Fidelio/Leonore and more Russians: Zoom 2021

Zoom has been my salvation in 2020, and not just in terms of keeping financially afloat. To realise how much it's meant not just to an ever-expanding group of students but also to the great performers who so generously found the time to make special guest appearances has been (and I don't use the term lightly) humbling. We've had wonderful appearances from Sue Bullock, Anne Evans, Richard Jones and John Tomlinson (captured below, looking more Gurnemanz than Wotan - he was in fact talking Hagen - at the class by a student) over the 10 Mondays on Wagner's Götterdämmerung, completing our Ring survey over three and a half years. In the latest Russian music term covering 1910 to 1917 there's been enlightenment on Stravinsky's Petrushka from Gergely Madaras, on his Rite of Spring from Andrew Litton and Catherine Larsen-Maguire (extended to two whole classes), and on Scriabin from Alexander Melnikov and Peter Jablonski.

For all of us involved on a regular basis, it's given a shape to the week, and for many, an alternative to live performances (for which, of course, there's no real substitute, but needs and circumstances must). Take the two one-offs on the Tchaikovsky ballets - The Sleeping Beauty on 30 December and The Nutcracker on the 21st. They came about because one student lamented that she would no longer be able to go to any of the planned, socially distanced Nutcrackers given the third, and severest, lockdown of the year. We could at least share our pleasure in the beauties of these amazing masterpieces. I can't resist featuring again the late, much missed Maria Björnson's most ravishing design for the Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty that came in for so much stick (I hymned the whole achievement on the blog here). Watched the entire DVD again yesterday and for me it's still the most magical Beauty. This is the Panorama from the second act, turned into a winter's tale.

These were also interludes between terms on Russian music - the first two have taken us from Glinka to Prokofiev's observations on the end of 1917, while the next covers 1917 to 1953, mainly but not exclusively Soviet (we have to follow the adventures of Prokofiev and Stravinsky in the west, too). I planned the Opera in Depth term to begin on 11 January with Beethoven's Fidelio (image up top, of the excellent Garsington Opera concert staging, by Johan Persson) and its original version, Leonore - on the special urging of Mark Wigglesworth, who's just conducted Fidelio for Opera North and wants most of all to 'do' Leonore at English National Opera - before moving on for the following five Mondays to Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel; as far as I can remember - and my records are still stored on the previous computer which went bust - I haven't covered it in over 30 years of Opera in Focus/Depth and it would tie in with what we're doing in the other course. It's also unclear what the main companies will be staging, so why not take advantage of an opera that's not appearing in any repertoires for the foreseeable future? By summer it should be clearer what the two last operas of the season should be.

Here's my planned itinerary for Russian music 1918-1953, subject to change depending on circumstances and special visits. Pictured below: Nikolay Myaskovsky and Sergey Prokofiev, friends born 10 years apart, in 1927, detail of a photo taken from the first volume of my Prokofiev biography (sorry to link to Amazon, but my online seller of choice, hive.co.uk, reports it out of stock).

1: Adventures abroad, dark times at home  7 January

Prokofiev travels to America while Myaskovsky stays at home and remains true to his characteristic moods of gloom and pessimism. Myaskovsky's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies contrasted with Prokofiev's shorter works of 1918-19 and the exuberance of The Love for Three Oranges.

2: Stravinsky in Switzerland; the Ballets Russes transformed   14 January

Stravinsky's Russian trilogy begins with the small-scale experiments of Renard (Baika) and L'Histoire du soldat. Ever the seeker after novelty, Diaghilev engages a fresh range of artists to work with composers old and new. With special emphasis on Prokofiev's Chout (Larionov design pictured below) followed by Stravinsky's Pulcinella and Les noces (Svadebka).

3: Enter Shostakovich  21 January

With a prefatory look at Myaskovsky's biggest and darkest symphony, the Sixth, followed by the First Symphony with which the precocious teenage Shostakovich, Petrograd/Leningrad Conservatoire student, burst upon the scene. His first total masterpiece, the Prelude and Scherzo for string octet, is followed by a singular marking of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution in what became known as his Second Symphony of 1927

4: 1927  28 January

The apogee of Soviet modernism, still strongly connected to developments in the west. We look at machine-age music by Prokofiev, Mossolov and Deshevov, and through Prokofiev's detailed diary entries for his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 look at the young musicians whose music he heard while he was there, chief among them Gavriil Popov with his remarkable Chamber Symphony.

5: A Gogol opera and two ballets  4 February

The young Shostakovich's reputation continued to grow with his wildly expressionistic opera The Nose and his two full-length ballets, The Golden Age and The Bolt - though proletarian musicians' organisations were now on the attack.

6: Two edicts, two masterpieces, 1932-6  11 February

The move to bring the querulous proletarian musicians' groups under one banner, the Association of Soviet Music, in 1932, looked like a good thing at the time, though it spelled trouble ahead. Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, completed at the end of that year, ran successfully in Moscow and Leningrad for two years before the blow fell with the Pravda attack on it in January 1936. Still he pressed ahead with his outlandish Fourth Symphony, but it was withdrawn before the scheduled public premiere at the end of the year. With special guest Elizabeth Wilson.

7: Soviet film scores, 1929-1938 - from New Babylon to Alexander Nevsky  18 February

Shostakovich worte his first film score for Kozintsev and Trauberg's New Babylon in 1929; Prokofiev worked on Feinzimmer's Lieutenant Kije four years later before becoming a true Soviet artist in 1938 with his music for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. With clips from those films as well as Alone, Counterplan and Volga-Volga.

8: The 'Soviet' Symphony, 1935-1945  25 February

Picking up on the first Russian symphony to cause real controversy, Popov's First, performed in 1935, we see how Shostakovich followed a superficially safer trajectory in his Fifth before ringing the changes in the Sixth. We end with Prokofiev's own special circumventing of socialist-realist formulas in his Fifth, premiered at the beginning of 1945 and seen (wrongly) as a victory symphony. Pictured below; Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian in 1940.

9: Chamber and instrumental 1938-45 4 March

Shostakovich's new journey in chamber music began with a kind of neoclassical purity, but Russia's dramatic entry into the Second World War opened up freedom in music again: the Second String Quartet and Second Piano Trio mark a dramatic change in course. Alongside them we also look at Prokofiev's so-called 'War' piano sonatas (6-8).With special guests Steven Osborne and Boris Giltburg.

10: The dangerous path to 1948   11 March

Two more towering symphonies, Shostakovich's Eighth and Prokofiev's Sixth, dare a naked sense of despair. After the war, it was time for the authorities to turn the screw again, which they did with Zhdanov's notorious trials of 'formalism in music', banishing the possibilities of dissonance and anguish expressed in music. Pictured below: Shostakovich in Leipzig, 1950.

I can see from this that I haven't managed to fit everything in: there will be two extra classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace. If anyone wants to join who isn't already on my list of students, just leave a message here with your email address. I won't publish it, but I shall certainly reply.

Beauty by the book

With apologies to the balletophobes, it’s Aurora time again. And on this occasion I don’t disagree with anything in the Arts Desk review by my eloquent colleague Ismene Brown, who took me along to the English National Ballet Sleeping Beauty (photos - only four to choose from, sadly, which is why you'll see them so often - by Patrick Baldwin for ENB). Perhaps, with infinitely less knowledge of the steps and technical difficulties involved, I have more than just one reservation about ace ballerina and ENB artistic director Tamara Rojo’s Princess, pictured above with Vadim Muntagirov. 

It’s not just that she goes to the altar untransfigured by love, but that there’s not a hint of girlishness about her 16-year-old in Act One. She tackles the absurd number of early challenges with aplomb, but the face is mask-like, except for when the mouth opens and closes in preparation for a hair-raising sequence. Which only, for me, highlights the narrative brilliance of Matthew Bourne in making Aurora a bit – Ismene thinks way too much – of a wild child.

But otherwise the shows are not really comparable: one is a consistent piece of novel storytelling, a dance-panto, whereas this lavish recreation of Kenneth MacMillan’s Petipa-faithful homage for the American Ballet Theatre preserves the aristocratic tradition without quite pickling it in aspic.

You’ve got to do it at the highest level, though, and ENB can. The Nicholas Georgiadis costumes are a wonder; as Ismene points out, they are as lavishly detailed for minor figures like the nurses, the Puritan spinning women and the haughty, stylishly hatted ladies of the Prince's court as they are for the individual fairies and regal mortals. Peter Farmer’s old-fashioned leafy painted flats are a bit minimal by comparison, but provide a pretty framework. You also need to be able to cast the character variations from strength, too, and this was for me the most amazing aspect of the production. 

The highlight, perhaps, is the Prologue’s Pas de Six. What extraordinary patterns Petipa demands from the 6x6x6 combinations of fairies, cavaliers and lilac entourage, and how perfectly that's realised here. What character there was in Nancy Osbaldeston’s finger-pointing Golden Vine and Shiori Kase’s sweetest of songbirds.

Maybe Kase’s smile is in default mode, but she used it to equally winning effect as Princess Florine in Act Three, partnered by the muscular but agile-legged Yonah (nephew of Carlos) Acosta, confirming the promise we’d already enjoyed in Le jeune homme et la mort. Osbaldeston shone again as Red Riding Hood, and lest we thought the royal couple’s thunder might be stolen, Muntagirov's immensely likeable Prince used his tall personage to peerless advantage in his tarantella. Rojo does aristocratic best, and was fine as a glacial Vision Aurora in Act Two. It would be hard to find better personifications of Good versus Evil than Daria Klimentová’s imperturbable Lilac Fairy and James Streeter’s Carabosse, memorably dressed as a wraith Queen Elizabeth who gestures stylishly enough to avoid toppling over into camp.

Of course I’m going to moan a bit about the cuts in Tchaikovsky's greatest score, more within numbers – often musically illogical – than with respect to the usual casualties. There, though, we could have had 20 minutes' more music rather than an unnecessary interval between Prologue and Act One. But how good to have an excellent live orchestra with such first-rate wind soloists (Gareth Hulse a real luxury in the best Grand Pas oboe solo you’ll ever hear).

I always wonder who dictates the tempi, conductor or dancers; two of the Prologue variations as well as Aurora’s in Act Three feel way too slow. There were a few smudgy ensembles but overall Gavin Sutherland led a confident performance. No doubt about it, though, this is the highest-level Gesamtkunstwerk Beauty on show. The regions who’ve already seen it must have wondered what hit them (Oxford and Southampton have yet to benefit). And you may well get a different Aurora and Prince, who should be as good if not better. But don’t be too timid to try out the Bourne Beauty too.

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.

Being Beauteous: Bourne and Järvi

Here’s my chance to wax more or less lyrical about two quirky but undeniably loving homages to Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, which the more I hear it the more I’m convinced is his meisterwerk. I had to own up to the BBC Music Magazine that since I’d written the very long, number-by-number notes for Neeme Järvi’s absolutely complete recording with the superb Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, I couldn’t review it for the publication. But I can attempt to do so here, having got that proviso out of the way. As for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Sleeping Beauty, ‘A Gothic Romance’, I went to the Sadler's Wells press night on Friday courtesy of my Arts Desk colleague Ismene Brown, who writes brilliantly about it as ever and almost convinces me about points over which we disagreed. The nub of which is that I warmed to it much more than she did.

What I admire most is Bourne’s way of telling a story, and in this case one that is very much his own spun from some of the elements of Perrault’s tale. I’m not sure how much of the plot one should give away, since I spent part of the first half wondering how the gardening boy/groundsman with whom young Aurora has such a sweet and sometimes funny first-love romance would survive one hundred years. A bite on the neck from Christopher Marney's Count Lilac, aka fairy leader (pictured below with fellow winged things in the Prologue, first of Simon Annand's production images) gave a good hint. You can see how effective Bourne regular Lez Brotherston's designs are, though there aren't enough pics of them in the image gallery.

The biggest twists are unveiled in the second half, with more than one awakening kiss failing to lead to the expected resolution. Shall we say that the grand Caradoc ball – yes, he’s the tall and sexy son of Carabosse, who expired some time after the Prologue – entails radical re-jigging and major cutting of Tchaikovsky’s score. What Bourne does use of it, and where he uses it, always has a strong musical/dramatic motivation. First change is the royal March of the Prologue banished in favour of the Act One garden hustle and bustle, which suits the 1890s bedchamber intimacy of this narrative and involves a delightful puppet baby climbing the thick curtain drapes. The musical number is reprised in its proper place when we meet the 20-year old Aurora in a Juliettish playfulness with her nurse before her boy evades detection in her bedroom (charming Hannah Vassallo and cute Dominic North pictured below).

Re-ordering in the garden scene, mostly Edwardian whites, means that Aurora’s variation is played out with interloping Caradoc. Surely Bourne means parallels here with the male Odile of his Swan Lake - who can forget Adam Cooper there? - especially since both numbers have eloquent violin solos (other witty references I thought I spotted are to Macmillan's Anastasia and, as I've already suggested, his Romeo and Juliet as well as other scenes in Bourne's own Swan Lake). He brings back another virtuoso sequence for violin, the Entr’acte of Act Two which has surely never been danced in ANY previous choreography of Sleeping Beauty, for a climactic Pas de Deux in the last act (obviously the Aurora-Desiré adagio is saved up for when good has triumphed over evil). The Rose Adagio is less successful. What Ismene writes about real dance never being properly carried through applies here, as choreography gives way to precipitate mime and Aurora falls swooning from a prick on the thorn of Caradoc’s black rose; that doesn’t work for me. But the curtain certainly does.

Gone are the courtly dances of Act Two – Bourne has moved in the opposite direction from his Cinderella, which was the first to rehabilitate Prokofiev’s world-travel divertissement – but we get the vision imaginatively treated, and more of the Entr’acte Symphonique’s spellbinding sleep music than ever before (still not quite the crucial 100 bars I discovered it to be, but everything except a repeat; the charismatic Jurowski lookalike Ben Bunce pictured with Vassallo below).

Of course there are no fairy-tale animals at the ball, but the radical, near-atonal Puss in Boots number is brilliantly staged when our hero infiltrates the black and red Walpurgis Night and the brilliant 5/4 Sapphire Variation is a welcome survivor from the second fairy sequence. A shame the Bluebird enchantment wouldn’t fit into this context. But the real problem is that chunks of a divertissement can't really be pressed into service for the long-term dramatic narrative which Tchaikovsky has abandoned (in favour of something equally wonderful) at this point. Anyway although by and large the biggest orchestral climaxes aren't matched by the fitful classicism of the choreography, the corps numbers, the Polonaise and the Mazurka, get vintage Bourne creepy-mannerist treatment. And the fashionable Twilight/Buffy links are canny.

The Apotheosis brings a neat return to the best idea of the Prologue. How prescient was it to give a major role to a royal baby?

Forewarned was forearmed in the case of the pre-recorded score. I’d hated the over-amplification of Prokofiev’s Cinderella music, and when I met two of Bourne’s team with J at the Garrick on Monday, I asked if this couldn’t be at a more natural level. Well, it was, and truthful enough to tell that Brett Morris had mostly done a wonderful job, with especially good violin solos from Gina McCormack. I loved the tempo for the Lilac Fairy music at the end of the Prologue, and the ‘Sleep’ Entr’acte sounded as spellbinding as it can.

That bewitching sequence came as a bit of a shock on Järvi’s recording: virtually double the tempo, with the Carabosse chords broken rather than sustained. He also has a Panorama at a speed which the woodwind and horn support can only just articulate, and a sprint at the end of the sublime Bluebird Adagio. But, for all that they probably couldn’t be danced to, how filled with energy are the faster passages. Järvi (pictured below by Till Veerhae) offers characteristic rubato that's often so subtle as to be barely perceptible but gives so much life to the symphonic passages, and a spectacular recording provides extended dynamic range which is especially impressive at the piccolo end.

Was it necessary to bring in James Ehnes and Robert deMaine respectively for the violin and cello solos? I wasn't sure at first, having heard Aurora’s Variation in Act One more powerfully done. But Ehnes’s sophistication creates wonders in the big Entr'acte Bourne found such a good use for, and the cello’s Andante Cantabile offshoot in the vision has wonderful life and line. There are some wackily extended harp cadenzas, and the woodwind in the animal portraits are a dream.

I did a Radio 3 Building a Library on the ballet score some years back, when Ermler’s Covent Garden performance came out on top; now I reckon it would be a very close-run thing between that, Lanchbery’s dansante Philharmonia recording, which took some time to appear on CD and now Järvi’s. His has the most demonstration-quality sound of them all. And I can say here, hoping to be believed, my devotion has nothing to do with the fact that I have a stake in its success…