Being Beauteous: Bourne and Järvi

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To the Philharmonie

...and not to hear the Berlin Philharmoniker - done that once, not one of its best evenings with Rattle grandly impersonating Karajan in Ein Heldenleben and Kozena murdering Ravel's Sheherazade - but the BerGEN Philharmonic under Andrew Litton, who will have to believe me when I say that they were better, not least in giving an idea of what Scharoun's hall can do for an orchestra.

It was a careering visit, last-minute substitute for a proffered weekend in Vienna, which would have been delicious, but more of a known quantity to me (even though I've been to Berlin about half a dozen times over the last 20 years). It started well on Monday afternoon with my first LONG conversation in what would best be described as HundDeutsch with the very genial 60-something Berliner who drove me from Schonefeld to the enormous Maritim Hotel near the Philharmonie. Usually you start in German and the much better English-speaking respondent switches over more gracefully, but not in this instance. And what this driver had to say was worth hearing. In addition to raising the subjects of Anna Netrebko and Sophocles's Antigone, he explained that so many of Berlin's taxi drivers were educated men, out-of-work engineers from the closed-down factories ringing the city, and we talked a bit about the impending hundred-per-cent legalisation of Eastern European workers on 1 May (up to now kosher to off-the-record employment in such cases has been about fifty-fifty).


A quick freshen-up in the hotel, and then it was straight over to the Philharmonie for the concert in this fabulous acoustic (picture above copyright Berlin Philharmoniker/ Schirmer; the top shot through early-spring trees is mine), which like its Birmingham counterpart gives air around the sound and lights up the inner parts. OK, so it's very Karajanesque that the conductor is right at the centre of the universe, but everyone can see everyone else and you really feel the audience is part of the action (below photo copyright Berlin Philharmoniker/ Lauterbach).


Very pleased to see again the German colleague I met in Faro last summer, the Berliner Zeitung's Jan Brachmann, who had interesting things to say about the kind of Rachmaninov Second Symphony he prefers - slow and spacious enough to let the dense orchestration breathe. Which is why his favourite is Kurt Sanderling's with the Philharmonia, clocking in at around 67 minutes; that I must hear.

Litton's interpretation - both interior shots below by the Bergen Phil's 'Informasjonssjef' Henning Målsnes - seems to have become more driven, in a good sense, since those groundbreaking 1989 Rachmaninov symphonies with the Royal Philharmonic (I was there at the Barbican for all three, and I'll never forget the poleaxing impact of No. 1 especially). The special string bowings and portamenti come, as he later told me in an interview which should appear on the Arts Desk on Easter Saturday, from Ormandy's marked-up score, so from the horse's mouth at only one remove, as it were. I loved the speed and elan of the scherzo, billowing out for the big romantic melody but making it unusually welcome second time around; and there was a sense that the slow-motion adrenalin rush - if that makes any sense - right at the heart of the slow movement could have gone on for ever.


Definitely there was something extra going on both there and in the finale, surely not unconnected with the orchestra's getting to play in the holiest of holies (though they were all delirious about Saturday's performance in the Vienna Konzerthaus, a sellout). They're a dedicated and enthusiastic bunch, and though the players come from all over the world, the Norwegian contingent and administration seem immensely likeable and humorous. I was somewhat surprised to hear Henning at the supper afterwards saying 'I know naaaathing' in the tones of Fawlty Towers' Manuel, and found that British TV comedy, unsubtitled, is big in Norway.

No doubt Grieg is staple fare for his fellow countrymen, but I'm certain I haven't heard the four numbers of the first Peer Gynt suite together since the Arthur Davison children's concerts of my youth - and never as seductively or playfully done as this, with plenty of contrast in the repeat of Anitra's Dance. And the Death of Ase is a masterpiece of simple means (even if better still with the spoken text above it, as we got in the unforgettable National Theatre of Iceland's selective Ibsen in the Barbican Pit back in 2007). The string arrangement we know as 'The Last Spring' was the second encore; that, too, is ineffable, though never more so than in the song version as sung by Anne Sofie von Otter with Bengt Forsberg on the piano, one of my desert island Lieder tracks.



The earlier encore, which came at the end of the first half, brought the house down: a rag-arrangement by the prodigiously gifted young percussionist Martin Grubinger. Litton, a fabulous jazz/classical pianist, took up the marimbaphone with esprit. Here's a shot by Henning of the two in rehearsal.


As for the new work, Rolf Wallin's Das war schön for percussion and orchestra is another of those pieces about process which forgets to give us the main events. The opening, for instance, sounds like the third movement of Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus, not a bad model. But that eventually brings in a broad melody under all the twittering, which never happens here. A little goes a long way, but as Litton later said in the interview, Grubinger is so charismatic that he could probably 'sell' the telephone directory. We'll be hearing a lot more of him - but bizarrely his first CD for Deutsche Grammophon, Drums 'n' Chant, is so far only available on the continent.


Here's another phenomenal player bound to inspire the young, as indeed do our own O-Duo and Colin Currie. It was good to see so many students in the Philharmonie, too, one group standing and arm-waving enthusiastically at the end: the payoff, no doubt, of the Berlin Philharmoniker's pioneering education projects. Boy, do we need more of that here: and now it seems we're even less likely to get it if music is excluded, as it may well be on 14 April, from the English Baccalaureate (did you even know there was such a thing? I didn't). Jessica Duchen has been running a very responsible series on her blog featuring comments from key players on the beknighted state of music education in the UK. And they're all right: if we don't give kids a taste of the wonderful world of classical music today, where will the audiences be tomorrow?