Discovering Danco through Ansermet

Continuing to dig in to the huge discography (300 plus Suisse Romande recordings for Decca alone) of Ernest Ansermet long after the BBC Radio 3 discussion of his legacy - the edited version still to be heard for the next few days on the BBC iPlayer here starting at 53m27s - I ordered up five discs from the Australian-based Eloquence wing of Decca, not least to explore his few opera recordings. And here I came across a voice I only previously knew through the Josef Krips Don Giovanni and Erich Kleiber Figaro, Brussels-born Suzanne Danco. Her lyric soprano is not so light as ever to be dubbed 'soubrette' - she sang Ellen Orford at La Scala, Marie in Wozzeck and Mimi - but it's the personality in everything she sings that shines through.

Anyone, for instance, who gets annoyed with poor Mélisande - abused, Maeterlinck would have us assume, by her previous lord and master Bluebeard before Golaud discovers her lost in the forest - might find this characterisation stronger than usual. There's certainly nothing wan or wispy about it, and you hear the pain creep in when Debussy needs it. As for the whole of this 1952 Pelléas et Mélisande, I think this may be the most compelling version I've ever heard on CD - I wish I'd known it when I spent six Monday afternoons on the work for my Opera in Depth course.

The classic Désormière recording of over a decade earlier is also very speech-melody conscious, and there will possibly never be a better Pelléas than Jacques Jansen (Ansermet's Pierre Mollet is also excellent). But here the sound is so much better, and Ansermet, preferring a forward sense of movement throughout to 'burn off the mists' long before Boulez, makes his strings sigh with pain and love. You can more or less understand, with even just a little French, what's being sung about just by listening without a libretto. Quelle clarté! I'd still turn to some recent recordings for further beauty of orchestral texturing, but I simply don't want to listen to a non-French cast who doesn't understand every nuance.

It's curious to see Danco get top billing in Ansermet's recording of Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges when in fact she sings not the role of the reactive child but the meltingly beautiful aria of the picture-book princess. Again, the pointillist detail of Ansermet's interpretation as captured in the bright old Decca recording is fabulous (even if the last chords of the Five O'Clock Foxtrot seem not to be fully scored) and here's Hugues Cuénod excelling, too, as old man Maths. Danco and her Golaud, Heinz Rehfuss, turn up in the aurally otiose L'Heure espagnole, too. But she's most bewitching in the Deux mélodies hébraïques - the first of which gives the strongest sense of the power she can unleash when necessary - and Shéhérazade. So full of charm and meaning, again, even if not as luxuriously upholstered as the classic version with Régine Crespin. Which I had quite forgotten is also an Ansermet/Suisse Romande special. Real gap in the library there - must correct.

On the same set there's the first of Ansermet's Boléros with the Paris Conservatoire Orchestra. a good couple of minutes more leisurely than his Suisse Romande version. I was glad to find out that his recording of Hérold's Zampa Overture is lurid with character, explaining why I was so obsessed with this piece as a child (I took out the Ace of Diamonds LP of French overtures at least twice from Sutton Library). And the Haydn revelation continues with renewed admiration for the mixed moods of Symphony No. 83 (the hen-peckings follow a dark start) and the charm of No. 84's finale (funny how the un-soubriquet-ed symphonies often seem to be overshadowed) in the set of 'Paris' Symphonies. The discoveries keep on giving.

On a very un-French footnote, I also confirmed for myself the total-classic status of this recording of Britten's first opera, operetta, musical, call it what you will. 

Having been disappointed with so much about the Wilton's mishandling of Paul Bunyan, despite some excellent casting, I came home, and confirmed the work's masterpiece status thanks to a cast under Philip Brunelle that puts it across with exemplary clarity (that word again, not so evocative in English).   

Ansermania

Ernest Ansermet's recording with his Orchestre de la Suisse Romande of Chabrier's Joyeuse Marche is a desert island track of mine: the precise brio instantly puts one in a jolly mood, the perfect curtainraiser to any concert of recorded music. His complete Delibes Coppélia was my top choice on BBC Radio 3's Building a Library. But I hadn't listened widely to the non-French repertoire in his 314 Decca recordings. Preparing for a Proms Plus homage on Thursday afternoon, I found myself constantly taken aback by the freshness, the combination of firm rhythmic definition and freedom, in  classical and romantic works. Not what one would expect from a Professor of Mathematics, but Ansermet was anything but rigid in his logic as an interpreter.

In the end a brief digression on that subject got edited out for the interval broadcast, which you can hear about 58 minutes into the Prom as available for a while on the BBC iPlayer (and I recommend it all). Listeners had just heard Debussy and Ravel, and were about to hear Stravinsky's Petrushka, so that remained the brief. But how I would love to have illustrated the perfect gait and spareness of the first movement in Ansermet's recording of Haydn's Symphony No. 22, 'The Philosopher'. In a fascinating documentary made during a rehearsal you can see here:

Ansermet says every Haydn symphony should be respected for its unique character, that there is so much more beyond the basic classical forms. The focused power of his Beethoven Fifth, Seventh and Ninth is also surprising. The studio performance of the Seventh's finale is one of the glories of the recording world; I haven't had time yet to watch the whole of the below film, but it's another of those unanticipated pleasures that YouTube constantly gives us.

Many sound files only reached me from Universal - which holds the Decca legacy but can't, it seems, get hold of it so easily - just as I was about to set out for Imperial College on Thursday afternoon, but the listening will go on. One of the tracks I did get to excerpt especially impressed our players - the second of the Valses Nobles et Sentimentales, silky but clear, with the necessary acidic jabs of pain. Here, also wonder of wonders, is a film of him conducting the OSR in La Valse.

The players weren't so fond of the Petrushka excerpt I chose - from the later, 1957 stereo version rather than the feted 1949 recording. A bit messy, yes, but so spirited.

I'd like to have included the white heat of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Finale - like the Beethoven, one of the best interpretations I've ever heard of a very familiar work - and more of Ansermet's perfect sympathy with dance music.

The relationship with Stravinsky (Ansermet pictured below with him and Prokofiev) is fascinating. It ran smoothly from the early days of the Ballets Russes - Ansermet took over from Monteux, called up for active service in 1915 - until 1938, when they fell out over a cut Ansermet insisted upon in the ballet Jeu de cartes. Much of the correspondence in Craft's Volume One selection is businesslike, but there's a touching commendation from Stravinky in 1919, after an OSR rehearsal of the new Firebird Suite, of how well Ansermet understands contemporary music, in that he doesn't approach it differently from 'music of the past'.

Schoenberg and his system Ansermet did not, would not, understand, and it's shocking to read in his huge study of musical aesthetics how he links the aridity with the 'Jewish question'. And that was in 1961! I won't sully the entry with quotations (and there's a still worse one in an earlier article on how Schnabel played like a Jewish banker). Still, I found that the Hannah Arendt Institute was promoting a conference on the holistic approach to music we find in Ansermet's magnum opus. A nicer way to end is to quote his fundamental tenet:

It is easy for a conductor to fill a musical phrase with feeling, because one can do more or less what one wants with a musical phrase. In any case, it is easier to do than to find the correct feeling, the one that puts the phrase in its context and takes account of its contribution to the piece as a whole...It is the interpreter's job to assimilate as much as possible the feeling which the composer turned into music, and to express it in such a way that the listener can hear it in terms of melody, harmony, rhythm and tempo. I have made my choice. First I imagine the musically sensitive listener. Thus I have faith in the listener, just as I have faith in the music, and the two things hang together. My idea is that the listener is able to understand and so all I need to do, in so far as I am able, is to let the music speak, without recourse to the sort of effects that one can always produce, but at the expense of the truth.

Berg and Chabrier: scum and froth

In Berg's case, I'm referring to the way downtrodden soldier Wozzeck is perceived by his crazy 'superiors' in what remains, perhaps, the 20th century's most shattering opera. And Chabrier's orchestral works, which I revisited as the most joyous corrective to trauma, may be frothy, but isn't that ability to lift rather than lower the spirits through melody and orchestration just as profund in its way?

As for the portraits above by Schoenberg and Manet, I couldn't resist a bit of quality artistry applied to musicians after what struck me as a rather bad Bryn portrait leading a blog entry elsewhere. I left a rudely jolly, or jolly rude, comment yesterday, wondering why musical portraiture is so poor these days (Adam Birtwistle's Glyndebourne stint being much the worst - at least this one's recognisable) but publication was not forthcoming, nor do I think it will be. Don't take it personally, Jessica, it's only my opinion, and apologies if I was treading on any personal sensitivities.

Praise-laden warnings were rife about Carrie 'A Doll's House' Cracknell's production of Wozzeck for English National Opera: this will bruise and amaze you, they said. And they were mostly right. Dominating all was Edward Gardner's finest run at the Coli since Peter Grimes and Der Rosenkavalier (if only because all three operas demand the ultimate in their different ways). A perfect guide through Berg's spider-web of unforgettable themes, Gardner also gave the most achingly late romantic expression to the tragedy: you were never allowed to forget how much came out of Strauss and Wagner. So many folk had related how the two unison crescendos after the murder shook them to the core, which they did, and the, yes, D minor summary pressed the tearduct button from the off.

Not everything about Cracknell's update worked for me, but all of it was thought through (photos by Tristram Kenton for ENO). There's nothing in Büchner's stunningly modern 1837 Woyzeck or in the opera which follows it so faithfully about the barracks boys seeing active service, but post-traumatic, post-Afghanistan stress disorder is a way of making Wozzeck's delusions instantly understandable. The child was too old for the final scene to have its full effect. Nor had there been  any outdoors for Wozzeck and friend Franz picking up sticks or for the climactic scenes by the lake with a rising moon. But these last had their own fearful impact.

Wozzeck no longer wades into a lake - or an immersion tank (Warner) or a vat of baked beans (Jones) - to retrieve the knife with which he's killed Marie; he cuts his throat at the kitchen table. I couldn't look. But certainly the sense of claustrophobia reached its peak here. And the aftermath, with the Doctor (ex-Wotan James Morris) and the Captain (Thomas Randle, still in good all-round shape) looking outwards from downstairs, played its part in chilling the blood (the two pictured with Leigh Melrose's Wozzeck in the centre below).

All the performances were strong, although I found Sara Jakubiak's Marie a tad undercharacterised, and Melrose could have made some of his longer lines more beautiful; the delivery was mostly very loud, the acting beyond reproach.

At the end, it wasn't my legs but my arms which had turned to jelly. I physically couldn't clap. And apologies to Guy, if he's reading this, for stonewalling him at the end, because I couldn't, didn't want to, speak for a good fifteen minutes afterwards.

It's too late to catch it now - the last performance was on Saturday - but, avoiding The Perfect American like the plague as I am (shutters down on Glass, and only Glass), if you want a rather more unexpected roller-coaster ride in an interval-less hour and forty minutes, go see Richard Jones's slyly skewed production of Ibsen's Public Enemy - aka An Enemy of the People - at the Young Vic. Having reviewed it for The Arts Desk, I should go again before it ends on 8 June. Below, the Stockmann brothers, played by Darrell D'Silva and Nick Fletcher, at loggerheads; photo for the Young Vic by Keith Pattison.

Nothing like a good dose of Chabrier to warm the blood, though. I was given the disc of orchestral plums at the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande's Festival Hall concert with the great Neeme Järvi the evening after I went to see Wozzeck. Järvi's not-of-this-world partnership with Boris Berezovsky, a pianist I've long wanted to hear live, in an unorthodox Grieg Piano Concerto turned out to be the highlight (the two pictured below at the concert by Jas Sansi), though there were masterly things as always about his Tchaikovsky Pathétique, including the best 5/4 waltz I've ever heard.

It was time for nostalgia: as in 1980, when a then unknown-in-the-west Järvi brought the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra to London, an encore was Arvo Pärt's Cantus to the Memory of Benjamin Britten (in 1980, I'd never heard any of Pärt's music). That had the same slot last night. If only the audience, full of Swiss watchmakers, had applauded more vociferously, we might have had Chabrier as a second encore on this occasion (back in 1980 it had been the Alla Marcia from Sibelius's Karelia Suite).

How else would these pieces get an airing beyond the world of CD? In my ideal concert, I think I'd have the Joyeuse Marche, with its lopsided rhythms and raucous glitter, at the start. Or would it be España, with its obsessive harping on the home key offset by orchestration as fabulous as Ravel's (a great admirer)? And could I have the lurching of the Fête polonaise from Le Roi malgré lui as my encore?

The recording which won me over was Ansermet's second (1964) Chabrier selection with the same Swiss orchestra; although that remains a key spirit-lifter, and its Fête polonaise swaggers in different places, Järvi has his own brisk glitter, a few characteristic charges at the ends - España especially - and he introduced me to a couple of works I'd never heard, including the early (1874) Lamento, making a persuasive, atmospheric case as always. Ansermet's 1964 Joyeuse Marche is here; never mind the Paris picture show.

So for me it's the Poulenc thing all over again. And here, too, I want to read the letters, from what Roger Nichols in his typically piquant note quotes or intimates. How about this from Chabrier's observation of local women by the Spanish seaside:

On the beach, those señoras possessed of a well-developed bosom often have trouble remembering to do up their costumes securely. From now on I shall  carry buttons and thread with me. To be of service is my greatest desire.

As for the intimations, thus Nichols on the Fête polonaise: 'in a letter still barely printable well over a century later, Chabrier whimsically envisaged turning the stage into an orgy, and then hiring a hypnotist to come and calm everyone down'.

Well, it wasn't all sunshine and roses; the later years before Chabrier's death from syphilis, Nichols tells us, were unhappy ones. But never understimate the power of the greatest light music to spread joy. We need it for our good health as much as we need Wozzeck for an understanding of the human condition. Oh, and happy 100th birthday, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Done my bit on that already, though happy to hear it again this year.