Being Beauteous: Bourne and Järvi

Here’s my chance to wax more or less lyrical about two quirky but undeniably loving homages to Tchaikovsky’s The Sleeping Beauty, which the more I hear it the more I’m convinced is his meisterwerk. I had to own up to the BBC Music Magazine that since I’d written the very long, number-by-number notes for Neeme Järvi’s absolutely complete recording with the superb Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, I couldn’t review it for the publication. But I can attempt to do so here, having got that proviso out of the way. As for Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures Sleeping Beauty, ‘A Gothic Romance’, I went to the Sadler's Wells press night on Friday courtesy of my Arts Desk colleague Ismene Brown, who writes brilliantly about it as ever and almost convinces me about points over which we disagreed. The nub of which is that I warmed to it much more than she did.

What I admire most is Bourne’s way of telling a story, and in this case one that is very much his own spun from some of the elements of Perrault’s tale. I’m not sure how much of the plot one should give away, since I spent part of the first half wondering how the gardening boy/groundsman with whom young Aurora has such a sweet and sometimes funny first-love romance would survive one hundred years. A bite on the neck from Christopher Marney's Count Lilac, aka fairy leader (pictured below with fellow winged things in the Prologue, first of Simon Annand's production images) gave a good hint. You can see how effective Bourne regular Lez Brotherston's designs are, though there aren't enough pics of them in the image gallery.

The biggest twists are unveiled in the second half, with more than one awakening kiss failing to lead to the expected resolution. Shall we say that the grand Caradoc ball – yes, he’s the tall and sexy son of Carabosse, who expired some time after the Prologue – entails radical re-jigging and major cutting of Tchaikovsky’s score. What Bourne does use of it, and where he uses it, always has a strong musical/dramatic motivation. First change is the royal March of the Prologue banished in favour of the Act One garden hustle and bustle, which suits the 1890s bedchamber intimacy of this narrative and involves a delightful puppet baby climbing the thick curtain drapes. The musical number is reprised in its proper place when we meet the 20-year old Aurora in a Juliettish playfulness with her nurse before her boy evades detection in her bedroom (charming Hannah Vassallo and cute Dominic North pictured below).

Re-ordering in the garden scene, mostly Edwardian whites, means that Aurora’s variation is played out with interloping Caradoc. Surely Bourne means parallels here with the male Odile of his Swan Lake - who can forget Adam Cooper there? - especially since both numbers have eloquent violin solos (other witty references I thought I spotted are to Macmillan's Anastasia and, as I've already suggested, his Romeo and Juliet as well as other scenes in Bourne's own Swan Lake). He brings back another virtuoso sequence for violin, the Entr’acte of Act Two which has surely never been danced in ANY previous choreography of Sleeping Beauty, for a climactic Pas de Deux in the last act (obviously the Aurora-Desiré adagio is saved up for when good has triumphed over evil). The Rose Adagio is less successful. What Ismene writes about real dance never being properly carried through applies here, as choreography gives way to precipitate mime and Aurora falls swooning from a prick on the thorn of Caradoc’s black rose; that doesn’t work for me. But the curtain certainly does.

Gone are the courtly dances of Act Two – Bourne has moved in the opposite direction from his Cinderella, which was the first to rehabilitate Prokofiev’s world-travel divertissement – but we get the vision imaginatively treated, and more of the Entr’acte Symphonique’s spellbinding sleep music than ever before (still not quite the crucial 100 bars I discovered it to be, but everything except a repeat; the charismatic Jurowski lookalike Ben Bunce pictured with Vassallo below).

Of course there are no fairy-tale animals at the ball, but the radical, near-atonal Puss in Boots number is brilliantly staged when our hero infiltrates the black and red Walpurgis Night and the brilliant 5/4 Sapphire Variation is a welcome survivor from the second fairy sequence. A shame the Bluebird enchantment wouldn’t fit into this context. But the real problem is that chunks of a divertissement can't really be pressed into service for the long-term dramatic narrative which Tchaikovsky has abandoned (in favour of something equally wonderful) at this point. Anyway although by and large the biggest orchestral climaxes aren't matched by the fitful classicism of the choreography, the corps numbers, the Polonaise and the Mazurka, get vintage Bourne creepy-mannerist treatment. And the fashionable Twilight/Buffy links are canny.

The Apotheosis brings a neat return to the best idea of the Prologue. How prescient was it to give a major role to a royal baby?

Forewarned was forearmed in the case of the pre-recorded score. I’d hated the over-amplification of Prokofiev’s Cinderella music, and when I met two of Bourne’s team with J at the Garrick on Monday, I asked if this couldn’t be at a more natural level. Well, it was, and truthful enough to tell that Brett Morris had mostly done a wonderful job, with especially good violin solos from Gina McCormack. I loved the tempo for the Lilac Fairy music at the end of the Prologue, and the ‘Sleep’ Entr’acte sounded as spellbinding as it can.

That bewitching sequence came as a bit of a shock on Järvi’s recording: virtually double the tempo, with the Carabosse chords broken rather than sustained. He also has a Panorama at a speed which the woodwind and horn support can only just articulate, and a sprint at the end of the sublime Bluebird Adagio. But, for all that they probably couldn’t be danced to, how filled with energy are the faster passages. Järvi (pictured below by Till Veerhae) offers characteristic rubato that's often so subtle as to be barely perceptible but gives so much life to the symphonic passages, and a spectacular recording provides extended dynamic range which is especially impressive at the piccolo end.

Was it necessary to bring in James Ehnes and Robert deMaine respectively for the violin and cello solos? I wasn't sure at first, having heard Aurora’s Variation in Act One more powerfully done. But Ehnes’s sophistication creates wonders in the big Entr'acte Bourne found such a good use for, and the cello’s Andante Cantabile offshoot in the vision has wonderful life and line. There are some wackily extended harp cadenzas, and the woodwind in the animal portraits are a dream.

I did a Radio 3 Building a Library on the ballet score some years back, when Ermler’s Covent Garden performance came out on top; now I reckon it would be a very close-run thing between that, Lanchbery’s dansante Philharmonia recording, which took some time to appear on CD and now Järvi’s. His has the most demonstration-quality sound of them all. And I can say here, hoping to be believed, my devotion has nothing to do with the fact that I have a stake in its success…

The great Martinů divide

The Moravian genius still splits opinions into fierce pros and cons, as testified by reviews (mine for The Arts Desk included) of Richard Jones’s ENO Julietta*, pictured above and below for English National Opera by Richard Hubert Smith. Many of us – a majority, it would seem -  love Martinů’s music to the point of the irrationality it seems designed to provoke. Others find it ‘not very good’, ‘superficial’, ‘anonymous’ and derivative, lacking ‘dramatic immediacy or distinction’.

I won’t single out the critics who number among the dissenting third, but the more I get to know Julietta, the more moving and coherent I find it, so naturally I want to challenge them. Of course surrealist treatment of someone else’s dream spread across three acts and nearly two hours of music has the potential to become one colossal, not to mention dated, bore. But protagonist Michel’s sleepwalking attempt to find the woman he heard singing at an open window surely provides the meaningful anchor one of those writers finds missing in the score. There’s an important ritornello in each act when he remembers and tries to bring to life that vision: music of heartache and pathos which stuck in my mind the first time I ever heard it (so much for unmemorability) and culminates in the fabulous cadence of the two ‘Julietta chords’**, rooted in Janáček’s Taras Bulba and going on to pepper Martinů’s six masterly symphonies of the 1940s and early 50s. I first quoted the chords here, musing on the Third Symphony; no harm in reproducing them again.

That refrain’s last playback leads to the ambiguous ending: to pursue his goal again, Michel must be lost to the real world, where others before him have gone insane. But is it worth it for sounds like this? Martinů’s painfully nostalgic musical resurrections of the past convince you (sorry, me) it might be. The three Julietta visions take place in three very different dramatic contexts. Jones and his fabulous designer Antony McDonald have taken the cue of the sentimental tune which kindles memories in an amnesiac dream-community to render a giant piano-accordion and to deconstruct it in various ways. I’m taking the liberty of giving the three stage pictures (dreamville, as I like to think of it, up top; the forest of Act Two below; accordion as filing-cabinet for the Office of Dreams further down). As in all of Jones’s work, design and production are hauntingly fused.

The wistful, very Moravian strains which the accordion conjures for the memoryless add a further layer of something to hold on to, akin to the impact of Ann Trulove’s lullaby on the tormented inmates of Bedlam in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress. Again,  Martinů offers respite from the fidgeting absurdity of dreamville, a lyricism which in my view is far from ‘stubbornly earthbound’ (one of the dissenters again). I can’t imagine Georges Neveux’s original play being anywhere near as rooted; Martinů’s music,when it briefly settles, is balm for troubled souls. As for ‘its manifold derivations failing to cohere into a greater whole’, the composer's stylistic thumbprints transfigure every debt, from Debussy to Stravinsky. I need a whole chapter to show how, but the symphonic example at the foot of this post gives a taster of his unique musical world.

Dramatic incoherence? Up to a point: the non-sequiturs of the somnambulent world demand it***. But I’m always surprised by the urgent twists and turns of the longest act, where Michel meets up with his dream girl again in the wood at night. The act constantly seems to have reached its logical conclusion, but the music goes on eluding expectations, above all by settling not to the hectic brilliance of the orchestral passage which Jones and his movement director Philippe Giraudeau choreograph as a queasily humorous crocodile ballet, but to the serenity and beauty of a quiet musical curtain as Michel heads for the deep waters only.

Insubstantial subject-matter? I think not. The opera, begun in 1936, seems weirdly prescient for the fate in store for Martinů, a wartime exile from the country he loved so deeply and a lover constantly trying to revive in memory the times of happiness he shared with Vítězslava Kaprálová, the talented composer who died aged 25 in 1940. His own words on the opera written seven years after that clarify what it’s all about better than I could. The following would have been useful material for the ENO programme:

The whole story…takes place neither in reality nor in illusion, but on a very thin line between them, so that everything real seems to be fiction and all fictions have the appearance of reality. The whole network of unforeseen situations and illogical conclusions has one unifying theme, namely the human mind, memory, on which the history and actions of our lives relies. Here, however, a world is presented to us in which memory is abolished, displaced; here everyone longs to gain it back, to renew it, to retrieve reminiscences of the past as well as to acquire reminiscences of other people and accept them as one’s own, in order to be able at least to touch the past – to catch the irretrievable moment of time. Situations, however, become absurd; there is a sort of continuum of time and space, from which time, however, i.e. the past, has vanished. The world appears here only at the given moment, which is replaced by the next moment, and so everything rushes into emptiness. It is in essence a psychological problem and really a very old human problem: ‘What is man, what am I, what are you, what is truth?’

In a contemporary world where so many of us are grappling with the problem of Alzheimer’s somewhere in the family, the theme of memory has disturbing new resonances. Is Martinů’s music worthy of it? In its fleeting beauty and tenderness, I think it is. To conclude, and to meet one critic’s objection that the composer’s many threads never cohere, here’s the start of the symphonic adventure with No.1, and the essence of Martinů’s personal style - the chromatic bloodrushes, the syncopated dance music, even the Julietta chords - in the nutshell of the first minute. There are other movements from other symphonies I might have chosen, but the performances on YouTube don’t come up to the mark of Neeme Järvi’s great Bamberg cycle, of which this is the first instalment.  

*Plenty of ticket offers available, or at least there were before first night; the generally warm critical reception may have changed all that. One ENO 'special' entails phoning up the box office and saying the magic word 'dream'.

**If you want them parsed beyond 'Moravian cadence', Thomas D Svatos outlines 'a kind of plagal cadence from a dominant 13th chord on the subdominant to the tonic'

***28/10  Here's another contrary view I've just come across: the music 'proceeds in fits and starts'. Didn't they used to say that about Janáček? And actually it strikes me there's a very strong parallel with another dreamlike opera which only makes sense at the end: Janáček's Osud, where protagonist Zivny finally pieces it all together - at greater length, admittedly, than Michel, but to similar effect.

Master and delinquent

The master is, of course, that greatest of conductors Neeme Järvi, something of a hero for me since he set the sleepy Edinburgh concert scene ablaze when I was an impressionable student; the delinquent is not I, in what's an especially nerdy looking photo, nor even, in truth, the real subject, my just-18-year-old godson Alexander. You'll understand what I'm talking about when you read the full story further down.

All this was only part of an eventful weekend whizz between Edinburgh, Glasgow and Broughton-by-Biggar. The lynchpin was a new Scottish Opera production of a Strauss opera I hold curiously dear - Intermezzo, the barely fictionalised tale of a marital storm-in-a-teacup between the composer and his wife. It turned out to be a discreet, human and gaudily but not inappropriately Klimt-framed show, classily sung and conducted. The Arts Desk, where the review went up yesterday, wondered if I couldn't find something else to cover while I was there. And what serendipity: the finest conductor the Royal Scottish National Orchestra has known before Stéphane Denève, who's doing such great things there now, was back in Edinburgh's Usher Hall on Friday for his only programme with the orchestra this season.

It was mainly taken up with 'the Leningrad', one of the four Shostakovich symphonies out of the fifteen I don't have any sort of soft spot for. Still, it's got all the usual traits, fireworks and between-the-lines nastiness, and I knew Järvi - whose performance of it back in the 1980s was one of the few I didn't catch live with the then SNO - would do wonderful things with it. He did, above all in a last five minutes I'll never forget - and just when I'd given up all hope of Shostakovich's less than convincing finale; again, read all about it on The Arts Desk. And you can hear the Radio 3 broadcast of the whole, splendid concert for the next week on the BBC iPlayer (with thanks to Petroc Trelawny for plugging the Arts Desk review at the end).

Neeme and I were supposed to meet at 5.30, but Radio 3's presence meant that the interview got shifted to 7pm. Yes, with a concert starting half an hour later. That's often been Neeme's style - he'll talk up to a concert, unlike Gergiev who will go on and keep the audience waiting if he's got more to say - and as usual the ideas and the enthusiasm were just pouring forth. I must say that when I last saw him in London, the performances - of Taneyev and Kalinnikov symphonies - were masterful, but he looked a little tired and unhealthy. Not so on Friday. Dear Edinburgh-based friend Ruthie, to my surprise, said she'd be happy to come in with me rather than hang around for half an hour; Neeme was predictably easy about that; and R can confirm that the first thing he said was how much he'd been enjoying my blog - 'I keep going back and back, more and more' - and what a good thing it was to express what you feel about all sorts of things in life. Here I am - again, a spur-of-the-moment thought that since Ruth was there, she might as well snap us - apparently telling him that the next entry would be extremely short. Not.


The interview will eventually appear as one of TAD's Q&As, so enough of that. But I ought to try to get to Tallinn in September when the male members of the clan - Neeme flanked by sons Paavo and Kristjan - will each be conducting a different orchestra on three consecutive nights.

So what about Armadillo? Well, I haven't heard it yet but I can imagine its fusion of jazz, rock and funk must be rather accomplished; clever Alexander has just got a distinction in Grade 8 clarinet, which is about as good as it gets. The full story of the Peeblesshire debacle, which made the front page of the local rag, is a bit sad and sorry, certainly not up there with the lead story of the weekend, the London protests against the cuts which of course I was nowhere near. The gig was planned to celebrate A's 18th birthday. First it was scheduled for Stobo Village Hall, then moved to Peebles Burgh Hall owing to police and council intervention, and finally cancelled at the last minute on health and safety grounds.


A has no need to disguise his identity with the dark specs (my idea as he doesn't like being photographed and surely wouldn't want his full visage seen here). His band honourably asked for a discussion at Peebles Police Station, but authority was adamant that this decent pack posed a public disorder risk. Result? 200 young people who'd bought tickets wandering round Peebles with nothing to do but...drink. And of course, as Alexander was quoted as saying in the article, the town was 'swarming with police...yet they claim they couldn't let our gig go ahead because of staffing shortages'. One phrase in the front-page piece especially makes me laugh, in this sentence: 'Police have revealed that they recovered a bumper haul of alcohol from underage drinkers around the Peebles and Innerleithen area on Saturday night'.

A bumper haul: the state totters! Anyway, the gig has been rescheduled, so Alexander will get to celebrate his birthday in style, and now he's 18 years and one day old, he can - not that he will - drink as much as he damned well pleases. Get off their backs, authorities: young people aren't as stupid or as reckless as you imagine. Oh, and some of them think Shostakovich is pretty amazing, too.