After comparison in the Opera in Depthclass yesterday between fast Rosenkavalier Preludes (Strauss in 1926), too slow for the parodied sexual agitation the composer asks for in the score (Karajan in 1982) and censored (Kempe taking the Prelude as opener to a 'waltz sequence' and shedding the horn-whooping orgasm), plus multiple illustrations of all the little gems in the first scene, we settled down to watch the first 20 minutes of Carlos Kleiber's 1979 Munich performance. Brilliance from the off (CK's entrance is about 1'40 in).
You can watch all of this if you like (no subtitles, unfortunately, though Fassbaender's plausibility and Jones's beauty should carry it), but I've put it up just for the sake of the first couple of minutes to recommend that you witness the most flexible conducting of all time - as far as I know - in action. Abbado followed in the master's footsteps for unfathomable suppleness, and daddy Erich's recording is still a stunner, but this Prelude - and indeed the lively pacing of the whole - is pure gold. I'm also getting hold of the Vienna performance on DVD since that great lady Felicity Lott is coming to talk Strauss with us on the 30th, so we need to see how she and Anne Sofie von Otter work together with great Carlos at the end of Act 1. Her capacity to move is a given; I always melted at that point every time I saw her in the role at the Royal Opera. Meanwhile, more quickening of the pulses with CK should be the order of the week between work. And here's a gem of exquisite agony which shows him taking a car-crash from the stage lightly as the Baron Ochs and male semi-chorus f*** it up towards the end of Act 2.
We'll be lucky in choosing only the best. This Straussian joy for the next six classes at least is such a bolster against the unfolding horrors of our age. As for my free offer of a scenario for a sequel to Shostakovich/Gogol's The Nose, the image of Nigel back from his time in Trump Towers' golden-showers lift and hauled off at Heathrow with a mysterious immovable brown stain on his conk could now equally well apply to Gove. Not that one should really be giving these pygmies headspace.
In the meantime, if only Las Vegas socialite Sari Bunchuk Wontner were still alive to give her immortal Violetta at Trump's inauguration concert. Filth for filth.
How could I forget? The greatest conductor of recent times died a year ago today, having given us a last decade with his Lucerne Festival Orchestra of the most extraordinary concerts I've ever experienced (Abbado in one of them pictured above by Peter Fischli). That his transcendentalism lives on is demonstrated to a remarkable degree in the Accentus Music film of the Lucerne memorial concert given on 6 April 2014.
I was very honoured to write the notes on the strength of a Guardian obit, and in one respect I had an advantage with the test pressing which the viewer won't enjoy: to experience the openings of the Berg Violin Concerto and the Adagio from Mahler's Third Symphony without voices over.
Yes, they've done the crazy thing of approaching those two performances with footage from other memorial tributes. I was very moved indeed to see the packed crowd in front of Milan's Teatro alla Scala for the Beethoven 'Eroica' funeral march conducted in Abbado's honour by Barenboim - sorry, there's just no comparison between those two - where the doors were thrown open to the wider public. Can you imagine a similar show of popular feeling for any musician in the UK? Ditto the Bologna lying-in-state for which musicians played around the clock.
Unfortunately the finished product brings on the music while all this is being shown, a terrible mistake in my opinion - especially when the Mahler finale, even without the string note gliding into the silence following the fourth movement's angelic conversation, needs the magic of its starting point.
What's invaluable in the DVD is to have the words of the wonderful Isabelle Faust, soloist in the Berg, and of veteran viola-player Wolfram Christ, testifying to Abbado's abiding presence in the orchestra, both as invisible guide while they play the first movement of Schubert's 'Unfinished' Symphony without a replacement and in the hearts and minds of the musicians.
The musicality of Hölderlin's verses for 'Brot und Wein' as read by Bruno Ganz is spellbinding - in the booklet note I've written about my own assumptions of the connection between the lines and Abbado's spirit - and here, too, is Andris Nelsons as one of a number of younger-generation spirits who may rise to Abbado's level. Indeed, the Mahler finale has a special intensity in its perfect pacing I've only heard twice before - from Abbado himself with the Berlin Philharmonic and from Jiří Bělohlávek with the BBC Symphony.
Boy, did we need it the evening we settled down in front of the telly. I urged it on J because we'd just watched a remarkably horrible film, Calvary.
The acting, led by Brendan Gleeson (pictured above with Kerry Reilly as the priest's daughter), is perfect, the cinematography very beautiful, but 20 minutes into the mannered script (which begins with the line spoken by a parishioner in confession to the priest 'I first tasted semen at seven years old'), I began to have the horrible sensation I'd been here before. Namely in the ugly thriller In Bruges, similarly unredeemed for me in that case by the lovely Colin Farrell. Sure enough, the director and writer of Calvary, John Michael McDonagh, is the brother of the screenplay author for In Bruges, Martin McDonagh. These siblings had a very strange upbringing, which may account for the negativity of their Weltanschaaung.
Such grotesquerie might work on stage - I've not seen The Pillowman - but it's at odds with cinematic naturalism. And when you have such visual beauty from the scenes along the Sligo coast, with - I'm assuming - Yeats's Ben Bulben in the distance, how come there's no spirituality at all in the film, not a single human mixture of good and bad in the whole community? Which was why I thought we needed a spiritual dimension to wash away the nasty taste left by Calvary. And we got it, in tearful infinity, from the memorial concert.
Meanwhile, the horrors of this temporal world are never far away. Also on 20 January 2014, street fighting in the Kiev protests was reported to have escalated. And where are we now? Still being haunted by even more horrific scenes of destruction around Donetsk airport as Russian-armed insurgents and possibly Russian forces fight on in breach of the ceasefire which, it seems, Ukraine has tried to honour. News continues to trickle in of Russian soldiers sent on 'secret' missions to Eastern Ukraine and killed in the conflict: the mother of one 20 year old has been brave enough to speak out. So Putin will continue to lie - and Hollande says he has no reason to disbelieve him?
I've read only one eye-witness account in detail - the brilliant Ukrainian Russian novelist Andrey Kurkov's Ukraine Diaries, which run from 21 November 2013 to 24 April 2014. Much of what you need to know about the complexities of the conflict is here, in startling proximity to the unfolding events.
Here's part of just one pertinent entry, from 20 February 2014. Kurkov is telling us how the then opposition leaders and radical nationalists like Pravy Sektor jumped on the spontaneously launched bandwagon. The complete paragraph seems to me like a paradigm of most revolutions.
...recently, the only way to distinguish a radical from a peaceful protestor is to see whether or not they [sic - put it down to slack translation] have a Molotov cocktail in their hand. The protestors have already been through all the stages: from the romantic phase, where everyone thought they could achieve their aims within a few days, to a premoniition of war, with revolutionaries covering their faces with balaclavas, wielding baseball bats and metal riot shields stolen from the police. Now we have entered a new phase, which can be summarised in five words: 'The bridges have been burned!' And many protestors on the barricades in Hrushevkoho street have removed their masks, no longer afraid to show their faces.
So here's to the girls on the go - Everybody tries. Look into their eyes And you'll see what they know: Everybody dies. A toast to that invincible bunch, The dinosaurs surviving the crunch - Let's hear it for the ladies who lunch! Everybody rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise! Rise!
Sondheim composed that mighty song in Company for Elaine Stritch, specifically for her 'acerbic delivery of self-assessment', just as he wrote Gypsy's 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' for Ethel Merman and A Little Night Music's eleven-o-clock number 'Send in the Clowns' for the inimitable short-windedness of Glynis Johns. I posted one of Lainey's many versions of 'The Ladies Who Lunch' back in 2010 here.
Now Stritch has joined Ethel in a heavenly Broadway, having lived to the age of 89 still a trouper despite four decades of heavy drinking and the rest living with diabetes. David Benedict has written a wonderful reminiscence of significant meetings with this straight-talking dame on The Arts Desk, and I hope others will come up with their Stritchstories too. But no obituary is going to match the life history, at least up to 2002, of the one-woman show Elaine Stritch At Liberty, which I count myself hugely fortunate to have seen at the Old Vic. Nothing, I think, can beat the work you have to do to visualise and keep up with her on the two-CD set of that event, so having said, buy it, I shoot myself in the foot by putting up the entire film as it appears on YouTube.
One bonus of the CD set is John Lahr's brilliant essay about working on a show which ended up 'Constructed by John Lahr, Reconstructed by Elaine Stritch' (we both laughed out loud at what he reports she said to him when he handed her an autographed copy of one of his books: 'John, you gotta stop givin' me these books with your signature. I can't give 'em away'). I think he sums it all up when he writes: 'By revealing conflict, failure, and the emotional price of Broadway survival, the show could generate that ozone of anger and anxiety which is, finally, the Stritch climate'.
Yet let's not forget the laughs won by perfect timing, the impeccable cadencing of a very distinctive language. She's irreplaceable, but we will continue to rise for this very human legend. To complete the Liberty life story with a perfect epilogue offering some overlap, it's vital to watch this New York Times film. Only Stritch, perhaps, could back up her thoughts on the possibility of an afterlife with lines from The Sound of Music's 'Something Good'.
The other big death this week left me oddly unmoved: could I honestly recall any concert of Lorin Maazel's which has stayed with me, or even - despite praise for his early Sibelius and Tchaikovsky - any one recording? Well, maybe the Teatro alla Scala performance I saw of Puccini's La fanciulla del West, when I found him in enthusiastic mode for the interview (for Manon Lescaut the following year he was just jaded and downright rude). When J told me the news of his death, my first thought was, phew, didn't write the Guardian obit, won't have to update - and then a lady from the obits desk rang and asked me to do just that; I'd completely forgotten. So I added a paragraph and the results are here.
Would I have forgotten the labours of love for Mackerras or Abbado? I hope not. I happened to be in Berlin in June en route for Dresden, catching an all-Strauss concert for which, I must be honest, I was pleased to find Semyon Bychkov had replaced him (with a better programme, too - out with the tacky music-minus-three Rosenkavalier Suite, in with an ineffable Schubert Nine). It was a beautiful summer evening with the moon rising over the Scharoun-designed Philharmonie in the interval.
I come to love the building, especially its foyers and auditorium, the more I visit it.
Inside the first face to greet me was Abbado's: nowhere except perhaps Lucerne reveres his memory more than the Berlin Phil, so this little exhibition of some wonderful photos
and many of his best musical observations held pride of place.
A shame there's no English tome on him comparable to the several in German and Italian. Give it time.
On which note, I turn sourly to a conductor who could sometimes be almost as great in performance as Abbado - possibly still can be - but whose pact with the Putin devil must surely end his career in the west. If anyone still has any doubts about the unworkability of Valery Gergiev conducting the World Orchestra for Peace at the Proms this evening - performances in Aix and Munich have already been cancelled - watch this interview in English by a Helsinki journalist (a minute or so of Finnish precedes it). My thanks to 'Boulezian' Mark Berry for drawing my attention to it.
If you can't be bothered to sit through the rather grim spectacle, I've jotted down a few choice phrases: [Eastern Ukraine] 'is not a problem of Russia - Ukrainian people kill each other'. On Crimea: 'it was not annexation, people were voting to leave Ukraine. There were too many Nazi elements...Those who killed so many people in Kiev and burnt so many people in Odessa, the east calls them Fascists, we don't want to stay with the Fascists.' Mattila, who stated that she would not work with Gergiev again, 'doesn't understand anything in politics, she has absolutely no idea what is happening in Ukraine...how she will look into the eyes of mothers who had children killed - there are many children killed'.
He is entitled to believe all this if he wants - though of course war quickly spawns atrocity on both sides, and no doubt there are refugees pouring into Russia - and if there were no political or humanitarian aspect to his work, we could note it and move on. But following his unequivocal support of Putin's re-election campaign and his jumping to be included on a list of signatures approving the Crimean occupation, a slightly more objective stance than this would be needed to justify his post at the head of a 'Peace' Orchestra (which has suffered already from scandals of funding in the recent past). I state this here because the driving force of The Arts Desk thinks I just want to 'pick a fight' with a conductor I used to respect, and always enjoyed meeting. So no more space to sound off there. (Update, Monday: photo by Chris Christodoulou from last night. No kerfuffles have been reported so far, more shame on the British public).
I do think a valid comparison is to be made with Vladimir Jurowski. No, he isn't living in Russia and he doesn't have to work with the regime. But it was still courageous of him to address a Moscow audience back in May about the gay aspect of Britten's War Requiem, how Britten and Pears were officially criminals for many years, how even Wilfred Owen was gay. No doubt which of those two conductors these two composers, snapped after a Moscow Conservatory performance of Britten's works in 1966, would applaud. One only has to remember Shostakovich's setting of Yevtushenko's 'A Career' at the end of his Thirteenth Symphony to know what he might be thinking of Gergiev were he still alive.
On a less heinous scale, Long Yu, the conductor of last night's China Philharmonic Prom which I didn't hear, is a party apparatchik who even if he were a decent conductor already holds more prominent posts than is healthy for a man in his position. That he's atrociously poor I can attest from the worst conducted performance I've ever heard, a spectacularly testudinal Elgar Cockaigne Overture with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. I have it from the horse's mouth that the players themselves stopped the whole thing falling apart as early as the tenuto in the second full bar. The orchestra petitioned their general manager to make sure they never worked with him again, but he said he couldn't guarantee it where big bucks from China were concerned.
Heigh ho, things at the Proms, which began well enough on Friday night, should start looking up again from tomorrow onwards. On Tuesday I'll be chatting with Sara Mohr-Pietsch and Hugo Shirley in the Proms Plus Intro, 4.45pm at the Royal College of Music down the steps from the Albert Hall, before Glyndebourne presents its Rosenkavalier semi-staged to the South Ken colosseum (I doubt if Richard Jones will have much to do with it; he was disappointed in what he felt were the singers overdoing his WNO Meistersinger at the Proms). I postponed a work trip to Italy by a day in order to take part, and much as I keep moaning that the Proms should have done Strauss proud with more arcane semi-staged operas like the fabulous Feuersnot, of course I'm pleased to be able to hear Rosenkavalier live for a fourth time this year.
I can add little more to the Guardian obit now up, various blog posts and Arts Desk features - a joint tribute with Ed Seckerson being the latest - jammed with superlatives about Claudio Abbado, who has died surrounded by his family in Bologna at the age of 80. His Indian summer with the Lucerne Festival Orchestra yielded simply the best Mahler I've ever heard: I got myself out there on the strength of the Second Symphony on DVD, to be stunned first by the Seventh, later by the First; as for the Ninth, it was simply an out of body experience.
Likewise, surprisingly, Tchaikovsky's The Tempest in Rome with another super-orchestra made up of the Orchestra Mozart based in his home town of Bologna and the Accademia di Santa Cecilia. Abbado's Tchaikovsky Sixth with the Simon Bolivar then-still-Youth Orchestra in Lucerne was only part of a poleaxing programme. Bruckner Five at the Festival Hall didn't quite do it for me - blame my problems with the piece - but the preceding Schumann Piano Concerto with Mitsuko Uchida was one of THE great partnerships. Both concert photos here by the great Chris Christodoulou.
All the qualities which made these performances peerless I've ennumerated elsewhere, not least in the obit - strange to think it was begun before the Lucerne dream took wing - but I'll just recall a few more. Live, way back, Debussy and Tchaikovsky with the LSO, more recently, Brahms with the Berlin Phil. On CD, the early Prokofiev Romeo and Juliet and Chout excerpts, Verdi's Simon Boccanegra with a dream cast, a Wagner disc with Bryn Terfel.
Later: in the City Lit class, too swamped by Abbadiana to do justice to Tippett's King Priam, I put together a sequence, mostly operatic to suit the students:
Wagner, Prelude to Act 1 of Lohengrin Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra (Arthaus Music DVD of the 1990 Vienna production)
Verdi, Prelude to Aida Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (DG CD, 1997)
Prokofiev: Dance with Mandolins from Romeo and Juliet and Final Dance from Chout London Symphony Orchestra (Decca CD, 1966)
Berg: Lulu Suite (first three movements) Anna Prohaska, Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra (Accentus Music DVD of 2010 Lucerne concert with encore: 'Ach, ich fühls' from Mozart's Die Zauberflöte). To my amazement, I see the entire performance is there on YouTube. It starts with the most blistering opener ever, 'The Adoration of Veles and Ala' launching Prokofiev's Scythian Suite, and ends with a great Tchaikovsky Pathétique. I remarked at the time that Abbado brought his own sound with him, especially in the beauty of the Berg, and that was especially evident when Dudamel took over the following night, good as he was.
Then there should have been something from the Rossini Il Viaggio a Reims, but time was short.
Finally, Mahler: Symphony No. 4 - third and fourth movements Juliane Banse, Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra (Medici Arts DVD of 2006 Vienna Musikverein concert).
And what could have been more appropriately bittersweet than that?
Anyway, I wish Abbado had recorded more Wagner - it's criminal that we don't have his Parsifal preserved for posterity - and my one great regret is that he never tackled the two Elgar symphonies, for which his own supreme gift of the most flexible rubato in the business would seem to have been made. Back now, anyway, to listen to the Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night's Dream music which he performed with the Berlin Philharmonic last year (friend Debbie was first soprano in 'Ye spotted snakes'). I was so looking forward to hearing the same with the Orchestra Mozart in Dresden's Frauenkirche this June; sadly it's not to be, but we've had our visions. Though we'll hugely miss him, there's nothing to regret: no-one lived a fuller life, one so much longer than illness would have led anyone to expect.
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.
Well, have you ever heard this most imaginative of ‘symphonic fantasias’ live in concert? I hadn’t until Sunday, when I reckon a trip to Rome – with which I fell headily back in love with again after a long absence from a city I thought I knew well enough not to swoon over any more – would have been worth it for twenty-odd minutes of Abbado magic alone. The man IS Prospero, for God’s sake, as one of the violinists of the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, sharing the concert with Abbado’s Bologna-based Orchestra Mozart, suggested in a roundabout way (‘it is not conducting, it is a Shining’). That the second-half attempted synching of various Shostakovich musics for King Lear with butchered fragments of the masterly Kozintsev film didn’t work is neither here nor there, and certainly not here in this instance because I must hold fire until I’ve got the Arts Desk piece sorted for tomorrow. Anyway, here's an Accademia-furnished photo from the occasion in the interim.
The point is just to say how ashamed I was to have forgotten Tchaikovsky’s most supernaturally beautiful Shakespeare fantasy. Heck, it’s not even on that 60-CD Brilliant set (I wonder if someone got confused with the earlier orchestral work based on Ostrovsky’s play about Katya Kabanova, The Storm?). But it seems to have been a constant in Abbado’s rep: there are two recordings, with the Chicago Symphony and then the Berlin Phil. There’s also a clip on the BPO’s website of a live performance from some time back, sadly not the bit I would have chosen, but worth seeing.
But none of Abbado’s previous performances could quite have had the tear-jerking, jaw-dropping tonal beauty which enveloped us on Sunday in the very first bars within the spectacular panavision space of Renzo Piano’s big hall. That’s a good little snippet to play blindfold to a listener and ask him or her to guess the composer (I think I might have gone for Sibelius, whose own Tempest music is peerless): this is the isle, and the sea around it, full of mysterious noises. Here’s one in the best sound I could find on YouTube – the Toscanini radio broadcast, alas, sounds awful - conducted by Eliahu Inbal
The lovers’ music may be rather more tied up with Tchaikovsky’s sense of yearning for happiness than about the more innocent Ferdinand and Miranda, but how it ravishes on each appearance (such scoring – and we’re talking the youngish Tchaikovsky of 1873 here).
Ariel and Caliban, too, he gets exactly right. Only the development is a bit perfunctory alongside the final, perfected version of Romeo and Juliet. But I salute the composer’s courage in ending where he started, with the island magic. A great piece, worthy to set alongside Sibelius’s late universe of illustrative numbers. I also dug into Sullivan’s incidental music, and there are some winsome dances there.
Tchaikovsky’s genius burned brighter than anyone had led me to believe last night when Neil Bartlett’s production of The Queen of Spades for Opera North played in the Barbican Theatre. Perhaps I was overcompensating for the sheer unfathomable blandness – Toby Spence excepted - of Deborah Warner’s fuzzy, traditional ENO Eugene Onegin; but I did find myself swept up in the tension that takes hold halfway through and, in the right hands, doesn’t let up until the final requiem.
At first I wondered. Richard Farnes’s way, though accomplished, with the doomy Prelude seemed a bit too leisurely: would there be enough narrative sweep in the drama proper? That soon surfaced, but then Kandis Cook’s multipurpose cheapish set with its moveable walls didn’t seem amenable to atmosphere and wasn’t always well lit. It did the opening garden scene a disservice but worked for Lisa’s room, the party
and the Countess’s bedchamber. And soon a not too laboured pattern emerged in Bartlett’s production – a thousand times clearer and more definite with the characters than Warner’s over at ENO. In every little diverting scene or number, somebody’s out of step or mood with the conformist, and usually uniformly costumed, group: a bullied boy soldier, unhappy Lisa when Paulina and the girls try to entertain her, the affianced couple in the party intermezzo, Yeletsky in the gambling room, even Tomsky himself, a bit of a seedy outsider – though not quite as much, of course, as poor Herman.
Whom I pitied, as one should. I know the never over-finessed big tenor of Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts has run into difficulties up top; he needs time out to firm it up with a good coach or teacher, I don’t think it’s too late, and the middle range remains strong as well as diction-clear. Nor are he and statuesque Orla Boylan ever going to be Love’s Young Dream.
But I’m not sure Tchaikovsky, already bending Pushkin’s cynical story overmuch, intended that. The more truthful a production, and the pithier the translation – by unfairly maligned Martin Pickard, as in the Onegin, this time with Bartlett’s collaboration - the more artificial their stock protestations in the first love scene are going to seem.
What the English text does stress is that the third man seeking the Countess’s three-card secret is a lover as well as an obsessive, and this is novelly played through thanks to Jo Barstow’s incredible characterization. She made very little impact in the nothing-doing Zambello production at Covent Garden, but here she moves through a succession of bewigged mannequin poses
to reveal the woman who still thinks she’s beautiful and alluring – and in this case, remarkably, is, as she uses her dancer’s arms to shed the years in the Gretry aria. Its second verse even out-pianissimo’ed the immortal Felicity Palmer in the classic Glyndebourne production. And Herman’s persecution, more a wooing until he pulls his pistol out (make what you will of that), is as compelling as her death and her sensuous ghost-appearance.
As for Orla – well, I adore her. I heard hardly any of the avowed pitching problems last night, and she does the stricken pathos of the Canal Scene better than any soprano I’ve seen on stage (and more on disc, like Gergiev’s Guleghina, tire at this point; Boylan’s strong semi-dramatic voice doesn’t). The smaller roles all mean something, as none did in the ENO Onegin. William Dazeley's very fine Yeletsky (in the shot below right taking on Herman's final challenge) suggests he'd have been a much better choice of Onegin over at ENO. I liked the contraltoid Paulina of Russian-born Alexandra Sherman - though the 'Chloe' to her 'Daphnis' in the pastoral was poor - and wondered who was singing the excellent Gouvernantka telling off her charges so charmingly in Act 1 Scene 2. It turned out to be that veteran characterizer Fiona Kimm.
The final scene maintains the tension Bartlett and Farnes have established from the bedchamber encounter onwards, helped out perhaps by the second of two cuts (bit of a shame to lose some of the only authentic Pushkinian lines in the gambling-den romp, but never mind). Farnes has true music-theatre instinct; though the Opera North violins need a few extra members, the orchestral sound is strong and true and survives the hideously dry Barbican Theatre acoustics. And there was no problem in having most of the brass and the timps on either side of the stage. What a great and inventive opera it is, even in its padding; and Bartlett saw to it that even the extra stuff tied in well. And thank God - after the leaden waits in Warner's Onegin - for fluid scene changes. Can’t wait for Ruddigore tonight.
Production photos of Opera North's Queen of Spades by Bill Cooper
Here he is at the Festival Hall rehearsal, in one of four characteristically superb shots by Chris Christodoulou: Claudio Abbado, the greatest, with the score of one of the 19th century's weirdest symphonies, Bruckner's Fifth. Its wackiness can only seem the more pronounced in a performance of such freedom, suppleness and colour-consciousness as the one we got last night from Abbado's ever-flexible Lucerne Festival Orchestra on the Southbank: indeed, that made me wonder if there wasn't a case for going even further, totally over the top, because I nearly laughed out loud at several spots in the outer movements.
Just as well, anyway, because I can't take solemn, ponderous Bruckner interpretations. His individuality seems to me to lie in his riven quality, the way religious assurances always crumple. In the Fifth, the usually problematic (for me, again, I stress) Bruckner finale is replaced by a brilliant solution: first the clarinet's cheeky broom sweeping the old ideas away, then the tear-jerking brass chorale at the point when everything seems to have run out of steam. Abbado made no attempt to paper over the cracks, but he did pursue the chamber-musical quality that had been the chief virtue of the Schumann Piano Concerto in the first half.
As in a late Mozart concerto, Schumann's woodwind have as much of the glory as the soloist, and Mitsuko Uchida is too good a listener and collaborator not to let the fabulous Jacques Zoon and his fellow-flautist shine. The Lucerne Festival Orchestra has certainly got through first oboists - first Albrecht Mayer, then Kai Frombgen, now Lucas Marcias Navarro (wasn't there a Berlin veto thing which led to the calling upon the Concergebouw principal?) - but they're all the world's best and Marcias Navarro led the way with incredible projection last night.
If Mitsuko occasionally charged with just a hint of panic at the thicker flurries, her sensitivity and clarity of phrase-turn made it all worthwhile. And it was surely a lucky escape that Abbado had fallen out with the unmusical Helene Grimaud before the festival performances - what a substitute!
I'm coming to love most in Bruckner those twilight zones where only a handful of woodwind play. Again, Zoon had the dove's share of the best, supported only by two clarinets and bassoon at one point in the slow movement, sharing a chuckle with first violins where you really couldn't see the joins. That came in the Scherzo's trio, a Landlerish miracle as it dewily came across last night which I'd rather hear repeated than the whole damned outer portion: it's at points like this that I cry out inwardly for Mahler's constant evolution.
But Bruckner is what he is, and as Sibelius - another true original - pointed out, it may be messy, but it's always authentic. As was this interpretation (authentic, that is, never messy) from the greatest conductor-orchestra team of our time. Look at the photogenic players, who glowed and hugged each other with genuine warmth as they always do after every performance with Abbado.
Wish I could go again tonight, when Mozart's 'Haffner' Symphony replaces the Schumann, but, alas, I'm teaching - Bruckner 4, as it happens, in preparation for Belohlavek's BBC Symphony performance next week*. Less of a rush, deo gratias, than yesterday, where I biked in to meet the players of the Pacifica Quartet (more on them anon) in the Wigmore at 3, taught my Passenger class at the City Lit, whizzed back to the Wigmore to do the pre-performance talk with the Pacificas, then pedalled off to the Southbank. Only Abbado could have made me miss the first instalment of the PQ's Shostakovich cycle, but I'll catch the second on Thursday.
*later - ouch: my students reminded me it's tomorrow (Wednesday 12). Just as well they did as I'm supposed to be giving the pre-performance talk...Fortunately there's just enough time to prepare.
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