Into the woods with Wagner's Siegfried

Perhaps I should more accurately have put 'flying through the forest', since the first four Mondays of my Opera in Depth class kept us buoyant in unpromising times. There's so much wit and spirit about young Siegfried's rapport with his scheming foster-father Mime, such galvanising energy about the forging scene, that it was hard to be downcast by dismal circumstances leading up the 31st (and including it; more of what I did on the day anon).

Such are the insane demands on the Heldentenor singing the most taxing role in the rep - Stuart Skelton, talking to me for the Wagner Society, said it was tougher than Tristan, and he'll never take it on - that I've only seen two Siegfrieds live who both lasted that act and looked goodish (in one case) and close to perfect (in the other): Siegfried Jerusalem in the Kupfer production for Bayreuth (image from Act 2 up top), and more recently Stefan Vinke at the Royal Opera, not the loveliest voice but the only other hero to make us leave the auditorium in the interval spinning with exhilaration. Fine actor too.

To guide the class, I've had none but the best for company. Delighted to find that Jay Hunter Morris (pictured above in the first of two Metropolitan Opera photos by Ken Howard) looks and sounds the part, though Robert Lepage's Met production doesn't really have enough Personenregie infill; it seems to rely on the dramatic intelligence of Hunter Morris and his Mime, Gerhard Siegel (also a Siegfried of yore, Vinke told me at another Wagner Soc talk).

Good to have a video-suggested forest and running water, too, but the ineptness of the lighting (too many follow-spots, video strips on faces) lets it down.

Even so, I'll be returning to the Met DVD for the middle of Act 2. After we'd eased in with Hunter Morris and Siegel, I reverted to the Chéreau Ring for the meetings of Donald McIntyre with Heinz Zednik's Mime and Hermann Becht's Alberich (the Licht- and Schwarz-Alberich similarities are brilliantly realised here, as they were in Richard Jones's Royal Opera Ring). The Forging Scene could only be Jerusalem's with Graham Clark's acrobatic Mime - we took the Kupfer production's Act 1 from the second part of the riddle scene (John Tomlinson's Wanderer superb, of course) to the end of the act, where Barenboim takes the last stretch at such a lick, Clark vocally and Jerusalem tapping-wise just keeping up with him. Terrible shame this clip doesn't go to the end, but you see how infilled the production is.

For soundclip excerpts, I was spoiled for choice: Remedios, Dempsey and above all godlike Norman Bailey on the ENO English-language Ring, now on Chandos;

bits of Melchior on various recordings;

Suthaus and Patzak for the sake of Furtwängler's Rome conducting; Domingo amazingly good in an excerpts disc with Pappano conducting the Royal Opera Orchestra (he's best in Siegfried anyway, I think); Hotter with Clemens Krauss, Bayreuth, 1953; for Act 2 Scene 1, Thomas Stewart and Zoltan Kelemen with Karajan and the Berlin Phil.

That took up the second half of Monday's class. In the first, we had a visit from the wonderful Tom Eisner. long-serving (30 plus years) first violinist in the London Philharmonic Orchestra, whom I know through his wife Jessica Duchen. Unusually curious for an orchestral musician (though the ones who came to talk at my BBC Symphony Orchestra course were, too), he has long rehearsal break chats with Vladimir Jurowski, who can talk about everything under the sun except sport (not a problem for either of us). There were four full days of rehearsals for Siegfried, and it showed right from the start - see my review for The Arts Desk - and when they embark on the full Ring in January, there will be three rehearsals before Xmas and then two weeks. Here's Tom at the class, happy to show the message on the back of his mobile while I flourish the Dover score of Siegfried.

We know that Jurowski is a phenomenal preparer, and also that he likes to place his players carefully. There was nearly a riot some years back when he wanted the double basses centre back, continental style, but they now prefer it. For Siegfried there were many extra players, making the numbers up, for instance, to sixteen first and sixteen second violins as Wagner stipulates, but Jurowski wanted only 12 each to play much of the score. It was, of course, a concert highlight to have superlative new guest principal horn Nicolas Mooney step forward to shake hands with Kerl's Siegfried and embark on his magnificent solo. Tom had hoped to bring him along on Monday for a reprise, but he was off to Belgium.

Needless to say it was the lazier players who asked to be on the back two desks...not Tom, of course. He said that the violas have it tougher than the violins, but it's still an endurance test, the toughest bits being Siegfried's outbursts over the sleeping Brunnhilde ('Das ist kein Mann', etc). Gossip about the singers was interesting but not repeatable here (he liked them all but was scared of one). The full works next January/Feb will be phenomenal, though we hope for some cast changes. Not, certainly, Adrian Thompson's Mime, Robert Hayward's Alberich or Elena Pankratova, tackling Brünnhilde for the first time. Here she is with Jurowski, Kerl and the players in the second of Simon Jay Price's two images reproduced here (there were so many to choose from).

Meanwhile we'll have ENO Siegfried Richard Berkeley-Steele coming to talk the Monday after next, and I'm working on two illustrious possibilities, about whom it would be precipitate to speculate. Then in the summer term, on to Elektra and Madama Butterfly. I hope the members of the Wagner Society who'v taken my class numbers up to 36 will stay on...

The ENO chorus: heard but not heeded

Famous last words: at the end of my Arts Desk reaction in March 2015 to Arts Council England's punishment of English National Opera, I wrote (with apologies for self-quotation): 'the artistic team is doing superlative work under difficult circumstances, delivering time after time. It would be criminal to see it disembowelled. So here's hoping newly-appointed CEO Cressida Pollock can build on what's daringly best about the company rather than plunge in with slash-and-burn techniques.'

'Slash-and-burn', unfortunately, is the way of McKinseyites like Ms. Pollock, according to a distinguished friend of mine who has had many meetings with their ilk during her years of working in the NHS. Said friend pointed out how the policy is to bring an organisation or department ruthlessly to its knees, then move on and wreak havoc somewhere else.

Ms. Pollock (not pictured in the second image by Robert Workman above: that's Elza van den Heever - I think - as Ellen Orford in the ENO Peter Grimes) started off well enough. I liked the look of her at first nights, where she seemed very engaged and to be having fun. She did indeed make a start with reducing ticket prices. Then the bombshell fell, which most of you know all about, from my banging on about it - and I'm not about to stop: 25 per cent reduction in the annual salary of the chorus (pictured up top with astounding new Verdi/Wagner soprano Tamara Wilson in the ENO Force of Destiny), accordant with a season due to run from September to March only.

That is unacceptable, unarguable, wrong. Period. Yes, money has to be saved, but there is no indication that Pollock and the Board have been listening to the alternatives put forward so far by many among the 5,800 petitioners on Change.org (the number is still rising; there's also an Equity petition which 5,000 + have signed to date). Their numbers include singers, directors, conductors, designers, actors and some of us critics. I'm especially proud to have drawn Vladimir Jurowski's attention to the situation. I thought he'd be a Mensch about it once he knew the facts and he was, writing:

 It's an appalling and unfair way of trying to resolve the financial and managerial crisis in which this wonderful company has found itself for way too long!! I have worked with ENO Chorus and know how incredibly dedicated and hard-working they are! And without its chorus no opera company would be able to carry on. It's like cutting off somebody's foot first and then expect this person to participate in running competitions -- either sadism or colossal stupidity!!! Cut its chorus and you'll kill ENO surely! And with the loss of ENO London's and UK's cultural landscape is going to suffer irreparable damage!!! We have been through similar crisis in Berlin several years ago and yet with some COLLECTIVE EFFORT all three(!!!) opera companies have been saved and continue working successfully... What ENO obviously needs now is a new talented Intendant with a new artistic policy and ideas, not a mutilated chorus!! And the Arts Council's silence is both worrying and shameful.

Jurowski and other famous names have left eloquent comments. Cressida Pollock's only 'reply' has been an unconvincing statement on ENO's website (she may have invented a new verb, 'to casualise'). But she's not addressing people directly. Yes, it's sour grapes from me that she hasn't, after a week, replied to an email I sent her. This is poor: let me use the example of the harder-working Kasper Holten at the Royal Opera in terms of a leader who's responded personally, and personably, to everyone I know. Ms Pollock has a PA, doesn't she? But no, not so much as a 'your comments have been noted' reply. (Pictured below: the ENO Pagliacci, brilliantly reworked by Richard Jones as 'Ding Dong!' performed in a northern repertory theatre - high time that returned; photo by Richard Hubert Smith).

This is the message, FYI, not different from what I 've been writing and saying elsewhere, and attempting to be constructive in asking for alternatives.

Hello Cressida (if I may),

I hope by now that you've seen enough proposals of alternative courses to be taken for ENO not to strike at its heart and its morale. It's true that something needs to give, but despite what you've written on the company website, the administration is not down to its bare bones. Does it really need 11 people in one department to raise a mere £5 million, for instance? Why are there no orchestral musicians or company singers on the board?

Perhaps the best way of all for everyone in the company to show goodwill is for all to take a much lower paycut than the one proposed for the chorus, say five per cent for a year or two until things turn round.  

As you will have seen from all three productions Mark Wigglesworth has conducted so far this season, the quality has never been higher. It simply can't be compromised - and above all you don't want to lose the best conductor ENO has ever had.

I should also recommend a proper debate about the issues involved. Contingents like the Friends of ENO feel badly let down by lack of consultation.

Best wishes,

David

The petition's been running for three weeks now, and there's been no sign of a rapprochement. A lot more people's voices need to be heard by the board - including said Friends, whose money the admin is happy to have, but not their thoughts. A student told me of one who was brushed aside by a board member in the last crisis and told to enjoy the opera, not worry his head about accounts (he happened to be a top accountant. Needless to say he withdrew his support).

I mean what I wrote about Wigglesworth as Music Director; he deserves an Artistic Director of similar vision to work with, and soon. The chorus also sang its fairly routine stuff in Bellini's Norma with sheen and passion, and to a huge ovation on first night. They did what Christopher Alden's clunky production asked them to do, and to be fair, he brought them forward on the curtain call for a second ovation. By the way, I'm not anti-Aldens; C's Britten Dream was a radical rethink that worked for me.

Make no mistake, a full-time chorus in a big company is not part of a museum culture but essential for 20th and 21st century masterpieces too: without it, no top-notch Peter Grimes, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Turandot, Julietta (pictured above by Robert Workman) or The Gospel According to the Other Mary, to cite a few essentials among the kind of electrifying music-drama ENO has been doing best for years. So, for the third time of asking - and having sent out a round robin to 150 students, with the result of five bothering to comment, I know it has to be repeated - sign and comment on The Spirit of Lilian Baylis's petition if you haven't done so already.

UPDATE (26/2) The Chorus has voted 100 per cent in favour of a strike after an Equity ballot. They were to be seen and heard earlier this morning outside ACE headquarters.

No sign of a shift from CEO or Board. This list of mostly irrelevant worthies, poorly put together, tells us all we know as to why there needs to be a clean sweep in this part of the ENO admin. Only one member has had any previous hands-on experience of opera companies.

Just read a response from ENO management to the strike proposals. No amount of arguing is going to justify the injustice of making professionals take a nine-month salary per year. No hint, even, of investigating alternative avenues (for alternatives there must be).

SECOND UPDATE (29/2) Not to namedrop, but to point out a further dimension to the argument: I was having supper with four singers of note (to put it mildly) - our beloved friend Linda Esther Gray (pictured above second from left), Valerie Masterson (left), Meryl Drower and Clare Moll - plus other spouses, and they made this point very passionately: that the chorus were such a rock and support to them when they appeared on the ENO stage. They pointed out that such experience and solidarity is especially important for young soloists and were horrified at the prospect of dissolution. Valerie has in fact signed the petition and I urged them to phrase their feelings in comments, but if they don't, this is a record of what they said.

A second e-mail  I sent to Cressida Pollock last week has also so far gone unanswered. And she has not corrected the factual errors on her ENO website statement. This does not bode well for 'listening'. No doubt the management will be trumpeting the nomination of the very chorus it's aiming to destroy, along with the ENO Orchestra, for the Olivier Awards' Best Achievement in Opera. They have to win, don't they? I'm sure Felicity Palmer, Antonio Pappano and Tamara Wilson, the other nominees, will cheer them loudly if they do.

THIRD UPDATE (5/3) Cressida Pollock's latest statement on the ENO site: quite apart from the spin and the unfair misrepresentation of the company's artists' attitude to negotiation, it contains a figure that is categorically wrong, stating ENO's need to survive on an annual budget of £12.38 million. That's the Arts Council subsidy, not the entire figure, which is twice that amount. Not impressive for a McKinseyite from an accountancy firm. The error has not been corrected despite repeated requests.

Things may turn even nastier with the arrival of a very aggressive 'negotiator' taking an alleged cut of £800 a day. Not encouraging when said negotiator played a part in the destruction of Scottish Opera as we knew it.

A wise head on young shoulders has just updated a very thoughtful blog entry on the situation here. And here are eloquent words as ever from a known and trusted colleague.

FOURTH UPDATE (17/3)

Wonderful message today from Sir Peter Jonas (pictured), the only administrator in the whole sorry affair to speak sense. OK, so that's because he's very much on the side of Save ENO, but still, this is good.

The Board of ENO do not heed or take kindly to advice and are behaving autocratically and irresponsibly towards the company, employees and art form that they are charged with protecting and supporting. They also fail to raise, from within their numbers and from their network of acquaintances, enough money to take up the financial slack after squeezing the maximum amount of financial income from the company’s work. This is on its own irresponsible. They have also failed to argue and fight ENO’s corner by directly confronting the ACE and by enlisting enough support in the political arena. These failures are impeachable but the sad truth is that it is employees, artists and the art form that will suffer the consequences. Over here, on the continent (deemed as irrelevantly “foreign” by the ENO Board) we have also had out battles to save opera companies over the last 25 years but threatened companies have survived because those responsible for them directly and indirectly as well as artists and committed support staff have fought back continually with civil courage and commitment. ENO is the bedrock of Opera in the UK. If the ACE can starve it to an untimely demise then the future of all opera companies in the UK is threatened and the demise of the once proud Scottish Opera is a frightening precedent !!! Mark Wigglesworth MUST be listened to and needs a strong partner as artistic director who should be, together with him, the internal and external figurehead of the company inspiring great work and fighting for the art form, artists and a clear vision of the future. I have not seen or heard any evidence of vision in the utterances of the ENO Board or management since this crisis was made public. THIS is the true scandal. 

Final footnotes: the strike in Act 1of Akhnaten at the last performance is now off, though the troubles are far from abating, and my crucial interview with ENO Chorus members went up on The Arts Desk earlier this week.

As a reaction to their withdrawn engagement in Sunset Boulevard, not a protest, the ENO Chorus is giving three April performances in London churches conducted by Wigglesworth of the Brahms German Requiem in its London version with two pianos. Full details here.

FIFTH UPDATE (18/3) A deal has been reached, but it's far from ideal, not least because the company will still be part-time with no operas performed between March and June. Details here.

Rachmaninov and Rossini: soulmates?

Such unlikely bedfellows, you might think, especially from their physical appearances later in life. Yet it was precisely at these stages that depression took a more persistent hold, that the inspiration become sparser - famously no operas from Rossini in the last 39 years of his life, and only five major works from Rachmaninov in the last 25 of his - and also that the quirkiness in what they did compose became more marked. Over the past week I've devoted myself to one or the other - Rossini for the second of my Guillaume Tell classes at the Frontline Club, Rachmaninov for a BBC Music Magazine feature and a pre-performance talk with Vladimir Jurowski at his request before the brilliant finale of his LPO series* matching the best-known works of the composer with the rich and rare.

One element I found the two share in their late(r) works should have been obvious to me but only struck me now: the way they work within conventional harmonic boundaries - essential for Rossini up to a point, almost a point of honour for Rachmaninov as the natural heir of Tchaikovsky living through the 20th century's first three decades of change. It's especially marked with Rossini's last opera and the instrumental pieces how the miniature can be floating along in bel canto or French-Italian manner only to end with a little twist or kick.

Rachmaninov very rarely ends a movement with an obvious gesture; I'm thinking, in the larger scale, of the forlorn descent of the two clarinets at the end of the 'Wedding Bells' sequence in The Bells, but it also applies to many of the songs where the piano coda usually adds something surprising. Never more so than in the rich unfolding of distant harmonies at the end of 'Son' ('Sleep' - or 'Dream'; the Russian word means both). The poem is by Fyodor Sologub (pictured below in 1910 by Serov), so far removed from the world of that bleak novelistic masterpiece The Petty Demon.

I've tried to render its economy in translation:

In the world there is nothing
More desired than sleep.
Enchantment is in it,
It has peace,
It has neither sorrow
Nor laughter on its lips,
And in its fathomless eyes
Many mysteries.
It has two wide,
Wide wings,
Light ones, so light,
Like midnight mist.
No-one knows how it bears us,
Nor where to or on what.
It does not flap its wings
And does not move its shoulders.

A necessary prompt since this performance, which I very much like, by Julia Lezhneva, has no subtitles.

How does Rossini compare? Well, the surprises are often found mid-flow, as in the little woodwind warning that breaks the idyll of the opening chorus in Guillaume Tell; every number in this leisurely first act has something original about it. But to find a song with a novel progression at the end, how about this little gem to which there is more than at first meets the ear. The poet is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, no less, a connection with last week's Guillaume Tell session, for which I unearthed a consummate French horn performance of a shepherd's Ranz des vaches known as the 'Rousseau' because the Genevan transcribed it. You can barely make him out in this painting by Dunouy of the master meditating in the park at La Rochecordon

but it chimes with the mood of 'Ariette à l'ancienne':

How the day seems long
When I am far from you!
All nature
Is now nothing to me.

The greenest grove
When you come not there
Is a mere wild place
Without appeal for me.

Rossini repeats the first stanza thrice and the second twice, not always to the same music. But it's the chromatic writing at the end which made me sit up when I was half-listening to later Rossini melodies on a Rossini recital recorded by Cecilia Bartoli back in 1990. The performance on YouTube, with a near-invisible Gyorgy Fischer at the piano, is somewhat later.

Rossini's originality was hard at work in those later decades - exercising harmonic ingenuity around one or two notes from the voice, and having fun with nigh-on 50 settings of Metastasio's very standard sentiments in 'Mi lagnerò tacendo'. I always think it's a shame that Hofmannsthal didn't choose this rather than 'Di rigori armato il seno' for the Italian tenor's aria in Der Rosenkavalier, but the latter is also the text for the Italian singer in the 'Ballet des Nations' in Molière/Lully's Le bourgeois gentilhomme, more relevant to what came next in the Strauss/Hofmannsthal partnership.

Anyway, here's Ceci singing three settings with Jean-Yves Thibaudet, respectively dark, poised and cheeky. La Bartoli's (over) play in the less-than-minute-long finale may cause listeners to miss the rarity of the form - a 'Sorzico', Spanish dance in 5/4, so a very early use of the metre in a classical work, to set alongside the Wedding Chorus in Glinka's A Life for the Tsar - and the spiciness of the vocal twists.

Wednesday night's Rachmaninov concert started with transcriptions none of us had heard before: orchestrations of four early piano pieces by a name hitherto unknown to me, Yury Butsko, comrade of Sviridov and Shchedrin, and arrangements of 10 short songs made for the great Ivan Kozlovsky in the early 1960s by Jurowski's grandfather, also Vladimir - thus enabling me to have chaired two talks featuring three generations of Jurowskis (unforgettable, though sadly by accident unrecorded by the LPO, the chat with his conductor father Mikhail before a blistering performance of Schnittke's First Symphony).

It was news to me how Rachmaninov's non grata status in the Soviet Union began to change with his financial support for the war effort, causing The Bells of all works - Jurowski's absolute favourite for depth and range - to be performed on the eve of the notorious 1948 show trials of 'formalism' in music, though without the organ.

I also nodded vigorously at Vladimir's assertion that the fourth piece arranged by Butsko, 'Easter', the finale of the Suite No. 1 for two pianos, is a precursor of the Minimalists. The basis is a tritone-haunted bell ostinato, as in the Coronation Scene of Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, broken occasionally by a famous 'Christ is risen' Orthodox chant. It's a desert island track as played on my recording with Argerich and Rabinovich - still more amazing than the Butsko transcription - but  I was pleased to come across this recording by Anastasia and Lyubov Gromoglasova. Odd that the camera only concentrates on one of the sisters, but that gives you a good idea how the lines are parcelled out.

Any other connection between Rachmaninov and Rossini? Respighi, who transcribed five of the great Etudes-Tableaux and turned Rossini's 'sins of my old age' into the brilliant potpourri ballet La boutique fantasque, which I've been listening to today alongside Britten's Rossinian dance suites the Soirées and Matinées Musicales (the Matinées begin with instrumental innovations on the Pas de six in Act 1 of Guillaume Tell, and end with something outlandishly Brittenesque). I want to get to know Respighi's sources, because if they contain anything like the number of dissonances and twists that appear in the ballet, they'll be more oddities to add to the Rossinian collector's corner.

A last word about two recordings I couldn't be without featuring the music of both composers. After the concert I went back to playing the two versions of Rachmaninov's Op. 39 Etudes Tableaux which kept neck and neck at the end of my Radio 3 Building a Library on this fascinating sequence. I still find it the greatest piano opus in Rachmaninov's susbstantial invention, and I still don't want to choose between Rustem Hayroudinoff and Alexander Melnikov - each has the edge on the other in certain numbers, but both are teeming with imagination throughout.

Yet as a disc Melnikov's is probably No.1 on the Rach shelf  (I'd also need the Kondrashin double of The Bells and Symphonic Dances, probably the Argerich/Rabinovich double act too). That's because it breaks up piano works - the concluding opus is the spellbinding late Variations on a Theme of Corelli - with the last set of songs, composed for Nina Koshetz shortly before Rachmaninov left Russia in 1917. It was here I first heard and fell in love with 'Son'. And the equivalent, much darker and more expensive masterpiece in the piano output, Op. 39 No. 7 in C minor, probably has its spacious apogee in Melnikov's hands (not bad considering Richter is high up among the competition).

I blush to confess that the collection of songs and scenes middle and late from Cecilia Bartoli and the underrated Charles Spencer (once Christa Ludwig's pianist of choice, now Anne Schwanewilms's) wasn't one I'd turned to much until the Guillaume Tell classes. And then I've played it again and again since. The six 'Mi lagnerò tacendo' choices are all fascinating, 'L'orpheline du Tirol' is bigger than I thought, and the gran scena at the end, Giovanna d'Arco is an amiable stunner.
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*Before you accuse me of reviewing a concert in which I played a small preliminary part, let me explain that I asked all my Arts Desk colleagues to step in, met with no success, thought I wouldn't write about it, but then realised that it was too vital and unforgettable an event to ignore. My feeling about writing about the work of performers I know and like is no shame, because I came to know them exactly through being an admirer of their art in the first place. And you can find reviews where I was less than enthusiastic about a Jurowski interpretation.

The bitter tears of Sergey Rachmaninov

 

Rachmaninov at the premiere of The Miserly Knight, 11 January 1906, with I. Grizunov (the Duke), G. Baklanov (the Baron) and A. Bonachich (Albert)

How glad I am Vladimir Jurowski still believes in the most haunting of Rachmaninov's three operas, The Miserly Knight, its text adapted practically word for word from Pushkin's magnificent 'little tragedy' (Skupoi Ritsar in the Russian - 'covetous' may hit the mark even better than 'miserly', especially since, as I only learnt a couple of days ago, Pushkin intended seven plays for each of the deadly sins, though he only reached four. For more on the origin of this frontispiece, see further down).

Nearly a decade on from his Glyndebourne championship, Jurowski (pictured below by Chris Christodoulou) conducted an orchestrally unsurpassable performance of The Miserly Knight in Wednesday night's London Philharmonic Orchestra programme, a fascinating double bill about gold and greed with substantial excerpts from Wagner's Das Rheingold in the first half. When he recently decided to join the pre-performance talk originally to have been given by director Annabel Arden alone, I was privileged to be asked to chair the chat. That meant handing over the review to my Arts Desk colleague Matthew Wright; he got it, I think.

Talk and performance were absolutely fascinating and challenging. VJ never views things from a conventional angle, and the way he manipulates the English language to express complicated thoughts simply is a marvel. Besides, who else would have pulled off this programme? The Rheingold sequence was infinitely more satisfying than Dudamel's disastrously paced and ineptly snippeted 'Entry of the Gods into Valhalla' the other week. It had been advertised as orchestral music only, but then Jurowski realised there wasn't enough to stand by itself. He found out that Sergey Leiferkus, his Baron, towering protagonist of The Miserly Knight, had sung Alberich and it all flowed from there. Thus we got the whole of the introduction, first scene and interlude up to the Valhalla theme, with the Rhinemaidens, in Arden's semi-staging, undulating above and below the front row of choir stalls. The Woglinde, recent Guildhall graduate Natalya Romaniw, took a minute to settle, but what a voice this is - I hear a potential Sieglinde in there.

Jurowski made the score gleam and undulate, as if we were in a finer acoustic that the RFH's (when I returned in the talk to his question of doing a whole Ring with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which he'd brought up at an earlier meeting, he said they'd need a whole new construction to house it). There was perhaps a touch too much care for the descent to and ascent from Nibelheim, and the patching felt a bit conspicuous from here up to the final sequence, but the anvils - 8, said the programme; 18, said VJ; 10 came on for a bow - resonated marvellously. Nor were the gods very Wagnerian-divine, but it was good to have the Rhinemaidens at the back rather than offstage, chilling the blood. And yes, we got six harps.

The Rachmaninov was, by contrast, impassioned, absolutely sure in every gesture - having played for the Glyndebourne 2004 production, the LPO still seems to have the music in its blood - and enshrined the most magnificent monologue in the operatic world from a still-untiring Leiferkus (there was a point a couple of years ago where I thought the voice was worn out, but little sign of that here). Annabel's finest touch was to find, unforced, a second role for the singer-actresses portraying Wagner's Rhinemaidens, as young Norns hovering above the Baron - especially valid since, as she pointed out, Russian abstractions like Death and Fate are feminine. The three made it work chillingly well.

We also spoke of how Rachmaninov takes a leaf out of Wagner in his slow-burn crescendos. There are two, the biggest, which seems to go on for ever before imploding, when the Baron, Bluebeard-like, lights candles and opens his six jewel-caskets. But the one with the more poetry to go with it is perhaps the more haunting in both music and text. Thus James E Falen's translation, preserving the Shakespearean iambic pentameters of Pushkin's original:

Ah yes! If all the tears, the blood and sweat
That men have shed for such a hoard as this
Should suddenly gush forth from out the earth,
There'd be a second flood - and I'd be drowned
Inside my trusty vaults.

As luck would have it, the fourth instalment of the Glyndebourne film downloaded to YouTube - I don't know for how long (and I'd urge you to buy the DVD, which is beautifully presented) - starts at exactly this point. So you can hear how Rachmaninov develops the extraordinary four-note ostinato of the third movement from his Suite No. 1 for two pianos, 'Tears' ('Slyozi'). This in turn derives from the bells of Novgorod, which haunted Rachmaninov from childhood. So that comes first here in the partnership of Nikolay Lugansky and Vadim Rudenko - my CD benchmark is Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch - and is followed by Leiferkus in the middle of Scene 2. Arden's production has the masterstroke of an aerialist, Matilda Leyser (now married to Phelim McDermott, Annabel told me), who scared the life out of me with her big eyes, as the fateful spirit of avarice.

Pushkin's monologue is great in itself: I've determined to learn it in Russian, as I started to learn Pimen's speech from Boris Godunov; let's see if I can get further this time  (Russians always appreciate you quoting some Pushkin - J can impress with 'Shto dyen gryadushy mne gotovit' since Tchaikovsky set Lensky's lines very faithfully). I'd also like to do my own translation and I've just discovered these illustrations for the Little Tragedies by a talented young artist, Ievgen Kharuk - very much in the tradition of Russian book illustration (though Ievgen is from Kiev, more power to his pen). Note the key motif from The Miserly Knight on the cover for all four works.

Look at more of his work here. It should, of course, be published. On which note, it saddens but doesn't surprise me to learn of the latest philistinism to dog the better part of Putin's Russia: the great publications known as 'thick' journals, a glory of the Russian intelligentsia even in Soviet times, are in danger of extinction and the dangerous fraud who's supposed to be the Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky (the one who said Tchaikovsky wasn't gay - see the footnote here - and who went on to even greater glories), won't lift a finger to help. 

 In the meantime, the staff of Moskva, the journal which first published Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, are ploughing on this month and the next unsalaried to try and save their great institution. The Interpreter has its rigorous finger on the pulse of this as of so much else. I know, pace David Damant's comment to a recent post, that it's partial as an instrument of opposition, but it does its best to provide chapter and verse against the scandalously nebulous propaganda pouring out of Russia at the moment.

A final, not unconnected, point: a far more incriminating photo than the above from 2004, along with detailed facts, here point to why there should be an immediate end to Anna Netrebko's hit-and-miss career in the west. If she was naive to think that giving money to a Donetsk opera and theatre company to carry on had nothing to do with separatist propaganda, then she should definitely have stopped when they asked her to hold the flag. Simple equation: if you pay to see Anna Netrebko, you're funding the daily murder of civilians in a war within Ukraine's legal borders - no doubt by both sides -  which the Ukrainians did nothing to start. And as a general principle, applicable to Gergiev too, the author of the article, Julia Khodor Beloborodov of Arts Against Aggression, is surely right:

Artists and their art can stand apart from politics. However, artists who use their artistic reputations to further a political cause cannot then be allowed to hide behind that reputation and claim to not be political actors.

Anyway, Netrebko's Iolanta and Four Last Songs discs are poor. That may be beside the point, but at least I wrote about those before I knew anything about this. 

Stritch in time

So here's to the girls on the go - 
Everybody tries.
Look into their eyes
And you'll see what they know:
Everybody dies.

A toast to that invincible bunch,
The dinosaurs surviving the crunch - 
Let's hear it for the ladies who lunch!
Everybody rise! Rise!
Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!

Sondheim composed that mighty song in Company for Elaine Stritch, specifically for her 'acerbic delivery of self-assessment', just as he wrote Gypsy's 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' for Ethel Merman and A Little Night Music's eleven-o-clock number 'Send in the Clowns' for the inimitable short-windedness of Glynis Johns. I posted one of Lainey's many versions of 'The Ladies Who Lunch' back in 2010 here.

Now Stritch has joined Ethel in a heavenly Broadway, having lived to the age of 89 still a trouper despite four decades of heavy drinking and the rest living with diabetes. David Benedict has written a wonderful reminiscence of significant meetings with this straight-talking dame on The Arts Desk, and I hope others will come up with their Stritchstories too. But no obituary is going to match the life history, at least up to 2002, of the one-woman show Elaine Stritch At Liberty, which I count myself hugely fortunate to have seen at the Old Vic. Nothing, I think, can beat the work you have to do to visualise and keep up with her on the two-CD set of that event, so having said, buy it, I shoot myself in the foot by putting up the entire film as it appears on YouTube.

One bonus of the CD set is John Lahr's brilliant essay about working on a show which ended up 'Constructed by John Lahr, Reconstructed by Elaine Stritch' (we both laughed out loud at what he reports she said to him when he handed her an autographed copy of one of his books: 'John, you gotta stop givin' me these books with your signature. I can't give 'em away'). I think he sums it all up when he writes: 'By revealing conflict, failure, and the emotional price of Broadway survival, the show could generate that ozone of anger and anxiety which is, finally, the Stritch climate'.

Yet let's not forget the laughs won by perfect timing, the impeccable cadencing of a very distinctive language. She's irreplaceable, but we will continue to rise for this very human legend. To complete the Liberty life story with a perfect epilogue offering some overlap, it's vital to watch this New York Times film. Only Stritch, perhaps, could back up her thoughts on the possibility of an afterlife with lines from The Sound of Music's 'Something Good'.

The other big death this week left me oddly unmoved: could I honestly recall any concert of Lorin Maazel's which has stayed with me, or even - despite praise for his early Sibelius and Tchaikovsky - any one recording? Well, maybe the Teatro alla Scala performance I saw of Puccini's La fanciulla del West, when I  found him in enthusiastic mode for the interview (for Manon Lescaut the following year he was just jaded and downright rude). When J told me the news of his death, my first thought was, phew, didn't write the Guardian obit, won't have to update - and then a lady from the obits desk rang and asked me to do just that; I'd completely forgotten. So I added a paragraph and the results are here.

Would I have forgotten the labours of love for Mackerras or Abbado? I hope not. I happened to be in Berlin in June en route for Dresden, catching an all-Strauss concert for which, I must be honest, I was pleased to find Semyon Bychkov had replaced him (with a better programme, too - out with the tacky music-minus-three Rosenkavalier Suite, in with an ineffable Schubert Nine). It was a beautiful summer evening with the moon rising over the Scharoun-designed Philharmonie in the interval.

 I come to love the building, especially its foyers and auditorium, the more I visit it.

Inside the first face to greet me was Abbado's: nowhere except perhaps Lucerne reveres his memory more than the Berlin Phil, so this little exhibition of some wonderful photos

and many of his best musical observations held pride of place.

A shame there's no English tome on him comparable to the several in German and Italian. Give it time.

On which note, I turn sourly to a conductor who could sometimes be almost as great in performance as Abbado - possibly still can be - but whose pact with the Putin devil must surely end his career in the west. If anyone still has any doubts about the unworkability of Valery Gergiev conducting the World Orchestra for Peace at the Proms this evening - performances in Aix and Munich have already been cancelled - watch this interview in English by a Helsinki journalist (a minute or so of Finnish precedes it). My thanks to 'Boulezian' Mark Berry for drawing my attention to it.

If you can't be bothered to sit through the rather grim spectacle, I've jotted down a few choice phrases: [Eastern Ukraine] 'is not a problem of Russia - Ukrainian people kill each other'. On Crimea: 'it was not annexation, people were voting to leave Ukraine. There were too many Nazi elements...Those who killed so many people in Kiev and burnt so many people in Odessa, the east calls them Fascists, we don't want to stay with the Fascists.' Mattila, who stated that she would not work with Gergiev again, 'doesn't understand anything in politics, she has absolutely no idea what is happening in Ukraine...how she will look into the eyes of mothers who had children killed - there are many children killed'.

He is entitled to believe all this if he wants - though of course war quickly spawns atrocity on both sides, and no doubt there are refugees pouring into Russia - and if there were no political or humanitarian aspect to his work, we could note it and move on. But following his unequivocal support of Putin's re-election campaign and his jumping to be included on a list of signatures approving the Crimean occupation, a slightly more objective stance than this would be needed to justify his post at the head of a 'Peace' Orchestra (which has suffered already from scandals of funding in the recent past). I state this here because the driving force of The Arts Desk thinks I just want to 'pick a fight' with a conductor I used to respect, and always enjoyed meeting. So no more space to sound off there. (Update, Monday: photo by Chris Christodoulou from last night. No kerfuffles have been reported so far, more shame on the British public).

I do think a valid comparison is to be made with Vladimir Jurowski. No, he isn't living in Russia and he doesn't have to work with the regime. But it was still courageous of him to address a Moscow audience back in May about the gay aspect of Britten's War Requiem, how Britten and Pears were officially criminals for many years, how even Wilfred Owen was gay. No doubt which of those two conductors these two composers, snapped after a Moscow Conservatory performance of Britten's works in 1966, would applaud. One only has to remember Shostakovich's setting of Yevtushenko's 'A Career' at the end of his Thirteenth Symphony to know what he might be thinking of Gergiev were he still alive.

My thanks to Gavin Dixon for drawing my attention to the film of Jurowski's speech (in Russian, linked on Gavin's blog entry), and also most recently for a description of a Socialist-Realist style reworking of a dodgy opera as Crimea in St Petersburg, which would be funny if it weren't so ominous a sign of history repeating itself.

On a less heinous scale, Long Yu, the conductor of last night's China Philharmonic Prom which I didn't hear, is a party apparatchik who even if he were a decent conductor already holds more prominent posts than is healthy for a man in his position. That he's atrociously poor I can attest from the worst conducted performance I've ever heard, a spectacularly testudinal Elgar Cockaigne Overture with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I have it from the horse's mouth that the players themselves stopped the whole thing falling apart as early as the tenuto in the second full bar. The orchestra petitioned their general manager to make sure they never worked with him again, but he said he couldn't guarantee it where big bucks from China were concerned.

Heigh ho, things at the Proms, which began well enough on Friday night, should start looking up again from tomorrow onwards. On Tuesday I'll be chatting with Sara Mohr-Pietsch and Hugo Shirley in the Proms Plus Intro, 4.45pm at the Royal College of Music down the steps from the Albert Hall, before Glyndebourne presents its Rosenkavalier semi-staged to the South Ken colosseum (I doubt if Richard Jones will have much to do with it; he was disappointed in what he felt were the singers overdoing his WNO Meistersinger at the Proms). I postponed a work trip to Italy by a day in order to take part, and much as I keep moaning that the Proms should have done Strauss proud with more arcane semi-staged operas like the fabulous Feuersnot, of course I'm pleased to be able to hear Rosenkavalier live for a fourth time this year.

Why Glyndebourne's Ariadne works for me

It's not fared well in the press, but Katharina Thoma's production of Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos adds up. At least it did for me when after all that talking about it I finally got to see this very original take on my desert island opera at Glyndebourne on Sunday. The cynical might say I was primed to like it by Thoma and the very intense mezzo singing the pivotal role of the Composer, Kate Lindsey (in the first of Alastair Muir's production photos above), when I spoke to them a week before the opening for The Arts Desk. It's true that everything Thoma explained about Ariadne's longing for death along with Bacchus's emergence from a life-threatening experience made sense as applied to traumatised victims of the Second World War in a makeshift country-house sanatorium who move from darkness to light. But it could have remained just a concept.

Instead, what ultimately materialised was what I'd most expected to miss - poet Hofmannsthal's essential 'mystery of transformation' - as Vladimir Jurowski gave the last half-hour wings and two very fine singers rose to the challenge. Soile Isokoski is no great shakes as a mover, but she acts with the voice, and what an ideally Straussian one it is for the most part, opulently riding the composer's 37 piece orchestra when it wants to become a hundred-headed hydra for Bacchus's arrival. I believed in her attempted suicide as she awaits the messenger of death; and, though it was all a little quick, in her capitulation to an almost equally befuddled Bacchus. Yes, it did indeed bring tears to the eyes and that sense of heightened emotion we so rarely find in this tricky and usually less than plausible love duet.

Sergey Skorokhodov had been under the weather on the first night, according to reviews, but yesterday evening we got the most convincing heroic-tenor god/hero on both dramatic and vocal fronts I've ever seen and heard in this usually thankless role. Anticipation of his turning up at Convalescence House, heralded not by three nymphs but keyed-up nurses drooling over a newspaper report, was decked out in all the glow the trio had earlier missed in their more Rhinemaidenish scene, the one blip where co-ordination with the London Philharmonic was less than spot-on.

All the more amazing, then, that the Prologue never dropped a stitch. Even the anti-Regietheater hordes surely couldn't have faulted Thoma's close lining-up of every little detail with the febrile clarity of Jurowski's absolutely fresh interpretation. One of many felicitous touches was to add to the four commedia dell'arte (read ENSA) gents - deft lindyhoppers and jitterbuggers in the opera's intermezzo - a fifth, playing the pianist which Strauss so often uses to accompany their antics. He twiddles assent to the Dancing Master's pirouette, and in the opera strikes his little top note on Zerbinetta's 'Verwandlungen' before zipping off to avoid any more of her touching-up.

Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke as said 'choreographer' to the comic troupe is Glyndebourne's character tenor of choice - how I'd love to see him as Mime - and spars well with Thomas Allen's consummate Music Master, still in absolutely top form vocally (above left with Ablinger-Sperrhacke). All the bit parts are taken with the detail only seven weeks of rehearsal at Glyndebourne can allow; among them there's a promising turn from Frederick Long as the Lackey who's knocked over and takes his bullying out on the Composer. Lindsey burns and rages, the boy wonder to the life; if the voice might be a bit slimline for a bigger house, it's perfect here - and indeed, a first-time acquaintance with this most sophisticated of 'little entertainments' in a theatre exactly the right size is a revelation, especially given all that orchestral cleverness.

Is the curtain to the backstage shenanigans one step too far? I think not, given that the music fulminates so and really leaves the action nowhere to go otherwise. A suicide, as in Claus Guth's Zürich production, is no solution, so I reckon Thoma got it right in her given context. We had a bonus, by all accounts, last night: an indisposed Laura Claycomb* - the Zerbinetta pictured below, obviously - was replaced by her cover, Ukrainian soprano Ulyana Aleksyuk. The swelling on the right notes to more than tweety-pie brilliance gave the love-scene of the Prologue a real extra frisson.

In the opera, it turned out Aleksyuk is no spot-on coloratura, but she still carried it off and managed all the top notes. And here I do think the stage business, confining Zerbinetta at her most Lucia-ish to an injection and a straitjacket, is one step too far. At least it cues an hallucinogenic second instalment of the Harlequinade, three of the four boys dragged up as the nurses; a plausible substitute for more of the same, which usually palls. And how dull, brainless and obscure, despite a surprisingly radiant performance from Renée Fleming and a very promising one from Jane Archibald as Zerbinetta, is Philippe Arlaud's Baden-Baden production which I've just reviewed on its DVD release for the BBC Music Magazine.

Anyway, I was duty bound to post this tonight, since tomorrow (Tuesday) is the live screening in cinemas across the country and the livestream via Glyndebourne's own website, both starting at 6.45pm (UPDATE: the whole thing is available to view when you want on the Guardian's website until 31 August). Don't miss one or the other - and stay with the experience to the very end even if you don't at first like what you see of the opera; it really is crowned with the mother of all transcendent finales. A reminder, too, that if you want to mug up on the basics of the elaborate high-art vs low-art drama, the Glyndebourne podcast presented by Peggy Reynolds with some rather alarming interpolations from self is worth a listen or a download here.

So, not quite a perfect view of Ariadne, but when good, great. And there were hardly enough false notes to strip the afternoon and evening of their perfection. I had an especially happy time with the pre-performance talk, and was delighted to welcome in the audience a stylish DJd gentleman with an excellent green mohican and some very classily dressed ladies in shalwar kemises of delicious hues. They were not shy with their thanks afterwards, either.

We also found a fabulous new spot of pleasing remoteness for the picnic. The gardeners have cut green paths through the meadow above the lake and below the sheep field that goes uphill towards the wind turbine. Here the sun warmed us all the way through the long supper interval as we tucked into substantial fare not from Bill's - the old regime of salad boxes is no more - but from a promising cafe/deli closer to the station. A few quick garden shots: most varieties of tulip are over, but not these in the formal garden

and diverse irises are now in their prime.

The cycads shoot out their ferns at last,

the much-loved mulberry near the house is finally leafing - will we be back to enjoy its delicious fruits? - 

and a ceanothus alongside alliums frames the lawn ensembles.

I mentioned Sean Henry's painted bronze sculptures in an earlier entry - any reservations on artistic merit may be offset by the fact that the figures are certainly good theatre - but I fancy Bryn as 'The Wanderer' wasn't there the week before the season started. He certainly is now, and dwarfs a tall admirer of his (this for both our blogging Wanderer and Lottie in Zurich).

Only one sour reminder spoiled the Sussex summer idyll. Every time the train from London to Lewes hits the viaduct at Balcombe, I instinctively look up from whatever I'm reading. It might be the sudden extra light from an abundance of sky, but in any case this is the loveliest part of the journey as you look down on the Ouse valley from a great height. I've never seen the viaduct from below but it enhances rather than spoils the landscape, I think.

Unlike the proposals to frack in the Balcombe area, the thin end of the exploitable wedge. France and Bulgaria won't allow fracking, swathes of America are against it, the evidence of potential damage is mounting all the time, so what motivates our greedy Conservatives -among them Balcombe MP Francis Maude, who appointed Lord Browne, a director of the firm Cuadrilla which intends to exploit these Sussex resources, to the Cabinet Office three years ago?

The gasdrillinginbalcombe Wordpress site which uses the above as its banner (read the inscription and much more here) will keep us all in the picture. And when the local people hold their next protest, I for one hope to be there with them.

*Tuesday evening - so much for the Berglund piece I was supposed to finish tonight. I succumbed to the opera - ie post-interval - partly because I wanted to see Claycomb. And she made more sense of the move from entertainer to crazed nympho: I understand now how it's used as a fulcrum to shift the balance from Ariadne's problems to the ones Zerbinetta turns out to have, too. No injection tonight, by the way. And this time really accurate coloratura which Claycomb could carry out while doing and having done to her all manner of things. 

The duet moved me as before, though for the film they'll have to use Sunday night's take of Bacchus's final phrase; Skorokhodov wasn't quite on the same top form tonight. Now - comments, anyone? Do say if you hated it and we'll argue it out.