Talkabout: Strauss, Prokofiev, Stravinsky

Put a week's silence here down to busy talk scheduling - crazy, in fact, but the subjects were desert island pieces (original 1912 design for the domain of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne above by Ernst Stern), so I wanted to do them all. Sunday was the first mad day. Having to be at Glyndebourne for a 10.30am talk, with a sound test well in advance, meant it was worth staying over on Saturday night to avoid a very early start from London. I was also able to fit in an interview the previous lunchtime with Katharina Thoma, director of the Ariadne auf Naxos which has just opened, and Kate Lindsey, the mezzo singing the Composer. Delightful company, as you can glean from the way-too-long but I hope interesting Arts Desk Q&A. I get to see the show when I talk again at Glyndebourne on 2 June.

Thoma took her central production idea from the fact that Glyndebourne was used as a wartime home for evacuee children. It looks idyllic as they run gay through green meadows, but no doubt the trauma always lurked.

Though it seems from another archive photo that there was no lake in the 1940s, and of course no new opera house, otherwise not a great deal has changed. Of course a smooth lawn now takes the place of the meadow, but the goalposts suggested that fun and games were still to be had before the season opened last Saturday.

The relatively new garden regime takes time to have its full effect: there aren't nearly as many varieties of exotic tulips as there used to be, but enough to make a pre-season May visit special.

The tree peony in the formal garden used to be in full spate on study days, but this year's slow progress means it's only budding, ready to burst.

Notoriously variable in its featured artists - remember the dreadful 'portraits' by Adam 'Son of Harry' Birtwistle? - Glyndebourne has made an odd choice this year. You'll be taken aback by Sean Henry's standing or sitting lifesize figures in polychrome/bronze dotted about the place (Bryn as Wanderer is the one I didn't see), and generally I don't mind them, but I'm not at all sure about 'Catafalque', the recumbent man out on the lawn. He certainly changes perspectives like this one from the Ebert Room where the talks take place.

So I took the audience on a whistlestop tour of Strauss and Hofmannsthal's three Molière projects, starting with Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme as Der Bürger als Edelmann in 1912. On the downloadable Glyndebourne podcast the plot's the thing, shorn of the Sunday talk's background complexities. It's very likeably presented by Margaret (aka Peggy) Reynolds and has been well edited by the delightful Mair Bosworth. I talk on it alongside an expert on commedia dell'arte and that great gentleman Michael Kennedy, whose Master Musicians book led my teenage self deeper into Strauss.

On Sunday, playing Pavarotti as the Rosenkavalier tenor singing 'Di rigori armato il seno' seemed like a good place to start alongside the same text delivered by an Italian Singer(ess, so it's armata) in Lully/Molière's Ballet des Nations. Hopping between Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Version 1 and the more familiar 1916 all-operatic Ariadne meant some fun in comparing Zerbinetta's whole-tone-higher, longer original crazy coloratura aria with the one we usually get.

There wasn't time to feature the cod-Turkish ceremony of Hofmannsthal's 1917 Bürger-minus-Ariadne (I'll never forget the late Peter Allen's take on it in his Edinburgh University staging of Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme for Les Escogriffes, which involved a swimming pool and actors in Kermit and Fozzy Bear masks: genius, it seemed at the time). But the first musical programme which Glyndebourne dramaturg Cori Ellison had devised, under the aegis of the lovely people in the Education Department, made amends with the Madrigal alongside two numbers from the 1912 incidental music - Monsieur Jourdain's little doggerel song, which I'd played in sequence with the original composer's aria 'Du, Venus' Sohn', and the pretty neoclassical duet for shepherd and shepherdess - as well as, from the opera, Harlequin's serenade and, from the Prologue, the Composer's ode to music.

As always with the young singers involved, you think, if the covers are this good, can the artists they're covering be better? That was true of all three singers, accompanied by repetiteur Helen Collyer: soprano Lucy Hall, mezzo Carla Dirlikov (pictured above by John Myers) - who pulled out all the stops for her big number, acting and all - and a fine young baritone, Daniel Shelvey.

I'd have loved to stay and hear Hall and Collyer in two Zemlinsky songs with Hofmannsthal texts, as well as Margaret/Peggy's 'mythical sisters' talks - the afternoon was devoted to the other new production, Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie - but a taxi was waiting at 11.55 to whisk me to Lewes station and the train back to London for a 3pm event.

This one was unmissable: Denis Kozhukhin playing all three of Prokofiev's titanic so-called 'War' Sonatas (6-8, composed between 1938 and 1944). Because the feat required a bigger rest-up time during the interval between the Seventh and Eighth Sonatas, the Southbank's The Rest is Noise team, having liked what they heard of my Paris 1910-1930 taster, enlisted me to talk for about 15 minutes while Denis prepared for the final hurdle. Classical Music Programme Manager Ben Larpent took the following photos; obviously the pianist could only be snapped after his performances.

Kozhukhin's interpretations were much as I'd found them when I reviewed his Onyx CD for the BBC Music Magazine's May issue: fabulously nuanced and with an uncanny skill in bringing out the tone-colours of different simultaneous lines. For me there was too much sustaining pedal in developments - not at all Prokofiev the pianist's style - and something reined in about the outer movements of the Sixth and Seventh Sonatas, though the latter's central Andante caloroso moved me to tears.

Just as well, perhaps, because my talk started - with credit to friend and so-collegial fellow Prokofievian Daniel Jaffé, whose singing-teacher then-wife Frith spotted the correspondence - with its obvious-when-you-hear-it resemblance to Schumann's 'Wehmut' from the Op. 39 Liederkreis. And of course this is one of those coded references to suffering which we used to think were exclusive to Shostakovich. Eichendorff's text begins 'I can sometimes sing/As if I were happy,/But secretly tears well up/Which free my heart', and ends 'no one can truly feel the anguish of my song's deep sorrow'. I don't need to add any more about the context except to repeat what I've written elsewhere, that according to his older son Sviatoslav, Prokofiev never talked about the terrible years 1936 and '37 to anyone, at least in the children's hearing.

Anyway, having a captive audience in the middle of a concert opened me up to a taste of my own reviewing medicine, so it was a relief to find that Colin Clarke on MusicWeb's Seen and Heard International approved. Quite a few enthusiastic listeners were unusually willing to come up and chat at the end of the concert, perhaps because they could see where I was sitting. And I got to meet the ever so nice Roger Vignoles, who said he'd heard Schumann when Kozhukhin played the movement, but couldn't place what exactly until I did it for him.

The glory, of course, was the pianist's: the end crowned the mighty work with the best of the three performances, as on the disc, of the Eighth, with its huge tarantella-cum-march finale majestically tying up the pain with the biting humour. Here's Kozhukhin introducing the sonatas.

My desert island disc of that, by the way, is the incomparable Sviatoslav Richter's, but this interpretation was very fine indeed. And Kozhukhin's way of terracing the sound came across beautifully in the only possible encore - Bach, but arranged by Ziloti (the B minor Prelude). There's certainly no harm in featuring the pianist who gave the premiere of the Eighth Sonata, Emil Gilels, in this ineffable lowering of temperatures.

Actually Kozhukhin's own performance of this gem, also to be heard but not seen on YouTube, is just as magical in its way.

With only a couple of days in London - more talking, this time in the Gloriana class - I flew up to Glasgow on Wednesday afternoon and back on Thursday night, since I had to be off to my beloved Göttingen and its Handel Festival the following morning. This way I didn't get to stay for the concert in which Matthias Pintscher conducted the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra in Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, which I was discussing earlier in the evening; another quick whizz after another talk was again the order of the day. But I did get to see Scottish Opera's new G&S, The Pirates of Penzance, to which I took godson Alexander on Wednesday night and which I reviewed for The Arts Desk. Here's the consummate Richard Suart's Major-General pirated, picture for Scottish Opera by KK Dundas.

In short, although the cast and orchestra were mostly excellent, the Savoy wit and wisdom drowned in a stream of gags by a director who didn't trust his material. I enjoyed rather more my haggis and chips sitting in warm sun on Sauciehall Street before the show. Ah well; Alexander got the point that the text is dazzlingly witty - who but Gilbert would rhyme 'Aristophanes' with 'Zoffanies'? - and the music stronger, quite often, than the Italian opera it spoofs.

Thursday was mostly spent indoors working on the Glyndebourne interview transcription and brushing up the material for the talk. But I did have an hour off walking from the ever-welcome aBode Hotel in Bath Street to City Halls. En route I had a plate of oysters fried in polenta

sitting outside at Glasgow's oldest established restaurant, Rogano, inspired design-wise by the art deco of the Queen Mary back in 1935.

The Duke of Wellington outside the Gallery of Modern Art, traditional target for Glaswegian malarkey, is no longer traffic-coned as he was in February but sports a rather sinister face mask (representing what I couldn't make out).

I took in some rather remarkable Victorian/Edwardian architecture around the City Halls in Candleriggs, all nicely tarted up for this fashionable zone. Again, I'd love to know more about what I was seeing, though I've just identified the eccentric turret in the middle as part of a former warehouse in Brunswick Street 'designed in the baronial style by architect RW Billings in 1854 for J and W Campbell'. The City Chambers are seen in the centre of the bottom picture.

Then I ensconced myself in a dressing room backstage at the City Halls to work, courtesy of Douglas Templeton and Andrew Trinick,

popping out for Pintscher's rehearsal of The Rite. Such efficient use of the time available, such professional dovetailing, such clarity and character; the firm basis would have allowed for any amount of extra intensity in the performance. Must set aside time to listen to the broadcast of the event proper available on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer (a more than usually generous three weeks left to catch it).

In the talk, I tried to offset the perceived modernism of Stravinsky's score and Nijinsky's choreography at the premiere 100 years ago this month with the music's roots in folk music and Musorgsky (the opening piping - I love Saint-Saens's remark in 1913, 'if that's a bassoon, I'm a baboon' - is a reworking of shepherd Gritsko's reed-playing at the end of the Sorochintsy Fair version of Night on a Bare Mountain).

So, after the most stressy of the week's travels, on to a more relaxing ambience in Göttingen where I wasn't required to hold forth and concert treasures - if not this year's opera - offered plenty of soul food. More on that anon, but let's connect by having William IV less stylishly debunked by the students of the university he so splendidly enriched just before his death in 1837 than the Duke of Wellington is by the Glaswegians.

 

23/5 Oh yes, and Wagner was a nifty four times 50 on the day of posting. How could I have forgotten? Anyway, I'm not in the mood at the moment (and a concert conducted by Sir Andrew Davis, of all people, hardly seemed like the best way to celebrate). There will be nothing but Wagner for me at the end of the year, for reasons I'm still not at liberty to divulge.

Happy birthday, Quinquin

Herrgott in Himmel, I nearly forgot that my favourite opera of all time and certainly the one I know best from head to toe, Strauss and Hofmannsthal's 'comedy for music' Der Rosenkavalier, is a hundred years old today; it took Gavin Plumley's homage - albeit with a clip of perhaps my least favourite Marschallin after Schwarzkopf, the over-indulgent Renee - on his Entartete Musik blog to remind me. Silhouette of Strauss and Hofmannsthal above by Bithorn, from the time it was shown in the Strauhof Museum Zurich's excellent exhibition 'Das Libretto'.

This is not, as they sing in the opera, quite what we'd hoped: I'd thought an annotated Rosenkav might make an intelligent coffee-table book for 2011, but there was much dragging of heels from a certain quarter, and then it was too late. Nor is there any chance for the seasonal warming of winter cockles this year, at least in the UK (what were you thinking of, Covent Garden and Mr. Pappano?)

Still, it's a time for Marschyesque reflection: almost too many great performances on stage and screen to recall. I can't quite choose an overall favourite on disc, though I guess the palm would have to go to the classic Erich Kleiber version.


I have a special affection for the Philips set, where the score is conducted like chamber music by Edo de Waart and Flicka shines as Octavian, and for the super-sumptuous if super-slow Bernstein offering. On DVD, there's no Marschallin more gorgeous and intuitively wonderful than Kiri's, though Gwyneth runs her close in the old Bavarian State Opera film: silence, you text-scoffers, and tell me in the following snippets if our often indolent Kiwi is slapdash or lacklustre with the meaning. Then along came Anne Schwanewilms's angry-beautiful redhead, and we all fell in love, I think, with that performance in an otherwise less than top-notch Dresden-in-Japan production. Sadly it's not snippeted decently on YouTube.


Best Octavians? For me, Fassbaender and Troyanos on DVD; on stage, a young Garanca in Vienna, terrific against Martina Serafin's gorgeous Marschallin - another redhead - though the creaking rep production left everyone to their own devices (lovely lady FLott said that the first time she met one of her Octavians at the Staatsoper was when she woke up in bed beside him/her). And the rest are usually good, with few matching the visual and vocal ideal of a young Sophie so well as Barbara Bonney, who seems to have stayed the girlish course for longest. I never thought Kurt Moll would make such a funny Ochs, but he does in the Met DVD, though for sheer classy delivery, dare I once again mention my good friend Peter Rose?

So what do we have that's worth seeing on YouTube (remember, to get the full picture on each of the below, you'll need to click on the moving image)? Kiri with Solti when the Schlesinger Covent Garden production was still fresh, ravishing and, yes, thoughtful in the Act 1 soliloquy:



Then let's switch to Gwyneth and Fassbaender in that classic Munich production, superlatively well conductor by Kleiber junior:



and back to Kiri, this time in a tired old Met staging which has just been issued on CD, and the fustian doesn't matter since the four leads find such meaning in interacting with each other. And though Levine has been quite a grand conductor of the score, his lavishness never holds up the proceedings like Thielemann's. The Sophie is Judith Blegen, no ingenue but still vocally very fine. Shame the whole thing stops at the end of the trio.



So raise a glass of old Tokay if you would to a complex masterpiece that's kept all the moaners on the run for a century now and retained its central place in a warhorse repertoire against the odds.

29/1 Very much on a related note, and as I mentioned in the reply to Jon below, the most beautiful Mozart/Strauss voice ever, Dame Margaret Price, died yesterday at the age of 69. I've written a brief tribute on The Arts Desk, and may add more here over the next few days. As always with these losses, such balm to be able to listen to her greatest recordings - and they are legion - by way of response.


I'm impressed that the BBC News website has a tribute among its headlines - as, of course, it should, but that kind of thing hasn't been happening recently. Are opera and classical music returning centre-stage as newsworthy?