Pictures from a presentation

Awards ceremonies are always best approached with circumspection – not difficult in this case, as I hadn’t heard a single one of the ‘winners’ in the BBC Music Magazine’s final list for 2013 – and then you can only be pleasantly surprised.

As I was on Tuesday afternoon. I’ve written up the event for The Arts Desk, homing in on what most interested me. The three strands of live performance were bound to take the lion’s share, yet there was no contest from Janina Fialkowska and even the charismatic Angelika Kirchschlager; Mei Yi Foo swept us all away with the canny choice of pieces by Gubaidulina, Unsuk Chin and Ligeti from her Best Newcomer award-winning disc ‘Musical Toys’.

She was snapped brilliantly by the BBC Music Magazine’s photographer, John Millar, both in action (above) and alongside some of the splendid Kings Place artwork (the shot I used over on TAD). I thought Millar’s top shot was of Jacques Imbrailo, Mark Padmore, Foo, Berlin Phil cellist Olaf Maninger and the so compelling-to-look-at Kaija Saariaho (a thoroughly sincere person always willing to give of her time, as I know from a short acquaintance). I used it over there, but I can’t resist including it here too

especially as it’s followed by formality, with Janina Fialkowska joining the picture.

Several other photos I couldn’t accommodate, or they didn’t tell the story I wanted. One is of Tony Hall and Sir Mark Elder head to head

before S’Mark swept the board with his Halle recording of Elgar’s The Apostles. This too I have yet to hear, but I didn’t much care for the same team’s The Kingdom, nor indeed for S’Mark’s Goodall-in-Wagner approach to Elgar, who always seems to me to need much more sweeping along, especially in oratorios like these. But we’ll see. 

A few more photos: here’s Mark Padmore looking moved, as indeed he was, talking about Bach as a lifelong companion and the uncanny inspiration of Peter Sellars.

And composer Dai Fujikura, interesting sound-maker in the concert I caught of the BBC Symphony Orchestra’s Japanese day, quirkily setting up Foo, whom he obviously admires.

As for ‘Musical Toys’, I thought it might just be through her canny choice of repertoire that Foo triumphed, but having listened to the disc a couple of times, I hear so much imagination in the distant voices of the Gubaidulina, while the Chin is technically terrific, and you should really try out the later Ligeti pieces when the notes of the chromatic scale begin to accumulate (he starts with one, ends with all twelve).

It was serendipity that the first unknown personage I was led up to, via the constantly popping-up Sebastian Scotney and David Fraser of ECM, happened to be the founder of Foo’s intriguing new label Odradek and also a pianist, John Clement Anderson. He lives in Pescara and so – with him, I’m presuming – does one of the other pianists featured on the label, Pina Napolitana from, yes, Naples, whose all-Schoenberg disc I need to hear at leisure with a score. Already, though, I’ve been hooked by another featured artist, Domenico Codispoti. 

His Liszt B minor Sonata was bound to feel just a little straightforward with Khatia Buniatishvili’s crazy interpretation still ringing in my ears, but he’s clearly a real poet, as the Petrarch Sonnets clearly show. And what’s haunting me is a Granados piece from Goyescas I’m ashamed to say I didn’t know, El amor y la muerte. This is the image, from Goya's Los Caprichos. 

The ‘ballad’builds around Goya's moment. A young man is dying in the arms of his beloved after losing a duel. The strength of the will to live ebbs and flows alongside the woman's sad consoling song, which breaks the heart before the final darkness falls, at least in this performance. Such profundity. If Odradek carries on at this level, it should have a few more award-winners on its hands. How delighted I am to find that the company has put up a film of Codispoti playing this very piece. Give it your full attention; and if you don't, you'll probably find as it develops that you drop anything you're doing.

Dyre desire of Light

Heading his manuscript copy of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar quotes John Florio’s translation of Virgil via Montaigne:  ‘Whence so dyre desire of Light on wretches grow?’ One of James MacMillan’s themes in his lecture for the Royal Philharmonic Society yesterday was how we wretches today, whether religious in the narrow sense of the word or the wider, still desire the light that music’s most transcendent passages can offer us. Actually, that sounds impossibly pompous, as JMacM’s soft-spoken, reasonable speech, eschewing all mention of himself in that visionary tradition, did not. I couldn’t quite work out the connection between his opening thoughts on Blake as an example of a broader visionary vein in English art and his central assertion of the importance of Roman Catholicism in Elgar’s life and work, but it was all food for thought. Bust of Beethoven in my shot below there to mark the RPS's 200th anniversary.

It’s true, we do tend to shunt Elgar’s Catholicism rather to one side, even in discussing the composer’s most overt assertion of his faith in Gerontius (though what more do you want than the Jesuits’ ‘A.M.D.G’ - ‘Ad majorem Dei Gloria’, ‘To the greater glory of God’ - at the top of the above page?). But perhaps it’s also true – a point not addressed yesterday – that the Catholic fervour which came from Elgar’s mother, and certainly not from his staunchly Anglican father, dwindled in later years. I can’t find the quotations I want, but I still have the hunch that the 'single short remark' Elgar made to Ernest Newman on his deathbed so ‘terrible’ that the younger man never repeated them to anyone might have been ‘I lost my faith in God’ (more frivolously, on hearsay, I’d wish it to be ‘I always preferred young men’, but no more of that).

No matter; the speech threw up plenty of points for discussion and, as Jude Kelly in fine presenting fettle said, we could have sat and talked for another hour. Nice to chat briefly to The Man afterwards, and I’m hugely looking forward not only to hearing his Oboe Concerto again in Glasgow on Friday – he will be elsewhere – but also his new Viola Concerto, due to be premiered by Lawrence Power as part of The Rest is Noise festival. I think I’m right in saying, at least from checking the index, that Alex Ross in his book of that name doesn’t give a single mention to MacMillan, one of the major voices in music today – and one of my two favourites (Adams being the other, of course).

Two hours later, I was in the chair alongside venerable composer Anthony Payne, whom of course we have to thank among other things for that rather miraculous realization of Elgar’s Third Symphony, and Heather Wiebe, Virginia academic newly arrived at King’s College London. Our moderator was Tom Hutchinson of the RPS, and the theme, supposedly, was 'The Edwardian Empire: Society and Culture', obviously with special reference to the performance of Gerontius due to follow in the Royal Festival Hall.

I was wrong in thinking that Heather was there as the cultural historian; she, too, is a musicologist, this time specializing in Britten. So we all had to readapt as we launched our little presentations by way of a start. Frankly, I think the esteemed AP should have gone before me, for clearly I’d stolen some of his thunder with the line about Elgar the European; but I also managed to contrast that with the perceived notion of the court composer to Edward VII. And in any case, Anthony was so genial, wise and good at batting the ball back and forth that it all became a delightful discussion in praise of our composer’s terrific originality. Maybe an antagonist could have stirred it all up more productively, but we had fun – even if I seem to have blanked out chapter and verse in all the after-euphoria (hoping there’s a recording. 15/7 Just discovered there is, here on soundcloud, thanks to The Rest is Noise festival's impressive soundarchiving. James's talk is there too).

We were all of us, JMacM included, seated in what’s supposed to be the royal box for Elder’s performance in the evening. I can’t say it moved me much. This conductor works so hard on revelatory textures, gleaming in the hands of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a superb chorus master, there with every word for the LPO Chorus and the Clare College Cambridge singers who served as the semichoir. But he doesn’t strike me as having the natural tempo rubato which late romantic music like this requires. Everything seems dotted and crossed with excessive precision; you can see the wheels at work. And sometimes he’s just too slow, in the tradition of his beloved Goodall, which sank the Angel’s Farewell for me, resplendently as the ever-dependable Sarah Connollly delivered it.

I did love Paul Groves’s hard work on extracting every inch of meaning from Cardinal Newman’s text, though, and in pushing his far-from-Helden voice to the right limits of agony and exultation when needed. The clarity of this truly world-class score came across beautifully. But for me, the desired light never quite shone. Have gone over to Sakari Oramo’s Birmingham recording at home to find out what was missing, and there is all the magic in all the right places.

So, from ‘A.M.D.G’ to Bach’s ‘S.D.G.’ (‘Soli Deo gloria’, ‘Glory to God alone’). Much less heavy weather results from this week’s Sunday cantata (someone told me Radio 3 is following the same calendar as I am; I had no idea). ‘Alles nur nach Gottes Willen’, BWV 72, is one of the short cantatas for the third Sunday after Epiphany* - short, it's argued, because the choir would have got very cold at this time of year; they were allowed to slope off before the hour-long sermon. Lucky them; in my treble days we had to sit and read Commando comics under the desks.

God’s will as exemplified, perhaps, in the day’s reading from Matthew 8 about Christ's healing of a leper (mosaic above from Monreale), is all there is to it. So it makes for a rather complacent sequence, shorn of questioning or suffering The striking minor-key launch of darting, rather agitated strings slightly undercuts the chorus’s sentiments (‘All only according to God’s will’); the music was re-used, not so interestingly in my opinion, at the start of the Gloria in Bach’s G minor Mass, BWV 235.

The alto reaches to the still-lively heart of the cantata. His/her recitative turns to arioso in the nine lines beginning ‘Lord, if thou wilt’ and moves almost seamlessly into the aria with the addition of two solo violins to the cello and continuo line, fugueing in one of the ritornellos. There’s a simple, dancing soprano number and a chorale based on a text by Albert, Duke of Prussia and an old French theme used in a cantata of the previous year, 1725. There – I’ve got off lightly this week**, but I’m looking forward to being tested rather more by JSB in weeks to come. Here's another from Suzuki's Bach series, Robin Blaze replacing Sara Mingardo whom I heard on another instalment of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage 2000.

*As 'Uncle Toby' points out below, I've got my church calendar in a muddle. This year we miss out on the third and fourth Sundays after Epiphany. This is Septuagesima, so I'll have to add another cantata. But that gives me the excuse of two more (fourth Sunday and Sexagesima) next week.

**Clearly not. The Septuagesima candidate I have to hand is 'Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn', on an altogether grander scale. Shall do my duty willingly some time this week

Fidelio - liberated at last

Only professional reasons could have lured me back to sit through Jürgen Flimm's quarter-baked Royal Opera production of Beethoven's Fidelio a second time. Yet it turned out to be a whole different show, musically at any rate, from the one I had difficulties finding a good word to say about for The Arts Desk.

It may well be that Mark Elder got into his stride after an unco-ordinated first night. Yet while he had little time to step into back-troubled Kirill Petrenko's shoes, the Royal Opera's highly respected Head of Music David Syrus was also giving his first performance on little rehearsal last night.


And how he kept this tricky-to-start piece on its toes, with an ever-firm inner pulse, clear articulation and above all a buoyancy which, I suspect, is not Elder's ball-game (he seems to me to have succumbed to Goodallisation in his knighted middle years). While a couple of weeks ago I'd been inwardly screaming to get to Nina Stemme doing Leonore's 'Abscheulicher' - not quite right on either night, as it turned out, despite this fine soprano's inward energy - here I was delighted by every little woodwind nudge and nuance in those domestic ariettas, duets and trios. Not quite Mozart, I know, but Syrus made them seem almost so, and it helped to be hanging over the orchestra and to see what was going on in the pit when pitifully little happened on stage.

There were frisson-moments where I'd found none on the first night - above all in a flawlessly elevated shift back from the central solos of the Prisoners' Chorus to its recap, and in the little skipping violin triplets that lift the charge of the final joyburst. Again, it didn't pay to look at the chorus jigging aimlessly in a travesty of liberation, but they were at least crisp and together with the conductor, no easy task. This was a performance which I like to think our still so sorely-missed Charles Mackerras would have looked down on and heartily commended.


No real shifts of opinion on the production - its one moment of grace, so to speak, remains the darkness of Act Two's opening - or the singers: John Wegner remains a cipher; Stemme doesn't seem at her focused best, with the wide vibrato having some trouble getting round Leonore's more florid phrases; and despite some beautifully unfurled phrases from Elizabeth Watts as Marzelline (pictured above with Kurt Rydl's Rocco and Stemme), the most accomplished and technically secure performance remains Endrik Wottrich's Florestan; if only some people knew how impossibly written for the voice is the vision of 'ein Engel, Leonore', and how well he carried it off. The production photos here are by Catherine Ashmore for the Royal Opera.


Again for reasons yet to be divulged, I spent the afternoon listening to one of Beethoven's chief inspirations, Cherubini's 1791 'rescue opera' Lodoiska, and realised that it's not just the situation - here husband Floreski attempts to rescue wife Lodoiska from imprisonment by a wicked Pole - which gave the cue. The Sturm und Drang scenes of Act Two are very prophetic; so is the lovely woodwind scoring for a male trio and the Act Three quartet. Very fine music, and beautifully done on the Sony recording by Cherubini apostle Riccardo Muti with a cast including Mariella Devia, who I imagine would have made an excellent Leonore in her heyday.


It was fascinating to reflect, too, on Beethoven's Leonore of 1805, his Fidelio of 1814 and all the upheavals that had shaken Europe in its time of troubles since the idealism of 1789 went so badly wrong. It's worth remembering that the Bouilly libretto which inspired Beethoven was supposedly based on a true story of a wife freeing her husband from the Jacobins in Tours, and I was reminded of the compelling figure Hilary Mantel makes out of revolutionary Camille Desmoulins and his relationship with his feisty wife Lucile in A Place of Greater Safety. The real Camille did indeed write letters of a Florestanesque intensity to his wife from prison, though of course they both ended up on the guillotine.


So quite apart from Fidelio's endless resonances today, one trembles once again at the lessons of the French Revolution - how quickly liberators became oppressors, how betrayed were the libertarian ideals, and indeed how wonderful it was that, with Napoleon finally crushed, Beethoven could try and recapture the hopefulness of 1789 in the last great optimism of 1814.