Opening the shrine, then down into the Rhine

Ten glorious Wednesday afternoons on the Wagner opera that always leaves me feeling whole have flown by, dovelike. I'll confess that musically I can do without the final transfiguration; it doesn't really take us any further, and unless you have a production where Parsifal moves on, feels a bit 'here we go again' in the non-action, too. But tears always come to my eyes in the Good Friday Magic music, whether in the opera or in the concert. It took the visit of John Tomlinson to drive home how beautiful and unusual the words are. The gist is that humans may look to God, but nature looks to humans to treat it kindly. Wagner's ecological thoughts, which permeate the Ring, chime so strongly with us today.

The oboe solo gave me my first big emotion a day or so after the big operation in July - my wonderful students Janet and Ian Szymanski sent me a Jacquie Lawson card which begins right there: total surprise. It starts above at 41m45s in what remains my favourite recording of Parsifal since I undertook to listen to every one from start to finish for BBC Radio 3's Building a Library. Kurt Moll and James King sing, where necessary, with such tenderness. You may well want to listen to the whole act, and indeed the complete recording is up on YouTube - it's otherwise too expensive to buy second-hand as a CD set. 

Our more recent visitors could not have been more generous in their time or human warmth. Linda Esther Gray (two below me in the second from right row vertical-wise pictured above - click on the image to make it bigger) not only went back to the notes she'd taken when working with Reginald Goodall for the Welsh National Opera Parsifal - our loss that she felt it wasn't right to participate in the EMI recording - but also provided fresh tales which don't feature in her autobiography (which she intends to update, and I'm cheering her on, will help where I can). One of my American students asked her about the Dallas Walkure - preserved in not at all bad sound here on YouTube - 

and we got the extraordinary history of a visit to one of the generous wealthy Friends of the Dallas Opera, who greeted her with 'oh gee, it's so good to have you. Pavarotti was here last week and when he went away the poodle was dead.' 'I said to her, what are you talking about? And she said, "well, he didn't come at the beginning, he came about 2 o'clock in the morning, and sat down in a chair, and when he left, the poodle was dead." He thought it was a cushion. This is absolutely true, I've just remembered it...I told the Friends, now what you all need to remember is that my aria in Act One begins "Du bist der Lenz", and at the end of it you've all got to clap. They thought I was being serious - it had in fact got very serious - and the President of the opera house had to stand up and say, "now, Linda has a very strange sense of humour - don't clap" '. It's a treasurable two hours. And of course there was plenty of time for seriousness. Here are a few of us, including Linda, listening to Astrid Varnay and reacting.

John Tom (second from right, secon row down - again, click to enlarge) was equally generous with his time, and voice - he sang a great deal of Gurnemanz's part in Act Three for us. 

His anecdotes included one about being summoned by Barenboim to step in as Gurnemanz in Vienna the day after he'd sung Hans Sachs at the Royal Opera = 'and when Daniel asks, you don't refuse'. At Vienna Airport there was a police car on the runway, lights flashing. They drove to the Opera House with the siren goinga. They arrived at the stage door 20 minutes before curtain-up. He hadn't ever sung Gurnemanz in this Vienna production. It's a role he could still do at 77, but more physically demanding ones with six-week rehearsal periods, obviously not - 'my legs won't let me'.

Another phenomenon, and so generous with his visits: he'll be back to discuss the Rheingold Wotan now that we've started Opera in Depth Mondays in the depths of the river, and we'll see him in the Bayreuth Kupfer production (pictured above), the greatest experience of his life. After the talk, we watched him in Kupfer's Berlin Parsifal, which followed on almost immediately from the last year of that Bayreuth Ring; so meaningful in every line, and moving to tears (pictured below with Waltraud Meier and Poul Elming). 

Other guests are lining up this term: Christopher Purves, who's sung the Rheingold Alberich twice recently, in Zurich and at the Royal Opera (so much to ask him), and, when we move on to Iolanthe, conductor Chris Hopkins and a return visitor, John Savournin, who's promised to gather other singers from Cal McCrystal's funny and beautiful ENO production. 

Mahler Part Two has kicked off, and so far I've asked Catherine Larsen-Maguire, who pulled off a triumph in the Seventh Symphony with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (one of our Arts Desk folk in the north raved about it; rehearsal pictured above by Ryan Buchanan), and Edward Gardner, who has elected to talk about Das Lied von der Erde. Rich times ahead.

Heavenly conversations in a year of Zoom classes

Ian Page, inspirational founder of what was originally Classical Opera and now goes by the collective vocal/orchestral heading of The Mozartists, wondered if his e-mail comment wouldn't look a bit pretentious out of context when I asked him if I might quote it. I'll still do so because it expressed what I've felt about those especially magical Zoom classes where musicians who haven't seen each other for some time - or even decades - find themselves together in the class and start conversing. Ian was referring to meetings with that wonderful mezzo Jean Rigby and her husband, the director Jamie Hayes, whom he hadn't seen for a quarter of a century, then with Mark Wigglesworth and Linda Esther Gray in the last Fidelio class, and added 'I've never been a particularly religious person, but it was almost like a vision of the afterlife, being able to chat about music with loved and respected friends and colleagues in a haven of timelessness!' Above, Mark (second from the right in the bottom row) is making us laugh. Ian is at the right next row up, Linda is on the left on the row above that and of course that's me second from left at the top (click if you want a bigger image).

The other three-way (four if you count myself as interlocutor) 'heavenly conversation' that brought us so much joy was between director Richard Jones and Wagnerian sopranos Sue Bullock and Dame Anne Evans. It was originally supposed to be spotlight on Richard, to talk about Act 2 of Götterdämmerung, but Sue and Anne had said they wanted to come along to see him. Sue was ready to speak, Anne had been wondering whether Zoom was for her and had asked to be a silent observer, but the other two shouted 'C'mon, Annie', so she did - and was still there at the very end as we were still shaking from emotion at her performance in Kupfer's Bayreuth Act 2. You can get a sense of the fun that was had from the below screen shot (Richard top left, Anne with a bit of husband and distinguished writer John Lucas top right, Sue centre of the second row).

So many connections made with the great and good in what now amounts to nearly a year of Zoom classes, starting out of pure necessity, have been serendipitous and charmed. I asked Ian to the Fidelio/Leonore classes because he's just released two superb CDs of 'Sturm und Drang' music familiar and obscure, and I wanted him to comment on Pizarro's raging. He then said that he'd been thinking the night before about scores he really wanted to conduct, which he was thinking about studying with a view to that, and Fidelio was at the forefront. So he came for the next four sessions. Similarly a New Best Friend made as a result of all this, the conductor (and top bassoonist) Catherine Larsen Maguire, based in Berlin, was recommended for my fourth class on the symphony, to talk about Schumann 2 and Brahms 1, and has been with us, on and off, ever since. Sometimes one of her cats, Lily, makes an appearance, though I confess the golden shot below isn't from one of our encounters.

It seems hard to believe that coming up to a year ago, I was grappling with the implications of taking my Opera in Depth class on to Zoom (we managed to reach the top of the mountain with Siegfried at Pushkin House on 9 March 2020). I was surprised and impressed by the number of students, especially the senior members, willing to give the format a try. The first class was bedevilled by poor sound quality for the excerpts, but I got some help before the second in finding how to do it perfectly. YouTube and DVD clips fell into place at a later date. The symphony course got more takers than I'd expected - after my 'Inside the BBC Symphony Orchestra' course at Morley college ended because the BBC doesn't support private classes, it had been difficult to drum up numbers for orchestral music. I'm eternally grateful to Dale Bilsland of the Wagner Society of Scotland for suggesting that, since the usual Gartmore House Ring adventure was out of the question in September, I should repeat Siegfried on Zoom. Many of the new visitors not only joined me for Götterdämmerung but have also signed up for other operas and the Russian music course which will enter its fourth term in mid-April. so we've been hitting the 60-students mark. A special debt of thanks to Kirk Davis of Southern California, who rises at 6am to join us at 2.30pm UK time: a born giver.

And so we've reached the Easter break, going out on a high with the second of my extra classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace, which ran to three hours and 40 minutes thanks to the unstinting and ceaselessly fascinating presence of Graham Vick (now a 'Sir', knighted in January) who stayed with us as I ran scenes from his 2014 Mariinsky production. He'd also been responsible for the 1991 Kirov experiment, again with Gergiev, and so was a witness to history - the new adventure beginning in the 1990s, which I also witnessed on my first visits to Leningrad as it transitioned back to St Petersburg, the shutdown well under way by 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea and an amazingly radical production had to jump through all sorts of hoops to reach the stage (I'm still surprised it did). Graham told us, among other things, that the manager of the Louis Vuitton shop below where he was staying told him that their prices were higher than any other store in the world. The Russian kleptocrats expected to pay more. Needless to see, this found its way into the 'Frenchified', corrupt world of Helene and Anatol. What I hadn't realised was that the 'retreat from Moscow' was supposed to represent the exit of western values in 2014.

It looks like boasting, but actually the below list is just a record for my own benefit of the astonishing number of visits we had from musical stars. All were happy to feel part of something at a time when isolation was the norm.

The Symphony

Class 1: Haydn with Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page

Class 2: Mozart's 'Jupiter' and Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ with Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan Bloxham

Class 3: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with Nicholas Collon

Class 4: Schumann's Second and Brahms's First with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Class 5: Brahms's Fourth and Tchaikovsky's ‘Pathetique’ with Vladimir Jurowski

Class 6: Mahler's Third with Paavo Järvi

Class 7: Mahler's Ninth and Elgar's Second with Vasily Petrenko

Class 8: Sibelius's Fifth and Nielsen's Fifth with Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste

Class 9: Martinů's Third, Prokofiev's Sixth and Vaughan Williams's Sixth with Mark Elder

Class 10: Shostakovich's Fifteenth with Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning

Class 11: Adams's Harmonielehre with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Russian Music 1: Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with Samson Tsoy; Tchaikovsky piano music with Pavel Kolesnikov

Russian Music 2: Stravinsky’s Petrushka with Gergely Madaras; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with Andrew Litton; Scriabin with Alexander Melnikov and Peter Jablonski (Peter was driving to a recording session at the time but made a beautifully produced short film from his home in Sweden).

Russian Music 3: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with Elizabeth Wilson; Prokofiev ‘War Sonatas’ and Shostakovich Second Piano Trio with Steven Osborne and Boris Giltburg; Prokofiev’s violin sonatas with Alina Ibragimova and Benjamin Baker.

Opera in Depth Summer term: Strauss’s Elektra with regular commentary from Susan Bullock, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with three separate visits from Ermonela Jaho, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder

Wagner’s Siegfried (Wagner Society of Scotland) with John Tomlinson

Opera in Depth Autumn term: Wagner's Götterdämmerung with Susan Bullock and Richard Berkeley-Steele, John Tomlinson, Anne Evans and Richard Jones

Opera in Depth Spring term: Beethoven's Fidelio/Leonore with Elizabeth Watts, Jay Hunter Morris, Ian Page, Linda Esther Gray and Mark Wigglesworth

Prokofiev's War and Peace, two extra classes: Graham Vick

These wonderful people have all come along for the love of music. I do like to send them various thanks, preferably books. My good Estonian friend Kaupo Kikkas could be called upon to supply the book of his Ansel exhibition to three contributors I knew would appreciate it. I won't mention the third yet because it needs to be a surprise, but the first two delighted recipients were Jay Hunter Morris, mighty Met Siegfried, whose YouTube film of the amazing Souper Jenny Kindness Tour he undertook with wife, son and friends around America showed me they'd visited the big natural wonders, and Boris Giltburg, who's a talented photographer as well as a great pianist. Kaupo sent me shots of the notes and dedication - this one to JMo.

And now, time to gather forces again, and enjoy what looks like it might be a rather clement Easter break. We return on 19 April to begin the summer term of Opera in Depth with Britten's Albert Herring and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (coinciding with a new production at the Royal Opera: director Richard Jones and conductor Mark Wigglesworth have promised to visit us - hopefully together). Russian Music 4 begins with the shadow of the Zhdanov trials of 1948 on 22 April. If you'd like to join, drop me a message here with your email; I won't publish it but I shall respond.

Elektra's death-dance, Butterfly's flight

For much of my Opera in Depth Zoom classes on Richard Strauss's Elektra - three out of five - we have been incredibly lucky and honoured to have the insights of Susan Bullock, one of the world's great performers of the role (pictured below at the Royal Opera by Clive Barda), who's since entered what she calls 'a whole new world of weird' - the strange territory of mother Clytemnestra's suppurating conscience.

And now, on the Monday after next, Ermonela Jaho will join us for the third class on Puccini's Madama Butterfly.

Ermonela was to have repeated her triumph in the role at the Royal Opera (pictured above by Bill Cooper) this summer, but sadly it's not to be; though you can catch her equally heartbreaking Suor Angelica in the screening of the Trittico as vividly realised by Richard Jones in the company's next weekly offering. She'll be there next Monday to talk about the challenges in the first part of Act Two, Puccini's longest and most intense psychological study (and it includes 'Un bel di').

Sue was there throughout our second and third sessions (there she is on the first of two screens above, second row down on the left. You may need to click to enlarge). When she wasn't able to attend the last Elektra class - online coaching has now taken over at the Royal Academy of Music's request - she sent what amounted to three wonderful essays on the Recognition Scene, Elektra's encounter with Aegisth and the turbulent finale. It made me think she should write a book on, say, five or six heroines she knows inside out - Brünnhilde, Isolde, Salome, Elektra, Madama Butterfly, perhaps Katya Kabanova - from her performing perspective. Always going in-depth with the marriage of words and music, text and dynamics - what she had to say about Schoenberg's Erwartung in the second class was fascinating - she could fill a real need, and weave in the crucial autobiography around it. Any publishers out there? I'll do some canvassing.

I am also indebted to Sue for putting me on to her admiration for a great (the greatest?) Elektra, Astrid Varnay. My allegiance, recordings and performance wise, has been to Nilsson (of course), Behrens,  Ibge Borkh,  Erna Schlüter, but now I'm a convert to Varnay's recordings with Mitropoulos live and Richard Kraus in the studio (where her sister Chrysothemis is sung by Leonie Rysanek, later Elektra in the Götz Friedrich film to Varnay's Clytemnestra).

The Mitropoulos experience is a live 1949 New York concert performance which plonks an interval at the end of Clytemnestra's short-lived triumphal interlude and goes on to omit the second Elektra-Chrysothemis scene. The sound is fairly dim for the orchestra, but what pacing and textural clarity! The end is wackier than usual; Varnay decides to go up to a top for her final note (tan-zen, a B, not a low F sharp) and the woodwind hang on before the final two-note thwack.The Kraus sounds much better, and he was a good conductor, but it doesn't quite have that level of visceral excitement. But it is complete.

That final scene wasn't the only end-of-class experience to leave me all worked up and discombobulated. It wasn't until we had the introductory class to Butterfly that I realised we'd left a suffocating, brilliantly-lit house for the open air and a chance to soar into blue skies (for at least the first act and half of the second).

I loved excursions into Saint-Saëns's La princesse jaune and Messager's Madame Chrysanthème (I've just started reading Pierre Loti's memoir-novella which was the basis for that pretty operette); and only just realised what really connects Madama Butterfly with The Mikado beyond the use of the same folksong and the japonaiserie - Smetana's Overture to The Bartered Bride. Coasting with Pavarotti, Robert Kerns and Karajan from 'America for ever!' to the arrival of Butterfly put me back into that peculiar lyric ecstasy in which Puccini is unsurpassed. And he was, of course, just as consummate an orchestrator as Strauss. Happy days ahead.

Meanwhile, the course on the symphony from Haydn to Adams has taken on a hue I hadn't anticipated, which is to say distinguished guests on a weekly basis; not sure I can keep it up for every class. I mentioned in the introductory post (all 11 classes duly listed there) having the gift of Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page to comment on Haydn and Mozart, then Mark Wigglesworth with Jonny for Beethoven. It was a real bonus that Nicholas Collon was able to join us for half an hour at the beginning of the class on Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique (his performance with the Aurora Orchestra from memory is still there on their website, as is their 'Eroica' and now their 'Pastoral').

On Thursday I made the acquaintance of Berlin-based conductor Catherine Larsen-Maguire (pictured above by David Beecroft), 15 years a bassoonist with the great orchestras and under the best conductors (Abbado, Haitink, Kirill Petrenko, Rattle, not a bad list). I'm so grateful to Aude-Marie Auphan of Victoria Rowsell Management, with its roster of selectively excellent artists, for putting us in touch.

Catherine (top row centre above; as with the Elektra class Zoom image, click to enlarge) was brilliant and vivacious on every point, and she induced in me a Sehnsucht to go and live in Berlin. Heck, what a dream: a country where music, and the arts in general, matter to so many more people than they do here, where the orchestral musicians are still on full pay, where there's been a civic and governmental responsibility to the C-19 crisis lacking, at least from our disastrous leadership, here. As our stumbling, irresponsible government in Westminster, in marked contrast to the real leaders in Scotland and Wales, plunges us into another vortex, the thought of joining a responsible society has become very pressing. There have been serious discussions at home; watch this space.

In the meantime, this coming Thursday's class has a double whammy: Paavo Järvi to discuss the unique finale of Brahms's Fourth, Vladimir Jurowski on the endgame genius in Tchaikovsky's Pathétique. Musicians on the continent are now beginning to go back to their full schedules again - for Vladimir it's a series of challenging programmes with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (listen here to the first), for Paavo work before the second season with his Tonhalle Orchestra in Zurich and, yes, the Pärnu Festival in July. which I hope and pray to attend because it's my favourite in the world - so we're very lucky to have had this window of opportunity.

UPDATE: I must write more about this anon, but Paavo is joining us this coming Thursday for Mahler 3, Vladimir Jurowski was with us for two hours on Brahms 4 and Tchaikovsky 6 - revelatory - and Ermonela Jaho for two and a half hours yesterday, including a full hour-long masterclass on 'Un bel di'. These are such exceptional human beings as well as top musicians.

SECOND UPDATE (22/6): This is going to look like bragging, but I'm very proud and happy about the latest developments. Vasily Petrenko joined the symphony class last Thursday to talk about Mahler, Elgar, the musical philistinism of British politicians and adapting to smaller forces post-crisis. Mark Elder is visiting the Butterfly class today, while Antonio Pappano has pledged to Zoom in for our grand finale next Monday. More developments expected...