Bizet à la Petit

Nearly missed the chance to see the score I'd been living with so long for the Radio 3 Building a Library, Bizet's L'Arlesienne music, choreographed by the intriguing Roland Petit. My dance-distinguished colleague Ismene Brown duly commemorated his death earlier this month at the age of 87 with an obituary on The Arts Desk, and she also drew my attention to the English National Ballet's Petit triple bill at the Coliseum, which I went along to see on Saturday evening. The photo below comes from Thomas Peter Schultz via Wikimedia Commons; the production shots are by the very generous permission of John Ross, whose other superb ballet images can be seen on the ballet.co site.


As everyone seems to have pointed out, the three ballets all deal with distressed young men seeking out death. Petit offers very personal, if slightly repetitious, takes on the bare bones of Daudet's L'Arlesienne, a Carmen story of sorts (it can hardly be called Merimee's, and only loosely Bizet's) and a Cocteau melodrama about a tortured jeune homme in a garret who hangs himself at the instigation of a lady in a yellow dress who turns out to be La Mort and shows the hanged man Paris by night.

L'Arlesienne, the latest (mid-70s) choreography of the three, keeps Daudet's central triangle of Frederi, the sweet village girl Vivette he's supposed to marry and the invisible girl from Arles who's driving him to madness. The corps participation is rather wonderful, with some stylised head-crooking and elevating straight out of Nijinska' work on Stravinsky's Les Noces to suggest the pressure of conformity. I actually thought the best number was the one Bizet uses to depict the unrequited Vivette, here another corps + soloists ritual. Vivette in the ballet (Erina Takahashi) gets the rather bland Minuet from La Jolie Fille de Perth as her solo; Frederi (the attractive Esteban Berlanga) does his leapy-leapy stuff to the Pastorale, though he spends more of his time in the early stages frozen with anguish.


The main drawback is that Frederi starts distraught with nowhere to go; at least in the play there's a brief interlude of happiness in the general drama of pain. And the old people's Adagietto is too settled for this central mesalliance. If Petit had gone to Bizet's melodrama numbers, he would also have found a more tragic musical ending. As it is, Frederi whips himself up in a dance of death to the Farandole and defenestrates himself in the final bars. At least Berlanga did this Orestes-pursued-by-invisible-Furies number well, with the final leap brilliantly caught in John Ross's photo.


Petit's Carmen was a sensation in 1949 - all that sex, the wonderful oddity of the uptight young man rather than the Carmen dancing the Habanera while the corps mockingly shout the words 'l'amour est enfant de boheme' etc, the brutal denouement to thwacking timps (Begona Cao and Fabian Reimar pictured below).


But the way the score's used is a mess - how much better a job Shchedrin made of it for Plisetskaya some years later - and Petit manages to complicate a simple story. Instead of village soldier boy corrupted and maddened by femme fatale this Don Jose seems to be a proud matador, while Escamillo is a camp sideshow who couldn't on his own precipitate the final tragedy. Cao, despite great long legs, seemed to be having a charisma bypass, and there was no chemistry with Reimair. Even the central Pas de deux was rather irksome: why use the scene with castanets when the bugle calls offstage signify nothing in your own take on the drama?


Most fun of all, if pure melodramatic tosh (blame Cocteau, and Petit's showbusiness instincts), was Le Jeune Homme et la Mort - and here Benjamin Pope's rather solid conducting of an astonishingly high-class ballet orchestra (Gareth Hulse and Katie Clemmow the oboists) came into its own with Respighi's grandiose arrangement of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Yonah Acosta, nephew of Carlos and pictured below in Arnaud Stephenson's rehearsal photo working with Luigi Bonino, is a powerful physical presence, well able to do 101 things with table annd chairs, and the right age for adolescent angst, too: I thought he could well be a star, but balletomanes who know more than I do weren't so sure.


Anyway, with no actual production pics of Acosta Jr, how could we not see how the original jeune homme, Jean Babilee, made a cultish figure of protest. You'll need to bypass a minute or so of talk for the excerpts.



And similarly, how could we not see the beautiful Rudolf as a slightly more ballet-conscious young man? Interestingly, and I think less impressively, this features the Bach organ original rather than Respighi's orchestration.



And now I'm off to find a copy of Black Tights starring charismatic Mrs Petit (Zizi Jeanmaire), Moira Shearer and Cyd Charisse. I also want to see the Petit ballet with the Tchaikovsky arrangements John Lanchbery was most proud of, Puss in Boots. Sadly there are only a couple of clips on YouTube, but the chaste (compared to Stravinsky) treatment of Tchaik miniatures is impressive.

So, it was an interesting but very mixed week, with no total hits: the Brian - time to move on from that - followed by the brave, clearly gifted Belarus Free Theatre actors trying to make something out of execrable texts at the Almeida, Katie Mitchell's idiosyncratic but not often well-acted take on a Jacobean domestic tragedy at the National (which has at least got me reading more), the curate's-egg Halle Prom - worth it for Schiff in Bartok 3 and the Proms premiere of Sibelius's Scenes historiques Suite 2 (now there's a mini-masterpiece) - and finally this. I guess the bottom line is that ENB's was a rather inhibited English take on French style, despite its truly international team of dancers.

Winners and losers?

No, we supposedly civilized people don't USE such terms, do we (vide that splendid movie Little Miss Sunshine), least of all in the hallowed halls of Radio 3's CD Review, where the word 'winner' is out of bounds. Nevertheless, as they say, a sop is needed to the public at the end of Building a Library, and usually I end up saying, this is my personal choice but I would have been equally happy with x, y and z. Not so for the suites-incarnation of Bizet's L'Arlesienne, I have to say, where the sophisticated beauty of Abbado's LSO left everyone else - Beecham included - some way behind.


And you may have found it odd that I made so much of Tommy's failure to use a Provencal side drum instead of a mimsy tambourine in the middle of the Pastorale. QED: hope the Cluytens alternative made the point. Is anyone going to complain that I didn't spend long enough on the complete incidental music? Well, combining suites and original was always going to be problematic - though nowhere near as bad as the first time I 'did' Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and was supposed to jump between ballet and concert-hall versions, very different - but made a lot simpler by the fact that the best of the two available had a German text, and that the alternative, Plasson, was as usual a bit sleepy and out of focus.

In the world of the play, the melodrama metamorphoses on Frederi's and L'Innocent's themes enrich our understanding of Bizet's subtlety but are too snippety to work in anything other than a semi-staged version with actors. Still, I'm very glad to have got to know them, and to love Bizet's incomparable woodwind writing even more. The complete Building a Library is here on the Radio 3 iPlayer for the next week; go to about the 34 minute mark to hear Andrew McGregor's introduction (with apologies for the spoiler above if you hadn't wanted to know the no. 1 choice)

Have you noticed how journalists spend far too much time accentuating the negative? 'What's your worst/Which composer do you really hate/What would you NOT take with you on a Desert Island?' are the most frequently asked questions. At best it's a bit of fun, but usually all it serves to do is to emphasise the blind spots of the writer. And never more so than in the BBC Music Magazine's latest attempt to get the critics to say what bores them. The disclaimer 'one man's meat is another man's poison' doesn't fail to conceal the fact that in nine cases out of ten the last laugh is on the disliker, unless he or she expresses that aversion in golden prose. Good grief, many of these pet hates are among my biggest loves: Tristan, Butterfly, Cenerentola, Strauss's Don Quixote, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mahler 8, Bruckner 7 (though admittedly the Britten and the Bruckner, like the Brahms German Requiem also cited, can sound awful in ponderous or frigid hands, but that's not the fault of the music)...

The only one I half agree with is Fiona Maddocks in her insistence that Purcell's Dido and Aeneas needs to cut to the chase and 'When I am laid in earth' which is, of course, one of the supreme laments of all time. Let's hear it for La Connolly at the 2009 Last Night of the Proms.



My other problem pieces? Quite a few, from Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses via Beethoven's Violin, Third Piano and Emperor Concertos (torpid slow movements especially) to Glass's Satyagraha. But I freely admit that, with the possible exception of glassy Phil, whose bland experiment I'd argue as tied to its time and place (move on, Mr Glass, evolve), blind spots they remain.

Bizet in Provence

Last Tuesday I went into BBC Broadcasting House to record this coming Saturday's Building a Library for Radio 3's CD Review: by my own choice, following on from the sunny time spent with Delibes' Coppelia, the subject was Bizet's incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's Provencal tragedy L'Arlesienne. It was actually a chance remark by my friend and unofficial former mentor Dr. Roger Savage that Bizet's Adagietto must be behind Elgar's most introspective moments that led me to listen again, and fall in love.

Of course I can't give even a hint of the 'winner' among the 20 or so recordings. But I would like to sing the praises a little more of the work itself. As I've discovered, all of Bizet's 27 numbers for Daudet's play are worth doing, though they need some kind of dramatic context - and only one of the three contenders there gives that, though unhelpfully it uses German actors (excellent all) rather than French. So it boiled down to a choice between various versions of the famous Suites: the first put together and re-orchestrated by Bizet himself, the second assembled by his friend Guiraud after his death (with a not exactly appropriate borrowing, the Minuet from La Jolie Fille de Perth).


Beyond the striking sax-solo portrait of L'Innocent, the hero of the drama's slow-witted brother who 'comes to his senses' just as Frederi, the protagonist, is abandoning his, and the tragic lovesickness of Frederi himself, there's not much here to tell you what a predominantly dark work this is. You need to hear all the melodramas for the play proper to know that it all ends badly, with a dramatic defenestration. As in Carmen, the merrymaking of the crowd - in the opera, for the bullfight, in the play, for a celebration of the feast of St. Eligius - serves as background to the tragic denouement.


And what a strange play it is, beyond the evocation of Provence which has so much in common with the later images of Van Gogh I've reproduced here. The 'girl from Arles' who gives the hero so much grief never appears: is she a Carmen-like vamp or just an ordinary woman with a history? There's a morbidity about our Frederi which apparently casts back to Daudet's unfortunate experience in his youth: one in which he contracted the syphilis which was to lead to a slow, lingering death (I've just picked up a copy of his sketches on the subject). Like Don Jose, his passion is unquenchable, but the violence is turned against himself. And there's also a Micaela, the village girl Vivette who loves him unquestioningly. Her music provides the real raison d'etre of the Second Suite, apart from its brilliantly effective orchestral combination of Farandole and old Provencal marching song, which we used to sing in Christmas carol services as 'De bon matin, j'ai recontre le train de trois grands rois'.


What did I take away from repeated hearings of the music? That Bizet's woodwind scoring, like Glinka's, is simple but perfect and goes straight to the heart. That the Menuetto's quiet ending may have influenced the Gavotte of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony; that the four-part string writing of the incredibly brief but profound Adagietto, which really ought to be played in the original by a string quartet, undoubtedly made its mark on Elgar, Mahler and Strauss.

This is potent writing on a miniature scale which finds it hard these days to carve out a niche in the concert hall, just as the fastidiously wrought, discreetly sensuous operas of Bizet's devoted friend Massenet no longer play a major role in the repertoire. And I doubt if that will change with the Royal Opera's production of Cendrillon, much as I love the piece and enjoyed most of the production. Read all about it on The Arts Desk, where I've also briefly commented on the Opera North vs Lee Hall presumed-homophobia kerfuffle (fellow blogger Jon Dryden Taylor wrote the response Opera North should have given). In the meantime, enjoy this striking production shot by Bill Cooper of simpatica if surprisingly pale-voiced Joyce DiDonato as Cinders with the stunning mezzo Prince of the real star, Alice Coote.


And don't forget to tune in to Radio 3 on Saturday morning, or go to the iPlayer for a week thereafter. I hope you come to love Bizet's music as much as I do. Next season it's back to the Russians, and I intend to give Prokofiev Vol. 2 a much-needed kick this summer, but I've enjoyed my Gallic interlude beyond measure.