The bitter tears of Sergey Rachmaninov

 

Rachmaninov at the premiere of The Miserly Knight, 11 January 1906, with I. Grizunov (the Duke), G. Baklanov (the Baron) and A. Bonachich (Albert)

How glad I am Vladimir Jurowski still believes in the most haunting of Rachmaninov's three operas, The Miserly Knight, its text adapted practically word for word from Pushkin's magnificent 'little tragedy' (Skupoi Ritsar in the Russian - 'covetous' may hit the mark even better than 'miserly', especially since, as I only learnt a couple of days ago, Pushkin intended seven plays for each of the deadly sins, though he only reached four. For more on the origin of this frontispiece, see further down).

Nearly a decade on from his Glyndebourne championship, Jurowski (pictured below by Chris Christodoulou) conducted an orchestrally unsurpassable performance of The Miserly Knight in Wednesday night's London Philharmonic Orchestra programme, a fascinating double bill about gold and greed with substantial excerpts from Wagner's Das Rheingold in the first half. When he recently decided to join the pre-performance talk originally to have been given by director Annabel Arden alone, I was privileged to be asked to chair the chat. That meant handing over the review to my Arts Desk colleague Matthew Wright; he got it, I think.

Talk and performance were absolutely fascinating and challenging. VJ never views things from a conventional angle, and the way he manipulates the English language to express complicated thoughts simply is a marvel. Besides, who else would have pulled off this programme? The Rheingold sequence was infinitely more satisfying than Dudamel's disastrously paced and ineptly snippeted 'Entry of the Gods into Valhalla' the other week. It had been advertised as orchestral music only, but then Jurowski realised there wasn't enough to stand by itself. He found out that Sergey Leiferkus, his Baron, towering protagonist of The Miserly Knight, had sung Alberich and it all flowed from there. Thus we got the whole of the introduction, first scene and interlude up to the Valhalla theme, with the Rhinemaidens, in Arden's semi-staging, undulating above and below the front row of choir stalls. The Woglinde, recent Guildhall graduate Natalya Romaniw, took a minute to settle, but what a voice this is - I hear a potential Sieglinde in there.

Jurowski made the score gleam and undulate, as if we were in a finer acoustic that the RFH's (when I returned in the talk to his question of doing a whole Ring with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which he'd brought up at an earlier meeting, he said they'd need a whole new construction to house it). There was perhaps a touch too much care for the descent to and ascent from Nibelheim, and the patching felt a bit conspicuous from here up to the final sequence, but the anvils - 8, said the programme; 18, said VJ; 10 came on for a bow - resonated marvellously. Nor were the gods very Wagnerian-divine, but it was good to have the Rhinemaidens at the back rather than offstage, chilling the blood. And yes, we got six harps.

The Rachmaninov was, by contrast, impassioned, absolutely sure in every gesture - having played for the Glyndebourne 2004 production, the LPO still seems to have the music in its blood - and enshrined the most magnificent monologue in the operatic world from a still-untiring Leiferkus (there was a point a couple of years ago where I thought the voice was worn out, but little sign of that here). Annabel's finest touch was to find, unforced, a second role for the singer-actresses portraying Wagner's Rhinemaidens, as young Norns hovering above the Baron - especially valid since, as she pointed out, Russian abstractions like Death and Fate are feminine. The three made it work chillingly well.

We also spoke of how Rachmaninov takes a leaf out of Wagner in his slow-burn crescendos. There are two, the biggest, which seems to go on for ever before imploding, when the Baron, Bluebeard-like, lights candles and opens his six jewel-caskets. But the one with the more poetry to go with it is perhaps the more haunting in both music and text. Thus James E Falen's translation, preserving the Shakespearean iambic pentameters of Pushkin's original:

Ah yes! If all the tears, the blood and sweat
That men have shed for such a hoard as this
Should suddenly gush forth from out the earth,
There'd be a second flood - and I'd be drowned
Inside my trusty vaults.

As luck would have it, the fourth instalment of the Glyndebourne film downloaded to YouTube - I don't know for how long (and I'd urge you to buy the DVD, which is beautifully presented) - starts at exactly this point. So you can hear how Rachmaninov develops the extraordinary four-note ostinato of the third movement from his Suite No. 1 for two pianos, 'Tears' ('Slyozi'). This in turn derives from the bells of Novgorod, which haunted Rachmaninov from childhood. So that comes first here in the partnership of Nikolay Lugansky and Vadim Rudenko - my CD benchmark is Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch - and is followed by Leiferkus in the middle of Scene 2. Arden's production has the masterstroke of an aerialist, Matilda Leyser (now married to Phelim McDermott, Annabel told me), who scared the life out of me with her big eyes, as the fateful spirit of avarice.

Pushkin's monologue is great in itself: I've determined to learn it in Russian, as I started to learn Pimen's speech from Boris Godunov; let's see if I can get further this time  (Russians always appreciate you quoting some Pushkin - J can impress with 'Shto dyen gryadushy mne gotovit' since Tchaikovsky set Lensky's lines very faithfully). I'd also like to do my own translation and I've just discovered these illustrations for the Little Tragedies by a talented young artist, Ievgen Kharuk - very much in the tradition of Russian book illustration (though Ievgen is from Kiev, more power to his pen). Note the key motif from The Miserly Knight on the cover for all four works.

Look at more of his work here. It should, of course, be published. On which note, it saddens but doesn't surprise me to learn of the latest philistinism to dog the better part of Putin's Russia: the great publications known as 'thick' journals, a glory of the Russian intelligentsia even in Soviet times, are in danger of extinction and the dangerous fraud who's supposed to be the Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky (the one who said Tchaikovsky wasn't gay - see the footnote here - and who went on to even greater glories), won't lift a finger to help. 

 In the meantime, the staff of Moskva, the journal which first published Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, are ploughing on this month and the next unsalaried to try and save their great institution. The Interpreter has its rigorous finger on the pulse of this as of so much else. I know, pace David Damant's comment to a recent post, that it's partial as an instrument of opposition, but it does its best to provide chapter and verse against the scandalously nebulous propaganda pouring out of Russia at the moment.

A final, not unconnected, point: a far more incriminating photo than the above from 2004, along with detailed facts, here point to why there should be an immediate end to Anna Netrebko's hit-and-miss career in the west. If she was naive to think that giving money to a Donetsk opera and theatre company to carry on had nothing to do with separatist propaganda, then she should definitely have stopped when they asked her to hold the flag. Simple equation: if you pay to see Anna Netrebko, you're funding the daily murder of civilians in a war within Ukraine's legal borders - no doubt by both sides -  which the Ukrainians did nothing to start. And as a general principle, applicable to Gergiev too, the author of the article, Julia Khodor Beloborodov of Arts Against Aggression, is surely right:

Artists and their art can stand apart from politics. However, artists who use their artistic reputations to further a political cause cannot then be allowed to hide behind that reputation and claim to not be political actors.

Anyway, Netrebko's Iolanta and Four Last Songs discs are poor. That may be beside the point, but at least I wrote about those before I knew anything about this. 

Pitch-perfect protest

I'll admit I was wary of joining a demonstration after so long; even years ago I only ever went on Pride marches, which I stopped attending when the whistles got too much and a BBC producer told me how he'd got tinnitus from an ex blowing one in his ear. J thinks I was on the Section 28 protest when they shut us in a garden, but I have no memory of that.

Anyway, the reason I went this time was simple. After three months of silence, having been targeted for lending his name to Putin's re-election campaign and failing to make any sort of comment on the murderous  new anti-gay laws in Russia, Valery Gergiev had finally produced a statement to prove he was gay-friendly. It was amusingly summarised in a tweet by Philip Hensher: 'Some of my best friends are gay. I don't support institutional homophobia. I leave that up to my friend Putin.'

Weak or not, the statement would have been enough for me had he not, in the time between the Met, Carnegie Hall and San Francisco Opera protests and this one, gone and put his foot in it about the anti-gay laws in Russia, which anyone who cares about human rights must abhor. He was quoted in the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant as saying 'In Russia we protect our children. These laws are not about homosexuality, they concern paedophilia'.

Now if he misunderstood, or was misquoted, he's had plenty of time to put the record straight. But he hasn't. And having reeled at a casually-muttered remark about 'child molesting' by an older relative of my now-godson when I was bouncing the baby A on my knee, I have a personal reason for seeing red at such equations.

So, in spite of having had so many amiable and fascinating meetings with Gergiev over the years, I still went along to the Silk Street entrance of the Barbican before his second performance of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust (I was speeding off at 7, the time the concert was due to start, to the first night of the dismal Magic Flute at ENO). I'd feared they might get it wrong: it would have been totally misleading to have banners saying Gergiev was homophobic, because I don't believe for a minute that he is.

As it turned out, what needed to be said was said. The orchestrator was the slightly scary but admirable Peter Tatchell, and he'd pitched it, I think, just right. It was peaceful and - as this very fair Guardian report points out*- 'civilised' but 'loud' as the African contingent, aptly there to protest similarly appalling human rights records in Uganda inter alia, backed up Tatchell in chanting 'Gergiev! Stop supporting Putin!' - some coaching occasionally needed on pronunciation - and the stress-curious 'SOME people ARE gay! GET over IT!'.

Chanting isn't really my thing, so I joined in a little less than lustily. But I was happy to accede to Peter's request to hand out leaflets, which again were correctly worded, and it rekindled memories of what it's like to be rejected, in this case by a fair few haughty concertgoers.

Anyway, the sparklers and the huge diversity of the protesters (the three above in a photo from the Tatchell Foundation) added to the festive, non-aggressive air. Unfortunately the whole thing was grievously misreported by Melanie McDonagh in a feeble Spectator blog as being inside the hall where she could barely make out cries of 'shame' (the hall event had taken place a week earlier, when Tatchell courageously held the platform for a minute before, not during or after, the concert). The pretence of being there, which she has not retracted?  Journalists lose their jobs for less. But I'm not even going to link to her invective; that would only help to give the right-wing rag the clicks it so badly needs.

As for my own 'open letter' to Gergiev's response on The Arts Desk, it felt strange and initially rather lonely. None of my musical colleagues was willing to lend support, with two against - the usual argument, 'why this and not x' - and three not wanting to go public; not a single contributor showed any solidarity. But then, as I could see from the bottom right column of the main page, there were plenty of supportive tweets from the likes of Jessica Duchen, Petroc Trelawny, Richard Bratby and - proudest of this - a lovely short eulogy from my oboist hero Nicholas Daniel. So it was clearly the right thing to have done. I don't blame the silent majority, but 'Halldor', commenting on the TAD latest, put it all rather beautifully. I select a few choice sentences:

The all-smiles, "you were marvellous" culture of the classical music world is deeply ingrained in all of us. And so many well-meaning, liberal people are deeply invested in Gergiev's prestige. So responses to real stand-up-and-be-counted moments like this are awkward, embarrassed; people wish it'd just go away, they lose patience, and don't think matters through.

Curiously but unsurprisingly even as I was turning the article's screw on what the consequences of the 'anti-paedophilia' law had been, Queer Nation New York reported the latest hate crime from Moscow with appropriately angry artwork.

Will this specific issue go away? Not until our conductor retracts or qualifies that awful statement. No-one's asking him to renounce Putin; that's just not possible in the present climate. But as to one PR's frenzied declaration that Tatchell is trying to ruin Gergiev's career, no chance, and that's not what any of us wants.

Rather more productive relations with musical Russians came thick and fast in the weeks around the protest. I loved interviewing Michail Jurowski, Vlad's dad, before what I think must go down for me as the most extraordinary concert of the year so far. I hope the LPO releases the recording of our talk, because he was fascinating about the distinguished visitors to the  intellectual household in which he grew up - Vladimir Senior was a respected Soviet composer - and on how as a teenager he played piano duets with Shostakovich. Michail Vladimirovich's wife took this photo in his dressing room, where he nearly talked himself out before the half-hour under the public eye. It gives some idea of how many staves the score of Schnittke's First Symphony often has to encompass.

As for the work in action, what a jaw-dropping masterpiece. I knew as I listened to Rozhdestvensky's outlandish recording with the score that morning that, unless the performance were to go badly wrong, there'd be an instant standing ovation, as there had been from the young in VJ's LPO performance of the Third Symphony.  And there was. Read about it on the Arts Desk review.

I was trembling with emotion even before we heard it: in the interval my companion for the evening Roger Neill introduced me to the vivacious, brilliant and hugely talented Alissa Firsova, and she introduced me in turn to her mother, Elena and the great Dmitri Smirnov. Elena was at both the world premiere of Schnittke's First in the 'closed' city of Gorky (Nizhny Novgorod, sadly in the news again recently owing to the awful plane crash there) and then, after the work's 12-year ban was lifted, at its second performance in Moscow - not nearly as good, she thought. Dmitri enlightened me as to why, though we found it extraordinary, the performance of Lutoslawski's Cello Concerto wasn't quite right in the light of Rostropovich's premiere performance (I heard Slava play it with the LSO; neither then nor in Truls Mork's interpretation earlier this did it have anything like the impact we got from Johannes Moser's piece of music-theatre). Here are all three in the foyer.

After  my Wigmore Hall talk in the Bechstein Room on quartets by Haydn, Britten and Shostakovich to be played by the dazzling Belcea Quartet, I realised that I'd been standing in front of the anniversary hero whose First String Quartet knocked me for six, so I got one of the punters to take a snap. Afraid I asked him to cut out Elliott Carter, not an idol of mine..

Fourth talk in a row was an introduction to Sakari Oramo's first official concert as new chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra: part setting-up of Shostakovich's First Piano Concerto and Mahler's First Symphony, with good links between the popular ditties in both, part conversation with Tristan Murail, whose two new pieces going under the collective title Reflections/Reflets were being given their world premiere. I was slightly apprehensive of talking to a composer with whom I wasn't sure I'd be in total sympathy, but the deep sound the minute the work began in rehearsal that morning captivated me. In our chat TM soon relaxed and became surprisingly bonhomous dealing with an charming old gent in the front row who asked about tunes. Murail's the one to look apprehensive in this picture, and I set  myself up as a candidate for another episode in 'great British dentistry' by the webtroll I've been ignoring, but it's the only one, so it will have to do.

The DDS trail has continued with two talks to the Friends of the Jerusalem Quartet (photo below by Marco Borggreve) around that amazing foursome's Shostakovich cycle. I only managed to hear the third concert in the first series, of quartets 4, 5 and 6, but from the very first bars it was obvious that these are the natural successors to the old Borodin Quartet in the powerful reserves they can draw on and their unique flexibility and tonal quick-changes. Five was, of course, the stunner, and the Sixth brought the redemption of romance just as I'd anticipated.

I have to say that cellist Kyril Zlotnikov's my favourite, not just for his handsome profile but also for the infinitely cultured sound he makes and the aristocratic, readable expressions which match the mood of the music in question.

And on the Friday I got to talk to the wonderful Boris Giltburg the morning after his stunning Queen Elizabeth Hall recital. He's a real Renaissance man, currently translating Rilke into Hebrew, and his command of English was astounding in his ability to articulate complex thoughts on space and silence in the previous evening's performance of Prokofiev Eighth Sonata. More on that anon. Here's Boris in the lobby of the St Pancras Hotel, which I also need to eulogise in due course.

One concert I wasn't sorry to miss was the five-hour epic of the Philip Glass Ensemble. A very treasured new student of mine who did go knows what I think of Glass, and drew this image of how he imagined I'd have been at the event. I've taken the liberty of setting it on the computer alongside a photo of the composer from that concert.

Only six days to go now before I hand in the script for the Radio 3 Building a Library on Parsifal, which explains why I've done so little blogging over the past couple of weeks.  That and visiting my poor old mum in hospital: she broke her hip en route to tests for a heart operation which should have taken place last week. Came out on Tuesday night, was in appalling pain at home and is now back in St Helier, which is where I'm heading now before further doses of Parsifal and Kundry.  And still loving every minute of this infinitely fascinating work - 'the greatest opera by the greatest composer' declares Mark Wigglesworth, who comes to talk to my City Lit opera class on Monday. Rich times indeed. And something to celebrate - many of Greenpeace's Arctic 30 who've spent far too long in jail in Murmansk and St Petersburg already, were released on (exorbitant) bail. Here's Ana Paula Alminhana Maciel from Brazil at the time of her liberation yesterday.

Yet fellow activist Australian Colin Russell is being held captive at least until February. Why him? No-knows. And like he says,

Sign Greenpeace's latest petition to keep the pressure up on urging Colin's release and the abolition of charges here.

29/11 update: Colin was released on bail today. The regular Greenpeace bulletin showed a joyous picture of him outside the St Petersburg prison embracing fellow activist Faiza Ouhlasen.

The 30's troubles are far from over, though. They've still only been bailed and could yet be sentenced. Remember the fate of their fellow 'hooligans', the girls of Pussy Riot. I'm sure, though, that the pressure will be maintained on Russia from the rest of the world.

*'One well-dressed man apologised for leaving early because he had to get to The Magic Flute across town at the Coliseum.' Guess who? I was wearing the same psychedelic flowery tie which always comes out on special occasions, like our civil partnership party, because it was the nearest thing I own to anything rainbowy. I also wore it last Friday to Dame Edna's gala launch at the London Palladium. Gladdie pix pending; in the meantime you'll have to read my Arts Desk review, possums.

Bells and farewells

Invited composer and Radio 3 presenter Robert Worby to talk to my BBCSO City Lit class last night - one of the few folk who can discuss really complicated things lucidly. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say he is to contemporary music what that real gent Brian Magee is to philosophy. The subject was something of a bete noire for me up to now, Brian Ferneyhough, prior to an 'immersion day' at the Barbican, and the students were gripped, though not perhaps entirely converted. If only the composer wrote as intelligibly about his head-music as Robert speaks. And just look at the crazy complexity of Ferneyhough's writing for string quartet.


One of the many dimensions touched upon was that of space, how RW's great inspirer Stockhausen especially distributes his forces. Robert spent quite a bit of time pointing out how we've been here before in most of the details, and in this case of course our man Berlioz was the pioneer (well, after Gabrieli, at any rate). In last Wednesday's electrifying performance of the Symphonie fantastique, the brilliant Yannick Nezet-Seguin paid special attention to the handful of spatial effects. So an oboe replied to the shepherd's cor anglais from a box high on the right side of the auditorium - not offstage, but ethereally hovering aloft, thus conjuring up a mountain landscape like this one in Verbier rather than the flat plains I've usually visualised in the Scene aux champs.


And the bells for the witches' sabbath were not only placed offstage left, with the doors spookily opening on an eerie white light, but doubled with a gong each for extra resonance. You can only see one of the gongs in the picture above, but here's percussionist Ignacio Molins demonstrating (he also rattled the military drum after the execution of the March to the Scaffold before leaving the platform for his final contribution). I heard the sound as if in the next room from the LPO office while waiting to go on for my talk, when in fact it was at least 30 yards away, and went to investigate. This is the result, all 21 seconds of it (mostly reverb).



The concert was a great event from the first, exquisite notes of Ravel's Sleeping Beauty to the last witchy stomp, drawing a roar from the crowd (Anna Caterina Antonacci's Cleopatra was riveting, too, though the double basses stole that particular show). My friend Edwina, whom I saw sitting some way away clapping her hands high above her head, said she thought it was the best concert she'd ever been to.

So we had to go back on Saturday to hear Yannick conduct Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, even though the Arts Desk's chokka music allocation meant it couldn't be written up there. The companion work, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, was not a happy experience: YNS's lively, graceful conducting sat uneasily with the precious, effete playing of Stefan Jackiw and Richard Jongjae O'Neill (very weak viola sound from him). I could only think of Julian Rachlin and Lawrence Power at the Mackerras Memorial Concert, and wondered why the LPO hadn't settled for its excellent leader, Pieter Schoeman, and guest principal viola Tom Dunn.


No matter; we were there to hear how Sarah Connolly and Toby Spence fared in Mahler's most profound eastern philosophising. And the answer was, very well indeed. We know that our Toby's no heldentenor, but I beg to differ with the home Siegfried: in my view, he did ride the orchestra, acted out the feelings much more vividly than he used to and served the porcelain delicacy of the third song very well indeed (I well remember Jon Vickers crashing bear-like through that. Must have been with Rattle and Jessye Norman at the Proms. And I see, eeuch, Sir Si's forthcoming Birmingham Das Lied will be with the hardly up-to-the-Abschied Lady R, Magdalena Kozena).

La Connolly certainly pushed all the right buttons, found the right breath control and all the colours. And yet. There's still not the individual sound you got with Dame Janet, nor the sense of going deeper which nearly broke my heart when Christianne Stotijn - a mezzo with a much less secure technique - unfolded her meditational Farewell with Ivan Fischer and the Budapesters back in 2008. What really carried it all, for me, was YNS's marvellous sensitivity with every phrase, his cushioning of the singers, the sheer chamber-musical sweetness he got at the end of 'Von der Schoenheit'.


It was so nearly perfect, and yet I have to admit - a bit grudgingly, because I was cross with Tom Service among others for implying that British orchestras aren't as edge-of-seat exciting as their grandest continental counterparts (it's the conductor, Tom, always the conductor) - that in sound if not spirit the Berlin Phil under Rattle went just that bit further on Monday. In the wider scheme of things, I believe that Nezet-Seguin's care over every detail is bound up with just a bit more sweep and phrase-lifting than Rattle's micromanagement. But something had happened with the Mahler Fourth: I suggested in the Arts Desk review that he and the Berliners had learned a greater sense of playfulness, partly through recording that gorgeous Nutcracker. Here he is with some of his handsome players at the Barbican - two of the three leaders on the front desk. Both photos are by Mark Allan (and by the way, who was that infuriating unofficial photographer in pink whose clicks could be heard from rows back at the beginning of the Fourth Symphony's poco adagio?).


I left wishing I'd signed up for more of their four-day residency (couldn't make the Schubert last night because of the Ferneyhough class). And then it turned out that colleague Alexandra couldn't make tonight's Mahler 3 (plus interesting prefaces from Brahms and Wolf). So I jumped at that, and now I can't wait. Because, despite any perceived shortcomings, oor Simon does know his Mahler. And on Monday night, although I sat through the performances feeling rather objective, the words just came pouring out in the review and then I couldn't sleep, there was so much to process.