Elektra's death-dance, Butterfly's flight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Myths and monsters: Opera in Depth 2019-20

The new season is upon us - at the Royal Opera, it's kicked off  with two revivals of very flawed productions which may yield good singing, but I'll give 'em a miss - and on 7 October I and my loyal students, along with a few new members, reconvene in splendid Pushkin House, Bloomsbury Square, for more journeys through the rich and rare.

In October, we depart from the most usual format of two operas split each 10-week tern with five Monday afternoons on each. This time we start with three classes on Handel's early cornucopia of brilliant ideas Agrippina, to coincide with a new production at the Royal Opera House starring Joyce DiDonato (if it's half as good as the ENO staging with Sarah Connolly, Christine Rice and Lucy Crowe, among others - Crowe returns here - I'll be happy). Moving forwards in time for the following five classes, the focus is on Gluck's incomparably concise balance of classical restraint and romantic emotion in Orfeo ed Euridice - undoubtedly the greatest of English National Opera's chosen operas on the theme of the Greek poet in music. We'll also be taking sideways glances at Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld and Harrison Birtwistle's The Mask of Orpheus. For the last two Mondays, we get to grips with the music of Berlin-era Weill to coincide with English Touring Opera's rare staging of his acidic fable Der Silbersee (Silverlake).

January sees us resume our four-year journey through Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, in tandem with Vladimir Jurowski's annual performances with the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall. We go into the woods and up a mountain with Siegfried, the most fairy-tale-like of the tetralogy.

Summer begins in blood-soaked ancient Mycenae with Strauss's Elektra - the ultimate development of the Wagnerian line, also pointing the way forwards to a more concise form of searing music-theatre. The season needs one hundred-per-cent Italian opera, and it was time to return to the miracle of exquisite orchestration and dramatic timing that is Puccini's Madama Butterfly. Both operas are in the Royal Opera's repertoire - Elektra in a new production starring the phenomenal Nina Stemme, Butterfly a revival witnessing the return of Ermonela Jaho.

If you're interested in joining us, leave a message with your email; I won't publish it but I will respond. 

So, off next to Gartmore House in the Trossachs to resume my Ring course for the Wagner Society of Scotland over four Septembers with Die Walküre. I wrote a bit about last year's fun if exhausting experience here. This time sunshine is forecast for a day or two - last year, after the above sunset on arrival, it rained on and off for the whole weekend - so I'll be making the most of my few afternoon hours off between some of the 13 (!) lectures in three and a bit days.

Roaring our heads off

...for these two, Nina Stemme and Donald Runnicles (which also means the Deutsche Oper Berlin orchestra), in a shatteringly great Proms Salome. No need to add much to the rave over on The Arts Desk but I wanted to include a few more of Chris Christodoulou's photos, which arrived as usual punktlich not long after I got back from the Albert Hall last night.

The above came from him after I'd asked for a landscape of Nina, preferably with Donald, to lead. Before he fired them back, I'd already cropped the money shot, and unless he objects don't want to replace it. Hence the second home. There were also others I couldn't use over there. Doris Soffel, having made little impression on us as the Countess in the Zurich Queen of Spades, really had a ball with Herodias, and Runnicles let her hold on to her top A at 'schweigen!' for what seemed like an infinity. Here she is with Stemme.

I mentioned the shame about the slight dependence on scores and music stands from most of the men - Samuel Youn's Jokanaan honourably excepted - but this shows that character tenor Burkhard Ulrich wasn't beyond acting it out as Herod.

Cheers, too, for the Narraboth, Belgian Thomas Blondelle

and Ronnita Miller from St Petersburg, Florida, now a Deutsche Oper principal, as a lustrous 'Page'.

It was a company show, no doubt about it: what a team Runnicles has in Berlin. But ultimately it had to be Nina's night. Doesn't she look, in relaxed mode, like our own intense non-singing (as far as I know) actress Olivia Colman?

Oh, and if you're curious to know who the boors were behind us, shouting 'sit down!' when I rose unhesitatingly to my feet after the shield-crushing, I'll go so far as to say that the only one of them I recognised - and they were all obnoxious in their self-expression before the invisible curtain rose - was a distinguished and, by all accounts, Mensch-like singer who must have welcomed a few standing ovations himself in his time. Shame on them.

1/10 As outlined in a comment below, this was everything the following (last) night's Elektra was not. Ed Seckerson expresses everything I felt in his review for The Arts Desk, not least so eloquently nailing the problem of Christine Goerke's upper register. And he's also right to say that Felicity Palmer's Clytemnestra was the star of the evening. What's the caption here? 'Yes, I'm still better than you, my girl, even at 70'?

Even so, in an ideal dramatic world, Clytemnestra shouldn't be either so old or so visibly raddled. After all, she's the mother of a 20 year old girl, and her decay is inner. Which is why you'll never see a better portrayal than Waltraud Meier's in the great Patrice Chereau's last stand. In fact this is one of the most riveting opera DVDs ever made, and Evelyn Herlitzius - slight of frame, searing of voice - IS Elektra as far as I'm concerned. For some reason my BBC Music Mag five-star review isn't up on the erratic website, but need I say more here? Don't waste time on the iPlayer broadcast of the Prom; buy the DVD.