Opening the shrine, then down into the Rhine

Ten glorious Wednesday afternoons on the Wagner opera that always leaves me feeling whole have flown by, dovelike. I'll confess that musically I can do without the final transfiguration; it doesn't really take us any further, and unless you have a production where Parsifal moves on, feels a bit 'here we go again' in the non-action, too. But tears always come to my eyes in the Good Friday Magic music, whether in the opera or in the concert. It took the visit of John Tomlinson to drive home how beautiful and unusual the words are. The gist is that humans may look to God, but nature looks to humans to treat it kindly. Wagner's ecological thoughts, which permeate the Ring, chime so strongly with us today.

The oboe solo gave me my first big emotion a day or so after the big operation in July - my wonderful students Janet and Ian Szymanski sent me a Jacquie Lawson card which begins right there: total surprise. It starts above at 41m45s in what remains my favourite recording of Parsifal since I undertook to listen to every one from start to finish for BBC Radio 3's Building a Library. Kurt Moll and James King sing, where necessary, with such tenderness. You may well want to listen to the whole act, and indeed the complete recording is up on YouTube - it's otherwise too expensive to buy second-hand as a CD set. 

Our more recent visitors could not have been more generous in their time or human warmth. Linda Esther Gray (two below me in the second from right row vertical-wise pictured above - click on the image to make it bigger) not only went back to the notes she'd taken when working with Reginald Goodall for the Welsh National Opera Parsifal - our loss that she felt it wasn't right to participate in the EMI recording - but also provided fresh tales which don't feature in her autobiography (which she intends to update, and I'm cheering her on, will help where I can). One of my American students asked her about the Dallas Walkure - preserved in not at all bad sound here on YouTube - 

and we got the extraordinary history of a visit to one of the generous wealthy Friends of the Dallas Opera, who greeted her with 'oh gee, it's so good to have you. Pavarotti was here last week and when he went away the poodle was dead.' 'I said to her, what are you talking about? And she said, "well, he didn't come at the beginning, he came about 2 o'clock in the morning, and sat down in a chair, and when he left, the poodle was dead." He thought it was a cushion. This is absolutely true, I've just remembered it...I told the Friends, now what you all need to remember is that my aria in Act One begins "Du bist der Lenz", and at the end of it you've all got to clap. They thought I was being serious - it had in fact got very serious - and the President of the opera house had to stand up and say, "now, Linda has a very strange sense of humour - don't clap" '. It's a treasurable two hours. And of course there was plenty of time for seriousness. Here are a few of us, including Linda, listening to Astrid Varnay and reacting.

John Tom (second from right, secon row down - again, click to enlarge) was equally generous with his time, and voice - he sang a great deal of Gurnemanz's part in Act Three for us. 

His anecdotes included one about being summoned by Barenboim to step in as Gurnemanz in Vienna the day after he'd sung Hans Sachs at the Royal Opera = 'and when Daniel asks, you don't refuse'. At Vienna Airport there was a police car on the runway, lights flashing. They drove to the Opera House with the siren goinga. They arrived at the stage door 20 minutes before curtain-up. He hadn't ever sung Gurnemanz in this Vienna production. It's a role he could still do at 77, but more physically demanding ones with six-week rehearsal periods, obviously not - 'my legs won't let me'.

Another phenomenon, and so generous with his visits: he'll be back to discuss the Rheingold Wotan now that we've started Opera in Depth Mondays in the depths of the river, and we'll see him in the Bayreuth Kupfer production (pictured above), the greatest experience of his life. After the talk, we watched him in Kupfer's Berlin Parsifal, which followed on almost immediately from the last year of that Bayreuth Ring; so meaningful in every line, and moving to tears (pictured below with Waltraud Meier and Poul Elming). 

Other guests are lining up this term: Christopher Purves, who's sung the Rheingold Alberich twice recently, in Zurich and at the Royal Opera (so much to ask him), and, when we move on to Iolanthe, conductor Chris Hopkins and a return visitor, John Savournin, who's promised to gather other singers from Cal McCrystal's funny and beautiful ENO production. 

Mahler Part Two has kicked off, and so far I've asked Catherine Larsen-Maguire, who pulled off a triumph in the Seventh Symphony with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland (one of our Arts Desk folk in the north raved about it; rehearsal pictured above by Ryan Buchanan), and Edward Gardner, who has elected to talk about Das Lied von der Erde. Rich times ahead.

Zooming Mahler ii: greater darkness, brighter light

On 12 October, I embark on the second batch of ten classes in my Mahler Zoom course, beginning with the grim marches of the Sixth Symphony, ending in the peaceful resolution of the at-one-with-the-world heartleap in Deryck Cooke's performing version of the Tenth Symphony (and completed it must be). 

The first term led me to the surprising realisation that of the first five symphonies, I love the Fourth the best, simply because it's absolutely perfect. You could say that in the Second and Third Mahler dares more, but it's a harder challenge to make them work. 

Edward Gardner pulled off Saturday night's performance of the 'Resurrection', launching his London Philharmonic Orchestra's 2023-4 season. I was going to give it a miss, because sitting on my special cushion isn't easy at the moment, and I always feel a bit outside the first movement - not a good start. But then our conductor turned out to be a born writer in his First Person on the symphony for theartsdesk. I was sold, and I'm so glad I went. I endorse everything my colleague Rachel Halliburton writes about the performance. The rare spectacle of the whole audience rising within seconds of the end was absolutely deserved, even if the choral climax does tend to have that effect. (Both images by Mark Allan).

Delighted to say that I met Ed by chance on the terrace of Oslo's stunning Opera House while I was there in June for Pekka Kuusisto's Shostakovich one-off with the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra. He was very warm in his friendliness, so I asked if he might come along as guest, as Jonathan Bloxham and Mark Wigglesworth did last term - and I hope Catherine Larsen-Maguire, having pulled off the rare feat of what sounds like a spectacular performance of the Seventh with the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland, will do so for the Seventh. I gave Ed the option of any of the others and he chose Das Lied von der Erde. Let's see who else might come along. 

I know it can never be quite like the line-up during the ten classes on the symphony I ran during lockdown - the busiest of conductors like Vladmir Jurowski, Paavo Järvi and Antonio Pappano actually had the time then - but we've built up a fair bit of goodwill. Do join us - all the details are on the flyer below (click to enlarge).

Zoom courses: from Nielsen to Mahler

After four Zoom terms on Russian music, one apiece on Czech and Hungarian, then homing in on great symphonists Sibelius, Vaughan Williams and Nielsen, it's time for the Big One: Mahler, starting this summer (tomorrow - Thursday 20, to be precise) with the first half, Symphonies 1-5, Das klagende Lied and the songs, then continuing in September with 6-10 and Das Lied von der Erde.

Not that Nielsen has any less status in my eyes, now that I've spent 10 weeks with the great but modest Dane. His essential robustness kept me buoyant, along with the sheer joy and richesse of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier, through those not-too-awful five weeks of radio- and chemotherapy. 

As well as getting to know underrated piano masterpieces like the Chaconne and Theme with Variations, my admiration for Nielsen's consistently original but ever more extraordinary symphonic journey has gone through the roof. The second movement of the Fifth, unquestionably one of the 20th century's greatest symphonies, has long been my favourite finale, infinitely rich, but the continuation of the journey in the opening movement of the Sixth, so misleadingly (jokily?) named Sinfonia Semplice, takes us one step further. Passages from it were running through my head for weeks. Lucky that we have this superb performance from Paavo Järvi with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra on YouTube.

It seems beyond doubt, to me at least, that Nielsen's recent heart attack fed into the weirdnesses and frenzies here, no less than Mahler's arrythmia informs the peaks and troughs in the first movement of his Ninth Symphony. But I love equally the way Nielsen takes apart the machinery in the rest of the Sixth, making sure never to lose sight of the first movement's essence. 

So there will be plenty to connect Nielsen and Mahler, even if the timeframes of their works are different. I must say that, still in the thick of Nielsenmania, I found it hard to adjust to the scale of Mahler's Third live at the Festival Hall with the Philharmonia - another Paavo performance, which might have been even more revelatory with one of his regular orchestras. But enough time has elapsed to return to Mahler's own very specific world - even though I'm lucky enough to be returning to Denmark, following the amazing time I had celebrating Nielsen's 150th anniversary, to hear performances of Hymnus Amoris (such an opportunity) and the Second Symphony, as well as to look at the new Carl Nielsen Museum in Odense. 

Here are the full details (click to enlarge) for the coming Mahler term - still time to sign up if you're interested. And you can get the videos if you can't attend on the day.

Horror and part-redemption: Ančerl and Haas

The still from an infamous film is not quite what it seems. Conductor, composer taking a bow, orchestra and smartly-dressed audience are all Jewish prisoners in Theresienstadt/Terezin. Two days later - the sickening cynicism of the Nazi propaganda machine! - they'll all be deported to Auschwitz. Few will survive. 

Conductor Karel Ančerl was one who did, though his wife and son were murdered in the gas chambers. Arriving in Auschwitz, he stood in line with his friend, said composer Pavel Haas. Mengele was ushering him on the path to extinction when Haas, weakened, coughed. 'No, that one'. And because of this obscene twist of fortune, the composer was lost to us and the conductor went on to greatness at the helm of the Czech Philharmonic. After the liberation of Auschwitz, he also found the orchestral parts - except the one for double-basses - of the work being performed in the film, Haas's Study for String Orchestra. 

Ančerl features in the film about the film, apparently not downloadable but to be found on YouTube (the title is 'The Führer gives the Jews a city' in capitals). Thankfully it is not the unadulterated propaganda exercise about happy life in Terezin. It's all in German, without subtitles, but an essential watch, if you can bear it. The great man's steely precision about the facts and circumstances is moving in itself. Needless to say several 'students' on my Zoom Czech music course were deeply involved - two had relatives who were in Terezin and/or were murdered in Auschwitz. Pictured below: members of the dressed-up Terezin audience several days before slaughter.

In every class, we've found something profoundly moving or troubling. Just think of the infant mortality and premature deaths which dogged the lives of the great Czech composers. As we moved through the decades, it became such a pattern that I felt I had to ennumerate. Smetana lost three daughters between 1854 and 1855, and his wife, who died of scarlet fever, four years later. Dvořák and his wife lost three children between 1875 and 1877. Janáček wrote in his 1924 autobiography that he would 'bind Jenůfa simply with the black ribbon of the long illness, suffering and laments of my daughter Olga and my little boy Vladimir'. No sooner had Josef Suk begun to mourn the death of Dvořák, his father-in-law, intending a five movement memorial with a triumphant conclusion, than his wife Otilie, Dvořák's daughter, also died. Thus the Asrael Symphony became a monument of almost unrelieved sadness.

Even though Bohuslav Martinů and his wife Charlotte had no children of their own, he had cause to mourn the remarkable young woman who may have been the great love of his life, conductor and composer Vítězslava Kaprálová (pictured above). Like another composer who should have gone on to greater heights, Lili Boulanger, she died at the age of 25. That was in 1940, just as the Martinůs were fleeing the Nazi occupation of Paris and marking the first stages of their difficult journey to the USA.

If, as the late, great Jiří Bělohlávek insisted, we accept Gustav Mahler as a Bohemian - he was born in Kaliště before the family moved to nearby Jihlava - then here's the most devastating chronicle of family loss of all the 'Czech' composers. Apart from the major loss of his life, the death of his four-year-old daughter Maria ('Putzi'), of the 14 children to whom his mother gave birth, six died in infancy, sister Leopoldine of a brain tumour at the age of 26, while 21-year old Otto committed suicide, and the greatest shock of all to the young Gustav, it seems, was the death of his brother Ernst of pericarditis, aged 14. On the manuscript of the work he defined as his official Opus One, the fairytale cantata Das klagende Lied, at the point where one of the two brothers in the forest lies down to rest - his sibling is about to slay him - the composer wrote 'Ernst' in the margin. Below are stanzas written out by Mahler in 1879.

Das klagende Lied got a look-in when I covered fairytales in the sixth Czech music class. Curious how events of great emotional significance have intruded on every instalment. Smetana's Má vlast, the fountainhead in so many ways, could be seen or heard in filmed or recorded concerts of special import: most recently, perhaps, when Rafael Kubelik returned to his newly-liberated country in 1990 (there are Japanese films of all the movements played by a conglomerate orchestra under him in Tyn Square, as wel as the famous sound recording of the Prague Spring Festival concert with the Czech Philharmonic). A thrilling, fast and often rough performance has been preserved from a radio broadcast of Václav Talich conducting the work under German occupation. It's so moving to hear the audience, in the midst of wild applause, break in to the Czech national anthem (which you get at the end of this excerpt - there's a complete performance on YouTube which stops before that point).

The Hussite chorale featured in Má vlast's last two symphonic poems, 'Tábor' and 'Blaník', runs through to Karel Husa's Music for Prague 1968 - I need say no more of the significance of that. Tomorrow we'll be focusing on Martinu in the 1940s but also remembering Haas and other Jewish composers who were murdered under the Nazis. I steel myself once again for a tough time and will try not to blub again. Then, in just over a week's time, it will all be over - the 10 Czech music classes as well as the 10 Opera in Depth surveys of Jenůfa and Julietta (which the students now accept as another of the 20th century's greatest operas). My thanks to visitors Nicky Spence, Mark Wigglesworth, Jana Boušková and Josef Špaček. As for the latest special guest, I can't wait to expound on the three Monday afternoon hours we spent in the company of Gerald Barry, ostensibly covering his latest operatic masterpiece, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, but roving far and wide to embrace, among other things, Miss Marple, Edward and Mrs Simpson, The Power of the Dog and linen napkins daubed with lines from Beethoven's letters. More anon.

Preaching to the fishes (again in vain)

It's not the first time I've referenced the quasi-folk poem from the anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth's Magic Horn) 'St Anthony of Padua's Sermon to the Fish', set to slithery music by Mahler (the original legend illustrated above by Tiepolo). But never has the parable of preaching to deaf ears - namely the fish at Rimini who in this treatment enjoy the words but go back to doing what they did before - seemed more appropriate as, after a brief change of lifestyle during lockdown, most fish in human shapes resume their senseless round of environment-destroying, consumerist idiocy. With a government of criminal incompetence and wilful, profit-bent malignity such as we have now, how could it be otherwise? The only hope is, as before, grassroots action; there are a lot of us who will NOT follow bad advice and will keep up responsible distancing and all that goes with it as before.

The above is by the pier for the houseboats near Hammersmith Bridge; the park behind it on this north side of the Thames had young picnickers in groups of 20 or so the weekend after people started losing the plot on VE Day - because the media told them that lockdown was at an end.

Here's one of the best performance I know, this time with a great mezzo rather than a bass baritone. The English translation is below (crucial for the point of this post if you don't understand the German).

St. Anthony arrives for his sermon
and finds the church empty.
He goes to the river
to preach to the fishes;
They flap with their tails,
and glisten in the sunshine.

The carp with their roe
have all congregated,
their mouths all gaping,
listening attentively.
Never did a sermon
so please the fishes.

Sharp-snouted pike
that are always fighting
have swum up in a hurry
to hear this pious one;

Also, those fantastic creatures
that are always fasting -
the stockfish, I mean -
they also appeared for the sermon;
Never did a sermon
so please the stockfish so.

Good eels and sturgeon,
that fine folk dine upon -
even they took the trouble
to hear the sermon:

Crabs too, and turtles,
usually such slowcoaches,
rise quickly from the bottom,
to hear this voice.
Never did a sermon
so please the crabs.

Big fish, little fish,
noble and common,
all lift their heads
like intelligent beings:
At God's command
they listen to the sermon.

The sermon completed,
each one turns away;
the pikes remain thieves,
the eels, great lovers.
The sermon has pleased them,
but they remain the same as before.

The crabs still go backwards,
the stockfish stay fat,
the carps still gorge themselves,
the sermon is forgotten!
The sermon has pleased them,
but they remain the same as before.

BBC Proms: talks and events

Frankly, this is first and foremost a shop-window alert to see if anyone else wants to come along to the remaining two talks I'm giving on Proms-related works: on Janáček's The Makropoulos Case tomorrow (10 August) 2.30-4.30pm at an address in Lancaster Gate, and on Mahler's Seventh Symphony, Thursday 18, same time, in St John's Wood. Addresses supplied on enquiry to me at david.nice@usa.net. Tamara Wilson is also due to return to the Frontline some time in the week of 5 September before her guaranteed-amazing performance in the Verdi Requiem on 9 September. She'll get back to me once she knows her rehearsal schedule. And you'd better believe that Tamara is almost as good a talker as she is a singer (only 'almost' because the singing is something superhuman...). There she is below with Mark Wigglesworth and James Creswell in the closing scene of Act Three from Wagner's Die Walküre.

Back in July we covered Mahler 3 and Berlioz's Roméo et Juliette, and I learned a lot more simply retracing familiar territory - there's no end to what you can keep on finding in the great masterpieces. Nor did the performances disappoint - though I felt a little distanced from Haitink's magisterial and at times very slow Mahler and JEG's Roméo would have been perfect if he'd had a Friar Laurence as good and true-bass-y as David Soar for Andrew Davis earlier in the year.

Highlights of the ones I've caught so far? Unquestionably Mark Wigglesworth's converting me almost completely to Tippett's A Child of Our Time, with fabulous soloists alongside Tamara and an apotheosis that really was levitational, and 27-year-old Pavel Kolesnikov as soloist in Tchaikovsky's glorious Second Piano Concerto alongside the superlative National Youth Orchestra of Scotland under Ilan Volkov (who quite transformed the imperial style into something altogether more humanly joyous).

HK Gruber was a star yesterday lunchtime, too.

The NYO experience the previous evening was a little tainted by Ed Gardner's dim view of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra - no idea what he wanted to say, if anything, with the work - and by my neighbour, who sketched throughout. This, inevitably, I didn't mention in the review, but he started by thinking he was some kind of artistic seismograph attached to Iris ter Schiphorst's Gravitational Waves, pencilling squiggles and zig zags as the music took him. You can imagine the resulting chaos on paper. For Strauss and Holst, he contented himself by drawing the players and clearly thinking this would be the main event of the evening for his neighbours, whom he immediately started showing the results.

Halfway through The Planets, I thought that instead of getting into an altercation with him if I asked him to stop, I'd unostentatiously put my rucksack on my knee so I couldn't see his drawing, but this of course impeded his wide-ranging right hand so he got indignant. Then he and his ferocious wife changed seats. I knew she'd be spoiling for a fight at the end, and determined to avoid one, but she got it by sitting and refusing to move as we and a nice, baffled gentleman behind us wanted to get out. 'You are the rudest audience I've ever encountered!' she blustered - having fidgeted throughout and hummed along out of tune to Holst's 'Jupiter' tune aka 'I vow to thee my country' - whereupon I cried shame on her. Oh dear - these conflicts are not to be stoked, but what can one do? Otherwise, the Proms audiences haven't been bad at all, and it was redeemed the next afternoon by my being able to tell the little girls sitting in front the story of The Firebird before it began. Which meant they enjoyed it enormously, if a little actively, playing princesses and ogres, which I didn't mind at all.

Fondest peripheral memory so far: seeing the huge queue stretching around the block ten minutes before Haitink's Mahler 3 was due to start. Even though it may have been mixed up with another waiting for the late-night Bowie Prom (which I switched on the telly back home to watch live, and off when the rapper came on), it reminded me that nothing has changed since I joined the queue for his 'Resurrection' in 1978. As I recount in the Arts Desk review, it was my first Promming season and I arrived too late to be admitted into the Arena; my one and only Gallery experience taught me never to go up there again. Still, it was the summer of Discovering Mahler and Abbado's Chicago recording was the first symphony recordingr I borrowed from Banstead Library.

Thrilled, too, to take dear friend Chris Gunness's 18-year-old nephew Andrew Lavelle to Proms while he was visiting from Houston. His first experience of the Albert Hall - that was good to get - and as he has a very wise head on young shoulders his responses were all perceptive. He soon takes up a place as a very talented viola-player at the Juilliard: what discoveries lie ahead for him. There he is above with uncles and friend.

And this is the Albert Memorial at c.9.30pm. Darkness on emerging from a Prom is a sure sign that the days are getting shorter again - September visits are always tinged with a certain circumstantial melancholy.

The nearby Serpentine Pavilion is a triumph this year, one of the best, from Danish architect Bjarke Ingels. That will last us well into early Autumn.

And I have still to seek out the smaller projects around Kensington Gardens, though I'm told they're not up to scratch.

Proms photos by Chris Christodoulou except lead image of NYO, by Mark Allan. All courtesy of BBC.

Fabulous Fučik

Picture if you will the delightful Sarah Walker - the BBC Radio 3 presenter, not the veteran singer - doing a drum majorette routine in the studio with an invisible baton while the liveliest of marches goes out on air. I think - I hope - we all got infected by the glittering spirit of Julius Fučík (1872-1916) as conducted, con molto amore as is so obvious, by Neeme Järvi, and played so brilliantly by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra on Chandos.

The disc was one of my two picks for an orchestral new releases stretch on last Saturday's CD Review (still available to listen to on the BBC iPlayer for another couple of weeks; our slot is around the 1.16 mark, though I also very much liked what I heard of  Hannah French's Building a Library on Haydn's Trumpet Concerto as we waited to go live on air). The other choice was a Mahler 6 from Daniel Harding, not a conductor I've found more than middle-of-the-road before, but with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra he's fired up and has a lot to say. And the cover gimmick of heartbeat ECG and hammerblow frequency is a good one.

Sarah chose the two Brahms Piano Concertos from Barenboim and Dudamel on DG, a recording which I found almost impossible to listen to in its ponderousness after the flights of Robin Ticciati in the First Symphony and now, on CD, Stephen Kovacevich's versions with Colin Davis when he was still plain Bishop. Sarah's other disc, the Schoenberg arrangement of Brahms's G minor Piano Quartet and his Accompaniment to a Film Scene, with Marc Albrecht conducting the Netherlands Philharmonic, was much more to my taste, and the Accompaniment came in useful when I was illustrating Shostakovich's original first interlude in Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk to my Opera in Depth students - it's just possible he knew Schoenberg's work in 1931.

The Fučík selection - I know, how easily the finger goes on the keyboard from c straight to k - really is quite a sequence, with excellent notes to match by Nigel Simeone (though even he can't unearth all the programmes - what, for instance, are the Marinarella and Miramare Overtures, miniature tone poems, all about?) It's a real New Year's Day concert of overtures, marches and polkas with plenty of novelties like whistling, anvils and farting bassoon. Andrew McGregor did a spot check on that venerable Viennese institutions and found that Fučík, Prague-born son of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and very much part of the K&K set-up, had never featured.

He had an interesting peripatetic life as bassoonist and military bandmaster, working in two Prague theatres as well as in Sisak (in Croatia), Sarajevo, Budapest and Berlin. I find it piquant that the most conventional of the marches, Under the Admiral's Flag, was played at Trieste's naval yard in 1911, with Archduke Franz Ferdinand present, for the launch of the Dreadnought battleship Viribus unitis (the Austrian navy not being something that figures much, for obvious reasons).

Certainly the waltzes are up there with Josef Strauss's for sheen and beauty, if perhaps not quite the same degree of memorability. The lessons of Dvořák, Fučík's most famous mentor, shine in the woodwind writing both there and in the Marinarella Overture, where Rusalka seems to glide out of the water. But if we're talking about tunefulness, Fučik probably has the distinction of being the most-played Czech composer ever through his 'Grande Marche Chromatique' Entry of the Gladiators; intriguing to learn that it was partly written to serve the new chromatic possibilities in valved brass instruments. It's a proper riot in the full-orchestral garb on the CD; the little harmonic sideslip in the trio tune is typical.

Fučík can't resist giving little kicks to his melodies, whether in syncopation, harmony or orchestration. Uncle Teddy is such fun, with Bohemian thirds and sixths to boot, and I love the eastern European otherness of Hercegovac; but undoubtedly the one on my brain, which I partly got played on the show, is the cheerful-making Florentiner March, supposedly mimicking the chatter of an Italian girl to which her man - an Austrian officer - grunts back 'Jawohl' on two low notes. The polkas are fine, too, especially The Old Grumbler with the bassoon (the RSNO's David Hubbard, excellent) getting under the dance's feet as well as joining it. So is it going to take a Czech conductor of high status to appear in Vienna on January 1 and get these pieces included? And if that doesn't happen, wouldn't Neeme make a marvellous New Year's Day master?