Two Soviet chamber masterpieces of 1927

The teenage Shostakovich entered the third term of my Russian music Zoom course three Thursdays ago with the audacious gambit of his First Symphony, which I managed to link to more Myaskovsky (the Sixth, his biggest and darkest symphony, took up the first third of the class, though the link to Shostakovich 1 was a passage in the finale of the Fourth). I've always had a problem hearing Shostakovich's first symphonic flourish placed at the end of a concert: the first two movements are brilliant and immediately characteristic, the third sludgy and the finale flailing - as I always found even before I knew he had real trouble ending the work.

Though shorter, the first Shostakovich outright masterpiece, I'd say, is the Prelude and Scherzo for string octet. It's up there with Mendelssohn's and Enescu's achievements in the same genre as teenagers, though very different in mood. I played the students just the end of the opening piece and the whole of the scherzo in a hell-for-leather, biting performance by the Borodin and Prokofiev Quartets, and the response was wildly enthusiastic. That's on YouTube, but oddly not downloadable. I searched others, and the most rewarding - visually as well as aurally - is this distinguished line-up from the Utrecht Festival. The Scherzo starts at 6m03 if you want to cut straight to the frenzy. 

The same was true of how they reacted to the slow movement of Gavriil Popov's Chamber Symphony (Septet), composed in the same year as the Shostakovich work was premiered. In the next class I focused on the year 1927, the high watermark of Soviet musical experimentalism, when the influence was still international (I'm quite pleased to have found a Malevich from that year, reproduced up top, which chimes well with the two finds). Shostakovich's octet pieces were merely premiered that year, but so much else can be shoehorned from a variety of styles - the 'mecanique' imported from France, post-Honegger Pacific 231, in the shape of Mossolov's Zavod with its anvil and metal sheet (I also followed up on Prokofiev's Second Symphony and Le Pas d'acier first), the percussion-only scherzo from Alexander Tcherepnin's First Symphony (actually premiered in Paris), Roslavets' near-atonal Third Piano Trio and the various pieces that Prokofiev heard the younger generation play on his first visit to the Soviet Union early in the year. 

His first acquaintance with Shostakovich was to witness the young firebrand play his First Piano Sonata. and he found it a relief in duller company; he thought Deshevov too insistent with his repertoire, though admired its humour (cue the short piano piece Rails); and got a sense of Popov's incredible talent. The outer movements of the Chamber Symphony have something in common with Prokofiev's own Quintet, composed for Boris Romanov's ballet Trapeze back in 1925, and owe a lot to French chamber music of the time. But the slow movement is unique, I think, especially in the rocking, bluesy passage which appears twice, perhaps the first hint of jazz in Soviet music. You may want to hear the whole thing, and another Dutch-based performance here, this time conducted by Valery Gergiev in Rotterdam, is good to watch; the slow movement begins at13m14s.

That cued the jazz which briefly flourished, partly due to the Leningrad premiere of Krenek's Jonny Spielt Auf (Jonny Strikes Up). So we ended with Shostakovich's arrangement of Youmans' 'Tea for Two' from No, No, Nanette, popular in Russia as 'Tahiti Trot', and one of the companion pieces with which it shared a concert, an equally wacky Scarlatti sonata arrangement. Since then we've moved on to The Nose, The Golden Age and The Bolt; the blow is about to fall next Thursday.

A Beethoven trifle for a time of feasting

No, not one of those ever more elliptical Bagatelles, but a Gerald Barry concoction for Christmas Day, images of which he sent to me as a morning surprise and has given me his kind permission to reproduce here. No prizes for guessing why the trifle is called '5', though funnily enough the image reached me upside down, prompting me to quip that the only thing it brought to mind was one of Janáček's musicalised Czech words (like the example he gives in one of his essays of an old woman calling a chicken, 'na, pipinka, [na, na]'.

Proof that the confection hath a bottom.

And a chance for me to spill a bean or two ahead of 2016 choices. Classical and Opera picks are due out on The Arts Desk tomorrow and Thursday, and I hope I can get round to doing a selection of a few CD oddities here. One which I'll flag in advance, Barry's typically off-kilter homages to Beethoven and other whimsies, I've already reviewed for the BBC Music Magazine - rather typically, it doesn't seem to have made it to their online directory of reviews - and have played three times already.

Needless to say I'm not the only one on TAD who thought the UK concert premiere of Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground was an operatic highlight of 2016 (and see the slightly daft entry on using 'to berserk' as a transitive verb). Hoping that next year might give us a production, but there would have to be animation in it to keep up with the velocity which is its chief characteristic (we got score directions flashing past on the supertitling). I thought that brilliant company 1927 would do the trick; Barry has been interested in the work of Barrie Kosky, who collaborated with 1927 on his Komische Oper Zauberflöte, so maybe there's the answer.

Mirabel's wonderland, 1927's dystopia

It's been a staggering year for opera in the UK: quite how staggering I didn't realise until I tried to compile a shortlist 'Best of 2014' for The Arts Desk, and even then there wasn't time to slip in a mention for one of the best children's operas I've seen, partly because this was its second year of performances - Will Todd's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland around the lawns and glades of Holland Park.

It isn't my intention to go over that magical ground again - I've already done so in review and on the blog - but it crops up again because Mirabel, my youngest goddaughter by 16 years, deep joy to go back into childhood again with words and music, is still caught up in the wonderland magic. She's pictured up top with the enchanting Alice of Fflur Wyn after the show - 1927's production of The Golem, seen above in the first of Bernhard Müller's production photos, will have to wait to move into the limelight - and below treading the Mad Hatter's teapot carpet.

I went up to Islington to deliver gifts for her fourth birthday just over a week before Christmas: Lewis Carroll's own under-10s version The Nursery Alice, the only time John Tenniel ever hand-coloured his own illustrations (specimens below) and with a very different if sometimes, for us, slightly cloying, wit and wisdom for the tots, plus the DVD of the Royal Ballet Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and my own CD compilation of music to go with the book. Note to self of what's on it as I didn't keep a copy, and I can cut and paste this in an email to Mirabel and ma Edwina:

The White Rabbit - 'The Interrupted Departure', No. 17 of Prokofiev's Cinderella

Wonderland and Alice's growing/shrinking - 'The Aquarium' and 'Personages with Long Ears' from Saint-Saëns' Carnival of the Animals

Swimming in the Pool of Tears - 'Panorama' from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty

The Caucus Race - Galop from Khachaturian's Masquerade Suite

The Caterpillar - 'Arabian Dance' from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker

Alice arrives at the Duchess's house, the crying baby and lost in the woods - Sequence from the 'child at play' movement of Strauss's Symphonia Domestica

The Mad Hatter - Polka from Shostakovich's The Age of Gold

Court of the Queen of Hearts and Lobster Quadrille - March and Gavotte from Britten's The Prince of the Pagodas

Trial - second half of Debussy's 'Fêtes' from Nocturnes

Back on the river bank - closing sequence of Debussy's Prelude à l'après-midi d'un faune

It later occurred to me that I could also slip in the end of 'The Tale of Squirrel Nutkin' from John Lanchbery's marvellous score to the Royal Ballet's The Tales of Beatrix Potter' for Bill the Lizard shooting through the chimney and ' Puss in Boots and the White Cat' from Tchaikovsky's The Sleeping Beauty for the Cheshire Cat.

But enough already. The results of this chez Mirabel I have yet to see, but while I was there the young miss bossed ma and me around in scenes from the book in which we both had to play various parts (ma did well when assigned the Duchess) but M was always Alice. I was dead impressed that she cited 'Caucus Race' as one of our scenes, but then I would be, wouldn't I? And apparently 'baroque' is a palace in the sky, stemming from an Aurora Orchestra performance she attended in which that image stood for the style of music.

Before I finish the adoration of young Dancing Delice, as I call Mirabel - as she may or may not embark on the Suzuki method, she may also become Fiddling Felice - I have to put up three shots by mama of her spontaneous and (Edsy swears, and she wouldn't lie) unassisted Lego response a week after she'd been to Holland Park. The Caterpillar:

The Mad Hatter:

and Mr Pantz as the White Rabbit.

I should explain that Mr Pantz is a bad-tempered toy elephant, excluded from Mirabel's christening service but caught eating cake and quaffing champagne at the reception, who is central to artist Edsy's film mythology. Watch him animated (or rather not) in pursuit of mammal studies besides Lake Leman here. And behold him below pictured with some batty friend (apparently).

It's not too tenuous to link the weird and wonderful E Ashton world to the genius I saw on the Young Vic stage the other Saturday. The young and brilliant company 1927 - still not got to the origin of the date-name, but I assume it's to do with a heyday of silent film expressionism - gave us their own 90-minute take on the Jewish myth of the Golem (pronounced Goe-lem, hence not to be confused with Tolkien's little monster), that clay mannekin which takes on a life ot its own. My colleague Alexandra Coghlan's five star review on The Arts Desk was all the encouragement I needed to go back to my favourite London theatre. If you think video production has been overdone in theatre, think again. This is one long animated film, brilliantly realised by Paul Barritt, in which the cast of five play live parts.

Not only that, but two or more of them keep the piano and percussion score by Lillian Henley going. It's based almost entirely on tritones and obsessively monothematic, never monotonous, and for the second time at the Young Vic since Richard Jones's sensational Annie Get Your Gun, with its anti-choreography, we get show numbers which are the antithesis of showy. Except, that is, for the songs of the punk band run by the sister of the protagonist, who narrates this fable of technological 'improvement'.

Should I give the story away? I think I'll let you see how they tell it for yourselves; suffice it to say that Golem One sets in the rot, Golem Two is a control-freak who helps the 'hero' to what he wants, including two girlfriends

and Golem Three is IN US. I have only one slight cavil, that the material is a touch overstretched, but there's so much to take in at every point that it's never exactly boring. It ought to run off with every award for theatrical ingenuity; certainly it's one of my shows of the year.

When senior goddaughter Rosie May asked me what she should take her 15 year old brother Paddy to see, I suggested this. As it turned out we didn't go to the same performance that Saturday - we got in to the matinee, she and Paddy attended the evening show - but we still met up for a burger lunch at the excellent Young Vic cafe. As not all adults in the below photo wish to have names attached to the jolly pic, suffice it to say that Paddy and Rosie are on the right.

After lunch, the two young 'uns went off to the Imperial War Museum, we were ready for the show and after we came out were rewarded by a sunset on The Cut

which simply got richer as we stood outside chatting.

Half the country may be groaning under heavy snow, but here in London it's been more often than not bright and crisp. And now I must go out for a bike ride while the sun is still shining before the next bout of entertaining.