Europe Day Concert CD: it's here

Delighted we are with it, too. Simon Weir, the producer at Classical Media, has done a grand job with sound that's very present - though it's odd to learn that St John's Smith Square has problems of dryness, since it never feels like that from where one's sitting. I think the small body of strings (5.5.3.3.2) mostly works in favour of the transparency I hear right from the start.

There's not much more to add to my report of the very rich and moving event, except to say that personal favourites remain the Martinů Ariane monologue, where you can really hear Nicola Said going for it (let's have another of Matt Smith's photos from the concert, below), true goosebump time, and the Sibelius Tempest numbers - I really don't know better performances of the movements in question on any other recordings, thanks partly to the exquisite wind playing and especially to Jonathan Bloxham's subtle work with clarinettists Joe Shiner and Greg Hearle in 'Song II', which may be my favourite minute of music ever.

Matt Kaner's new 'Brexit' piece Stranded still sounds fabulous, of course; I hope Matt and violinist Ben Baker can make good use of it. The biggest surprise was how totally gorgeous the Pearl Fishers Leila/Nadir duet comes across on the recording; it was good in performance, but I didn't realise how good. I repeat myself, but we're ready to see Jennifer Davis's Micaëla and Thomas Atkins' Don José right now (there they are on 9 May below, at the anxious stage of the duet). They're in the Jette Parker Young Artists Summer Performance on Sunday along with the four others I heard at St Clement Danes - looking forward to that.

I actually took a week off from concert and opera going after the East Neuk Festival - 11 events in three and a bit days needed proper digestion, and hopefully the results on The Arts Desk, if necessarily a bit telegraphic in the overall 1500 words, do it justice. I did, though, catch a lunchtime event by serendipity. Joined our nearly nonagenarian friend Edward at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital to be there for him before and after an endoscopy.

At first I just sat in the waiting area - a pleasant space, like most in that admirably designed building - but started to fulminate at the telly: it was Trump's big-scare speech in Warsaw about defending white Western civilization, and the droning of platitudes became too much. I asked the nice receptionist if she knew when Edward would be out. '1.45' came the answer. So I popped out, bought a sandwich, came back and found a flute-and-piano recital in full swing in the ground floor atrium.

This was thanks to hospital charity CW+ and the Concordia Foundation: a concert every Thursday lunchtime. Good music, good art: this is a place that's a dream of what an NHS hospital can be like. My experiences there have all been good; a friend who was a cancer patient there had a less good time of it. Depends on the medical team in question, I guess. But anyway, the fascination of this event was watching all those who came, stayed, stood for a bit, danced around, walked past either with smiles on their faces and as if nothing was happening.

And the playing was top-notch: flautist Sophia Castillo and pianist Marie Otaka, both prizewinning student at the Royal College of Music. I caught the end of their selection from Bach's Second Orchestral Suite, a very evocative piece by Ian Clarke called Orange Dawn, a very surprising transcription of Lensky's Aria, the show-offy Monti Czardas, 'Morning' from Peer Gynt and an also surprising Carmen Fantasy put together by Francois Borne. It sent me back to the ward lighter of heart, even if I then had to sit for another hour with intermittent Sky highlights of that abysmal Trump speech.

From Bronze to Carmen

It was one of those embarrassingly rich London days, preceded by a convivial evening (drinks at the Garrick, the perfect meal at Terroirs). Our dear friend and terrific artist Ruth Addinall had come down from Edinburgh to see us and catch the Royal Academy’s Bronze exhibition before it closes on Sunday. So I took most of Tuesday off and accompanied her around town. The exhibition at  the RA and the opera at the Coliseum were our two mainstays, though the unplanned interludes turned out to be fun – Ruthie trying on trousers and jumpers, and I searching in vain for more bright blue moleskins, in Cording’s, and snatching a falafel in Gaby’s (reprieved, it seems, from its threatened demise).

Sculptor Jon Edgar, whom we've come to know through Ruth, joined us for the exhibition, and it was good to have his expert knowledge, though once past the first big room we went our separate ways. The keynote piece at the start would be worth the price of the admission alone. In the late 1990s, Sicilian fisherman dredged up first a leg and, a year later, the torso of what is known as the Dancing Satyr (though as Bryan Sewell points out, since the foot is not a goat’s hoof it is much more likely a human follower of Dionysus). It would be exciting to accept the attribution to Praxiteles and date it to the fourth century BC, though probably it's Hellenistic. The flowing-haired beauty is skilfully lit and comes alive in his celebration from every angle you look.

Follow that? Well, the first room did pretty well with the human figure, mixing up centuries and races with delicious abandon. A noble Roman towers over a Nigerian bowman. A stick-thin figure looks like a Giacometti; it turns out to be an Etruscan votive figure from the second century BC. The giant ensemble of Rustici’s John the Baptist preaching to a Levite and a Pharisee stands at the end of the room alongside a cast of Cellini’s Perseus, their monumentality gently mocked by Donatello’s tiny Putto with Tambourine.

To the left of the big saloon is a crystal-clear exposition of the process from wax model to treated bronze (I won’t attempt to précis the technique); to the right the exhibition continues with a slight diminishing of interest in the subject matter, from animals to functional objects, though the Etruscan Chimera of Arezzo is a fabulous sight

and it’s fun to have a Louise Bourgeois spider (IV)on the wall.

In between the feral animate and the inanimate is a room of group figures, again ranging from the monumental to a real miniature beauty, Riccio’s tender Satyr and Satyress. The scope expands to early wonders like the 14th century BC Chariot of the Sun from Denmark, Chola bronzes and Buddhist figures. Those look especially handsome in the Gods and Goddesses room, eastern ascetics sitting alongside elegant Renaissance divinities; en route, the reliefs section has Adriaen de Vries’s magnificent muscled blacksmiths at work in Vulcan’s forge.

The last room rises to the heights again with heads of all ages. I’m at one with Ruth and J in adoring the Ife brass Head with Crown, its fascination compounded by striated lines down the face.

Hard to say which object to take away, this or the Dancing Satyr – probably the latter,  if I’m to be true to myself and let an ideal of male beauty take the palm.

So onwards, eventually, to the Coli. Calixto Bieito’s production of Carmen, which had quite a few attractive masculine torsos on show, arrives at English National Opera bronzed and polished after ten years doing the rounds. I enjoyed it far, far more than I expected after the aimless shenanigans of his Don Giovanni – I was bored rather than shocked by the mess he made of the Act One Finale – and his Ballo in maschera, which started well but suffered from the law of diminishing returns in its random sexual violence. There was probably too much not terribly convincing prodding and fondling in the first half of this Carmen, a few non-readable ideas (the man in white at the start, for instance – fateful controller? He turned out to be Lillas Pastia, king of the gypsies, but I wouldn’t have known that without reading the programme). Nor was Bieito's avowed period, Franco's Spain in the late 1970s, evoked by the action as far as I could see.

Acts Three and Four, though, were much the best I’ve seen in the opera house (Ruxandra Donose as Carmen and Adam Diegel as Don José in both the above pictures). The five Mercedes – six, as has been often pointed out, if you include Carmen’s girl-friend and add the French accents – were terrific props to animate a scene where all you normally get is brooding gypsies hunkering on a dimly lit stage. And the silhouette bull sign looked good at the back of Alfons Flores’s often unencumbered arena (huge variety of lighting, too, from Bruno Poet).

The act also contained the two musical highlights: Donose, possessed of a beautiful if not tonally very varied mezzo instrument she takes some time to engage, rose to the most dignified Card Scene aria I’ve heard. Then there was Elizabeth Llewellyn’s powerful Micaela, hints of Leontyne Price honey at the top of the voice. Shame her characterization was ill defined by Bieito – first she’s too forward with José in Act One, then too timid, and the fuck-you gesture to Carmen as she goes off with him to the supposedly dying mother didn’t work.

Musically, there was good co-ordination between soloists, chorus and orchestra. On Tuesday night the conductor was ENO Head of Music Martin Fitzpatrick. I’d hazard a guess that he pulled out more stops than Ryan Wigglesworth, responsible for the worst conducted concert I’ve heard in a long time (a couple of years back with the BBC Symphony Orchestra). But the less accomplished of the two Wigglesworths – no way to be confused with the masterly Mark – may have improved since then.

Hunky Duncan Rock’s Corporal Morales (pictured above with the fabulous Llewellyn) and Leigh Melrose’s slightly seedy bullfighter Escamillo should probably have swapped roles, since Rock’s voice is more ample; but Melrose is an excellent musician and played with the phrases rather well. American tenor Diegel as Don José has a slightly nervy, raw sound which came into its own for the nailbiting final duet, though before that he sang flat too often for comfort and didn't unbend enough for the physical violence. Promising sounds came from the Mercédès, mezzo Madeleine Shaw. As with Bronze, Sunday is the last day to catch the show, though no doubt it will be back for a good many seasons: I'm glad that ENO has at last hit on a lively production for a core component of its more pack-em-in rep.

My apprehension about going to see it at all was based on how spoiled we’d been throughout the seven glorious Opera in Focus classes we spent on Carmen at the City Lit. It’s a hell of a role to pitch at the right level between sex and dignity. On disc the voice can do it alone: of the Habaneras we compared – from Supervia, Dusolina Giannini, Troyanos, Obraztsova, Moffo, Callas, de los Angeles  and a young Marilyn Horne dubbing Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones – de los Angeles (pictured below) and Moffo were the most liked by the students, Giannini the least, while Troyanos tended to steal the show in the Seguidille and the Card Scene.

Yet having never seen a totally convincing Carmen on stage, I and the students were knocked for six by Elina Garanca in the DVD of Richard Eyre’s Metropolitan Opera production. You know what it feels like when the ideal for a role pops up once in a lifetime – Gheorghiu in her first Covent Garden Traviata, Bryn as Hans Sachs? Garanca is in that league. Though she’s a natural blonde, she looks utterly convincing all dusked up. The voice is vibrant and utterly consistent from top to bottom of the register – actually in that respect the same could be said of Donose – and as sexual predator she’s dangerous, wild and funny without being tarty. There’s real electricity between her and Alagna’s compelling José. Judge for yourselves in the final scene, though do try to get to see the characterization as a whole.

Credits: all ENO Carmen photographs by Alastair Muir

Bronze images kindly supplied by the Royal Academy (except for the top picture which is mine) with the following credit details:

Dancing Satyr, Greek, Hellenistic perios, 3rd - 2nd centuries BC Museo del Satiro, Church of Sant'Egidio, Mazaro del Vallo

Photo Sicily, Regione Siciliana - Assessorato Regionale dei Beni Culturali e dell'identita Siciliana/© 2012. Photo Scala, Florence

Donatello, Putto with Tambourine, 1429

© Staaliche Museen zu Berlin - Preussicher Kulturbesitz, Skulpturensammlung und Museum fur Byzantische Kunst, J P Anders, Berlin

Chimera of Arezzo, Etruscan, c. 400 BC

Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici della Toscana

Photo Antonio Quattrone, Florence

Louise Bourgeois, Spider IV, 1996

The Easton Foundation, courtesy Hauser & Wirth and Cheim & Read

Photo Peter Bellamy/ © Louise Bourgeois Trust

Adriaen de Vries, Forge of Vulcan, 1611
Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich
Photo © Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Walter Haberland

Head with Crown, Nigeria, Ife, 14th - early 15th centuries

National Museum, Lagos, National Commission for Museums and Monuments, Nigeria

©  2012. Photo Scala, Florence

Bizet à la Petit

Nearly missed the chance to see the score I'd been living with so long for the Radio 3 Building a Library, Bizet's L'Arlesienne music, choreographed by the intriguing Roland Petit. My dance-distinguished colleague Ismene Brown duly commemorated his death earlier this month at the age of 87 with an obituary on The Arts Desk, and she also drew my attention to the English National Ballet's Petit triple bill at the Coliseum, which I went along to see on Saturday evening. The photo below comes from Thomas Peter Schultz via Wikimedia Commons; the production shots are by the very generous permission of John Ross, whose other superb ballet images can be seen on the ballet.co site.


As everyone seems to have pointed out, the three ballets all deal with distressed young men seeking out death. Petit offers very personal, if slightly repetitious, takes on the bare bones of Daudet's L'Arlesienne, a Carmen story of sorts (it can hardly be called Merimee's, and only loosely Bizet's) and a Cocteau melodrama about a tortured jeune homme in a garret who hangs himself at the instigation of a lady in a yellow dress who turns out to be La Mort and shows the hanged man Paris by night.

L'Arlesienne, the latest (mid-70s) choreography of the three, keeps Daudet's central triangle of Frederi, the sweet village girl Vivette he's supposed to marry and the invisible girl from Arles who's driving him to madness. The corps participation is rather wonderful, with some stylised head-crooking and elevating straight out of Nijinska' work on Stravinsky's Les Noces to suggest the pressure of conformity. I actually thought the best number was the one Bizet uses to depict the unrequited Vivette, here another corps + soloists ritual. Vivette in the ballet (Erina Takahashi) gets the rather bland Minuet from La Jolie Fille de Perth as her solo; Frederi (the attractive Esteban Berlanga) does his leapy-leapy stuff to the Pastorale, though he spends more of his time in the early stages frozen with anguish.


The main drawback is that Frederi starts distraught with nowhere to go; at least in the play there's a brief interlude of happiness in the general drama of pain. And the old people's Adagietto is too settled for this central mesalliance. If Petit had gone to Bizet's melodrama numbers, he would also have found a more tragic musical ending. As it is, Frederi whips himself up in a dance of death to the Farandole and defenestrates himself in the final bars. At least Berlanga did this Orestes-pursued-by-invisible-Furies number well, with the final leap brilliantly caught in John Ross's photo.


Petit's Carmen was a sensation in 1949 - all that sex, the wonderful oddity of the uptight young man rather than the Carmen dancing the Habanera while the corps mockingly shout the words 'l'amour est enfant de boheme' etc, the brutal denouement to thwacking timps (Begona Cao and Fabian Reimar pictured below).


But the way the score's used is a mess - how much better a job Shchedrin made of it for Plisetskaya some years later - and Petit manages to complicate a simple story. Instead of village soldier boy corrupted and maddened by femme fatale this Don Jose seems to be a proud matador, while Escamillo is a camp sideshow who couldn't on his own precipitate the final tragedy. Cao, despite great long legs, seemed to be having a charisma bypass, and there was no chemistry with Reimair. Even the central Pas de deux was rather irksome: why use the scene with castanets when the bugle calls offstage signify nothing in your own take on the drama?


Most fun of all, if pure melodramatic tosh (blame Cocteau, and Petit's showbusiness instincts), was Le Jeune Homme et la Mort - and here Benjamin Pope's rather solid conducting of an astonishingly high-class ballet orchestra (Gareth Hulse and Katie Clemmow the oboists) came into its own with Respighi's grandiose arrangement of Bach's Passacaglia and Fugue in C minor. Yonah Acosta, nephew of Carlos and pictured below in Arnaud Stephenson's rehearsal photo working with Luigi Bonino, is a powerful physical presence, well able to do 101 things with table annd chairs, and the right age for adolescent angst, too: I thought he could well be a star, but balletomanes who know more than I do weren't so sure.


Anyway, with no actual production pics of Acosta Jr, how could we not see how the original jeune homme, Jean Babilee, made a cultish figure of protest. You'll need to bypass a minute or so of talk for the excerpts.



And similarly, how could we not see the beautiful Rudolf as a slightly more ballet-conscious young man? Interestingly, and I think less impressively, this features the Bach organ original rather than Respighi's orchestration.



And now I'm off to find a copy of Black Tights starring charismatic Mrs Petit (Zizi Jeanmaire), Moira Shearer and Cyd Charisse. I also want to see the Petit ballet with the Tchaikovsky arrangements John Lanchbery was most proud of, Puss in Boots. Sadly there are only a couple of clips on YouTube, but the chaste (compared to Stravinsky) treatment of Tchaik miniatures is impressive.

So, it was an interesting but very mixed week, with no total hits: the Brian - time to move on from that - followed by the brave, clearly gifted Belarus Free Theatre actors trying to make something out of execrable texts at the Almeida, Katie Mitchell's idiosyncratic but not often well-acted take on a Jacobean domestic tragedy at the National (which has at least got me reading more), the curate's-egg Halle Prom - worth it for Schiff in Bartok 3 and the Proms premiere of Sibelius's Scenes historiques Suite 2 (now there's a mini-masterpiece) - and finally this. I guess the bottom line is that ENB's was a rather inhibited English take on French style, despite its truly international team of dancers.

Winners and losers?

No, we supposedly civilized people don't USE such terms, do we (vide that splendid movie Little Miss Sunshine), least of all in the hallowed halls of Radio 3's CD Review, where the word 'winner' is out of bounds. Nevertheless, as they say, a sop is needed to the public at the end of Building a Library, and usually I end up saying, this is my personal choice but I would have been equally happy with x, y and z. Not so for the suites-incarnation of Bizet's L'Arlesienne, I have to say, where the sophisticated beauty of Abbado's LSO left everyone else - Beecham included - some way behind.


And you may have found it odd that I made so much of Tommy's failure to use a Provencal side drum instead of a mimsy tambourine in the middle of the Pastorale. QED: hope the Cluytens alternative made the point. Is anyone going to complain that I didn't spend long enough on the complete incidental music? Well, combining suites and original was always going to be problematic - though nowhere near as bad as the first time I 'did' Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and was supposed to jump between ballet and concert-hall versions, very different - but made a lot simpler by the fact that the best of the two available had a German text, and that the alternative, Plasson, was as usual a bit sleepy and out of focus.

In the world of the play, the melodrama metamorphoses on Frederi's and L'Innocent's themes enrich our understanding of Bizet's subtlety but are too snippety to work in anything other than a semi-staged version with actors. Still, I'm very glad to have got to know them, and to love Bizet's incomparable woodwind writing even more. The complete Building a Library is here on the Radio 3 iPlayer for the next week; go to about the 34 minute mark to hear Andrew McGregor's introduction (with apologies for the spoiler above if you hadn't wanted to know the no. 1 choice)

Have you noticed how journalists spend far too much time accentuating the negative? 'What's your worst/Which composer do you really hate/What would you NOT take with you on a Desert Island?' are the most frequently asked questions. At best it's a bit of fun, but usually all it serves to do is to emphasise the blind spots of the writer. And never more so than in the BBC Music Magazine's latest attempt to get the critics to say what bores them. The disclaimer 'one man's meat is another man's poison' doesn't fail to conceal the fact that in nine cases out of ten the last laugh is on the disliker, unless he or she expresses that aversion in golden prose. Good grief, many of these pet hates are among my biggest loves: Tristan, Butterfly, Cenerentola, Strauss's Don Quixote, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Mahler 8, Bruckner 7 (though admittedly the Britten and the Bruckner, like the Brahms German Requiem also cited, can sound awful in ponderous or frigid hands, but that's not the fault of the music)...

The only one I half agree with is Fiona Maddocks in her insistence that Purcell's Dido and Aeneas needs to cut to the chase and 'When I am laid in earth' which is, of course, one of the supreme laments of all time. Let's hear it for La Connolly at the 2009 Last Night of the Proms.



My other problem pieces? Quite a few, from Monteverdi's Return of Ulysses via Beethoven's Violin, Third Piano and Emperor Concertos (torpid slow movements especially) to Glass's Satyagraha. But I freely admit that, with the possible exception of glassy Phil, whose bland experiment I'd argue as tied to its time and place (move on, Mr Glass, evolve), blind spots they remain.

Bizet in Provence

Last Tuesday I went into BBC Broadcasting House to record this coming Saturday's Building a Library for Radio 3's CD Review: by my own choice, following on from the sunny time spent with Delibes' Coppelia, the subject was Bizet's incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's Provencal tragedy L'Arlesienne. It was actually a chance remark by my friend and unofficial former mentor Dr. Roger Savage that Bizet's Adagietto must be behind Elgar's most introspective moments that led me to listen again, and fall in love.

Of course I can't give even a hint of the 'winner' among the 20 or so recordings. But I would like to sing the praises a little more of the work itself. As I've discovered, all of Bizet's 27 numbers for Daudet's play are worth doing, though they need some kind of dramatic context - and only one of the three contenders there gives that, though unhelpfully it uses German actors (excellent all) rather than French. So it boiled down to a choice between various versions of the famous Suites: the first put together and re-orchestrated by Bizet himself, the second assembled by his friend Guiraud after his death (with a not exactly appropriate borrowing, the Minuet from La Jolie Fille de Perth).


Beyond the striking sax-solo portrait of L'Innocent, the hero of the drama's slow-witted brother who 'comes to his senses' just as Frederi, the protagonist, is abandoning his, and the tragic lovesickness of Frederi himself, there's not much here to tell you what a predominantly dark work this is. You need to hear all the melodramas for the play proper to know that it all ends badly, with a dramatic defenestration. As in Carmen, the merrymaking of the crowd - in the opera, for the bullfight, in the play, for a celebration of the feast of St. Eligius - serves as background to the tragic denouement.


And what a strange play it is, beyond the evocation of Provence which has so much in common with the later images of Van Gogh I've reproduced here. The 'girl from Arles' who gives the hero so much grief never appears: is she a Carmen-like vamp or just an ordinary woman with a history? There's a morbidity about our Frederi which apparently casts back to Daudet's unfortunate experience in his youth: one in which he contracted the syphilis which was to lead to a slow, lingering death (I've just picked up a copy of his sketches on the subject). Like Don Jose, his passion is unquenchable, but the violence is turned against himself. And there's also a Micaela, the village girl Vivette who loves him unquestioningly. Her music provides the real raison d'etre of the Second Suite, apart from its brilliantly effective orchestral combination of Farandole and old Provencal marching song, which we used to sing in Christmas carol services as 'De bon matin, j'ai recontre le train de trois grands rois'.


What did I take away from repeated hearings of the music? That Bizet's woodwind scoring, like Glinka's, is simple but perfect and goes straight to the heart. That the Menuetto's quiet ending may have influenced the Gavotte of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony; that the four-part string writing of the incredibly brief but profound Adagietto, which really ought to be played in the original by a string quartet, undoubtedly made its mark on Elgar, Mahler and Strauss.

This is potent writing on a miniature scale which finds it hard these days to carve out a niche in the concert hall, just as the fastidiously wrought, discreetly sensuous operas of Bizet's devoted friend Massenet no longer play a major role in the repertoire. And I doubt if that will change with the Royal Opera's production of Cendrillon, much as I love the piece and enjoyed most of the production. Read all about it on The Arts Desk, where I've also briefly commented on the Opera North vs Lee Hall presumed-homophobia kerfuffle (fellow blogger Jon Dryden Taylor wrote the response Opera North should have given). In the meantime, enjoy this striking production shot by Bill Cooper of simpatica if surprisingly pale-voiced Joyce DiDonato as Cinders with the stunning mezzo Prince of the real star, Alice Coote.


And don't forget to tune in to Radio 3 on Saturday morning, or go to the iPlayer for a week thereafter. I hope you come to love Bizet's music as much as I do. Next season it's back to the Russians, and I intend to give Prokofiev Vol. 2 a much-needed kick this summer, but I've enjoyed my Gallic interlude beyond measure.