Magdalen in March

If we’re talking about archetypal English afternoons, then I can think of nothing much more perfect than lunch in an Oxford college, a walk around the grounds in warm spring sunshine, and choral evensong in the college chapel. To paraphrase unpoetically one of Oxford’s wisest graduates, gentle reader, do not care to know/Where Russia draws his* eastern bow,/What violence is done,/Nor ask what doubtful act allows/Our freedom in this English town,/Our dining in the sun.

Last Wednesday’s freedom came courtesy of Opus Arte promoting Magdalen College Choir, starting with a CD of Buxtehude’s Membra Jesu nostri. So far I’ve only dipped, but the work is a very quirky gem, celebratory or lamentatory according to what image or incident the limb of each motet conjures up. If I’m to be honest, the evensong was a mixed blessing. I like the bright, open sound the choir makes under Daniel Hyde, very much in the James O’Donnell tradition of more robust, continental style as opposed to the rather bloodless tones of our own cathedral tradition. 

I’d moaned to Philippa Howard, our cicerona, that I much prefer singing Byrd to listening to his music, and had hoped for something Victorian and vulgar in the service, but I’d forgotten what a masterpiece his Second Service is – or rather, the ideas came back as fresh as the day we first sang them on an All Saint’s Banstead cathedral course back in the 1970s. Yet in the anthem, Quomodo cantabimus (which we never performed), I had the curious sensation that the choir was singing ever so slightly sharp throughout – a much better fault than singing flat, indicative of zeal rather than torpor, but disconcerting all the same.

The rest was unalloyed pleasure. Though arriving in Oxford on a late train, I couldn’t resist speeding on foot along a favourite route from the station to Magdalen and was just in time for lunch at the Lodgings of the President, Professor David Clary. This in itself was a privilege – thought the building is nearly all Victorian, it has treasures such as the richly detailed Flemish tapestry received by one of the early Presidents for his part in arranging the match between the ill-fated Arthur, brother of the future Henry VIII, and Catherine of Aragon; both were only 15 at the time of their wedding in St Paul's. The Cathedral claims that this detail, reproduced courtesy of the Master and Fellows of Magdalen College, represents the royal couple, though our Master's wife, who kindly gave us a tour, thought that was highly speculative.

Guests at table included former Magdalenians - if that's what they're called - John Mark Ainsley, with whom I was delighted to join in a paean to Richard Jones – JMA had just been singing in the stupendous ENO Rodelinda – and Robin Blaze, who sang from the same hymnbook on the glories of Göttingen.

I took myself off for a solitary look at the magical late 15th century cloister/quad, with its figures reproduced in the drawing of the White Witch’s stone statuary for Magdalen man C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe - last seen with the wisteria in bloom, but against greyish skies - and then headed across the lawn towards Holdsworth's virtually unadorned New Building of 1733

and in front of it the plane tree planted in 1802 to commemorate the Peace of Amiens (this and other much more curious facts to be found in Peter Sager's Oxford & Cambridge: An Uncommon History, which I'm reading from cover to cover, having loved his outsider's take on East Anglia).

The college’s eccentric possession of a deer herd was much in evidence, horns being locked across the pastures. We stood, watched, chatted, then went in to evensong via the ever-impressive pre-chapel, which has all the major treasures - the misericords which start with a man's head peering between a lady's thighs, Piper's animals-report-the-nativity charmer stained glass and the sepia grisaille west window of the Last Judgment, designed by a London goldsmith in 1632, removed before the Second World War and not replaced until 1996, a project funded by two Californian former students. Looking back on my last Magdalen entry, I see I've got almost the same picture, but never mind.

JMA told me the chapel resonates – the G spot, as it were – to B major, for which Francis Jackson catered in the final ‘Amen’ of his canticles. 

After the service I wove my way along the seclusion of New College Lane, skirting Magdalen and New until the back of All Souls came into view with Hawksmoor’s Gothic/Baroque twin towers in silhouette

then shining in the late afternoon sun from west of the Radcliffe Camera.

And the cherry blossom was in full glory in front of St Mary’s on the High Street.

So back to London by 7pm to head for the Marylebone Hotel and talk to heavenly Anne Schwanewilms on Strauss, the role of whose Marschallin she now truly owns. We had a full 95 minutes’ conversation, during which she left me in no doubt that she’s the funniest as well as the wisest soprano I think I’ve ever had the pleasure of interviewing. Some of her comic mannerisms even reminded me of Carole Lombard, another beautiful woman with an earthy streak. Photo below by Javier del Real.

A shame the impersonations of a certain conductor weren’t filmed as well as sound-recorded; I wonder how I’ll transcribe them for the Arts Desk Q&A, due to appear just before her Barbican concert appearance with Sarah Connolly, Lucy Crowe and Mark Elder conducting the LSO (Rosenkavalier excerpts only, alas, but don’t miss them). La Schwanewilms was here for another Wigmore recital, which I went to hear the following evening but didn't review simply because most of the programme was the same as the one I'd covered back in December 2011; even so, her spellbinding narrative skills proved hair-raising in Liszt's 'Die Loreley' and achingly sorrowful in Mahler's 'Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen'.

Much on my mind at the time of the interview was Die Frau ohne Schatten, that extraordinarily hard-to-stage fairy tale creation of Strauss and Hofmannsthal. Anne compared the two productions in which she’d appeared as the Empress – central to Christof Loy’s magic-free psychological study at Salzburg, which she bought though some of her friends didn’t, and coping at the Met with sets so tricky that they sent her to hospital on one occasion in the late Herbert Wernicke's resurrected show: that yielded pretty pictures, she said, into which the singers had to fit as best they could. She came a cropper several times on her mirrored glass slope, pictured below, and on one of those occasions had to make a visit to a New York hospital.

Claus Guth’s Royal Opera production, previously seen at La Scala, strikes a miraculous halfway house between psychoanalytic probing and the supernatural. I’ve waxed lyrical about it over on the Arts Desk and hope to go again towards the end of the run. The cast is uniformly excellent, led by Emily Magee’s sympathetic Empress (pictured below with father Keikobad in another of CliveBarda’s excellent photos).

Communicating with the CBSO’s Richard Bratby about it, I thought he hit the nail on the head when he remarked that he’d never realized what a desperately sad opera it is – and that includes the apotheosis, which worked for me here as never before. I even had a dream the same night about the court-room fantasy which is one of its more extraordinary later tableaux.

As it happened, talks with two fascinating women framed the Oxford visit, making for an exceptional 24 hours. On the Tuesday evening Sioned Williams, principal harpist of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and one of the world’s great soloists, came to talk – and did she just – to my City Lit class about the music she’s been commissioning for her 60^th birthday year.

Such wisdom and passion here about the infinite variety of so-called ‘contemporary’ music, above all how you the artist have to find what you like and go with that, and by the same token the composer must know your own special skills and abilities (which of course is how Britten always worked). I was pleased to see Paul Patterson as one of Sioned’s invitees (her very friendly Iranian husband Ali Hosseinian, whose compatriots' music she continues to champion, was there to offer technical assistance, too).

I wish I’d recorded it all – but Sioned, who had been ill and thus wasn’t able to bring her harp this time, will be back in September close to her special anniversary concerts. I’m relieved to say that her home remortgaging to pay for the commissions will now be partly offset by a grant from the Park Lane Group.

*I'm afraid Putin's lies and macho posturing have forfeited the feminine article of Mother Russia, but it was ever thus. The poem, of course, is my favourite, 'A Summer Night' by W H Auden.

Don't kill Lulu

Men have been doing it since 1894, when Frank Wedekind first shocked the world with his Lulu play(s) about an amoral child-woman abused by men and doing what she can - which turns out not to be much - to get her own back. At least Wedekind had the half-decency to wonder whether (spoiler alert) Jack the Ripper should casually slaughter Lulu's lesbian admirer Countess Geschwitz on the way out of her garret; Geschwitz did survive in Christof Loy's mesmerising, minimalist Royal Opera production of Berg's operatic version.

Now a woman who ought to know better joins the persecution. Composer Olga Neuwirth (second spoiler, if you're really determined to go see her version) has her Lulu shot by ALL the men in her life. But much, much worse, in American Lulu, a 'version' unwisely taken on by director John Fulljames and a committed company now playing at the Young Vic, Neuwirth murders her protagonist with the most inept, incoherent replacement imaginable for the last act Berg, in his mostly compassionate character-study, failed to complete.

Neuwirth (pictured above; happy to give the credit, unsupplied on my source) writes that she finds the opera's ending, as completed by Friederich Cerha and accepted these days by most opera houses, unsatisfactory. But it's Wedekind's as well as Berg's, and of course the symmetry is essential: Lulu's earlier 'victims' all return in different guises as her clients, and Dr Schön, the only man she says she ever loved, is 'Jack'. In any case, about 12 minutes of the music, including the crucial Liebestod, is already there in Berg's Lulu-Suite.

But no, Neuwirth, having slashed and burned the first two acts to virtual incoherence - the audience was already leaving the theatre in droves midway through the performance I saw - writes her own jangly, vocally awkward and high-lying muzak for all but a bar or two of an intolerable last third (we're held captive for an intervalless hour and forty minutes, though that didn't stop the escapees). In her favour are the Morton Wender organ arrangements of the jazz music and the central, palindromic interlude - but the animation narrative to that, by the usually excellent Finn Ross, is incomprehensible. Unfortunately Neuwirth's own libretto for the final scenes is the most risibly pretentious as well as unclear I think I've ever come across; pity Jacqui Dankworth as the Geschwitz character, stuck to a mike and delivering banal platitudes in a last-ditch attempt for her character to make any kind of impact.

The transfer to the deep south in the Fifties and Sixties as well as New York in the Seventies - will she overcome? - would probably work fine in a production of the real opera; here the interpolated Martin Luther King and June Jordan texts say nothing about what kind of character, or idea, Lulu is. Exploited she may have been, but she ends up an unsympathetic bitch caught in nebulous situations. The end is an awful long time in coming, but it can't come too soon.

This is all a terrible shame for a singer who acts her socks off and would clearly make an excellent Lulu in 'proper Berg', American soprano Angel Blue. She's the main reason why I bother to write about a mostly wretched evening at all (she's pictured throughout here by Simon Annand for the Young Vic). Blue's Lulu is various, compelling and - most important - she can deliver all the high-wire, coloratura-y stuff, or at least what's left of it in Neuwirth's disembowelment. I felt deeply sorry for her lying there as rapid exits were made by at  least a quarter of the audience ( I might suggest at least part of this was due to unfamiliarity with Berg's tough musical language, familiar as it is to so many of us now, on the part of Young Vic regulars). She deserves much better and, in any case, her future is bright.

Among the men, the excellent Paul Curievici works hard and convincingly as the Photographer (Berg's Painter, pictured with Blue's Lulu up top), and Robert Winslade Anderson  makes a sleazy and by no means decrepit new character, Clarence, out of Wedekind/Berg's Schigolch. The players of the reduced orchestra - the London Sinfonietta, who ought to be good - lack nuance and phrasing; the volume in the small space is relentless. I won't name the conductor, because I know him and like him. Anyway, I sat with interest through what remained of the Bergian torso (no arms either). Towards the end, though, I and my companion, Alexandra Coghlan who's written a very flavoursome review of the show for The Arts Desk*, were screaming for release.

Let's turn, then, to a happier Muse. Anyone who's been reading this blog for long knows how I worship at the shrine of the unique Anne Schwanewilms. At last, in June, I got to hear her ideal Marschallin in Dresden, and she was back here the Monday before last to give a BBC Lunchtime Recital at the Wigmore Hall. I reviewed it for The Arts Desk, and the Schumann Op. 39 Liederkreis knocked me for six. It's now definitively my favourite of all song-cycles (or song groups, if you prefer). I ordered up the Capriccio CD double quick, and tried to play the Schumann half while attending to administrative stuff a couple of days ago.

It's a measure of how Schwanewilms has blossomed from just an otherworldly-beautiful voice to an utterly compelling interpreter that I couldn't just pay half-attention. Every note, every colour demands full focus. The scary wood and castle narratives are searing and 'Wehmut', which Prokofiev adapted with profound significance in the slow movement of his Seventh Piano Sonata, pierces the soul. For me, this is one of the greatest of all Lieder, and Schwanwilms' performance the track I'd now single out for anyone who wants to understand the art in three minutes.

Many of the Wolf songs on the disc were new to me. How strange, unpredictable and unorthodox many are. I must say I don't find the more anguished ones exactly sympathetic or quite human, with the exception of 'Das verlassene Mägdlein' - ach, the pain our soprano brings to 'Träne auf Träne' - but Schwanewilms makes the most of their oddities. Like Schumann, with the added experience of Wagnerian chromaticism backing him up, Wolf can cloud a happy picture so subtly: 'Im Frühling' is the most complex response to spring I know, and what a great scena this makes for Schwanewilms.

I think I like Wolf best when he gives this mesmerising singer the cue to spin a longer line, as in the harmonic miracles of 'Gesang Weylas' and the bright-to-dark 'Verborgenheit'. At any rate, I feel a Wolf obsession coming on: over to Fischer-Dieskau soonest.

Schwanewilms' perfectly good pianist, Manuel Lange, seems rather too ordinary for her. The partners we've seen her with here - Charles Spencer and now Roger Vignoles - seemed much more like equals in strange adventures. A shame, in the meantime, that there's no complete single Wolf or Schumann song from Schwanewilms on YouTube. What I did find is this interview, introduced in English but not thereafter subtitled. It includes, piecemeal, the performances of Wolf's 'Auf einer Wanderung' and 'Das verlassene Mägdlein'.

And here's some wonderful news: sorry as I am that fine Lieder singer Angelika Kirchschlager has had to withdraw from this coming Thursday's Wigmore recital, it's fabulous that Schwanewilms, with Spencer, will take her place. Not sure how much of the programme I can catch given that I have to be at a short concert to inaugurate the Barbican/Guildhall School of Music and Drama's Milton Court; Debussy, Strauss and Wolf may be casualites, but I'm assuming Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder will be the last songs on the programme, and I wouldn't miss what Schwanewilms makes of them for the world.

Coda should belong to a third soprano of the front rank, gifted Anna Prohaska, singing Lied der Lulu from Berg's suite under Abbado. I was lucky enough to catch this most potent of teams at the Lucerne Easter Festival several years ago, when the orchestra was not the Berlin Phil, as here, but the Simón Bolívar [no longer] Youth Orchestra. It was their first acquaintance with Berg, and could the touch have been more incandescent than Abbado's? He creates his sound no matter who he conducts. So it was with the Venezuelans, and so it is here with the Berliners. Text of Lulu's Credo as applied to Doctor Schön follows.

Although for my sake a man may kill himself or kill others, my value still remains what it was. You know the reason why you wanted to be my husband, and I know my reasons for hoping we should be married. You let your best friends be cheated by what you made me, yet you can't consider yourself caught in your own deception. Just as you've given me the evening of your life, so you've had my whole youth in exchange. I've never sought in my life to appear other than the image which has been created of me. And no-one has ever taken me for anything other than what I am.

*Poor Alexandra - what a week she's had of it. Hard to tell which she disliked more, this - probably, given the single star - the Grandage A Midsummer Night's Dream or the oldies' Much Ado About Nothing. Add into the mix Matt Wolf's hilarious review of the film Diana, and it's been a week of serious thumbs-downing on The Arts Desk. Except from me for Mitsuko and young maestro Robin on Thursday.

The beauty of retrospective

It looks like an end-of-term line-up, though in fact this photo by the indefatigable Chris Christodoulou of cast, conductor and director of the Proms Die Walküre was taken at the mid-point of a Ring that no-one will ever forget (who ever forgets any Ring, for that, matter, but this one was special from the very first low E flat). There's an even better version, without Barenboim - who hardly stands out as the only unjolly one above - and with the immensely likeable Justin Way seemingly doing a Rhinemaiden on the laps of Terfel, O'Neill and Halfvarson, to head my Arts Desk retrospective on Wagner at the Proms.

I knew I had to honour it, having been stunned quite as much in different ways by Tannhäuser and Parsifal as I had by Das Rheingold and Die Walküre (the reason I had to miss the last two Ring instalments and the Tristan is, as I've been at pains to point out before, Norfolk and Britten related). Surely the artists would have as awed a perspective as I did? Well, they're an eminently more practical bunch, thank goodness, but I think I got some interesting results. I'd been a bit reluctant to do phone interviews as time was short, but when it seemed like the only option for a very busy Donald Runnicles, Sir John Tomlinson and Way, I took it on board and loved the results.

Runnicles, pictured in a photo from Chris's extraordinary gallery of conductors in extremis for The Arts Desk which we instigated in 2010, was a consummate pro, giving me the 200 words in almost perfect straight-off-the-top-of-the-head form. Courteous, too: 'You will be very welcome, sir, at the Deutsche Oper'. Sir John belied his title and was instantly so amiable and friendly. He'd been on a family holiday in Rome, so we talked about the new film hymning that great city, La Grande Bellezza, which I can't wait to see. He told me he'd been doing Gawain in Salzburg, and was flabbergasted when he found out that the director had a whole new concept - not working with the singers. So in effect he had to help out others who'd not done it before with the staging.

This led to the Proms's great virtue - putting the performers first, really focusing on the one to ones. Neither of us would usually say that such a context is better than a full-scale production at its best, but that special magic doesn't happen often enough in the opera house. It did with Kupfer's Bayreuth Ring, where JT cut his teeth alongside Daniel Barenboim and which occasioned my only visit there so far (and that would be enougn; I had my Bayreuth vision). There was plenty more fascinating chat once I switched the mike off.

And the beauty of retrospective? Well, I'd been thinking earlier about how much more interesting it can be to interview artists AFTER they've done something. The only reason it doesn't happen more often is because publications are reliant on the pre-performance publicity machine. But I treasure both of Richard Jones's visits to my City Lit opera class once his Welsh National Opera Meistersinger and Royal Opera Gloriana were up and running (still got to write that last up here).

It always strikes me as dishonest when critics talk about 'the best Prom of the season so far' when they won't have seen so very many;  only the most fervent of season-ticketed Prommers has the right to say so. I managed 14, and the peaks stand out. Of the Wagners, which were one long high, Act 1 of Walküre was possibly the most electrifying I've encountered live (Way's personal highlights were the whole of Walküre and Act 2 of Gotterdämmerung, where I'm told Nina Stemme really came into her own, though she's never less than dependable). Otherwise, no question: the late night Malians and Azeris, Lisa Batiashvili with Oramo in the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Yannick Nézet-Séguin's Prokofiev Fifth, the best I've ever heard. His sheer, unfeigned delight and energy shine in another of Chris's best pics.

Amazingly that whole performance, as televised on BBC Four, is up there on YouTube (not for long, I shouldn't wonder, but enjoy it while you can).

Wish I'd been there for the Spanish song and dance - astonishing to think it blazed out in the middle of the big Wagner week - and no regrets about missing the Last Night (three-line whip for friend Father Andrew's 50th birthday dinner in an excellent Nepalese restaurant). We caught it on the iPlayer on Sunday night. My, the final jamboree goes on these days, as a sort of extended showcase to the world. But Alsop's discipline and her focused energy were always impressive.

Joyce DiDonato - what a trouper, looking great, plastering over the cracks in an instrument which I've never found hugely individual, but it's still a demonstration of what artistry is all about.

Nige - well, even the Diplo-mate, usually unamused by musical comedy and like me a bit troubled by the ongoing Kennedy persona ('like a down and out Irish navvy'), was in stitches at the fun and games of the much-treated Monti Csardas. Spot all the references?

New seasons have been opening and stunning in the meantime. What a scorcher is the National's Edward II, a Young Vic kind of show in a usually much more conventional space.

Attractive John Heffernan (pictured for the NT by Johan Persson) didn't dominate, but only because it was such an ensemble production. On Monday lunchtime, heavenly Anne Schwanewilms's Schumann Op. 39 Liederkreis was a perfect partnership with Roger Vignoles (only connect: when I met him after Kozhukhin's Prokofiev triple bill, he expressed his surprise at the connection between the Seventh Sonata's Andante caloroso and Schumann's 'Widmung', and here he was playing it). Anne's website man and a loyal student of mine, Howard Lichterman, introduced me to her and I took a shot of the perfect duo which wasn't professional enough to appear on TAD.

A renewed Weill crush has just been put on hold as I rediscover Paul Bunyan in the wake of the British Youth Opera staging (which was good, but not as dazzling as their staging of Cimarosa's The Secret Marriage). I fiercely defend the total brilliance of the collaboration with Auden, which given that I've also been listening to The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny strikes me now as a determinedly optimistic riposte to Weill and Brecht. If you have any criticisms about the poetry, just ask who apart from Da Ponte, Hofmannsthal or Brecht could come anywhere close to the best of this genius text.

I went back to the Plymouth Music Series' 1988 classic recording, coinciding with the epoch-making Aldeburgh revival, and I don't think it can be beaten for American authenticity. Love Pop Wagner as the balladeer. And isn't this Britten's most unambiguously joyous stage work?

New seasons elsewhere: the now old chestnut about the 'show solidarity' petition and the Met opening rumbles on, with signatures being added all the time and further dissatisfaction with Gergiev, who now echoes Putin's equation of homosexuality with paedophilia: disgraceful (scroll down the Onegin piece and the comment at the foot of the companion article on The Arts Desk for an update). Michael Petrelis and his loyal companions have been making the right kind of stand at the San Francisco Opera opening gala - ie no disruption of the performance itself, in which married lesbian soprano Patricia Racette stars - and have got a very decent statement out of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra (how could it not so reply with Michael Tilson Thomas at the helm?)

I love this photo of a grande dame* showing her solidarity with the friendly protest before the opera gala - from Petrelis's blog, courtesy of him and the photographer Bill Wilson. What a great redemption of that famous Weegee shot in which two overmadeup socialites with tiaras sweep in to the Met past a gaping pauper.

So towards an annual interlude: our walk for the Norfolk Churches Trust. Jill has planned out a route of 15 or so miles and 13 churches. The forecast, alas, is for less good weather than we've had over the past few years. Maybe that will encourage folk to give more generously - though I hope I don't have to invoke the kind of disaster scenario we experienced back in 2006. By way of reminder, here's last year's report and a photo of St Margaret, King's Lynn, alongside which we stay each time, so it's always our starting point.

And, at last, another sunny farewell. This one will mean going over to a page on the Emerging Indie Bands site where godson Alexander's Lieutenant Tango has just been feted. Makes me wonder why he never enlightened me over the 'kwela beat', and what it is. Happy to plug away at a third track, 'So, Go', because, while the million-sellers J sometimes plays on his iPad - following a Facebook commendation, just dipping - sound like dross to me, this is dance music with a genuinely creative edge.

*The lady, Michael now tells me, is glamorous grandmother Joy Venturini Bianchi, owner of San Fran's Helpers House of Couture, at 74 still a redoubtable socialite and staunch friend of the gay community. For the charitable origin of 'Helpers', read the linked article. What a woman! I love the comment on fashion's Alexander the Great: 'McQueen, Jesus Christ almighty. I have a dress by him with a hood so chic that I can't even stand it.'

Birthplace of the rose-bearer

Strictly speaking, it should have been to salute Wagner's Dresden era in his anniversary year that I returned to the Semperoper (pictured above) after 23 years; I last saw Joachim Herz's so-so production of The Love for Three Oranges here, and still have one of the foam oranges chucked at the audience to prove it. That was a bonus to a recording-session visit for Gramophone; the occasion was Haitink's EMI recording of Der Rosenkavalier in the Lukaskirche, with Kiri te Kanawa and Anne Sofie von Otter (the highlight for me was getting to talk to the Staatskapelle Dresden's then first horn, Peter Damm, whose Kempe recording of the Strauss concertos I'd long adored). Subject for another entry must be the transformation of this once-beleaguered city that's taken place in the interim.

My Strauss Leibsoper - or is that Ariadne auf Naxos or Intermezzo or Daphne, I can't decide - had its first performance here in 1911, and this time we had a chance to catch it at home. Below, Robert Sterl's painting of Ernst von Schuch conducting at the opening run.

The prompt was our good friend Peter Rose, giving his latest showing of the role which has truly become his own, Baron Ochs; but he'd have to have paid my air fare and hotel to see him, say, with Simone Young conducting - as she so often seems to be, and I'm truly sorry not to think more highly of one of the few maestras on the scene - or a less than diamond cast. But the Marschallin was the glorious Anne Schwanewilms, her Octavian Elina Garanča (whom I also saw in Vienna years ago when Peter should also have been singing, but had to pull out). Thielemann was conducting, too, and he knows the score inside out.

So what could go wrong? Well, truth to tell, not enough to matter to the essentials, but all-round perfection, alas, it was not. By no means the biggest drawback was that the sets had got stuck in the floods and for some reason I didn't understand never made it even for the second performance. Elbe waters were still high after the heroic salvation of the city the previous week by sandbagging Dresdeners, but all else seemed back to normal and the locals were breathing huge sighs of relief by drinking and/or picnicking on the riverbanks during two perfect summer evenings.

I don't think we missed a great deal, having seen Uwe Eric Laufenberg's underanimated production WITH the sets on DVD; the 1950s costumes are the thing, and everyone wears them with style. Only occasionally was the perfunctory back wall, globe lamps above and shabby doors beneath, a liability. In the first act it helped throw the action forward, giving three fine singer-actors space to operate and impress. Photographer Klaus Gigga's images for the Semperoper often capture that superbly.

Garanča is such a hyper-feminine mezzo that she seemed more in her element as 'Mariandel' than Octavian, though always singing with that unique and connected upper-range fullness that makes her one of the world's top opera stars (and, for me, THE best Carmen). Peter has enlarged his repertoire of grins and tricks, making Ochs a more than usually lovable country cousin in his rustic get-up while singing the parlando with incredible elegance and beauty of tone when the opportunity arose. He told us he'd added some business with the naughty pugs in the levee scene mainly for our benefit, and sure enough I laughed so loud that the dowdy Dresden bourgeoisie around us cast disapproving looks. Below: cutting short the Italian tenor (Bryan Hymel, not visible here but excellent, though having to be followed by the orchestral players rather than following them) with 'Als Morgengabe!'

I complimented Peter first on the apparent rapport with Thielemann, but he told me they'd got by on just one rehearsal. Can you imagine? The conductor's one of the very best, but collegiality would not seem to be a forte; he barely acknowledges his singers offstage and sometimes trips them up with the marvellous but seemingly capricious flexibility for which he's famous (this information not from Peter, by the way, who got the thumbs up from the pit on more than one occasion). It's standard for continental repertory opera - not so the EXTRA rehearsal with the orchestra alone - but contrasts markedly with the Glyndebourne Ariadne, for which Jurowski was present from the first at the seven week of rehearsals.

Schwanewilms, anyway, was beyond sublime in the Marschallin's Monologue - phrases so delicately inflected that you strained to catch them - drawing an audience in is always a much greater art than reaching out - and such pointing of the German text that I never expect to hear it bettered. She certainly brought on the heartbreak and the tears in her changed-mood misalliance with her uncomprehending Quinquin.

Well, what can I say? Wanderer (see previous blog entry; and see now - 22/6 - his own take on the evening, capturing far more eloquently than mine the essence of heavenly Anne, which I should have highlighted more) and I couldn't stop blubbing in the interval. It's singing-acting on a level very few achieve. And throughout the interval we had the balmy Dresden evening to enhance the bittersweetness,  not to mention the astonishing view across the Theatrerplatz to Augustus the Fat's Hofkirche - an unpopular Catholic riposte to the citizens' Frauenkirche, about which more anon - the Residenzschloss and the Hausmann Tower, a great ensemble complemented by the Zwinger Palace out of sight to the right.

The location gave as much to gawp at as the crowds (though I have to say I've never encountered a more frigid audience, which seemed more local than international. They did, it's true, give a standing ovation at the end).

Oh, we were so anticipating the Presentation of the Rose, but from the minute the Sophie opened her mouth I knew we had a liability on our hands. Ungainly of phrase, lacking charm in sound and appearance, useful only for her top notes, Daniela Fally was not on the level of her colleagues. And frankly, you do need a bit of scenic glitz - even if it's nouveau-riche Faninal bling - for the famous Hofmannsthal-concocted ritual. At least the splendid Irmgard Vilsmaier, whose Hänsel Mother had made such an impact at Glyndebourne and who is also a Brünnhilde as you could tell, made some amends as a full-voiced Marianne Leitmetzerin (pictured on the right here).

Bit parts were a mixed blessing. Apparently Thielemann had sacked some of the house singers on a single hearing, putting the Dresden admin in a funk to find international replacements double-quick. For every plus there was a minus: vivacious Helene Schneiderman as a stylish Annina was let down by her unfunny, self-conducting Valzacchi (no name needed). The Faninal (also nnn) was a cipher; the Police Commissar in Act Three, house bass Peter Lobert, more than stood up to Peter vocally and demonstrated how threatening this usually saggy bit of the drama could be if it were moved back from Laufenberg's setting to the 1940s. Excellent pint-sized tavern owner from Dan Karlström; the footmen at the end of Act 1 the usual gabbled mess. The extras in the Lerchenau retinue wambled around grotesquely and without discipline.

But the main thing is that without a sympathetic Sophie, in effect the Marschallin's younger self who escapes the older woman's fate of a loveless arranged marriage, you do miss the senior soprano for an act and a half. Her comeback in Act Three was, naturally, highly emotional, and Peter made the most of Ochs's dashed hopes in that fascinating disentanglement before his waltz-exit: his 'mit dieser Stund' vorbei' gave the final threesome's entanglement a run for its money.

Trio? To be fair, Fally sang well enough and was even rather touching as a forlorn schoolgirl standing apart; Schwanewilms crowned it with hyper-pathos and Garanca provided lustre, though I inwardly groaned when she missed a big phrase - Thielemann-anxiety, perhaps? - and the magic took a while to return. Again, I just don't think this sort of thing would happen given Glyndebourne or even Covent Garden preparation time. You have to hand it to these international singers, exposing their reputations to an audience who knows nothing of the rollercoaster circumstances. Although Thielemann still gets results, and no-one does late-romantic rubato quite as easily as he does, the collegial way is surely better.

Anyway, we filed out with hearts tugged at, though not so much as in Act One, and wafted past the 19th century homages to Roman grottesco style in the foyers

down the stairs to the bust of Wagner (I wanted to find another to Strauss, but the attendants denied knowledge of one),

out into the fragrant Dresden summer night

and on to a meal with Peter and co. Our Dresden experience had only just begun - I have much more to write about the bewildering treasures we saw the next day - but our reason for being there was already fully vindicated.

In the meantime, my very long eulogy on Richard Jones's Royal Opera staging of Britten's Gloriana yesterday evening - a well-nigh perfect entertainment from first to last - is  up on The Arts Desk. Shame I didn't make it to Aldeburgh for an against-the-odds amazing Peter Grimes beach show on Monday, but a migraine peaked at just the wrong time, and it was a fair old trek to north London for the press bus - shudder - and back in the wee small hours.

In search of a shadow

The first time I saw Strauss and Hofmannsthal’s ‘massive and artificial’ (Strauss’s words) operatic fairy tale Die Frau ohne Schatten performed by Welsh National Opera, programme and posters were garlanded with images by the Belgian symbolist painter Fernand Khnopff, whose enigmatically titled ‘I Lock My Door Against Myself’ is pictured up top, his ‘Sleeping Medusa’ below. The opera’s unsettling, decadent atmosphere, its clash of spirit and human worlds, was not exactly Khnopffed but well served all the same by the spare yet effective and magically lit touring production (and great Norman Bailey sang the role of Barak the Dyer – I’m pleased still to have his singing in Act 1 on an old cassette).

Yet it’s worth remembering that, begun as it was before the First World War, this optimistic fantasy finally premiered in a Vienna stricken by post war austerity. The mood had changed – as had Strauss’s, who, as he waited for Hofmannsthal to get the last bits of text to him in 1916, decided that such monuments were now out of joint with the troubled times and felt ‘downright called upon to become the Offenbach of the 20th century’ instead.

Quite apart from its dodgy moral-majority message that you’re incomplete without children – which can be sidestepped by special pleading that the subjects are really creativity and compassion - Frau is, no doubt, problematic in that it starts out taking the magic seriously in an astonishingly scored first act and finishes by not believing enough in its happy end. But does this justify wrenching it to another time and place still reeling from calamities, a chilly 1950s Vienna of underheated recording-studio halls and drab winter clothing, where a stiff Christmas concert performance deputises for the portentous finale?

That’s director Christof Loy’s solution, and I’m still in two minds about his 2011 Salzburg Festival production, now preserved on an Opus Arte DVD. It does humanise all five principal characters – on one side the Emperor and the Empress who has not yet born him a child, on the other the dissatisfied wife who may or may not give up the shadow the other woman needs and her placid husband, with the Mephistophelean Nurse as conniving go-between. There is, though, one huge problem. I genuinely believe that, for all the mumbo-jumbo, the essence of Hofmannsthal’s plot is rather simple as it follows the Empress’s path to enlightened rejection of the shadow, the realization that she cannot buy her own happiness at the cost of others. Loy replaces, rather than parallels, it with a recording-studio ‘storyline’ that’s so oblique it doesn’t begin to make sense. His exhortation of Strindberg’s preface to A Dream Play suggests that he never intended it to. 

Anyway, it’s not my place here to discuss the DVD as a whole, which I’ve done within the constraints of a BBC Music Magazine review yet to be published. I will say that I was alternately fascinated and baffled, never repelled, by the production, but always in thrall to Thielemann’s magisterially beautiful conducting of the Vienna Philharmonic and to the Empress of my Straussian idol Anne Schwanewilms (pictured up top by Monika Rittershaus for the Salzburg Festival).

It’s not a flawless performance, but so expressively right for the translucent not-quite-earthly girl who becomes a deeply feeling human being. Prior to the DVD release with English subtitles, chunks of the telly screening went up on YouTube, so watch and hear, if you will, the Empress’s awakening scene in Act One – that’s a keenly-inflecting Michaela Schuster as the Nurse at the start, and you can decide whether you want to go on to their scene together, a bit of a trial without translation -

and the culminating ‘judgment of Solomon’ scene of Act Three in which the Empress has to decide whether to take the shadow or not. Maddeningly, there’s no dramatic substitute for the usual suspense as to whether the elusive shadow will appear on cue or not, or for the chilling sight of the Emperor petrified except for his eyes; but I reckon Schwanewilms holds the intensity of the drama with her vocal and physical expressiveness. Again, you can probably forego the barky aftermath of heldentenor Stephen Gould’s contribution.

Protests great and small

I little thought, when Tunisia set the democratic trail blazing at the beginning of the year, that 2011 would draw to a close with Putin-dominated Russia joining the party. But there they were south of Moscow's centre, about 50,000 of them, all protesting against parliamentary elections that no-one seems to doubt were rigged.

The top photo was swiftly placed on Wikimedia Commons by one of those ever-growing people whose courage we can't begin to grasp, Dmitry Mottl; below it is a kind of Where's Willy? shot by Brian Rybolt - who also took the next image - in which I am one of quite a few grinning gleefully not (knowingly) at the camera but at the fabulous Henry Goodman's witty song-plea to keep Gaby's Deli safe from needless obliteration by the ghastly Westminster City Council. Here's Henry with the owner, Gaby Elyahou, at the more or less impromptu 'Cabaret Falafel' on Thursday afternoon, where they were preceded by another wry ditty from Gaye Brown.


It's a drop in the ocean, yet equally reliant on force of numbers - as well I know in the dismal lack of response to save the black poplar trees on the south side of our gardens from a very dubiously reasoned execution - and once a London landmark is gone, it's gone for good. Daquise, unchanged since Coronation Year, outlived plans to redevelop the row of shops by South Kensington but then had a horrid makeover by New Polish Prosperity and is now unrecognisable. Here the proposition is to replace thriving Gaby's, which caters for salt-beef addicts and vegetarians alike, with a 'Strada-like chain restaurant', of which there are already hundreds in the West End. My colleague Judith Flanders set the ball rolling on The Arts Desk, clarifying the situation: sign the petition, please.

And I hope we'll have sound and/or vision of Henry's speech and song up soon. With that easy charm which makes everyone instantly jolly, he remembered sitting in Gaby's at various times with Jeremy Irons, Alun Armstrong and Ute Lemper. Whose image on the Chicago poster next to the cafe here - my pic as they were assembling for an outdoor shot - is both apt and a reminder that Gaby's is tied up with the soul of West End theatreland.


Then I was off, buying myself on the way a Chinese pork bun and a strong Italian espresso from other Soho stalwarts, to pure escapism and the fabulous Anne Schwanewilms digging luminously deep into Mahler at the Wigmore. But what a year it's been for people power. Not always successful - pray, or whatever it is you do, for the Syrians - and often with an ambiguous outcome; yet I can't remember a time in my life where the tide of the world seemed to turn so momentously in such a potentially hopeful direction. More, no doubt, to follow in 2012.