One-offs: El Niño and The Nose

I'm actually referring to one-off classes from the past two weeks of my Opera in Depth course, but Adams' Christmas oratorio/opera and Shostakovich's Gogol extravaganza are both unique even in their composers' outputs (top images: Mujer de Mucha Enagua, PA'TI XICANA, 1999, as it appears on the cover of El Niño's indispensible first recording, and the 2012 tapestry The Nose, with Strawberries, executed by the Stephens Tapestry Studio, Diepsloot, Johannesburg, to a design by William Kentridge - part of the wonderful exhibition Thick Time at the Whitechapel Gallery, which I have yet to write about).

Adams was to go on and enrich the biblical-mythic aspect of his music in an even more complex work, The Gospel According to the Other Mary, while Shostakovich had another shot at Gogol in the 1940s, trying to set his play The Gamblers word for word, but gave up (there are Gogolian touches in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, too). Before I pass over what we talked about Shostakovich-wise the week before last - the Adams experience has rather eclipsed it - I must at least put up one more image taken by Bill Cooper of the best thing about Barrie Kosky's Royal Opera production, the multiple dancing noses.

Curiously I felt that the single class on The Nose was actually enough - I'd started by intending three - while I wanted at least another two-hour session on El Niño. All the students who spoke up seemed to fall in love with Adams' piece on the spot.  None had seen the overloaded UK premiere with Sellars overegging an already elaborate pudding with a film that hadn't been timed to fit the music; Adams admits the many shortcomings of that first production when it opened at the Chatelet in his indispensible autobiography Hallelujah Junction, which I wrote about on the blog back here). 

I started where Adams does in Chapter 12 of that beautifully written confessional, with what he calls 'the ecstatic shuddering and quivering of violins and jubilantly exclaiming voices' of Handel's 'For unto us a son is born' from Messiah. He goes on to write about the WASPy images of Christ and his disciples from his childhood, his mother's move from the Episcopalian to the Unitarian Church, and how its 'moral and intellectual training', though fine, seemed too close to Plato, Voltaire and Bertrand Russell and didn't feed his need for the 'spiritual truths' of religious mystery and miracles (the latter my own sticking-point with the New Testament). Elsewhere, to Michael Steinberg he confided 'I envy people with strong religious backgrounds. Mine is shaky and unformed. I don't know what I'm saying, and one reason for writing El Niño was to find out.'

It almost goes without saying that, as in so many of Adams' works, the light and the dark are in constant tension. That's best summed up, perhaps, in Mary's response from the St James Gospel when Joseph asks why she is weeping one moment, laughing the next, and she replies: 'It is because I see two peoples with my eyes,  the one weeping and mourning, the other rejoicing and glad'. Only the simplicity of the final children's chorus, a setting of Rosario Castellanos' A Palm Tree, offers any kind of resolution to the two-edged use of the title, 'El Niño' as both 'the child' and that phenomenon of capricious weather - though this too, one feels, is provisional: the naive leading us back towards innocence and away from the sentimental. 

Like Steinberg. I'm indebted to Adams for introducing me to the poetry of Castellanos (1925-74), one of the world's greats, it would seem - and which of us, in the UK at least, knew her work before? On the original recording, it's the incandescent Lorraine Hunt Lieberson who intones the sinuous, Spanish-faithful setting of Castellanos's childbirth chronicle,  'The Annunciation'. The interplay of poems by Castellanos and other Spanish-language writers with Biblical texts and their curious offshoots is as masterly as Britten's interweaving of the Latin mass for the dead with Wilfred Owen in War Requiem, and sometimes more ambivalent. The choruses are shattering, the writing for Dawn Upshaw stunning - more than the pure-voiced Mary of Part One, it's her anguished delivery of 'Memorial for Tlatelolco', the most hard-hitting of the Castellanos poems included, which packs the biggest punch, along with music of breathtaking complexity. This, of course, is the work's 'massacre of the innocents', the flipside of the radiant birth. More on the 1968 horror here.

But Adams also has the gift to be simple: I prefaced it with the mixture of St James' and the Latin Infancy Gospel depicting Joseph's amazement at how the whole scene stands still for the birth, sustained strings and pinprick piccolos backing up Willard White's superb natural declamation. And of course we had to end where Adams does, with the finale genius interweaving of the Pseudo-Matthew narrative where the Holy Family is fed and watered by a palm tree obedient to the Christ Child alongside the final Castellanos poem. And naturally the Flight into Egypt becomes the part of the Christmas tale which perhaps has most resonance today given the plight of those millions of refugees fleeing death and destruction.

All this makes us anticipate Adams' own performance with the LSO on Sunday all the more, even though it's only two years since I was blown away by the first performance I heard to present the music in its unadorned glory. Meanwhile, only a couple of hours after I'd finished Monday's class, quite a few of us had moved on to the Barbican for something completely different - the European premiere of Gerald Barry's Alice's Adventures Under Ground. Read all about it on The Arts Desk. The magnificent seven singers are pictured below with Thomas Adès conducting the Britten Sinfonia; image by Mark Allan.

Gerald had promised to follow up his first visit to the class earlier this year with another, but a final rehearsal yesterday afternoon meant that wasn't possible. Never mind, he'll be back soon, not least - I'm certain - for the first UK staging of his new opera.

The grail

Here's one I prepared earlier, now let out of its cage. Look no further if you haven't listened to my Building a Library on Parsifal, just broadcast, and you're postponing revelation until you catch it on iPlayer for the week, or whatever this clip facility now up and running might be (17/!2: my producer tells me it should be 'up there until the end of days', or of the BBC, whichever comes first. There's also a podcast, which you can download here). I'll even stick in a further grail image, 'the one', ho hum, in Valencia Cathedral, to delay a glimpse of the winning cover.

The choice, for the first time in my 20-odd years of doing the programme, was totally obvious. So many folk have said to me over the past few months, 'of course you'll go for Knappertsbusch '62'. I thought I would when I listened again to Hans Hotter as Gurnemanz in Act One. But it became ever clearer to me as I listened to the three 'Kna' Bayreuth Parsifals currently doing the rounds - also including his first, from 1951, and his last of 1964, not long before his death - that I didn't want this kind of hard-hitting so often.

Kna's style does make for magnificent pinnacles - Hotter's 'O wunden-wundervoller heilige Speer' ('62) and George London's 'Erbarmen' in Act 1 ('51), Jon Vickers' 'Amfortas! Die Wunde!' in Act 2 ('64) - but what I've always sought since Haitink showed me the light at Covent Garden, conducting Bill Bryden's mostly intelligent production, is a naturalness that doesn't need to reiterate the spirituality and grandeur. As Mark Wigglesworth remarked when he came to talk to my Opera in Focus class the other week, Parsifal gives and gives while Tristan simply takes and leaves you exhausted. A great conductor needs to guide and give space where necessary, of course, but not to impose his (I await a 'her') will.

Which the great Rafael Kubelik never does. A few clever folk knew of this 1980 studio recording's existence but I certainly didn't before I came to listen and nor did my Parsifal-crazy producer Clive Portbury. He agrees that it's incomparably the best of what we have.

Runners-up I don't need to mention again here, but I do urge you to see the DVD of Hans Hollman's Zurich production. It would qualify alone as the only document of Haitink's conducting, but it's also the most quietly moving staging I've seen, trusting to the singers' stillness in the outer acts and - most important of all - respecting the transcendence of the grail ritual for all the suffering that surrounds it. The vital antidote, in short, to Stephen Langridge's Royal Opera horror. The students all thought so when I screeened Act Three in an extra class on Monday, and many wiped away the tears that simply hadn't flowed at Covent Garden.

I have a feeling that might happen when the Met production with Jonas Kaufmann comes out on DVD in February; from the images I've seen it appears much more in the right region than the one we're enduring in London. In the meantime, snap this up while you can; Gatti's conducting won't surpass Haitink's, and probably won't come anywhere near.

Alas, there are no clips on YouTube so I'll move sideways to seasonal seriousness. On the same Tuesday when my preparation schedule had been eaten up by the flying visit to 'do a telly', I took the BBC Symphony Orchestra class through two very different responses to the Flight into Egypt story, tied in with the chance to hear the two works in question tonight and tomorrow afternoon. Berlioz's painfully beautiful, intimate L'Enfance du Christ located the narrative close to the centre in the hands of the tenor 'Evangelist'. We had Anthony Rolfe-Johnson returning to life so scrupulously for John Eliot Gardiner, but all I could find on YouTube was Alain Vanzo not at his considerable best for Jean Martinon. So let's make do with that.

Like Britten's best poetry compilations, John Adams's El Niño would be admirable just as a sequence of magical words tellingly juxtaposed, without even  taking into account the extraordinary music which of course layers it still further. I look forward to experiencing it tonight without Peter Sellars' stage 'realisation', so enervating when the 2000 Paris original came to London. Adams for his supernatural epilogue turns to the charming and naive Gospel According to Pseudo-Matthew for a rest beneath a rather unusual palm tree, and juxtaposes it with the last of the stunning Mexican poems by Rosario Castellanos, a revelation to me.

As the soundclip doesn't offer a translation of the Castellanos poem, I take the liberty of reproducing it here:

Lady of the winds,
heron of the plains,
when you sway
your waist sings.

Gesture of prayer
or prelude of wings,
you are the cup into which the skies
pour one by one.

From the dark land of men
I've come kneeling to behold you,
Tall, naked, alone.
A poem.

So the text resounds and melts into a single repeated word in the mouths of  children - 'poesía'.

15/12 What a weekend it's been. My Arts Desk reviews are now up of El Niño here and of L'Enfance du Christ here. Don't whatever you do miss the Radio 3 broadcast of the ineffably moving Berlioz performance on the iPlayer here for the next week.

Rising above the desert

'Desert' is probably the wrong word to describe early Minimalism: at the time it must have seemed more like a rainforest after the aridity of Darmstadt's iron rule. So in writing my Arts Desk review of the BBC Singers' and Endymion's reduced-forces version of Steve Reich's 1984 masterpiece The Desert Music, I fumbled for a compromise, 'savannah', in trying to describe the terrain from which it, and earlier (in 1980-1) John Adams's equally individual chorus-and-orchestra spectacular Harmonium, took off. Curiously, and incidentally, that same day I read a passage in Richard Mabey's bewitching Nature Cure where another of my heroes used the term 'savannah' for an image in a different context.

As ever, in trying to sum up what Minimalism was for the students in a 20-minute lecture-room whizz before the Milton Court concert began, and where these two composers departed from its basics, I found my Adams bible, Hallelujah Junction, indispensible. Mighty John is writing about the work in which he first found his voice, Phrygian Gates, having turned 30 by the time Mack McCray gave its premiere in 1977. Forgive me for reproducing such a large chunk of text, but it conveys everything I want to say, and more, from an insider-practitioner's perspective.

I had first heard Terry Riley's epochal In C while still living in Cambridge, probably in 1971. A friend, another composition student, invited me back to his flat with the promise of introducing me to something 'like you've never heard before.' And he was right. What he played for me was the famous Columbia Masterworks LP of the landmark piece that announced a new style in contemporary music. Terry's In C may have been to contemporary American music what Ginsberg's Howl or Kerouac's On the Road were to literature. With its insistent, unyielding high pulse on the high C of a piano and the sunny, upbeat fragments of melodies recirculating over and over in a loose polyphony, In C captured the congenial hippie spirit of the West Coast while at the same time proposing a new, slowly evolving approach to musical form. It was also marvelously provocative, giving an R. Crumb [who? I only know, and love, George*] middle finger to the crabbed, pedantic world of academic modernism.

I later heard more organized, more elegant versions of the Minimalist aesthetic when Steve Reich brought his ensemble to town in 1974. Their performance of Drumming revealed a different but equally novel take on pulsation as the guiding principle of the music - the main event, so to speak - but compared to In C, Reich's materials were more fastidiously organized and the gradual process of melodic, harmonic and timbral evolution more methodical. What also impressed me about Reich's music-making was that it was done at a high level of expertise and preparation. In contrast to the free, anarchic avant-garde happenings I'd been involved with, Reich's music used precision and balanced counterpoint to create a sound world that was carefully organized, musically engaging and sensually appealing.

...What appealed to me about these early works of Minimalism was that they did not deconstruct or obliterate the fundamental elements of musical discourse such as regular pulsation, tonal harmony or motivic repetition. Indeed they did the opposite: they embraced pulsation and repetition with an almost childlike glee. To me, it felt like the pleasure principle had been invited back into the listening experience.

And what of Glass? I have foresworn his company, which means that if I can avoid it I hope never to sit through one of his symphonies or operas again. Adams is brutally frank on the historical limitations.

...But much as they enchanted me, these Minimalist compositions felt like latter-day descendants of Baroque compositions from the 18th century. As musical organisms, the pieces were largely monolithic, their expressive worlds more often than not confined to a single affect. One spoke of trances or hypnotic states. That was both the brilliance of the style's originality and the conundrum of how to make it evolve into a language of greater subtlety...Much of his [Glass's] symphonic music, such as the 1996 'Heroes' Symphony, based on songs by David Bowie and Brian Eno, moves among simple, familiar harmonies in regular symmetrical units of two and four bars, while the orchestration, once established for a movement, remains more or less unchanged.  

Those are shortcomings you won't find in The Desert Music or Harmonium. Which is why I'm still startled when someone else labels Reich and Adams (pictured above, much more recently than Reich, by his superb photographer partner Deborah O'Grady) American Minimalists. I've just read an annoying interview in the latest BBC Music Magazine with John Tavener, who says he hates that 'school' on the whole: 'John Adams bores me to tears'. Tavener's longer rituals bore me to tears, as it happens. Adams bores me never, even if I respond to some works more enthusiastically than to others.

The Desert Music certainly isn't for trance states; as Reich says in an interview on the original LP, 'I actually prefer the music to be heard by somebody who's totally wide awake, hearing more than he or she usually does, rather than by someone who's just spaced out and receiving a lot of ephemeral impressions.' As the poetry of William Carlos Williams, a real revelation to me, has it as set in the fourth movement, 'I am wide/awake. The mind/is listening.' The below is a fine performance, even if the choir doesn't 'get' the text in the same way American or British forces seem to.

The opening is anything but Minimalist-diatonic basic: in fact so much of the piece lives in a state of suspension, like Tristan und Isolde, or anxiety (specifically about the nuclear threat) that the hint of an F major resolution, still ambiguous, makes the ending especially luminous.

In that context, I proposed to my great blogging friend Susan Scheid over on Prufrock's Dilemma that we each give a list of 20th century works offering affirmative capability, even if that only comes at the end of the masterpiece in question, one per decade. Here are mine today (they could of course change tomorrow). The Desert Music slotted into the 1980s only by postponing Adams for the 1990s

1900s: Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht. It was actually composed in 1899, but the Rosé Quartet and two players from the Vienna Philharmonic gave the original sextet premiere in 1902.

1910s: Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. Especially apt since Salome and Elektra had preceded it.

1920s: tricky - Prokofiev's The Prodigal Son is suitable because of the beautiful homecoming, but Nielsen's Fifth Symphony is the greater work.

1930s Britten's Paul Bunyan. Such optimism, such a libretto (Auden). Having recently been faced with the possibility that several of the 'mature' operas, one especially, might not be as great as I thought they were, I love it the more.

1940s: should really be dividied into war and post-war years, but this is a celebration that manages to be rooted and iconoclastic at the same time: Messiaen's Turangalîla Symphony with its crazy final blaze of a chord out-Scriabining Scriabin.

1950s: Shostakovich's Tenth Symphony. That finale really is raucously celebratory, not hollow, I fancy, with the rampaging of the composer's personal signature. And Stalin really was dead, even if the composer had no great optimism about his successors.

1960s: Poulenc's Gloria. Hits the heights more surely than the earlier Stabat Mater, which I heard on Wednesday and found it eclipsed by Prokofiev's painfully beautiful Seventh Symphony.

1970s: Bernstein's Mass. I see I've gone to the New World for later 20th century optimism from this point on.

1980s: Reich's The Desert Music

1990s: Adams's El Niño. Cheating in quite the opposite way to my choice of Verklärte Nacht: I assume work began at least a couple of years before the Paris premiere in December 2000. Looking forward to hearing it shorn of its Peter Sellars production overload when Jurowski conducts it towards the end of The Rest is Noise festival.

*Howard Lane clarified below: 'R. Crumb is the signature of the cartoonist Robert Crumb of Fritz the Cat, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers and Mr Natural fame.'

UPDATE (28/10) Notice board for pre-performance talks I'm involved with this week - four on the trot:

Wednesday 30 October: talking to Michail (father of Vladimir) Jurowski in the Royal Festival Hall about his LPO performance of Schnittke's First Symphony. Sorry to hear that Sasha Ivashkin, who knew Schnittke well, has written and/or put together two marvellous books about him and interprets the great man's cello works as well as anyone, is ill and had to cancel his play-and-talk event: hence this different combination.

Thursday 31 October: Up to Birmingham for a talk before Sinaisky conducting the CBSO in Rachmaninov's The Bells.

Friday 1 November: prefacing the brilliant Belceas' Wigmore performance of quartets by Britten and Shostakovich.

Saturday 2 November: back to the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican to chat with Tristan Murail and say a bit about Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto and Mahler's First Symphony before Sakari Oramo's first official concert as the BBCSO's chief conductor.