Hardly surprising if I love the above image by Bill Knight of the sexy-in-any-wear Régis Mengus in Poulenc's Les Mamelles de Tirésias. Laurent Pelly's Glyndebourne double bill kicks off with the most unusual and powerful staging of La Voix humaine I've seen; little surprise if it was one of my top performances of the year in the 2022 Arts Desk 'Best of Opera'. So was the English Concert semi-staging of Handel's Serse at St Martin-in-the-Fields with five classy women (Emily D'Angelo pictured below by Paul Marc Mitchell, Lucy Crowe, Paula Murrihy, Daniela Mack and Mary Bevan) and vivid playing under Harry Bicket.
So I've chosen these three operas along with Poulenc's masterpiece, Dialogues desCarmélites, for summer's Opera in Depth classes. Not least because I hope Robin Ticciati, steeped in Poulenc at Glyndebourne over two seasons, will join us along with some of the singers and Bicket from the EC Serse. The Glyndebourne Carmélites opens on 10 June.
We certainly did well over the seven Rosenkavalier classes. First came Paula Murrihy, one of the best Octavians in the world today, and conductor Fergus Sheil, giving us quality time after a day's rehearsal ahead of the Irish National Opera spectacular.
Then, in the last class, a Marschallin and Ochs for the ages, Dame Felicity Lott and Sir John Tomlinson, appeared TOGETHER (quite a dream come true; you'll have to click for the bigger picture but I wanted the two to appear as we all saw them - FLott is top left and JT on the right of the second row).
Students have agreed that FLott's characterisation is the most moving and gracefully real of all; it's a shame there's not more of John Tom's Ochs to be seen.
And in a last-minute bonus, Richard Jones and his inspiring choreographer/movement director Sarah Fahie, whose Glyndebourne Rosenkavalierwas the most meticulous and inventive movement-wise of just about any opera production I've seen, were able to join us once their stupendous ENO Rhinegoldwas up and running, so we got quite a bit on that from them too.
What had to be cut out of the chat on Richard's request - that Bertie Carvel will be taking the role of Henry Higgins in his (RJ's) Pygmalion at the Old Vic - can now be revealed as it's official. Shaw's play, fascinatingly, was premiered only two years after Rosenkavalier, in 1913, and (very surprising, this) at the Hofburg Theatre, Vienna, in a German translation.
Anyway, full details of the new term, which starts on Monday (17 April) below - click to enlarge (do join us, from anywhere in the world - if you can't make the live class I always send a video).
"S'ist mein Leiblied' - 'it's my favourite song' - declares Baron Ochs in Der Rosenkavalier of his signature waltz-tune. By the same token, Rosenkavalier is probably my Leiboper - certainly the one I know best, the intricacies of which, in both Hofmannsthal's libretto and Strauss's music, seem inexhaustible. This coming term's Zoom course, starting tomorrow (9 January) will be my third visit in the opera classes, but since the last time there have been new recordings and new productions on video (including Bruno Ravella's for Garsington, the exquisite and Grace-Kelly-stylish Miah Persson's Marschallin and Hanna Hipp's fine Octavian pictured in it above by Johan Persson; Irish National Opera takes on this staging in March with a fine cast led by Celine Byrne, the fabulous Paula Murrihy and Claudia Boyle). There's always more to discover. And as always when I repeat a classic, I don't look back on old notes.
Last term ended rather more positively than I was expecting. I'd been reluctant to revisit Britten's The Rape of Lucretia, so whittled it down to three rather than five classes (Rosenkavalier will have seven, Korngold's Die tote Stadt also three). Ronald Duncan's often excruciating libretto troubled me even more in Oliver Mears' production when I saw it at Aldeburgh.
I'd always wondered about André Obey's play Le viol de Lucrèce - about which all the contributors to the Rape of Lucretia symposium book I picked up are so cagey that an addendum slip had to be printed giving it proper credit. Then I found that Thornton Wilder had translated it in 1933. Surely Eric Crozier, at least, knew this? It's so much better, in every respect, than the drama Duncan fashioned. For a start there's no Christian overlay. There ARE two narrators, a man who follows Tarquin's progress, a woman who reflects Lucrèce, but they don't appear until Obey's second act (the first has two soldiers relay, chorus-like, what's going on in Collatine's tent). The aftermath is much more acceptable today: Lucrèce as powerful tragic heroine, knowing that her divulging of the rape will trigger Collatine's vengeance and a Roman uprising, not some self-disgusted victim.
At the beginning of the last and third class I continued the comparison between opera and play. But joining us were Jean Rigby, the most moving Lucretia I've ever seen on stage, and her husband Jamie Hayes, who'd directed the work for British Youth Opera. Jean had already instigated a kind of cast reunion of the original Glyndebourne Albert Herring - since I don't seem to have written about it here, I must boast about the other visitors: John Graham Hall, Alan Opie, Felicity Palmer, Alexander Oliver and Felicity Lott (who sang Lady Billows in a revival) - and I knew what a fun and generous person she is.
Everything Jean had to say about the circumstances around that remarkable Graham Vick Lucretia at ENO back in 1987 informed what we were about to watch - namely Act Two from the moment Tarquinius awakens Lucretia to the end of the opera. And the film itself was testament to how, when every singer has worked on phrasing and meaning so intensively - not just Jean, but everyone else in an extraordinary cast - reservations about the infelicties of the text vanish in the face of such consummate music-making, such singing-acting. The whole film is available on YouTube but in a fuzzy picture, so I recommend you get the DVD.
We were blessed with our guests this last term. I'm so happy that John Savournin, our most innovative living Savoyard as singer and director, was able to join us for the two classes on The Yeomen of the Guard (I still didn't manage to persuade two students that G&S is worthy of keeping company with the best). John's brilliant re-imagining of Patience for nine singers at Wilton's Music Hall was the big surprise in my operatic 'Best of 2022' for The Arts Desk. When we spoke he was preparing for the last performance of Golijov's Ainadamar at Scottish Opera, a production I long to see; hence, I think, the moustache.
And right at the end of the five classes on Verdi's Aida, I suddenly remembered that Tamara Wilson, one of the most generous of guests way back when I was still giving live classes at the Frontline Club and she was performing Leonora in The Force of Destiny at ENO, had sung the title role all round the world (but not, sadly, in the UK, and after a bad experience in Verona which I think may have had to do with a refusal to sing it in blackface, as the vile Netrebko recently did, she has retired the role from her rep).
When we met online, Tammy was preparing to revisit the role of Turandot, this time for Barrie Kosky in Amsterdam (I was so hoping we could go and stay with our friends there, and see it, before Christmas, but too many hospital appointments got in the way). I remembered how revelatory she had been on the previous visit about how she marks up the score, and includes intentions, and so requested she did the same here. The 'intention' behind 'straniero, ascolta!', for instance, reads 'feel pleasure that I'm going to kill him'.
So yes, what fun we had. And I'm hoping we'll be able to welcome at least one Marschallin, Octavian, Sophie and Ochs to the Rosenkavalier sessions; watch this space. Still not too late to join if you can - from anywhere in the world, time depending. And if you can't make the class, you get the video. Full details below; click to enlarge.
I've made my homage to Friday's special event on The Arts Desk, and I don't have many more words to add; I just want the excuse to add a couple more photos taken at Friday evening's astonishing event by Patrick Anderson. J and I, reeling out stunned by the high level of the 90-year-old's delivery in four songs - that's technique and soul for you - and by her obvious Menschian qualities, recalled that La Laine was always in the background as we grew up - her jazz and scat-singing, endlessly impersonated, at a more sophisticated level than that of a torchsong belter like Shirley Bassey (often watched at home with the sound down, my parents' idea of fun). Yet she is undeniably one of the greats.
I see I've already told how when I shared a flat in No. 32 Dundas Street in my second year at Edinburgh University, we wore out a budget-price reissue of Cleo singing in the 1950s. And in the review I mention the sensation, at her appearance in Michael Tilson Thomas's LSO series The Gershwin Years, of feeling as if she was singing to me alone, so direct was her communication. Those flashing eyes roving round the audience and fixing on individuals were still at work on Friday. Kudos to Jude Kelly, again, for choosing so well in the Southbank's (B)Old - as in 'Be Old', creatively - festival. Sorry to have missed Julie 'Going to the Zoo' Felix in the Clore Ballroom earlier.
The second was the opera itself, on Sunday at Glyndebourne. I've written up my second visit to the Richard Jones production, with a very different revival cast, here on The Arts Desk. But I ought to add here the interesting perspectives given by my companion, artist friend (and mother of our youngest goddaughter Mirabel) Edwina and her friend Christine. Here's Edsy before our picnic in blissful seclusion.
They found the opera spooky, weird and unsettling - the Jones effect, but it's definitely there in the music's queasy gearchanges and timeleaps. As Bill Knight took a special batch of photos for The Arts Desk, it's a pleasure to have the excuse of using more than the original four over there. Here are Rachel Willis-Sørensen, a redhead taking very well to the raven-haired look of original Marschallin Kate Royal, and Kate Lindsay, the most lustrous of Octavians (Tara Erraught first time round was funnier in the cross-dressing comedy, but not quite on the same level vocally).
No question about this Leopold, bastard son of Ochs and acted once again by Joseph Badar as a crucial component of the drama, presenting the silver rose. Here he is flanked by Brindley Sherratt as his feckless dad and Willis-Sørensen.
Erraught's and Lars Woldt's were the faces made for comedy last time: on Sunday the winning mug belonged to Elizabeth Sutphen as a feisty Sophie.
Rose-presentation: again unforgettable the slight swaying, prefaced by raised heels from all which get a laugh, but the seriousness kicks in again very quickly.
Time for Sherratt to step forward fully in his visual transformation (gammon make-up and hideous wig). Ochs and Annina (Stephanie Lauricella, classy casting),
delight in the letter as the retinue unfold girlie cards to parallel the fashion pictures for the Marschallin's levée in Act One
and payup time in Act Three (oddly Bill doesn't have any pics of the big stuff thereafter).
After that claustrophobia it was good to get out into the gardens in a blissful evening light overlooking the fields and downs.
I don't always make the first Glyndebourne weekend, so I'd forgotten what flourishes in the garden at this time. Irises everywhere, of course
complemented by alliums
and the yellow variety by the lake.
Wisteria still flourishing by the house
and the first roses along the wall.
Dicksonia antarctica springing up from its winter sleep
and one final shot of picnickers with the mulberry in the foreground. What a lush time of year.
Lovely weather for the wedding, too, the previous day. Yes, I watched the service live, switching off rapidly as the coach hit Windsor town and the blether of the BBC commentators became too much (only Kirsty Young kept it real). Loved the contrast between Tallis's 'If Ye Love Me' and the Gospel choir. Both performances were excellent, but I'm glad that cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason had the limelight. He'll stay calm and centred now that he's a megastar, and no-one deserved the success more; he's a natural.
Decca issued this photo (uncredited) to celebrate big sales for his
debut album, also far from the usual bits and pieces (it includes a
complete performance of his signature Shostakovich First Cello Concerto
with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra conducted by the superb
Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla - her CD debut too, I think I'm right in saying).
We're a long way now from Cleo. Or perhaps not... The title, by the way, homages one of my favourite films, which I wrote about here.
It wasn't long enough. In the end the Opera in Depth term just concluded was eaten up, by general consent, with Der Rosenkavalier, including visits by Richard Jones and Felicity Lott (Robert Carsen would have come along, too, if he hadn't had to leave for America prematurely). I would have loved to spend longer with Rimsky-Korsakov's enchanting Snow Maiden, but I hope we managed to make a very lovely whistlestop tour of its four acts (five including prologue) in half the time it takes to perform the entire opera (usually heavily cut, as it was by Opera North in a production which still managed the magic well despite its Russian sweatshop setting. I wonder what Tcherniakov will make of it in Paris. Shortly to find out).
I find I can reproduce some of the greatest hits here, so let's start with the atmospheric Prelude. It's a good tone-poem evocation, like the design by the great Roerich below (his are also the other designs featured), of the stage directions by Alexander Ostrovsky, whose 'spring fairy tale' was the basis for Korsakov's first operatic masterpiece, and for which Tchaikovsky wrote equally delightful incidental music in 1873.
Beginning of spring. Midnight. Krasnaya Hill is covered in snow. To the right, bushes and a leafless birch grove; to the left, a dense forest of large pine and spruce trees, their branches bent low and covered with snow; in the distance at the foot of the hill a river is flowing; round its ice-holes and melted patches of water a fir-grove has been planted. On the far bank of the river the Berendeyev town....: palaces, houses, peasant cottages, all made of wood decorated with elaborate painted carvings; lights in the windows. A full moon covers everything in its silver light. In the distance, the sound of cocks crowing.The Wood Demon is sitting on a dried out tree-stump. The whole sky is filled with returning migratory birds. Spring Beauty, borne by cranes, swans and geese, descends to earth, surrounded by her retinue of birds.
This performance, from the great Yevgeny Svetlanov and his 'orchestra with a voice' (Gergiev) the USSR State Symphony Orchestra, is of the whole orchestral suite, including the chorus of birds without the delightful vocal parts, the quaint March of Tsar Berendey's Court (a model for Prokofiev's March in The Love for Three Oranges) and the best-known number, the Dance of the Tumblers from Act 3's summer revels.
We have to catch something of Snegurochka's very own personal magic. She's summoned by ill-matched parents Frost and Spring, and in her first aria tells them how she's attracted to the songs of shepherd-boy Lel and his fellow villagers. The first theme associated with her, heard in the first vocalised text, appears originally on the flute and I have no doubt that Prokofiev deliberately quoted it in the exposition round-off of his "Classical" Symphony's finale. After all, the symphony was composed in enchanting spring circumstances outside revolution-torn Petrograd. There's been a timely Decca release of Russian and other operatic arias and songs by the gorgeous Aida Garifullina, whose amazing presence the Opera in Depth class saw in DVDs of Graham Vick's Mariinsky War and Peace (special loan). The version with orchestra isn't on YouTube, but we're lucky to have this film of Garifullina performing the aria with piano at one of the Rosenblatt recitals. She's certainly musicality incarnate.
I have one complete recording with which I'm very happy, conducted by Fedoseyev with Irina Arkhipova doubling the roles of Spring Beauty and Lel. Such a distinctive sound, even if Lel's three songs could be subtler. The whole recording is on YouTube, and I link to it near the bottom here, but for now let's just pick out Lel's Third Song from the midsummer ritual of Act 3.
Other highlights include character-tenor Tsar Berendey's first aria with cello obbligato - I have an old 50s recording with Ivan Kozlovsky, an acquired taste and sadly not on YouTube. That leaves us nothing here of Act 2 other than Roerich's splendid design for Berendey's palace.
There are also fascinating comparisons to be made between Korsakov's and Tchaikovsky's scores. Though the former's dance is better known, Tchaikovsky's skomorokhi are more joyous still and their music touches on the liveliest numbers in Swan Lake, composed around the same time (early 1870s). There's a terrific performance from Neeme Järvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, but the winner is an outlandish arrangement for the Osipov Balalaika Orchestra in the legendary 'first recording made with western equipment on Soviet soil'.
One passage can't be extracted here which Prokofiev describes very movingly in the autobiography of his youth commemorating Rimsky-Korsakov's death in 1908. Amongst other observations, he records his St Petersburg Conservatory professor, Nikolay Tcherepnin, saying 'When a French orchestra was rehearsing Snow Maiden in Paris (or perhaps it was Monte Carlo), the musicians were so delighted with the festive scene in the sacred wood, when Lel takes Kupava to Berendey and kisses her to the strain of a marvellous melody, that when it came time to play the melody again they suddenly put down their instruments and sang it. That was a really exciting moment'.
Our last stretch in the class was the climactic duet between Snegurochka and Mizgir, the human to whom she's finally decided to give herself - two unforgettable tunes here - her melting in the rays of the sun and the glorious hymn to Yarilo led by Lel - a tune in 11/8 time. Another Prokofiev anecdote is essential here, since Korsakov wrote two 11/8 ensembles. He's remembering a discussion of his youth with his older friend, the vet (and fellow chess player) Vasily Morolev.
In the stallion's stall he asked me. 'You mean you really don't know Rimsky-Korsakov's opera Sadko? It's a fine piece of work....In the first act there is a chorus in 11/8 time so exciting that you simply can't sit still in your seat.' I gave a start. 'In 11/8? I know that in Snow Maiden Rimsky-Korsakov has a chorus in 11/8. and I even heard that one conductor, who simply couldn't manage to conduct the chorus, kept muttering all during the singing of it; "Rimsky-Korsakov has gone completely mad" ["Rimsky-Korsakov sovsem s uma soshel']. But when I tried it, it turned out that the phrase doesn't fit the chorus from Snow Maiden, because it comes out "completely mad"[ie with the stresses displaced].
'Wait a minute!' Morolev exclaimed excitedly. 'Maybe that phrase fits Sadko!' And he began to sing in turn 'Hail, Sadko, handsome lad' ['Goy ti Sad-Sadko, prigorii molodets'] and 'Rimsky-Korsakov has gone completely mad'
'It fits! It fits!' we shouted at the same time. And we began to sing the theme of the chorus, first with one text, then with the other [Prokofiev writes out a musical example to prove it].
No YouTube snippet of the final ensemble exists, so you can have the benefit of the entire recording. I own a good CD edition on a rare label which sounds better than this, but it will do. Zoom forward to 3'05'28 if you want the last two minutes. Listen out for the shifting chords above a fixed bass which surely gave Stravinsky the cue for the very end of The Firebird.
The only DVD we had access to in the class, not on YouTube, was the very charming and ethnographically detailed Soviet film of Ostrovsky's original play I bought from the Russian Film Council, with splendid folk music using the right kinds of voices (obviously the numbers are not Korsakov's).
The other option, if you don't mind a condensed version and you want to entertain children - or indeed, just yourself - with something rather lovely in its old-fashioned way, is a sweet Russian cartoon (with subtitles) which includes many of the musical highlights.
I ought to add by way of footnote that our previous two Opera in Depth classes had been devoted to Act 3 of Der Rosenkavalier. Apart from the usual extracts ranging far and wide, the DVD I chose to show was of Richard Jones' production from Glyndebourne. No-one has ever managed, in my experience, to make the discomfiture of Ochs pass in a flash, not to mention be funny and dark at the same time (pictured below, Lars Woldt and Tara Erraught, singers with fabulous comic instincts both, by Bill Cooper for Glyndebourne).
It soon became even more apparent that this is Jones at his meticulous best, choreographing every move with rigour, throwing out much of Hofmannsthal's detailed scenario and finding his own equivalents to match the music at every point. Had been intending to switch over to a final scene with truly great voices (Jones, Fassbaender and Popp for Carlos Kleiber or Te Kanawa, Troyanos and Blegen for Levine), but neither seemed so perceptive on the human level, so we stayed with Jones to the charming end (yes, he actually makes something warm and amusing of Mohammed's entry to retrieve - not Sophie's handkerchief but the wrap of the mistress with whom he's besotted).
Next term we move on to two lacerating studies of jealousy, close in time but musically poles apart - Verdi's Otello (Francesco Tamagno pictured above) and Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande. Ten Mondays 2.30pm to 4.30pm starting 24 April at the Frontline Club. Leave me a message here if you're interested in joining with your email: I won't publish it but I promise to reply.
It was because of his involvement in the scenario of the masterpiece we know as Der Rosenkavalier that I turned to a biography of Count Harry Kessler, but as usual if the personality catches one's fancy, I'm now on his trail. This is a writer as fascinating as Stefan Zweig for the picture he gives of his troubled times. Thanks to Laird M Easton's biography, published by University of California Press with an attention to detail worthy of Kessler as meticulous book-producer, I've ordered up the two volumes of diaries. One copy of the first I presented to Dame Felicity Lott on Monday as a present for her visit to my Opera in Depth class at the Frontline Club; more on those wonderful two hours in a future post, but this is a good excuse to put up one picture of the lovely lady, self looming larger only because the photographer, David Thompson, was sitting on the left side.
Suffice it to say she was charming, natural, very funny and very moving (especially on Carlos Kleiber, for her as for anyone who cares about conducting absolutely the greatest). She also read several of the Marschallin's monologues in an English translation I'd originally done for another deserving Dame, Harriet Walter, to perfection
As for Kessler, I wanted not to review, as it were, the whole book, but just to offer some quotations from the Count's post-First-World-War years, unhappy ones, inevitably, and one reads with dread of his hopes for a better world against the background of a Germany in turmoil. A brief thumbnail sketch first, and no-one could do it better than Easton in his epilogue:
Kessler was neither a professional politician nor a diplomat, neither an artist nor a professional writer [I take that to be in the narrowest sense, for he was/is a superb wordsmith], neither an academic nor a professional museum director, not quite a soldier and not quite a secret agent, not English or French, but not, in the end, fully Germanic either. He had no firm vocation, and no fixed abode [though it should be added in this context that he was immensely rich, at least up until the First World War]. Kessler's life seems to lack clear contours, spills out over all banks, meanders, in places runs into the sand. The number and scale of his concrete achievements, while impressive enough, pale admittedly against the myriad unrealized or only partially realized ambitions, schemes and projects which, like a vast nimbus of potentiality, accompanied him up until the very last years [he died, a refugee from the Nazis, in November 1937]
The other point crucial to the background here is what Easton described as Kessler's perception of 'the great axis of his life, the agonistic relation between Macht and Geist, between power and spirit'. A child of the Wilhelminian/Bismarck era, he didn't easily set aside his sense of Germany's supremacy in the early part of the First World War. But then disillusion set in, and he moved more towards socialism and pacifism. His espousal of the new when contemporaries like Hofmannsthal were turning their back on him is an attractive trait: quite often he missed the mark, one suspects because he fancied the young male artist in question, but he did also see the value in Georg Grosz, for instance. Perceptive from a man painted (splendidly and several times, see up top and lower down) by Munch in the pre-war days.
Kessler's activities in the 1920s and 30s make for depressing reading only because we have the gift of hindsight. Funny, though, how many of his observations could be made today - this is certainly a case of finding the present in the past. In the lectures published in Germany and Europe (1924), he argued that the way to mitigate suspicion of France towards Germany was to seek 'common interests recognized by both countries and sufficiently powerful to minimize the risk of aggression from either side'. As Easton points out, his plea for democratic control of both countries' industries anticipated 'by 27 years the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of today's European Community'.
At the same time, he misjudged Hitler as 'a local agitator endowed with some sort of magnetism for Bavarians'; sounds familiar to many of us who thought Trump and Brexit couldn't go beyond the lunatic fringe.
His visit to America at that time is fascinating for some of the judgments:
Nothing here really has roots: not the Good, nor the Bad, not the houses, not the people; neither the friendships, nor the enmities. The soil, both the spiritual and the instinctual, is still too new and too loose. Feelings and judgments grow like asparagus and like asparagus are soon "out of season"...Will America ever become deep?
And later:
I feel the old maids of both sexes will kill America like the priests killed and emasculated Spain. Nobody can have any conception of this moral oppression and tyranny who has not been here. The atmosphere of America, its fear and hatred of the truth are those of a tea party in the back parlor of a parsonage. There are a few faint signs of revolt; but up to date they do not amount to much considering the huge mass which takes its firm stand with the old ladies.
The only route that might offer help to the world, he thought, was the League of Nations, subject to certain amendments he recommended. He feared the rise of the Nationalist Party in Germany:
For us there is only the League of Nations and England or a war of revenge and Russia. Any middle path leads to the abyss just like our tacking back and forth between England and Russia under Wilhelm II...now the struggle has been finally decided and it is only disastrous to put forth the old,,,Ludendorff. Now only a united Europe can still retain her control of the world.
He noted how the paramilitary violence blocked the way in Germany and had reached an impasse: 'the narrow-minded people at home and the ghost-seeing here [in Paris] join hands in a danse macabre.' And he told his audience, in a motto for our times, too,'both here and there we must take up the fight with the same decisiveness and bitterness as our enemies or bury our hope for peace. Contentious and reckless pacifists are needed, not whining.'
Well, we know what happened. He thought that the poison of National Socialism was 'a disease of the German lower middle class'; I reckon we need to use that unfashionable term, rather than 'working class', of Trump's chief constituency if we are to move forward and stop beating ourselves up about 'the people v the elites', which may be true in part - the disease of the banks and the corporations has never been properly addressed - but isn't the whole story. There was no proper opposition to the Nazis then; it is incoherent so far in America and, as represented by Corbyn's lamentable 'command' over the Labour Party, disastrous in the UK. Anyway, I'm sure I'll have cause to return to the Kessler of the Diaries in these pages. In the meantime, I'm back to the lighter ironies of Péter Esterházy's dazzling family pseudo-history Celestial Harmonies, which is oddly comforting as well as very funny at times.
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.
All observations, questions and challenges are welcome: resistant to tweeting and Facebook (though long converted to LinkedIn), I still like to exchange ideas. You don't have to be signed up, and you can be anonymous, but comments are moderated.
Copyright
If you wish to use any of my own photographs featured in the blog, or any of the text, just let me know in the comments. Acknowledgment and a link are all it takes.
Posts
