Farewell Katerina, welcome Leonora

Prefatory note: this was mostly written before I heard the news today. Not that there's anything to say except, thoughts not just to Paris but to the families of everyone blown up or mown down indiscriminately in tens and thousands around the world so far this terrible century. It's almost too much to bear..

As on the stage of the London Coliseum, so in my Opera in Depth course - we've said our goodbyes to Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (ENO production image by Clive Barda) after six Monday afternoons and found ourselves hooked by Verdi's La Forza del destino (or rather "Force" as they have to call it at ENO, though I'd be happier with The Power of Fate as an English title. All ENO photos by Robert Workman). We had a very distinguished transitioner, new ENO chief conductor Mark Wigglesworth, to talk us through a retrospective on Lady M and what to expect from his second opera of the season. He's generous with his time, candid and of course absolutely the best thing that could have happened to ENO after Edward Gardner, able to apply his own deep sound to an orchestra (and chorus, too) in top shape.

Even more amazing is that I asked him if he'd mind mentioning to American soprano Tamara Wilson, making her London debut and giving possibly the operatic performance of the year as Verdi's Leonora, that we'd like her to visit us at the Frontline. She said she'd come, with wit and verve, and so Monday 23 November will be a love-in with La Wilson. If you'd like to attend this one-off, contact me at david.nice@usa.net. I've even been able to schedule an extra class at the end of term so we don't miss out on going through the opera (and four two-hour sessions still aren't enough).

I'm able to divulge what I thought of Force now that my Radio 3 Music Matters chat with Tom Service, who was very much on the same wavelength, has been broadcast; it's up on the iPlayer and as podcast here*. As expected, Calixto Bieito's production was a maddening mix of woolly, repetitive grimness and the odd scene of penetrating brilliance. Certainly I wept and was left shaken when our pitiable heroine seeks consolation in a monastery and meets - wrench of Verdi's intention, this, I know - only sadism and brutality. But as this is the Spanish Catholic church, is it that surprising? Coincidentally, I've just been reading in Glenn Watkins' beautifully written The Gesualdo Hex a document testifying to Spanish monks' infinite misogyny (we're talking Civil War with Bieito, though it's too much to the fore rather than providing a context for the private pursuit of revenge).

Bieito, as usual, overstates that misogyny; there's hardly a scene where a woman isn't on her knees having her hair pulled, or worse - and the expensive set on the revolve isn't usually as effective as it looks above, though the video projections are always impressive. But thanks to Wilson's magnetic acting with voice, face and body, and her fusion with Wigglesworth's phenomenally dramatic and stage-attuned conducting, pity and terror were the keynotes at the end of ENO's first half. There are plenty of hallucinatory moments, like 'Piu tranquillo l'alma sento' and the ghostly clarinet and violin solo reprises of the big phrase in the preceding aria. James Cresswell played his metallic-grim bass part in this superbly: could he play Wotan to Wilson's Brünnhilde, if she stays the course and develops as expected? Mark MUST do a new Ring at ENO, and Richard Jones has said he's willing to look at it again after one and a half productions, so how about it?

We have, of course, to wait another act and a half for Leonora to return, whereupon the tension levels rise again, and the floating of the lines in the great trio of Verdi's revision banish regrets that Bieito didn't go with the first version, very much his line with two corpses and Alvaro throwing himself off a rock cursing God. The other payoff is the most intensely quiet of pianissimos from the ENO Orchestra. Heck, they could all do Aida *now*.

For me, neither of the genre scenes works. Bieito insists on decontextualising them, replacing the old messes of his Don Giovanni et al with chorus stock still in lines; the patchy lighting means you can't often see who's singing when. Predictably, every moment is brutal here, no light and shade (though I wouldn't condone a completely cosy Preziosilla either). Andrew Shore was presumably engaged to make a funny Melitone, but he's just horrid according to Bieito.

The two principal men don't blend well, though each is good. Gwyn Hughes Jones, as we know from his Walther in the ENO Mastersingers, is tireless but a bit bright and underballasted for a tenor of his build; Anthony Michaels-Moore is now merely solid in middle range, inaudible below - I used to like him a lot. Still, he plays the war-crazed veteran compellingly in a Klaus Kinski kind of way. Bieito doesn't help the two stagewise, keeping them apart until Alvaro rants about pulling a knife on Carlo when he's pinioned under him with no chance of doing so. GHJ does fire on all cylinders in the last act, though.

Mark prepared us well the Monday before. Interestingly he had been engaged, before his big appointment, to conduct the opening opera of the season, but that had changed to Carmen. And he was already down to return for another Lady Macbeth. I can't remember everything he said - should have recorded the talk - but among the most interesting observations was one in which he said that while singers will do anything a director asks - because they've come from a musical, rather than a theatrical training, and lack the confidence to speak out - they won't take notes from the conductor half so readily. Though I imagine Wilson did both, so closely bound to her orchestra in sense and intensity, so committed to the sometimes cruel hoops through which Bieito put her, did she seem.

In the first hour of that class, we finished off Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk - or rather Katerina Izmailova, since it was Shostakovich's revision, further cut, which Mikhail Shapiro used in his 1964 film. Mark came in to see the very end, Vishnevskaya so devoted as Katerina that she was prepared not to have a body double for her character drowning self and fellow convict Sonyetka in the Volga.

Memorably she spoke about it some years back - 'weather very cold, water very wet' - and writes in Galina: A Russian Story of how because a reel had been lost the scene had to be re-filmed, not in warm water near Odessa but in the much chillier Gulf of Finland. Well, it was worth it. We also used scenes from Martin Kušej's Amsterdam production with Eva-Maria Westbroek and Christopher Ventris; the class agreed that the wedding scene was more convincing than it had been in Tcherniakov's ENO staging. Otherwise, I beg to differ with some of them that his Act Four was unsatisfactory; for me, that was pure genius.

In the meantime, Georg Friedrich Haas's Morgen und Abend really worked for me at its Royal Opera world premiere last night (we're back to the great Clive Barda for the last image, of Sarah Wegener as Signe and Christoph Pohl as her dead, or departing, father Johannes). Wish we could have asked Graham Vick back to talk about it; apparently he adores the music, and I can well see how it would get under one's skin. Haas is fascinating talking to Tom on that same Music Matters episode: the notion that if you love something enough, there will aways be people in the audience who love it too is beautifully put.

*And/or you might like to listen to Tom Jones interviewed by Cerys Matthews on the BBC World Service. Total tonic on a day bleak in more ways than one.

The Rostropoviches at home

It’s not certifiably a seasonal shot, but you can well imagine the Russian equivalent of a Boxing Day scenario with Slava bowing or strumming while Galina sang – and the kids turned out OK, didn’t they? With Vishnevskaya’s departure earlier this month, virtually all of a great Russian musical generation are no more (though the slightly younger Rozhdestvensky and Temirkanov remain).

True, Russia’s number one diva could be prickly and egotistical - playing endless videos of herself to students at her Aldeburgh course, trying to organize a national uprising against Dmitri Tcherniakov’s ‘desecration’ of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. And she carried on singing roles well past their (ie her) sell-by date, only to astonish everyone with her low-key portrayal of a bewildered grandmother in Sokurov’s haunting film Alexandra.

When Vishnevskaya was good, she was great, at least up until the end of the 1960s. I reproduced on The Arts Desk an interview with her, made in 1988, about her role in Britten’s War Requiem, with a few YouTube clips. I think my favourite, though, is her later recording of Musorgsky’s ‘Where are you, little star?’ This earlier version has a rather oversophisticated orchestration by Igor Markevitch, but the artistry is unmistakable.

Here's an approximate translation for the text, written (it's presumed) by the composer in the style of a Russian folksong, which of course the music evokes:

Where are you, little star, where are you, bright one?

Perhaps you've been dimmed by a black cloud,

A black cloud, a threatening cloud?

Where are you, maiden, where are you, fair one?

Have you deserted your dear friend,

Your dear friend, your beloved?

The black cloud hid the little star,

The cold earth took the maiden.

Vishnevskaya’s was the musical death of 2012 that resonated with me most. I always had reservations about Lisa Della Casa in Strauss - a certain tension in the technique stopped hers being the ideal floaty soprano in his music. And there was a diva in the less good sense, reading about the conflicts with Hilde Gueden on the Solti recording of Arabella (though that's still my favourite). Thinking about writing something on Henze for The Arts Desk, I really couldn’t drum up enough of an all-round portrait, much as I admire a couple of his operas (the symphonies remain unexamined territory). Elliott Carter remains musical anathema – great craft, plenty to comment on there, but it doesn’t communicate to me at all.

Jonathan Harvey’s music I need to get to know – and will do, with the opera Wagner Dream being performed next year (though I do remember talking to him at a Glyndebourne rehearsal of Tristan, which he said thoughtfully had to be the richest score of all, didn’t it?). And now we hear of Richard Rodney Bennett’s departure. Shame the radio tribute had to lead with the pastiche-y waltz from the film Murder on the Orient Express, though that’s the only tune of his I can hum. I loved his duo appearances with sassy Marion Montgomery, too.

(28/12) And Brubeck? How could I have forgotten mighty Dave? I was hoping to find on YouTube the wonderfully bitter-sweet third movement of brother Howard's rather inspired Dialogues for Jazz Combo and Orchestra, pitting the Dave Brubeck Quartet against Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, but it's not to be found. So we'll have to make do with the original cover of Time Out, which I nearly wore out in my university years; I owned it in a double set with Time Further Out the second LP.

(29/12) Howard, in the comments below, reminded me of Ravi Shankar too. So I dug out my Ravi Shankar: The Sounds of India disc, in which he gives modest introductions to the melas and the instrumental combinations of ragas. There's also a useful sleeve note by composer Alan Hovhaness. I like the sound of the sitar against the tabla and tambura, of course; I marvel at the rhythmic variations; but my western ear still can't get attuned in the long term to drone-fixed music that never modulates. My fault entirely.

(30/12) There's also the enormous omission here of colossus Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, though I did pay homage in A Fish-Sermon Transmogrified. DFD was the only western classical musician mentioned in the BBC Arts and Entertainment's photo-narrative of great departed. That's right, none of the above composers was included. Hurrumph.

As for the Guardian obits I’ve stockpiled, most of the subjects have defied mortality so far, and may they continue to do so.