Three kings, two good men

There’s no point in saying ‘now here’s a gem’, because I suspect that with each Bach cantata I discover this year there will be treasure.  But Sie werden aus Saba alle kommen (All they from Sheba shall come) BWV 65, the Epiphany conclusion of JSB’s first Christmas cycle for Leipzig in 1724, has an especially rich, jewelled instrumental cortege for its three wise men (Bassano's sumptuous depiction of the homage illustrated above).

One commentator reckons the additions to the usual strings and continuo – two each of horns, oboes da caccia and recorders – respectively stand for gold, frankincense and myrrh (associated with embalming; apparently recorders were especially connected with funeral music).  John Eliot Gardiner, whose 6 January 2000 performance in Leipzig’s Nikolaikirche I’ve just heard, associates the recorders with ‘the high pitches..[of] oriental music’ and the oboes da caccia with eastern ‘shawm-like double-reed instruments (salamiya and zurna)'.

Whatever the significance, the pairs gild a splendid opening processional with a hint of drone bass before the chorus parts’ canonical entry, and the tenorial singularity of the oboes da caccia (model illustrated below) dances around the bass aria.

The diamond, though, is the tenor’s number. We’ve moved from the splendid gifts of the magi to the ‘humble heart’ offered by the reciter, with ‘the gold of faith, the frankincense of prayer, the myrrh of patience.’ As if to show how rich the non-material gifts can be, the three pairs plus two violins play delightful little one-bar figures off against one another in a lilting 3/8. This is more opulent and multicoloured even than the kings' opening procession.

Bach's choice of concluding chorale, set to a French 16th century tune, begins with the first line of what we know as ‘O God, our help in ages past’. Another great gift then, infinitely more memorable than the compromised Bach concert at Kings Place I heard last Thursday (which won't stop me going to more with different ensembles in KP's Bach Unwrapped series). Here's another Harnoncourt performance on YouTube so you can hear what I've been writing about - though nothing can match the trumpet-like splendours of Gardiner's horns.

One strand of the Christmas reading was to devour the rest of Ludmila Ulitskaya’s works so far translated. The two books in question are diametrically opposed in style. The Funeral Party is a novella I shall read again, engaging as it is from first paragraph to last. It's a quirky evocation, in the manner of the last act of La Bohème but more cheerful, of friends gathered in a New York attic round a dying Russian émigré artist, Alik, a free spirit whom everyone adores (and we do, too, thanks to deft strokes from Ulitskaya) His crazy wife and former lovers among the women initiate rather haphazard events such as the consecutive visits of a priest to give the last rites and a rabbi. The death seems inevitable, and not to be feared; the burial is followed by a funeral party which turns out, as all such should, to be a vibrant celebration of a life.

Throughout, Ulitskaya’s skill is in the little things that the characters say and do. There’s not much room for any of this in the relatively epic Daniel Stein, Interpreter. It’s a curious semi-fictional testament to Oswald Rufeisen, a Polish Jew who saved others while working for the Gestapo as an interpreter before emigrating to Israel and becoming a Carmelite priest. He’s clearly a good man, and Ulitskaya uses his reconciliatory words and deeds as a reflection on the riven religious factions in the beleaguered holy land. It seems that Stein/Rufeisen visited his old friend Karol Wojtyla in the Vatican and encouraged him to recognize Israel – I had no idea the Catholic church didn’t until then – and to be the first pope ever to visit a mosque.

The problem is that because reflections on Daniel/Dieter are mostly testaments in epistolary form, we miss the more immediate human idiosyncrasy which is Ulitskaya’s strength in the three other books of hers I’ve read. The scope, ranging from 1930s Poland to the 1990s, is certainly ambitious, though I can think of other masterpieces which convey the theme of what entails true Christian goodness more succinctly (that wonderful French film Of Gods and Men remains a benchmark). And I don’t know whether Daniel is supposed to have a fault, but for me it inevitably comes when he fails to acknowledge the right to inclusion of a parishioner’s gay son, protesting that homosexuality is beyond his understanding because ‘women are so beautiful, so attractive’, and advising the mother to send her son away from home so that he doesn't trouble her. So much for Christ-like acceptance.

Interesting, isn’t it, that just because a novel takes a big theme like the Holocaust and the Jews in Israel, that doesn’t make it more of a masterpiece than one which adopts a slice of life and infers the larger resonances from what’s done and said in its duration. The Funeral Party is for me the masterpiece of the two (and has the advantage of such simplicity that, like Chekhov’s stories, I imagine I could struggle through it in the Russian). But I still want to read everything Ulitskaya has written, especially the novel Vladimir Jurowski selected in his typically challenging summer reading list for The Arts Desk back in 2011, Imago. Hopefully that's next on the list for translation.

Divertissement

What’s the vaguely seasonal listening here at home? Bach cantatas, not necessarily tied to the time of year, an always inexhaustible treasury; G&S, thanks to a fellow blogger who may wish to remain anonymous since he dug out some hard-to-find Mackerras radio recordings, including Princess Ida with Valerie Masterson as the heroine and Philip Langridge as Hilarion; and Tchaikovsky ballets, as ever.

I feel I’ve not exhausted the musical strain in my earlier bracketing of Bourne’s and Järvi’s Sleeping Beauties. It seemed only fair to return to Petipa since the New Adventures version had to jettison so much of my desert island Tchaikovsky, in other words most of the fairy-tale homages at Aurora’s wedding. Some earlier fantasy designs featuring high-camp courtiers and animals present themselves online in Bakst’s far from moribund later imaginings for Diaghilev’s surprising 1921 extravaganza. Quite where the Indians, Chinese and blackamoors fit in I’m not sure, but at least we get proper animal heads for Puss in Boots, a passage Bourne ingeniously reinterpreted

and Red Riding Hood’s Wolf, part of a character number not in the Bourne vampire ball.

Poorly filmed though it is, I thought the following link to a strand of the Kirov/Mariinsky’s 1890 reconstruction was worth including because you won’t have heard any of these three numbers in the Bourne version. In the case of the Cinderella/Prince ‘supplementary' as well as the fabulously imaginative Tom Thumb ‘Pas berrichon’, they might not even be on your ‘complete’ recording, and probably not in any recent Royal Ballet production you've seen. YouTube embedding isn't, apparently, allowed but click here to view the sequence. If you want to see the Bourne-absent Bluebird sequence, you can go back to the previous slice.

It seems criminal that the kids-and-ogre routine has been sliced off two CD transfers in order to cram the ballet on to two discs (a feat which Järvi achieves with no cuts but some very fast speeds). This, after all, is the number which a colleague of the young Shostakovich at the Leningrad Conservatoire remembers them both especially admiring for the way in which ‘the theme is broken up and scattered amongst various instruments at wide intervals of the register’. No Bakst designs for that number, nor for the Bluebird, but here's the legendary Enrico Cecchetti with his Florine in 1890.

Now for a more extended slice of magic, which Bourne did include closer to its entirety than any other choreographer whose work I've seen - the Entr'acte Symphonique 'Le Sommeil', mentioned in the previous Beauty blogslice with copyright discovery of its string tremolo lasting 100 bars. You can check for yourself in the piano score which accompanies it here, and go on if you will to some of the dances in Act III. Of these, Bourne included only the Polacca, aforementioned Puss and, with special percipience, the 5/4 Sapphire Fairy variation last featured in the wacky Björnson-designed Royal Ballet Beauty. I fear the volume levels may be a bit low, and the first two bars of high violin tremolo aren't there, but the Concertgebouw/Dorati recording is an interesting choice,

As for New Adventures absences, you can't miss them for too long in that mostly wonderful show; unless you’re impossibly Petipa-purist (and heaven knows that master fiddled around with the original score himself), its storytelling ingenuity will be bound to win you over.

May it run as long as a show we should have seen long ago, but somehow never did – One Man, Two Guvnors, Richard Bean’s updating of Goldoni to 1963. In the mood for froth, J picked up two half-price tickets on Thursday, so off we went to the Theatre Royal Haymarket to see how the highly-praised Owain Arthur acquitted himself in the James Corden Truffaldino-ish servant role. I have no comparison to make, but Corden's one-time understudy charmed us even as we sat somewhat nervously on the end of the second stalls row, wondering whether we’d be the next audience participants implicated in the stage mayhem.

As it turned out…well, I won’t spoil the fun, but this is the perfect seasonal treat since it's as close to panto as you can get if you dislike the genre. I was reconverted last year with the Wimbledon Dick Whittington starring Dame Edna Everage, who was wonderful but by no means the only onstage laughter-maker. Likewise Arthur, given exuberant turns from Jodie Prenger as our main man's feisty sex interest (pictured below in the second of two Haymarket production photos by Johan Persson), Daniel Ings as a posturing thesp, Ben Mansfield as arf-arf Stanley Stubbers, Rhona Croker’s dumb blonde and Gemma Whelan excellent in a revival of Vesta Tilly-style male impersonation.

We were also apparently fortunate to be rewarded with the return of the original, award-winning deaf old waiter Alfie, Tom Edden (pictured below by Alastair Muir) in the ever more hysterical slapstick climax of the first half. His walk across the stage with a rattling tray was a consummate comedy turn in itself.

The warm-up skiffle band and the vaudeville musical numbers by various members of the cast added to the simple but uproarious pleasures of the evening.

After the Boheme and Robert le Diable plunges, we’ve been lucky in our catching-up going-out, culminating in as classy and dramatically varied a Handel Messiah as I expect to see and hear at St John’s last night – Arts Desk review (probably the last for a while) here. It’s been a delight to have flying visits from dear friends overseas, encompassing two goddaughters and a godson (our adored Lottie came to London as a member of the Zurich Opera Dutchman chorus, and the Buma-Hills-es, over from Amsterdam, met us for dim sum today).

We’ve enough reading to keep us happy in the quiet spells between the socialising: I’m working my way through Sondheim’s Finishing the Hat, a Christmas present two years ago but only sampled until now, wondering at his highly critical masterclass in the art of lyric(s) writing, and Ulitskaya continues to amaze in an affirmative tale about Russians gathered round a dying friend in a New York attic, The Funeral Party (with the stress decidedly on the ‘party’). Season’s greetings to any readers who are still dropping by at this quiet time.