Zooming Albert, Tito, and Russians from 1948

It seems appropriate to kick off the summer term of my Opera in Depth Zoom course with Britten's Albert Herring*, that Maupassant-adapted classic operatic comedy - one of the few truly great ones of the 20th century - since we're heading towards the merriest of months, and Eric Crozier's libretto is about a virginal May King crowned in the absence of any suitable village maidens (pictured above by Robert Workman: Richard Pinkstone as Albert with Adrian Thompson as the Mayor, Clarissa Meek as Florence Pike and Orla Boylan as Lady Billows in the wonderful Grange Festival production, which I reviewed on The Arts Desk). 

Helping that great mezzo Jean Rigby and her husband director Jamie Hayes with some of the fiddly bits about Zoom sound and vision for a talk they were giving to the Northampton Opera Group, and instantly warming to them both, I thought I might be able to call upon Jean to talk about the Glyndebourne production originally directed by Peter Hall (and still ready for revival, I think). She's delighted to be able to help, and I'm hoping we might reassemble other members of that original cast, including John Graham Hall, Felicity Palmer and Alan Opie. Fingers crossed.

We kick off next Monday afternoon (19 April), 2.30-4.30pm, and the next three or four Mondays (Bank Holidays obviously excepted) will be devoted to Albert. Then we move on to Mozart's La clemenza di Tito for the following five Mondays (pages of Metastasio's libretto, much used by the time Mozart came to set/adapt it, pictured above), due a new production to mark the Royal Opera's emergence from lockdown. Director Richard Jones and conductor Mark Wigglesworth, both regular visitors to my Opera in Depth courses, have promised to come along. 

The last of four terms on Russian music begins next Thursday, 22 April. You don't need to have attended the other three to follow this one. I've made a provisional draft for each class thus:

1: The Zhdanov trials and after  22 April

After the ‘chaos instead of music’ Pravda article attacking Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk in 1936, a second massive blow fell on Soviet composers in February 1948, when Stalin’s right-hand man Andrey Zhdanov initiated a conference attacking so-called ‘Formalism in Music’. Shostakovich and Prokofiev were the main victims. The attacks on film came earlier: clips from the main culprit, Lukov's A Great Life (Bolshaya Zhizn) - a mining sequence entirely set to music - and Part Two of Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, with Prokofiev's finest film score are followed by the final scene of a party-line monster, Chiaureli's The Fall of Berlin (1949), where Stalinalike Mikhail Gelovani arrives in the destroyed German city to a perfunctory choral epilogue by Shostakovich, and see how Prokofiev adapted with a further simplified, but still characteristic, style. We hope that Steven Isserlis will be our guest to discuss the cello works of that period.

2: The effect of the trials on symphonic music  29 April

We look at Shostakovich’s ‘bottom-drawer’ parody of the event and its 1957 sequel, Rayok or The Musical Peepshow, before hearing excerpts from symphonic music composed in the shadows, with short clips from Myaskovsky's 26th and 27th Symphonies, much more on Prokofiev's Symphony-Concerto and his swansong, the Seventh Symphony, with a backwards glance at his major revision of the 1930 Fourth Symphony in 1947. Andrew Litton returns to the class. 

3: Shostakovich before and after the death of Stalin  6 May

Shostakovich had begun his Tenth Symphony before the death of Stalin on 5 March 1953 (the same day as that of Prokofiev; no surprise to see see how the Italian communist paper l'Unità covered the 'main' event, pictured above) but did not compose the bulk of it until after that watershed, allowing himself an uncharacteristically jubilant if wild finale. Andrew Litton returns to give a masterclass on a symphony he has conducted 66 times. With a brief look at how the 24 Preludes and Fugues were received by a hostile committee in 1951.

4: Chamber and instrumental: Shotakovich and the younger generation in the 1950s 13 May

Shostakovich's position as the supreme chronicler of Russian life and soul was now unchallenged, but new names start to emerge: the considerable figure of Mieczyslaw Weinberg, aka Moisey Vainberg, born in Poland in 1919 but Moscow based from 1943, at Shostakovich’s urging; and Galina Ustvolskaya, Shostakovich’s pupil from 1939 to 1941 and then from 1947 to 1948. Her output is small but original – ‘there is no link whatsoever between my music and that of any other composer, living or dead’, she declared, with a certain hyperbole – and Shostakovich quotes her 1949 Trio for clarinet, violin and piano in his Fifth String Quartet, premiered in 1953.

5: Quotations: Shostakovich's Eleventh Symphony and Eighth String Quartet  27 May

Why did Shostakovich revert to revolutionary songs as the material for his Eleventh Symphony, 'The Year 1905'? We look at some of them with the help of the singing of the National Youth Orchestra players. And what was the real significance of the deeply personal Eighth Quartet? With an interlude in the shape of light music by Kabalevsky and Shostakovich in his operetta Moscow Cheryomushki.

6: Americans in the USSR: Van Cliburn, Bernstein, Stravinsky and Balanchine 3 June

The third great 20th century Russian composer came in triumph to Moscow, celebrating his 80th birthday (pictured above with Rostropovich). We take the opportunity to look at the very different paths he had taken in America, and what came next.

7:  End of the Thaw and musical life after Khrushchev: 1962-8  10 June

Khrushchev's sudden rages against jazz and abstract art signalled a closing-down of hard-won freedoms. Shostakovich's Thirteenth Symphony, setting a range of poems by the young iconoclast Yevgeny Yevtushenko, was a surprise casualty. Meanwhile, dodecaphony was having its impact on a younger generation of composers, but not for long: we see how Alfred Schnittke and the Estonian Arvo
Pärt. With a special visit from pianist Sophia Rahman.

8: The inspirers: great Russian performers of the later Soviet years, Shostakovich and Britten  17 June

Time to consider those towering artists who offered such lifelines to composers in trouble, with special focus once more on Rostropovich, and this time investigating the special connections forged by his wife, soprano Galina Vishnevskaya (pictured above at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport in 1963). Britten quickly became friends with the pair, and later with Shostakovich: we examine further links between the British and Russian composers.

9: Shostakovich: Endgames   24 June

In his later years, an ailing Shostakovich was much preoccupied by death, and approached each work as if it could be his last. The Fourteenth Symphony is his answer to Musorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death, which he orchestrated: a cycle setting poems by Lorca, Apollinaire, Küchelbecker and Rilke for soprano, bass, strings and percussion. The Fifteenth Symphony of 1971 is an autobiographical orchestral summing up, but by no means his last work. Each of the last three string quartets offers a different angle on death: terrified in the Thirteenth, ultimately radiant in the Fourteenth and skeletally enigmatic in the Fifteenth. Parallel are the last song cycles, with explicit reflections in the texts especially of the Michelangelo Suite, and the swansong of the Viola Sonata

10: The end of history – the mid-1970s onwards  1 July

Two towering figures in Russian music emerged after Shostakovich – Alfred Schnittke, who like the master constantly surprised with his eclecticism up to his death in 1998, and Sofia Gubaidulina (born in 1931), who has continued to compose music of a visionary intensity.

If you're interested in signing up - each two-hour class is a tenner, making it £100 for each term - leave me a message here with your e-mail. I won't publish it, but I promise to get back in touch.

*UPDATE - since Mark Wigglesworth offered 24 May for his date to talk about the Royal Opera La clemenza di Tito, I thought we'd actually start with the Mozart instead.