Wagnerabend in Belgrave Square

They do these kind of events very well, the Germans, and returning to the ambassador's residence was bound to be a pleasure. Especially as the programme had been arranged by the organisers of the Wagner 200 events this year, Mark Eynon and top Wagner expert Barry Millington (my former editor at the BBC Music Magazine, also the one who was kind enough to kickstart my Prokofiev book, pictured above with Sue Bullock and her husband Richard Berkeley-Steele. Georg Boomgaarden, the genial German ambassador, is seen between two of the heads).

What kind of Wagner fare can you serve up in an intimate space? They managed a good mix. La (or should that be Die?) Bullock launched stylishly with top pianist Llŷr Williams in the Tannhäuser greeting, 'Dich, teure Halle'. Janice Watson sang two of the Wesendonck Lieder (actually the two I find least interesting, but they were well done all the same). Here are the four artists in one of two official photos; the shots of the trio at the top and of Sir John Tomlinson in conversation with Barry are mine.

The coup was to bring the Bullock-Berkeley-Steeles together in the Dawn Duet from Götterdämmerung. Williams somehow managed to conjure an orchestra in the sunrise, and in came the two, each standing naturally and lovingly while the other sang. I'd forgotten what point SB brings to the German text, all the better in a small room. She's a fabulous recitalist: her Crear Classics disc of the Wesendoncks, Britten's The Poet's Echo and Prokofiev's Five Akhmatova Poems with contrasting flavours of Strauss, Quilter and Rorem is outstanding (it was our Vocal/Choral disc of the month in the BBC Music Magazine's March 2007 issue) .

Apparently another CD of songs with Malcolm Martineau is due for release shortly; and she's to be heard in recital at the Wigmore on 22 March.

To round off the little homage, Williams made effortless work of the Tristan Liebestod in Liszt's insane transcription (all those tremolos!). Eynon gave a felicitous speech, and didn't need to sell the highlights of the forthcoming festival to me: I'll be going to Kings Place to hear Watson's song recital and Williams's presentation of Wagner piano pieces alongside other Liszt transcriptions.

That greatest Wotan of the 1990s, Sir John Tomlinson, was there in the audience at the ambassador's residence, wrapped up in the music; he'll be presenting a read-through of the entire Ring libretto in the British Library on 9 June (date now confirmed thanks to Barry's message below). Dame Gwyneth, alas, couldn't make it, though she'll be masterclassing as part of the festival; now there's a diva I want to meet. The programme of events so far confirmed is on the Wagner 200 website here. Millington and SJT discussing plans below.

The whole event was entirely genial; the ambassador (to the right of Berkeley-Steele, ie to his left, in the photo below) and his wife are very cultured folk - not always the case in that world - and J likes them very much indeed. Sue Bullock has always struck me as completely natural in person (we first met her at pianist Phillip Thomas's 50th birthday party). I managed to have a chat with RBS about Phyllida Lloyd's English National Opera production of Götterdämmerung in which he sang Siegfried: absolutely the best staging of that particular opera I've ever seen, even if I had my doubts about the others (good in parts). Ardent Wagnerians apparently felt the same - one went to see it six times - and we all lament the fact the cycle never had another chance.

Meanwhile, roll on the festivities in the round. My priority is to get to see Die Feen as done in concert by Chelsea Opera, though sadly a Sussex Das Liebesverbot later in the year has bitten the dust. Collectors can tick off a few gaps in the Wagner list, though to be honest there aren't that many worth bothering about.

The following Monday, the Italians held a parallel tribute to Verdi at their ambassador's very beautiful residence in Berkeley Square. This turned out to be an actor reading excerpts from Verdi's letters and memoirs translated by Gaia Servadio and Royal Opera chorus master Renato Balsadonna playing excerpts from Nabucco, La Traviata, Aida and Otello on the piano. Interesting enough, but we missed la voce cantata.

Old-age troubles Tranströmed

I've not read enough on the biographical side about Liszt to know if he died in despair. But his later years were not happy ones, as a clutch of photos including the above underlines. An earlier chasm opening up from the loss of two children must have deepened, and - naturally prone, it seems, to depression - he knocked back the absinthe. But unlike Rossini or Sibelius, he kept on composing, and left us some of the most forward-looking fragments of gloom or despair in all 19th century music.


The suspended or abandoned tonality wasn't exactly new - check out certain Chopin - nor was he first off the line in developing the whole-tone scale (only last week I heard another American academic trotting out the line that it was really Debussy's invention, but of course it goes way back to Glinka in the 1840s and possibly earlier). But I've been hearing these epigrammatic mood-musics this week in compelling recitals by Louis Lortie and Pierre-Laurent Aimard, and while Lortie made an epic balance of all-Liszt light and shade, Aimard's all-grey-to-black first half was quite a lowering experience, slipping in though he did neutral Wagner as well as unconsolable early Berg - straight out of Liszt's Nuages gris - and late Scriabin. Here's Aimard's most striking contribution - the one where the whole-tone scale and not just the tritone lollops about - Unstern! sinistre, disastro (only approximately translateable as Dark star! Sinister, disastrous)



So, no consolation for the old Abbe, nothing of Verdi's Falstaff fugue or Strauss's sunset song. By another of those many online serendipities, though, my blogger-ideal Susan Scheid on Prufrock's Dilemma - ie endlessly curious, responsive, encouraging one by an articulate enthusiasm to explore more - introduced me to a poet I'd heard of but never read, the Swedish visionary - and I hope I don't use that word lightly - Tomas Tranströmer. 80 this year, he's just received the Nobel Prize in Literature. Sue's informed post was on his attitude to Haydn, the stroke that in 1990 partly inhibited movement down his right side - encouraging Swedish composers to write left-handed pieces to keep his love of piano-playing going - and a real masterpiece of a poem, Schubertiana.


So I sent off for the latest collection immediately. Do read Sue on the essence of Schubertiana, which contains for me the most profound written sequence on what music can do for struggling man, but let me get to my point. Which is that between recitals, I was able to read Sorgegondolen in Robin Fulton's translation. The poem which gives this collection, written in the year of Tranströmer's stroke, its title is centred around Liszt's two pieces both called La lugubre gondola, composed while he was staying in Venice's Palazzo Vendramin between November 1882 and January 1883.


The host was his son-in-law and junior by less than two years, Richard Wagner, whose death on 13 February 1883 the gondola pieces supposedly forecast (Liszt also wrote a musical epitaph, which Lortie included in his Italian journey). Hence the 'two old men' of the poem's first line, 'staying by the Grand Canal/together with the restless woman who married King Midas/the man who transforms everything he touches into Wagner' (Cosima, naturally). Tranströmer intersperses his visions of that Venetian trio with three 'Peep-holes, opening on 1990', counterpointing his own dreams during a more clinical near-death experience. But of course it was the lines on La lugubre gondola which struck me and came in useful for the Aimard review. I hope I'm permitted to quote them more fully, as I did in a message on Prufrock's Dilemma; sadly this format doesn't permit the right indentation.

Liszt has written down some chords that are so heavy they ought to be sent
to the mineralogical institute in Padua for analysis.
Meteorites!
too heavy to rest, they can only sink and sink through the future right down
to the years of the brownshirts.
The gondola is heavily laden with the crouching stones of the future.

My YouTube choice would have been the interpretation of Krystian Zimerman, but these extremely evocative performances have the benefit of the score put up by the loving poster.





Redemption? I reckon it comes both through how these pieces can be programmed - Aimard was perhaps too austere in his first-half grimness - and how we approach them. Tranströmer does indeed transfigure, and what a contrast in those blue eyes (at least as captured in the cover photo for the New Collected Poems), that unsentimental glimmering optimism, to poor old Liszt. I'm reminded of what another great writer, Stefan Zweig, wrote in The World of Yesterday of another great composer, Richard Strauss, who was 68 when Zweig worked with him on the comic opera Die schweigsame Frau:

At first his face impresses as almost banal...But only one glance into the eyes, those bright, blue, highly radiant eyes, and one instantly feels some particular magic behind this bourgeois mask. They are perhaps the most wide-awake eyes I have ever seen in a musician, not daemonic but in some way clairvoyant, the eyes of a man fully cognisant of the full significance of his task.

St Paul's: what's the problem?

If you haven't been down to Paternoster Square, you might have a rather grim, media-fed image of the Occupy London protest camp outside St Paul's. I was surprised when I went there on Wednesday to find that the neat and tidy tents were well to the left of the main entrance; the steps up to the two doors, and the entire area around Queen Anne, are completely clear, and welcome as ever was to the hordes of tourists who are now busy snapping the interlopers. When I went back yesterday evening on my way to the Hvorostovsky recital at the Barbican, the path to the side door which leads to the restaurant and shop had also been cleared.

So far, too, it seems, all is extremely well organised: the toilet facilities, the cooking area, the 'Star-Books' stall run by those against the preposterous closure of the libraries. Sure, there isn't one point being made here, and some are bound to be distinctly fuzzy; but it's an arena for ideas. I saw no hint of the off-their-heads ferals who made Parliament Square such a dodgy place to be earlier this year.


But is it safe? St Paul's, having officially told the police to clear orf from protesters who so far show no signs of making trouble, and fielding a clergy many of whom are fundamentally sympathetic, now says it has to close its doors. It didn't make a very clear case for this yesterday, only loosely citing 'health and safety' issues*. The protesters countered that they'd checked with the fire brigade, which apparently has no problem. Worse, the 'first closure since the Blitz' line kow-tows to the worst kind of Daily Mail 'national shame' mentality.


That said, it's clear that there are some potential hazards here, and the main one - that the violent fringe could hijack the cause - is certainly problematic if, as I understand it, St Paul's is liable for anything that happens on its territory. But sadly this hasn't been spelled out properly so far and the cathedral has only itself to blame for vague publicity.

Today, incidentally, you probably won't be hearing from a closed cathedral the thunderous sounds of Liszt's Prelude and Fugue on BACH on the mighty organ - the chromatic upheavals of which contributed to my being sick in the porch of Norwich Cathedral in the early 1980s. As Jessica Duchen reminds us, it's the exact 200th anniversary of the Hungarian's birth. Here he is looking across to the cumbersome facade of the Esterhazy Palace at Eisenstadt (the inscription on the other side is rather odd, claiming Liszt as foremost son of Austrian Burgenland).


And here's his Blauer Salon in Eisenstadt's splendid Landesmuseum, reassembled lock, stock and barrel from the Schottenhof in Vienna.


I really don't have any Desert Island Discs for the occasion, unless it be Arrau in the Benediction de Dieu or Margaret Price in the Petrarch Sonnets, two of which Hvorostovsky spun rather beautifully in last night's recital. Most of the rest I can take or leave - my loss, I know; but so much Chopin last year spoiled me for returning to Liszt's piano music and finding it wasn't as miraculous, under all the wrappings, as I used to find it. Postscript: but then I listen to Cziffra in the Transcendenal Etudes, and I start changing my mind again...

*I've received further clarification from the St Paul's publicity department on what these problems consist of. They list:

· Presence of unknown quantities of flammable liquids.

· Smoking/drinking within the tented areas.

· Potential gas safety within the catering facility.

· Compromised free fire exits, usually open now closed but manned.

· Slips, trips and falls exacerbated at night with cover of darkness.

· Due to the darkness issues on North side, use of naked flame lighting.

· Sleeping risk within the tented area, if fire should break out.

· Public heath issues

a Sanitation

b Food hygiene

c Rodent/pest issue

· The issues of rope/guy-lines attached to trees, bollards, lamp standards possibly causing injury to face/neck/upper limbs and trips on low level guy-lines.

· VIP security due to camp protest.

All of which I can see the point of, but two questions remain: whose land is this (one recent report suggested it was a patchwork of St Paul's, City of London and free-for-all territories)? And exactly how does this rebound on entering and using the cathedral - is the fire risk too great?

Flag-flying on Europe Day

No. 10 Downing Street, it was baldly reported, wouldn't be waving the gold stars on the blue background, as apparently it had under a different regime the previous 9 May; only Vince Cable's lot would set a good example. Cameron's cravenness seemed to be a concession not only to the anti-European wing of the Tory party but also to those dismal organs of supposed popular opinion the Express and the Mail. Not to mention the thousands, it seems, who hate the idea of Europe so much they want to put a bomb under the European Commission Representation in London (as gleefully reflected in a dodgy Telegraph article which I won't give the benefit of a link).

Fortunately, I'm told, the Europe Day celebrations in St John's Smith Square, which has Europe House - the former Thatcher HQ - as neighbour, were marred last Monday by not much more than a stink bomb. I was far too Fotherington-Thomas in mood to notice, having skipped down Whitehall after my first Verdi Macbeth class looking for blue flags, not finding one but then coming across Parliament Square, where Westminster Council had done the 9th of May proud by flying the banners of all the member states as well as their symbol of unification. And how good they looked in the declining sun of a perfect Spring evening.



The light was also picking out the tower of the original Westminster Abbey, so often overshadowed by the Wren-Hawksmoor west end:


And so, past the Slovenian Embassy proudly waving the blue-and-gold as it always does, to Smith Square and its upturned footstool.


Very well, so Dickens thought it was some 'petrified monster, frightful and gigantic, on its back, with its legs in the air', but I like it and have so many fond memories of fine concerts there. The Europe Day concert, performance-wise, was certainly in that happy league, and the 13-year-old Liszt's one-act opera Don Sanche, wisely abridged for the occasion, occasions a bit more than amazement at the competence of its young master, chiefly a memorable tenor aria which I reproduced at the foot of my Arts Desk 'buzz' piece about the event and am happy to regurgitate here. No credit's given to the tenor, but he's good.



Catchy, no? More so than the duffer output of Donizetti, at any rate. For more detail, see the TAD article; I'll leave you with a shot of the excellent young soloists from the European Opera Centre along with the beaming players of the European Union Youth Orchestra - whose cellos and basses found fun even in their endless V-Is - conducted by Laurent Pillot (no, I wasn't snapping during the performance; this one's a publicity shot commissioned by the hosts).


Worth reporting that, although I don't much like standing for anything except a great performance, the EUYO's pure rendition of that orchestral portion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony serving as Europe's 'Ode to Joy' brought many people not only to their feet but also to the brink of tears. Not me, but still I could see the good in welcoming an anthem that celebrates not narrow nationality but universal brotherhood.

More on heavenly Margaret

I've said most of what I wanted with a few YouTube sound-clips on The Arts Desk, and in a footnote to the Rosenkav celebrations here. But since I haven't stopped listening, in between Berlioz snippeting, to the great lady, here are just a few words on Margaret Price, whose death last Friday marked the departure of yet another of the 20th century's great voices (in fact, if I remember rightly, when asked by the BBC Music Magazine for my own list of 20 great sopranos a couple of years ago, I put her third after Maria and Joanie).

I had a crazy idea of going down to the small seaside town in Wales where she bred dogs like the golden retrievers above - photo courtesy of Malcolm Crowthers - to bend the knee, but it's too late now. In any case, the voice is the thing, and what a lot we have to remember her by. I've noted that I still need to get her French chansons disc, and the latest Wigmore CD - I was there, and still count it the greatest song recital of my life - but I think I've got a fair few of her performances on disc and LP.


These three are perhaps the most treasured. The Wigmore Hall 1971 recital embraces what Roger Neill regards as a Price peak, Liszt's Three Petrarch Sonnets. Such strength combined with such radiance is, I think, unique among sopranos, and exactly what we got in her Wesendonck Lieder (that was when I went off the rails and hazarded for the Guardian that she was probably 'the most complete soprano of our time'). Yet equally good, and more unexpected, is her way with Russian in Musorgsky's The Nursery - and indeed, she does catch the child within without the archness. Some of the other songs on the LP - Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, Rossini - didn't make it onto CD, so the original's worth keeping.

Surprisingly, much of the song repertoire isn't as yet to be found on YouTube. I was also reminded of her achievements in English rep - Mary's 'The Sun Goeth Down' in Elgar's The Kingdom, the eerie voice in Vaughan Williams's Pastoral Symphony and Cathleen in his not-so-hot Riders to the Sea (only the contralto, Helen Watts, really gets the goods here). Now I need to reinvestigate her Schubert and Schumann. This is something, though: the loveliest Lied ever written, Mahler's 'Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen', sung by the most beautiful voice - and what ineffable long lines towards the end.

Lisztomania

Or rather, mania with Liszt attached. I wasn't expecting to be quite so stunned by the new DVD of Kenneth MacMillan's Mayerling; having seen Edward Watson as a rather pallid Romeo, I'd never imagined he'd be up to the mark of syphilitic, gun-toting, sado-masochistic Crown Prince Rudolf of Austria (not telling you the true-to-life plot if you don't already know it). But that's the intriguing thing about dancers, as with singers, that some roles just fit them like a glove. I wish I'd understood this earlier in life.

Clearly 35 words on it in a BBC Music Magazine ballet round-up wasn't going to be enough, so I was lucky to have a chance, simultaneously, to write about Liszt and the use of his music in the ballet by John Lanchbery for the Royal Opera and Ballet website, readable here. I think the site looks good now as well as, let's hope, reading informatively and being well cross-referenced).

That fellow Jack, as Lanchbery's pals knew him, really was more of a great man than most people seem to have recognised. I adore his work on Tales of Beatrix Potter - which he came to the flat to talk about shortly before he died, tinkling away on the ivories of our on-loan Steinway Boudoir Grand to demonstrate - and La fille mal gardee. The Liszt potpourri is perhaps even more sensitive a selection. There are works already scored by Liszt, who God knows was not on the whole the greatest orchestrator, including the opening of A Faust Symphony which serves as brooding deathmotif throughout; but Lanchbery also does a pointedly weird job himself on some of the quirkier piano miniatures. Anyway, read all about it over there.


As for the latest cast to take up MacMillan's grim gauntlet, what an ensemble it is. All the ladies create a real sense of character - not just the scary-ambitious Mary Vetsera of Mara Galeazzi (pictured with Watson above in the first of two Royal Ballet production photos by Johan Persson, in a Pas so physical you fear her body might snap) and Sarah Lamb's calculating Marie Larisch but also the poignant ones, Iohna Loots as poor Princess Stephanie (dancing another weird Pas de deux with Watson's Rudolf below) and Cindy Jourdain's hot-and-cold Empress Mother. There's a dazzling, sexy cameo from Steven McRae, too, as royal cabbie Bratfisch. Otherwise the whole thing works against what I always thought the principle of ballet was, to froth up, instead stripping down to the skull beneath the skin. Very scary. I can't wait for it to come back into the Royal Ballet rep.


And of course it's the Liszt bicentenary, as if you could possibly have missed that already, as well as Hungary's controversial six-month EU presidency (it looks as if Sarkozy and Merkel may already have plied a restraining effect upon Hungary's truly awful new government). I have no regrets about missing the wonderful Budapest Festival Orchestra under Ivan Fischer on Sunday, simply because while no doubt that was a five-star occasion - my pal Ed Seckerson certainly loved it, and so did the diplo-mate - the duo of towering violinist Leonidas Kavakos and revelatory pianist Enrico Pace over at the Wigmore would have to merit five and a half. More anxious to hear a masterpiece not often played live, Prokofiev's First Violin Sonata, in such hands rather than the relatively known quantities on the BFO programme, I chose to write about the recital for The Arts Desk; I'm still reeling from it and thinking over especially the plains of heaven Kavakos and Pace trod in Schubert's C major Fantasy.

Anyway, there's plenty more Liszt on the horizon (all they had on offer at the Southbank was the First Piano Concerto, another dubious choice for Stephen Hough, but Fischer had already done several of the not-great tone poems as well as anyone could expect at the Barbican several years back). Mayerling has sent me back to some of the sources, not least the Harmonies du soir of the transcendental etudes which serves as a climactic Act 3 Pas de Deux. Bertrand in Paris was going through a Cziffra craze, some of which rubbed off on me, so here's the phenomenal Hungarian master surmounting a peak of pianistic art:



Before we go on to more Cziffra, a less overheated interlude - one of the many great works which wouldn't have fitted into the decadent, hothouse environment of Mayerling, Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este. This performance was recorded in 1928 by my personal favourite among Liszt interpreters, Claudio Arrau.



Cziffra leads me on to the opera we're spending seven or so weeks on at the City Lit, Wagner's Tannhauser. We're already having an intriguing time in the two Venusbergs of 1845 and 1861, so here's the Liszt transcription of the Overture from Tannhauser's second hymn of praise to Venus to the end:



And just as an ironic encore, since there's been so much talk of this since we discussed it at Susie and Michael's on 2 January, another overture transcription with a difference: Hindemith's Overture to The Flying Dutchman as Played at Sight by a Second-Rate Spa Orchestra at the Village Well at 7 O'Clock in the Morning.
A little of it goes a long way until it breaks out in a Strauss waltz, but what effects from a mere string quartet.