Fabulous Fučik

Picture if you will the delightful Sarah Walker - the BBC Radio 3 presenter, not the veteran singer - doing a drum majorette routine in the studio with an invisible baton while the liveliest of marches goes out on air. I think - I hope - we all got infected by the glittering spirit of Julius Fučík (1872-1916) as conducted, con molto amore as is so obvious, by Neeme Järvi, and played so brilliantly by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos.

The disc was one of my two picks for an orchestral new releases stretch on last Saturday's CD Review (still available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for another couple of weeks; our slot is around the 1.16 mark, though I also very much liked what I heard of  Hannah French's Building a Library on Haydn's Trumpet Concerto as we waited to go live on air). The other choice was a Mahler 6 from Daniel Harding, not a conductor I've found more than middle-of-the-road before, but with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra he's fired up and has a lot to say. And the cover gimmick of heartbeat ECG and hammerblow frequency is a good one.

Sarah chose the two Brahms Piano Concertos from Barenboim and Dudamel on DG, a recording which I found almost impossible to listen to in its ponderousness after the flights of Robin Ticciati in the First Symphony and now, on CD, Stephen Kovacevich's versions with Colin Davis when he was still plain Bishop. Sarah's other disc, the Schoenberg arrangement of Brahms's G minor Piano Quartet and his Accompaniment to a Film Scene, with Marc Albrecht conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic, was much more to my taste, and the Accompaniment came in useful when I was illustrating Shostakovich's original first interlude in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to my Opera in Depth students - it's just possible he knew Schoenberg's work in 1931.

The Fučík selection - I know, how easily the finger goes on the keyboard from c straight to k - really is quite a sequence, with excellent notes to match by Nigel Simeone (though even he can't unearth all the programmes - what, for instance, are the Marinarella and Miramare Overtures, miniature tone poems, all about?) It's a real New Year's Day concert of overtures, marches and polkas with plenty of novelties like whistling, anvils and farting bassoon. Andrew McGregor did a spot check on that venerable Viennese institutions and found that Fučík, Prague-born son of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and very much part of the K&K set-up, had never featured.

He had an interesting peripatetic life as bassoonist and military bandmaster, working in two Prague theatres as well as in Sisak (in Croatia), Sarajevo, Budapest and Berlin. I find it piquant that the most conventional of the marches, Under the Admiral's Flag, was played at Trieste's naval yard in 1911, with Archduke Franz Ferdinand present, for the launch of the Dreadnought battleship Viribus unitis (the Austrian navy not being something that figures much, for obvious reasons).

Certainly the waltzes are up there with Josef Strauss's for sheen and beauty, if perhaps not quite the same degree of memorability. The lessons of Dvořák, Fučík's most famous mentor, shine in the woodwind writing both there and in the Marinarella Overture, where Rusalka seems to glide out of the water. But if we're talking about tunefulness, Fučik probably has the distinction of being the most-played Czech composer ever through his 'Grande Marche Chromatique' Entry of the Gladiators; intriguing to learn that it was partly written to serve the new chromatic possibilities in valved brass instruments. It's a proper riot in the full-orchestral garb on the CD; the little harmonic sideslip in the trio tune is typical.

Fučík can't resist giving little kicks to his melodies, whether in syncopation, harmony or orchestration. Uncle Teddy is such fun, with Bohemian thirds and sixths to boot, and I love the eastern European otherness of Hercegovac; but undoubtedly the one on my brain, which I partly got played on the show, is the cheerful-making Florentiner March, supposedly mimicking the chatter of an Italian girl to which her man - an Austrian officer - grunts back 'Jawohl' on two low notes. The polkas are fine, too, especially The Old Grumbler with the bassoon (the RSNO's David Hubbard, excellent) getting under the dance's feet as well as joining it. So is it going to take a Czech conductor of high status to appear in Vienna on January 1 and get these pieces included? And if that doesn't happen, wouldn't Neeme make a marvellous New Year's Day master?

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…