Thursday's journey into night

So I did it more or less right by my own hard-to-keep standards on Wednesday, sticking to a vow not to read the news or listen to the radio, and - as described in the previous post - the personal good took over. Not only that; an evening at ENO witnessing Wigglesworth's last fling in the magnificent Kentridge-designed and -directed Lulu proved not to be the heavy weather I'd expected, but a rigorous and ultimately exhilarating focus on what you can achieve by working through a score like Berg's to the very highest standards. I'm going again on Saturday and taking godson Alexander, down here from Scotland on a visit. Pictured below by Catherine Ashmore, another artistic take by William Kentridge to set alongside the Maleviches which have served me well.

Yesterday, not so good. Started fine by trying to get my teeming thoughts on Lulu into order. But then I gave way not only to reading The Guardian but getting involved in commenting on LinkedIn articles. For God's sake! Do I never learn? I kept away from Facebook and Twitter exactly because of this intemperate desire to sound off. And of course when it comes to talking about Trump you're going to come up against the semi-literate trolls. This one can string a sentence better than many, but oh, the instant insults come so easily. Indulge me while I reproduce the exchange, under a piece by Martin Schulz, President of the European Parliament which also brought forth such lovely comments as one recommending the purging of  'libtard pollutants' and another opining that 'an execution of a couple of assholes ie bill n hillery [sic] would be a good start'.

David Nice
Writer, lecturer and broadcaster on classical music

Can we just stop using the word 'respect'? It was inappropriate for the Brexit referendum result and it's ludicrous to apply it to Trump.

[redacted]
Contributor at American Patriot; OurCivics; American Thinker; LinkedIn

imbeciles like you need to go to your safe places so that you do not get your feelings hurt, cream-puff. At least have the intellect to not support scandal ridden criminals if you are going to even mention respect.

DN: Well, well. We can expect a lot more of this filth now. This is clearly a thread to avoid. Of Turkish origin, Mr [redacted], as your name suggests? Then all the more shame on you for supporting a racist and a xenophobe.

KO: Trump is neither a racist nor a xenophobe (heck, he is married to a foreigner, moron!).  Advocating for a nation that respects its laws (immigration included) is no xenophobia or racism.  He never said all Latinos were criminals.  He was talking about the 35% of our prison inmates that happen to fit that bill.  Basic intellectual honesty demands that one see that much.  As you comprehend nothing of the business world, learn how business people think so that you do not buy in to idiotic talking points.[...]

DN: Big assumptions there, Mr [redacted] Please don't talk of intellect or honesty. Or have the disrespect to call someone else a moron or a cream-puff. And now this cream-puff is going to float away...

And of course there's always that option. I should have taken it sooner on one other thread, but I was curious to see if I could have a dialogue with someone who thought differently. I made the mistake of asking a young woman advertising herself as an 'Environmental Scientist' what she meant by some organisational jargon which meant nothing to me and oblique talk of sheep and elephants (turns out Democrats and liberals like myself are sheep, Trump's people the elephants, supposedly in a good way, though of course pachyderms on the rampage cause a lot of damage).

That was like talking to a person who appears sane but then says something so outlandish that you suddenly realise he or she isn't. In this case I got back the reply 'Enough with donkey empathy, your [sic] a victim of feigned political diligence and you have never have to watch an oversight committee get canned for something really important. You are a sheep that has never stood for anything...you have never had a cause, you have never really followed politics, you have never cared enough to get involved.'

Much she knew about me. Another nice person jumped in with 'Allyson will...grind you up' and as an articulate afterthought just put up one word, 'punk'. I congratulated those two and a third for taking a leaf out of Trump's rulebook of classic bullying and left. This, like the catalogue of much direr abuse catalogued in the twitter page of Day One in Trump's America (admittedly not all of it verifiable), has the imprimatur of Trump's encouragement to express hatred. We can expect much, much more of it in the years to come: the Brexit licence to abuse 'foreigners' multiplied infinitely and extended of course to the LGBT community (a regular contributor to Parterre noted how he was walking down a New York street and out of a car came 'hey, faggot! How do you like your new president?')

You'll see I manage not to put up that unbearable visage, and much as I approve this German headline I have to cut off the picture below it.

Worth having on link-record, though, the list of 'the 282 places, people and things Trump has insulted on Twitter' in today's New York Times.

As for the nature of the roughly 25 per cent's 'revolution'*, I'm having problems with my anger when friends parrot the 'disenfranchised lashing back against the elite' as the chief cause. For me, this liberal self-beating-up is one of the reasons why we are where we are. Let's say an unthinking 'lashback' may be a contributing factor - ironic that in the cases of Brexit and Trump, the vote was for a far worse 'elite' than the liberal one - but a breakdown of the demographics doesn't show anything so simple. The driving forces were racism and xenophobia pure and simple (though of course there are social reasons behind that). I'd like to see more in the press from the psychological perspective. But foreign correspondents do politics, not psychology. And since I'm not a politician and don't have to be diplomatic, this is about the gist of it for me.

That and an astonishingly prescient comment from H L Mencken in 1920.

That seems to be not quite the original quotation; I wish he'd written the 'narcissistic' bit but it seems not. Here's the full context: 

The larger the mob, the harder the test. In small areas, before small electorates, a first-rate man occasionally fights his way through, carrying even the mob with him by force of his personality. But when the field is nationwide, and the fight must be waged chiefly at second and third hand, and the force of personality cannot so readily make itself felt, then all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum.

The Presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Anyway, back to black Thursday. Things brightened much later in the day with the mother of my young viola-playing friend Andrew Lavelle sending me a soundclip of him playing Bloch in a Juilliard masterclass. Here he is again - the original context comes in this entry - from a spontaneous mini-recital after one of my Frontline Club opera classes.

Andrew and Amanda were two people I'd unaccountably left off the list when I sent an email, with several links, to all American or America-based friends I could think of. The young will have their day - but how long, o Lord, how long? I only wish I could have held on to the delusion that half of America doesn't want this. But since a staggering 46.9 per cent didn't vote, it's only a quarter.

So what to do? Ignore social and wider media, get out into the fresh air and go walking, like Hillary with her dogs and the lady who met her while out with her daughter (the photo taken above, which I assume I reproduce with the Facebooker's blessing, is a real spirit raiser, unless you wish Hillary dead or in jail, of course). Then, replenished, get back to not accepting but fighting, find out how to turn anger into power - which, as one civil rights organiser put it 'takes discipline and focus'. And make sure you're in good physical and mental state before you plunge in. I promise a slow drip of nature shots from various walks in the entries to come.

On which final note, here's another shot from Spetses, by day this time, taken like the sunrise image in the previous post only last Sunday (can it be? A week is a long time in politics). And I've only just found out that Hydra, the further of the two islands in the distance, was beloved by Leonard Cohen, whose 'Joan of Arc' just hit me with the force of revelation. Maybe he, rather than Bob Dylan, should have got the Nobel Prize for Literature

*Bearing in mind the 46.9 per cent of eligible voters who did nothing - pointed out lower down in the piece - that leaves both Clinton and Trump on points of 25 per cent each (HC, of course, having the lead by some 800,000 votes to date, with some counting still to go).

Don't kill Lulu

Men have been doing it since 1894, when Frank Wedekind first shocked the world with his Lulu play(s) about an amoral child-woman abused by men and doing what she can - which turns out not to be much - to get her own back. At least Wedekind had the half-decency to wonder whether (spoiler alert) Jack the Ripper should casually slaughter Lulu's lesbian admirer Countess Geschwitz on the way out of her garret; Geschwitz did survive in Christof Loy's mesmerising, minimalist Royal Opera production of Berg's operatic version.

Now a woman who ought to know better joins the persecution. Composer Olga Neuwirth (second spoiler, if you're really determined to go see her version) has her Lulu shot by ALL the men in her life. But much, much worse, in American Lulu, a 'version' unwisely taken on by director John Fulljames and a committed company now playing at the Young Vic, Neuwirth murders her protagonist with the most inept, incoherent replacement imaginable for the last act Berg, in his mostly compassionate character-study, failed to complete.

Neuwirth (pictured above; happy to give the credit, unsupplied on my source) writes that she finds the opera's ending, as completed by Friederich Cerha and accepted these days by most opera houses, unsatisfactory. But it's Wedekind's as well as Berg's, and of course the symmetry is essential: Lulu's earlier 'victims' all return in different guises as her clients, and Dr Schön, the only man she says she ever loved, is 'Jack'. In any case, about 12 minutes of the music, including the crucial Liebestod, is already there in Berg's Lulu-Suite.

But no, Neuwirth, having slashed and burned the first two acts to virtual incoherence - the audience was already leaving the theatre in droves midway through the performance I saw - writes her own jangly, vocally awkward and high-lying muzak for all but a bar or two of an intolerable last third (we're held captive for an intervalless hour and forty minutes, though that didn't stop the escapees). In her favour are the Morton Wender organ arrangements of the jazz music and the central, palindromic interlude - but the animation narrative to that, by the usually excellent Finn Ross, is incomprehensible. Unfortunately Neuwirth's own libretto for the final scenes is the most risibly pretentious as well as unclear I think I've ever come across; pity Jacqui Dankworth as the Geschwitz character, stuck to a mike and delivering banal platitudes in a last-ditch attempt for her character to make any kind of impact.

The transfer to the deep south in the Fifties and Sixties as well as New York in the Seventies - will she overcome? - would probably work fine in a production of the real opera; here the interpolated Martin Luther King and June Jordan texts say nothing about what kind of character, or idea, Lulu is. Exploited she may have been, but she ends up an unsympathetic bitch caught in nebulous situations. The end is an awful long time in coming, but it can't come too soon.

This is all a terrible shame for a singer who acts her socks off and would clearly make an excellent Lulu in 'proper Berg', American soprano Angel Blue. She's the main reason why I bother to write about a mostly wretched evening at all (she's pictured throughout here by Simon Annand for the Young Vic). Blue's Lulu is various, compelling and - most important - she can deliver all the high-wire, coloratura-y stuff, or at least what's left of it in Neuwirth's disembowelment. I felt deeply sorry for her lying there as rapid exits were made by at  least a quarter of the audience ( I might suggest at least part of this was due to unfamiliarity with Berg's tough musical language, familiar as it is to so many of us now, on the part of Young Vic regulars). She deserves much better and, in any case, her future is bright.

Among the men, the excellent Paul Curievici works hard and convincingly as the Photographer (Berg's Painter, pictured with Blue's Lulu up top), and Robert Winslade Anderson  makes a sleazy and by no means decrepit new character, Clarence, out of Wedekind/Berg's Schigolch. The players of the reduced orchestra - the London Sinfonietta, who ought to be good - lack nuance and phrasing; the volume in the small space is relentless. I won't name the conductor, because I know him and like him. Anyway, I sat with interest through what remained of the Bergian torso (no arms either). Towards the end, though, I and my companion, Alexandra Coghlan who's written a very flavoursome review of the show for The Arts Desk*, were screaming for release.

Let's turn, then, to a happier Muse. Anyone who's been reading this blog for long knows how I worship at the shrine of the unique Anne Schwanewilms. At last, in June, I got to hear her ideal Marschallin in Dresden, and she was back here the Monday before last to give a BBC Lunchtime Recital at the Wigmore Hall. I reviewed it for The Arts Desk, and the Schumann Op. 39 Liederkreis knocked me for six. It's now definitively my favourite of all song-cycles (or song groups, if you prefer). I ordered up the Capriccio CD double quick, and tried to play the Schumann half while attending to administrative stuff a couple of days ago.

It's a measure of how Schwanewilms has blossomed from just an otherworldly-beautiful voice to an utterly compelling interpreter that I couldn't just pay half-attention. Every note, every colour demands full focus. The scary wood and castle narratives are searing and 'Wehmut', which Prokofiev adapted with profound significance in the slow movement of his Seventh Piano Sonata, pierces the soul. For me, this is one of the greatest of all Lieder, and Schwanwilms' performance the track I'd now single out for anyone who wants to understand the art in three minutes.

Many of the Wolf songs on the disc were new to me. How strange, unpredictable and unorthodox many are. I must say I don't find the more anguished ones exactly sympathetic or quite human, with the exception of 'Das verlassene Mägdlein' - ach, the pain our soprano brings to 'Träne auf Träne' - but Schwanewilms makes the most of their oddities. Like Schumann, with the added experience of Wagnerian chromaticism backing him up, Wolf can cloud a happy picture so subtly: 'Im Frühling' is the most complex response to spring I know, and what a great scena this makes for Schwanewilms.

I think I like Wolf best when he gives this mesmerising singer the cue to spin a longer line, as in the harmonic miracles of 'Gesang Weylas' and the bright-to-dark 'Verborgenheit'. At any rate, I feel a Wolf obsession coming on: over to Fischer-Dieskau soonest.

Schwanewilms' perfectly good pianist, Manuel Lange, seems rather too ordinary for her. The partners we've seen her with here - Charles Spencer and now Roger Vignoles - seemed much more like equals in strange adventures. A shame, in the meantime, that there's no complete single Wolf or Schumann song from Schwanewilms on YouTube. What I did find is this interview, introduced in English but not thereafter subtitled. It includes, piecemeal, the performances of Wolf's 'Auf einer Wanderung' and 'Das verlassene Mägdlein'.

And here's some wonderful news: sorry as I am that fine Lieder singer Angelika Kirchschlager has had to withdraw from this coming Thursday's Wigmore recital, it's fabulous that Schwanewilms, with Spencer, will take her place. Not sure how much of the programme I can catch given that I have to be at a short concert to inaugurate the Barbican/Guildhall School of Music and Drama's Milton Court; Debussy, Strauss and Wolf may be casualites, but I'm assuming Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder will be the last songs on the programme, and I wouldn't miss what Schwanewilms makes of them for the world.

Coda should belong to a third soprano of the front rank, gifted Anna Prohaska, singing Lied der Lulu from Berg's suite under Abbado. I was lucky enough to catch this most potent of teams at the Lucerne Easter Festival several years ago, when the orchestra was not the Berlin Phil, as here, but the Simón Bolívar [no longer] Youth Orchestra. It was their first acquaintance with Berg, and could the touch have been more incandescent than Abbado's? He creates his sound no matter who he conducts. So it was with the Venezuelans, and so it is here with the Berliners. Text of Lulu's Credo as applied to Doctor Schön follows.

Although for my sake a man may kill himself or kill others, my value still remains what it was. You know the reason why you wanted to be my husband, and I know my reasons for hoping we should be married. You let your best friends be cheated by what you made me, yet you can't consider yourself caught in your own deception. Just as you've given me the evening of your life, so you've had my whole youth in exchange. I've never sought in my life to appear other than the image which has been created of me. And no-one has ever taken me for anything other than what I am.

*Poor Alexandra - what a week she's had of it. Hard to tell which she disliked more, this - probably, given the single star - the Grandage A Midsummer Night's Dream or the oldies' Much Ado About Nothing. Add into the mix Matt Wolf's hilarious review of the film Diana, and it's been a week of serious thumbs-downing on The Arts Desk. Except from me for Mitsuko and young maestro Robin on Thursday.

Deller, VW and the Melodians

That's acclaimed artist Jeremy, not late countertenor Alfred, and his masterly fusion of music and image in the 'English Magic' film which is currently part of his British Pavilion exhibit at the Venice Biennale*. I'm indebted to old friend and frequent commenter Howard Lane for drawing my attention to it. Howard and his daughter Rowan headed to Venice as part of the amazing Melodians, an English/Trinidadian steel band from south London whose talents Deller engaged for his genius selection of British sounds and sights. Here they are on a wet Abbey Road zebra crossing having recorded the soundtrack in an appropriately famous UK institution.

I could hardly believe my ears as the film proper got underway with the mystic chords of the Romanza from Vaughan Williams's Fifth Symphony rippling on steel. That's another one in the eye for the Ukippers who would claim VW and Elgar as their own. It not only sounds exceptionally haunting in that arrangement by the Melodians' conductor Anne Hornby, but it somehow fits with the two other choice transcriptions, of 'Voodoo Ray' by A Guy Called Gerald and 'The Man Who Sold the World' by David Bowie.

There's no need for me to interpret for you the haunting juxtapositions Deller finds between birds of prey and VW, claws of natural and mechanical kinds, the timely exuberant human bounce on an inflatable Stonehenge or the selective images of the Lord Mayor's Show to the Bowie (title not irrelevant - and did you know the army paraded tanks through the City on that day? I didn't). Just watch the 14 minute film here (the Vaughan Williams for the birds begins one minute in). Then watch it again. A little masterpiece, and the EP might be worth buying

Howard commends Jeremy Deller as a Thoroughly Good Bloke who was happy to share the Venice limelight with his steel banders. Here they all are outside the Pavilion. Howard is peering over shoulders at the back; Rowan - how she's grown since I last saw her - is third from the right of the sitters.

Hearing the Bowie again serendipitously coincided with a delightful blog entry from dear Sophie in Mali, who has been getting hotel staff turned bogolan workshop assistants Baba and Papa dancing to Bowie - and they are very choosy, I know, about what non-Malian imports they will embrace (the DVDs we took of Fawlty Towers had them in stitches about their very own irascible hotelier). This photo of our Sophe wearing her MaliMali designs (of course, never the one to miss an advertising opportunity, for I can't believe she drifts around the hotel in that ensemble) jigging with Baba belongs to her blog, but if I put it up here too, it will make me jolly just to look at it.

This is irresistible to dance to, too: Lulu's Bowie-approved cover version of 'The Man Who Sold the World'.

 A couple more YouTube specials to make you smile. I have a feeling that if Austria had entered 23-year old Martin Piskorski, ex-Vienna Boys Choir member currently training at the European Opera Centre in Liverpool, for the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, there might have been a tenor in the final. The below, his moment in the sun, was THE goosebumps moment of the diplo-mate-facilitated Europe Day Concert 2013 at St John's Smith Square, with Laurent Pillot conducting the great European Union Youth Orchestra.

To celebrate the Irish presidency, some rarities had been unearthed, including the Overture and an aria from Stanford's Shamus O'Brien. Who knew? The Overture is a gem worthy of Sullivan at his absolute best -  I hope not to demean Stanford by saying so - and I'll probably put it up on another post. And young Piskorski has the money note in the big phrase towards the end of 'My heart is thrall to Kitty's beauty'. The instant 'bravo' at the end comes from my guest Debbie York, and she knows what she's talking/singing about.

I could kick J as much as myself for not finding out more beforehand about last night's concert to inaugurate the Lithuanian presidency, also at St John's. 'Some accordionist', he'd said when I asked who was performing, not knowing more - this is THE accordionist of the moment with his charismatic band, Martynas Levickis, just signed up to Decca. Whether he is more than a good player - ie up to the standards of the phenomenal Mythos Duo whose Petrushka transcription is my CD of the year so far - I can't yet tell, but he certainly has musicianship and charisma. This is such a moody picture of him duetting with the band's handsome violinist yesterday, courtesy of the Lithuanian Embassy. And I missed it!

Levickis sprang to fame, unlikely as it may seem, on Lithuania's Got Talent in 2010, competing alongside  the likes of a man who played tunes on his teeth. He baffled the half-witted audience and judges by playing Piazzolla's Libertango, but readily played something more obviously crowd-pleasing, and of course much less interesting, on request. 'This is more like it' gurn the lardier versions of Ant and Dec from the wings. Anyway, he won.

*And I'm afraid it's usually been a 'his': only two female artists in 40 years. Shame on you, British Council.