he's also right to say that Felicity Palmer's Clytemnestra was the star of the evening. What's the caption here? 'Yes, I'm still better than you, my girl, even at 70'?

Even so, in an ideal dramatic world, Clytemnestra shouldn't be either so old or so visibly raddled. After all, she's the mother of a 20 year old girl, and her decay is inner. Which is why you'll never see a better portrayal than Waltraud Meier's in the great Patrice Chereau's last stand. In fact this is one of the most riveting opera DVDs ever made, and Evelyn Herlitzius - slight of frame, searing of voice - IS Elektra as far as I'm concerned. For some reason my BBC Music Mag five-star review isn't up on the erratic website, but need I say more here? Don't waste time on the iPlayer broadcast of the Prom; buy the DVD.

A Babel of hope and possibility

The phrase is not mine but my bright young colleague Alexandra Coghlan's on The Arts Desk, penned about Berio's Sinfonia, which preceded a shattering but nuanced interpretation of Shostakovich's Fourth Symphony at Tuesday night's Prom. I choose to apply it to the superlative team which gave one of the best Proms I've ever heard, our already-beloved European Union Youth Orchestra, and further, to the even younger members of nine British youth orchestras they mentored in an inspiring workshop featuring 180 young musicians on the platform of the Royal Albert Hall the morning after the EUYO triumph.

All photos here by the wonderful Chris Christodoulou, with whom I managed to have a good chat as the players lined up on the steps in front of the hall's south side. Above, below and in the last photo are some of them on Wednesday morning conducted by likeable young motivator Duncan Ward and playing to a small audience of friends, family and a handful of scribblers like me.

A big question which I intend to peck away at: why did the BBC not ask Chris to snap one of their most photo-friendly evenings? He tends to come to everything he can, but the press folk only ask him for so many Proms. More bizarrely, why did BBC Television choose not to film the EUYO concert for broadcast (Radio 3's transmission is on the iPlayer for the next month)? The fact that they'll be transmitting the National Youth Orchestra Prom is no excuse: it shouldn't be a case of either/or, but both. And what better to spell out the message that there IS a future for great orchestral music than the enthusiasm and commitment of these photogenic young players with their handsome young conductor, the already great Vasily Petrenko (replacing an indisposed Semyon Bychkov, who would also no doubt have trained them up to the hilt)? Was it politics or is there a less sinister explanation? Shame on you, Beeb - you should be helping to tell the world that this is what we're fighting for in Europe. True internationalist Sir Henry Wood would have thought so too. I asked Chris especially to snap this one for us.

Anyway, I was there on Tuesday evening with the diplo-mate - having to break his rule of avoiding all Proms, and he couldn't have admired it more - in the EU invitees' zone close to the stage, leaving Alexandra to write up the event for TAD. I didn't sway her beyond a very late message saying that if she didn't give it five stars, she would be exiled to an island of exclusively baroque music. There was no need: she'd already written the piece by then, and she touches on just about everything I would have done, very much in her own eloquent style, so I don't have to reduplicate here.

Just a few points of my own, then: first, that I've never heard a more detailed, coherent or intelligent performance of the baggy-monster Fourth. Petrenko, at times sexy-sinuous, at others rhythmically taut, amazingly so in the Berio, drove a line through Shostakovich's most outlandish orchestral work without ever being over-emphatic.

There was much more more lyricism than we've come to expect, more sheer fun in the concerto-for-orchestra parade of solos and groups, while never losing sight of the terrifying overall rhetoric. And what an extra layer of emotion there was in hearing a first-half work which seemed to think that 'classical' music had shattered into fragments, never to be pieced together again, and an even greater masterpiece ending in total annihilation, and finding them in the hands of a future which is as bright performer-wise as it is in the new wave of post-Darmstadt, post-modern composers who are no longer afraid of the kind of cornucopia Shostakovich loved so much.

I've written about the Inspire Workshop event over on TAD, but the BBC were slow in getting Chris's pictures over to me, which is how I can indulge in a few more here. That was fun, but the EUYO concert has burned itself on my heart as what will have to be the most extraordinary Prom this year, however much of excellence is no doubt still to come.

Young and old alike must rejoice that today is the 100th anniversary of Tove Jansson's birth, a special day she shares with her Moominpapa (anyone's guess), the diplo-mate (thirtysomething, of course) and his mother Wyn (86, doing pretty well by the sea yesterday). Shot of the last two at St Leonard's from behind only due to privacy wishes.

I raise my special Hemulen mug to the great author, and like to think of her like this below in 1956 on her special island with her partner Tuulikki Pietilä and her beloved mother Signe Hammarsten-Jansson, the 'Grandmother' of the volume I most often gift, The Summer Book  (remember this to young Sophia, countering the child's insistence of 'a big, enormous Hell': 'You can see for yourself that life is hard enough without being punished for it afterwards. We get comfort when we die, that's the whole idea').

 
Tove would approve last Saturday's outing to Holland Park and Will Todd's splendid opera for children Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (or should that perhaps be 'New Adventures') with goddaughter Mirabel. I managed to sneak in a picture of her with the lovely Fflur Wyn, Alice personified, to the Arts Desk review, but felt it might be overload there to include Keel Watson's very friendly Caterpillar

and the family bear of long wear and tear, Special/Spesh, occupying the White Rabbit's cage in the opera's Grimthorpe Pet Shop.

Fortunately they all lived happily shortly after: Spesh was released to join Mirabel,  ma Edsy and auntie June for tea and scones chez nous.

Remembering Sir Colin

The Guardian obituary I wrote on Sir Colin Davis is up and running online, so there's not much to add other than to note a few personal favourites among his performances, with a couple of photos from his last Proms season sent to me by the ever-marvellous Chris Christodoulou. Don't you just love the happy-respectful look above on the face of the young cellist from the Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra? It's the perfect emblem of Sir Colin's unstinting work with budding players. And here's one from the very grown-up Beethoven Missa Solemnis he conducted that same summer of 2011.

We're assembling a line-up of tributes citing chapter and verse on The Arts Desk (16/4: it's now appeared with a roster of great names to draw attention away from the obsequies of a less universally loved and admired public figure), so I'll leave it at two first choices. Probably the tops for me among his live performances was a Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra Proms performance of Beethoven's 'Eroica': standing in the arena, I could feel a bizarre sense of physical elevation, as if my feet were about to leave the ground . Next best thing on CD is the relatively early Beethoven 7 he recorded; I think it was my first experience of that dance-apotheosis.

The recording I finally took off the shelves to play today was the Dresden studio recording of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel. What a dream cast: Edita Gruberova, Ann Murray, Gwyneth Jones (as the mother), Christa Ludwig (as the witch), Franz Grundheber, Barbara Bonney, Christiane Oelze. The whole thing just glows with that mellow Staatskapelle sound; to begin with those horns is quite a treat.

Sadly there don't seem to be any clips from the 1992 recording on YouTube. So I'll take the risk of sticking up the much more recent Royal Opera performance. It wasn't a production I especially cared for, and my idol Anja Silja is finally beyond the pale as the Witch, but you can just focus on Sir Colin conducting the Overture, which was my choice this morning. As for further listening, as Kenny Morrison in Dvora Lewis's office just said to me, 'there's a lot to celebrate'.

Concert afterchat: bells and Poe

At the end of his hard working week with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and just after Rachmaninov’s serene epilogue to all the doom of Poe’s funeral bells had sent us floating down from the Festival Hall, a beaming and relaxed Vladimir Jurowski joined me for a post-concert dialogue in the RFH’s ballroom zone. That’s another prime pick from Chris Christodoulou’s Proms shots above – we annually present a selection on The Arts Desk – which seemed like a better lead than the diplo-mate’s loyal phoneshot of the afterchat, though here it is anyway.

We talked about the weird disappointment of this brilliantly planned Bells ‘n Poe programme having been cancelled a month ago on what should have been its first airing: the lights failed at the Usher Hall during the Edinburgh Festival so – no concert (and they’d even flown in a baritone to replace indisposed Vladimir Chernov at 24 hours’ notice). VJ mused on The Bells’ ill-starred history - it has a reputation, it seems, somewhat akin to the Scottish Play - despite its highest place in the composer’s self-esteem, starting with the misplaced dedication to Mengelberg who’d only just dissed the work (hard to understand why). 

Although the ‘choral symphony’ has plenty of light and shade, it fascinates me especially how Rachmaninov goes beyond the bleak finality of Poe’s death-ode and provides the most levitational – I have to repeat that word, especially in the context of Saturday’s performance – conclusion imaginable. Jurowski remembered, as so well do I, Svetlanov’s last concert with the BBC Symphony Orchestra and how, knowing he was very shortly to die, the great man stretched out the transcendence to seeming infinity. That searing event has been issued on CD, but isn’t on YouTube, but another classic Russian recording is, albeit somewhat oddly via a crackly LP rather than the CD transfer – Kondrashin’s Moscow Philharmonic stunner. The final Lento lugubre begins at 23’36; the levitation comes at 32’40 though needs to be prefaced with at least a bit of the preceding gloom to have its due effect.

Here's some more of Poe's text if you feel like accompanying your listening with a bit of authentic English-language flavour (though even enlarged, it's not always easy to decipher):

VJ seemed pleased with his own matured interpretation of a work he loves: I mentioned the exceptional balances in the glitter of the sleigh-bells movement, and he felt that tenor Sergei Skorokhodov and the amalgamated London Symphony and London Philharmonic Choirs had really, for once, come through the orchestral busy-ness. He wanted a feeling of exultation, not craven terror, in the ‘Alarm Bells’ movement: this, after all, was 1913, when the imaginative anticipation of sweeping away the old order was far from the horrifying reality it would become.

I was impressed how little Jurowski repeated of what he’d recorded for the LPO’s website, where he expounded so eloquently on the place of bells in Russian culture as the only instruments heard in Orthodox services and on the Russification of Edgar Allan Poe. Even so, he is clearly so involved with the poetry of Konstantin Balmont, Poe’s distinguished Russian (hyper) translator, that he had more to say about this silver-age master. We to- and fro-d a bit about the other bell pieces on the programme, post-war collages by Shchedrin and Denisov which I think I’ve written just enough about on the Arts Desk review. Curiously there is a performance of Denisov's impressionistic Bells in the Fog on YouTube, though alas the audience is not as receptive to its cusp-of-silence beginning as Saturday night's crowd was.The big picture, by the way, is of Sofia Gubaidulina, for me the greatest voice of contemporary Russian music.

Jurowski also passionately defended the other Poe-inspired piece on the programme, Myaskovsky’s Silentium. As he pointed out, the Poe fable of a man who can withstand anything the Devil throws at him except silence is a tale for our times, perhaps even more so than for the late 1830s when it was written. So far as the symphonic parable is concerned, there’s a loyal Jurowski family connection with the honourable, somewhat lugubrious Myaskovsky, and I couldn’t help but admire the dogged sombreness of this early piece, so often mentioned in the correspondence with Prokofiev. Jurowski sticks to the line that ‘Myaskusya’ develops his symphonic ideas better than Prokofiev, who was often openly dismissive of his musical substance – as was I when VJ conducted the Sixth Symphony, a work I’d been hoping to like as well as I had on a first recorded hearing.

So I suspect VJ was being a bit naughty in passing a passionate Myaskovsky admirer’s question about why we didn’t hear more of the 27 symphonies over to me, and what I thought might be the problem. But I voiced my mixed feelings about the unevenness and deferred back to him again, since he’s spent time studying the works as I have not.

Come question time, I was glad one lady took us back to the earlier concert in the week, and – observing how the players seemed to have a whale of a time in the ‘symphonic picture’ drawn from Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten - asked whose selection it was. Jurowski’s, of course, and I’m glad we agreed on the awfulness of Strauss’s own ‘fantasia’, which VJ pointed out contains much of the worst music in the opera. There was another great critical split along the lines of the Martinů divide on how effective this much more interesting selection was; having accepted that we weren’t going to get the voices, I tried to enjoy it for what it was, and found myself seduced by all those odd extra instruments on full display: the Chinese gongs, the glass harmonica (pictured below in hands-on by Thomas Bloch; no working one in either of the big Russian cities, Jurowski told me about a performance there), the four tenor tubas. It gave me a fresh perspective on Strauss’s extraordinary score, and you can’t ask for more than that. 

Coming up: three titanic programmes from the tireless Jurowski, linking British and Russian attitudes to ‘War and Peace’, marking the bicentenary of the Battle of Borodino and 70 years since the premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony. It should be amazing to hear the Russian National Orchestra tackle Vaughan Williams’s Sixth – VJ reports that Muscovite audiences were stunned by that unique, drifting finale – and combined Anglo-Russian forces in Shostakovich 7. Too much choice this week, alas: to be loyal to my BBC Symphony Orchestra class, I have to attend that band’s first concert of the season tomorrow and miss Jurowski’s Prokofiev War and Peace scenes: not too great a wrench when the alternative is to hear Jukka-Pekka Saraste conduct Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and the peerless Alice Coote singing the most beautiful song in the world, Mahler’s ‘Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen’, among the Rückert Lieder. 

Image of a lighthouse bell in Primorsky Krai in Russia's far east above by V Kotelnikov, courtesy of Russian language Wikipedia

Maestrissimo Claudio and crazy Anton

Here he is at the Festival Hall rehearsal, in one of four characteristically superb shots by Chris Christodoulou: Claudio Abbado, the greatest, with the score of one of the 19th century's weirdest symphonies, Bruckner's Fifth. Its wackiness can only seem the more pronounced in a performance of such freedom, suppleness and colour-consciousness as the one we got last night from Abbado's ever-flexible Lucerne Festival Orchestra on the Southbank: indeed, that made me wonder if there wasn't a case for going even further, totally over the top, because I nearly laughed out loud at several spots in the outer movements.

Just as well, anyway, because I can't take solemn, ponderous Bruckner interpretations. His individuality seems to me to lie in his riven quality, the way religious assurances always crumple. In the Fifth, the usually problematic (for me, again, I stress) Bruckner finale is replaced by a brilliant solution: first the clarinet's cheeky broom sweeping the old ideas away, then the tear-jerking brass chorale at the point when everything seems to have run out of steam. Abbado made no attempt to paper over the cracks, but he did pursue the chamber-musical quality that had been the chief virtue of the Schumann Piano Concerto in the first half.


As in a late Mozart concerto, Schumann's woodwind have as much of the glory as the soloist, and Mitsuko Uchida is too good a listener and collaborator not to let the fabulous Jacques Zoon and his fellow-flautist shine. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra has certainly got through first oboists - first Albrecht Mayer, then Kai Frombgen, now Lucas Marcias Navarro (wasn't there a Berlin veto thing which led to the calling upon the Concergebouw principal?) - but they're all the world's best and Marcias Navarro led the way with incredible projection last night.

If Mitsuko occasionally charged with just a hint of panic at the thicker flurries, her sensitivity and clarity of phrase-turn made it all worthwhile. And it was surely a lucky escape that Abbado had fallen out with the unmusical Helene Grimaud before the festival performances - what a substitute!


I'm coming to love most in Bruckner those twilight zones where only a handful of woodwind play. Again, Zoon had the dove's share of the best, supported only by two clarinets and bassoon at one point in the slow movement, sharing a chuckle with first violins where you really couldn't see the joins. That came in the Scherzo's trio, a Landlerish miracle as it dewily came across last night which I'd rather hear repeated than the whole damned outer portion: it's at points like this that I cry out inwardly for Mahler's constant evolution.

But Bruckner is what he is, and as Sibelius - another true original - pointed out, it may be messy, but it's always authentic. As was this interpretation (authentic, that is, never messy) from the greatest conductor-orchestra team of our time. Look at the photogenic players, who glowed and hugged each other with genuine warmth as they always do after every performance with Abbado.


Wish I could go again tonight, when Mozart's 'Haffner' Symphony replaces the Schumann, but, alas, I'm teaching - Bruckner 4, as it happens, in preparation for Belohlavek's BBC Symphony performance next week*. Less of a rush, deo gratias, than yesterday, where I biked in to meet the players of the Pacifica Quartet (more on them anon) in the Wigmore at 3, taught my Passenger class at the City Lit, whizzed back to the Wigmore to do the pre-performance talk with the Pacificas, then pedalled off to the Southbank. Only Abbado could have made me miss the first instalment of the PQ's Shostakovich cycle, but I'll catch the second on Thursday.

*later - ouch: my students reminded me it's tomorrow (Wednesday 12). Just as well they did as I'm supposed to be giving the pre-performance talk...Fortunately there's just enough time to prepare.