And the Best Tatyana Letter Scene winners are...

...as far as Tchaikovsky's opera is concerned, two: still,  on DVD and in the opera house, Yelena Prokina for Graham Vick at Glyndebourne back in 1994. Here's the reaction of some of the students on my Opera in Depth course after I'd played it to them on Monday. I've cut down the bigger picture to focus on the best responses. One lovely person with a lifetime of astonishing musical experiences recalled emotionally what having seen it at Glyndebourne meant, and how happy she was to see it again now that she and her husband can't get there any more.

Two hours still weren't quite long enough on what turns out to be so many people's favourite operatic scene. Sound recording only wise, there was a strong positive reaction to my personal favourite here, Gabriela Beňačková in a Supraphon disc of Czech and Russian opera arias - I picked it up for a dollar when we spent a New Year in Prague a year after the Velvet Revolution. Vaclav Neumann conducts the Czech Philharmonic.

Parallel with the opera, we're also listening to some of the Pushkin text, in both the English translation of Charles Johnston and the Russian original, in two recordings featuring the very beautiful incidental music provided by Prokofiev for a 'stage realisation' of the verse novel intended for the centenary year of Pushkin's death, 1937, but destined never to see the light of day (Prokofiev repurposed much of the music in War and Peace as well as several other later scores). 

We treasure the reading of Wests Timothy and Same, and Niamh Cusack as Tatyana, in Edward Downes' realisation on Chandos, but I thought it might be most interesting for you to hear Tatyana's letter to Onegin as read by Chulpan Chamatova, with the late Mikhail Jurowski conducting the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra in the music that occasionally punctuates the text. You can have your English translation to hand if you need it. I originally found the recording broken into tracks, which would have been most convenient but doesn't work in this format. Here's the whole thing. The Letter begins at 15m32s.

Meanwhile on Thursdays, the Sibelius course is taking us all deeper and broader than I could ever have imagined. The most recent class, 8, featured not only the String Quartet 'Voces Intimae', which I'm getting to know and admire better, but three orchestral works I love most of the so-called tone poems, all composed within a relatively short space of time. I am now obsessed with hearing them all in a single Sibelius half of a concert programme. Luonnotar for soprano and orchestra is the creation myth, and could be followed by The Bard, a voiceless singer strumming his lyre until the sound of primitive lurs summons him, a kind of Ragnarok that goes profoundly within; and then one could have the purification of water in The Oceanides. 

Well, I can dream, can't I? Now there are four more summer term Zoom classes to go, then a break, then the Wagner Society of Scotland wants me to start up with Die Meistersinger on 3 August, another luxuriant course of 10 classes. More of that shortly.

A tale of cock and despot

English Touring Opera's new production of Rimsky-Korsakov's The Golden Cockerel made me decide to give a one-off Zoom class on his satirical swan-song (the fact that the event itself turned out to be a bit of a turkey is incidental now). It may not be as profound as its immediate predecessor, The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, where the myth of the disappearing city which sinks beneath lake waters to preserve itself from the marauding enemy might be repurposed now for Ukraine, or as bewitchingly lovely as The Snow Maiden, but it does encapsulate many of Korsakov's styles and innovations, taking them one step further down the road of a modernism he professed to hate.

As I made clear in the review, there's one aspect of the fable - drawn by Pushkin from Washington Irving's 'Legend of the Arabian Astrologer' in his delicious Tales of the Alhambra, which he read in a French translation - with obvious connections to now: a capricious ruler sets off on a pointless campaign, with disastrous results. For the poet, disaffection with Nicholas I was part of the picture; for the composer and his librettist Belsky, the evident twilight of Nicholas II's reign and the disastrous Russo-Japanese War of 1905 would have been pertinent. 

There's also a parallel real-life story which makes me very proud to have picked up a copy of the vocal score when I was last in Moscow, albeit a battered edition. As Sergei Bertenson and Jay Leyda, Rachmaninov's best biographers to date, record, the composer, leaving Russia towards the end of 1917, 'carried one small suitcase: the only music in it was his first act of Monna Vanna [the opera he never completed], sketchbooks containing the new piano pieces [the Op. 39 set of Etudes-Tableaux, for me his piano masterpiece], and the score of Rimsky-Kosakov's Golden Cockerel' - the same edition as the one I proudly possess. 

Later, in 1934, Rachmaninov wanted it sent from New York to his wonderful new Villa Senar on Lake Lucerne along with The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh. 'Just to read a score by Rimsky-Korsakov always puts me in a better mood, whenever I feel restless or sad,' he declared.

Less valuable but much treasured by me are two editions of Pushkin's original tale. Artist Tatyana Mavrina's illustrations for Pushkin fairy-tales bound together by the story-telling cat of the poem that prefaces Ruslan and Lyudmila were published in 1984 by Detskaya Literatura and won the international Hans Christian Anderson Medal. This was one of the last things I bought from the long-defunct Collets on Charing Cross Road.

You also get the tales of Tsar Saltan, the Dead Tsarevna, the Fisherman and his Wife, and the Priest and his Worker Balda. But the Cockerel is what concerns us. I reproduce two of the three-page spreads below.

The most famous illustrations are those of the great turn-of-the-century artist Ivan Bilibin. They're not part of the beautifully-printed Everyman's Library of Children's Classics volume, from which I used to read to my godson Alexander the Tale of Tsarevich Ivan, the Firebird and the Grey Wolf with sound clips on cassette I took from Stravinsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov (he remembers that experience to this day, I;m so happy to say). But I found them in a slightly rougher-and-readier Pushkin volume published by Literatura Moscow, accompanying a dual Russian and English text. That's the ill-fated Tsar Dodon being pecked to death up top, This is the tailpiece

this the Tsar being presented with the Cockerel by the Astrologer,

and this the first manifestation of the mysterious Shemakhan Queen.

She's a fine manifestation of woman power, albeit only through using feminine wiles. The female heroines of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories aren't all-powerful, but that truly great writer has plenty of interesting new takes on the fairy-tales of Perrault and others. I returned to this beautiful spider's web of fantasies when I was covering Bartók's Bluebeard's Castle in my Hungarian music course, and realised I hadn't read beyond the titular narrative.

I soon realised that the 10 tales are much richer if read in context. 'Puss-in-Boots' serves as a kind of entr'acte, and animal metamorphoses are rife. Most remarkably, there are refrains that serve like musical themes, recurrent but altered by the context, and re-reading makes it all even richer. Stuck on a train without another book, I decided to turn a second time to the two stories I found the most hauting and poetic. 'The Courtship of Mr Lyon' and 'The Erl-King', with its fabulous descriptions of natural detail in a wood, and found even more connections in retrospect. If I still composed - I dabbled as a teenager - I'd be spoilt for choice to make mini-operas here. One could even use the same soprano (or mezzo) and baritone for a triple bill... Well, I can dream, can't I? But the music is already there in Carter's perfect prose. What genius.

Tsars now and then

This one

stands roughly in relation to that one

as did Boris Godunov (c.1551-1605)

to Ivan IV, 'the Terrible' (1530-1584)

Why do I make the point? Because until Russian history stops repeating itself, we are likely to go back to truth-telling poets of the past to find the present in what they write. It was a scene in Pushkin's Shakespearean history-drama Boris Godunov not in either of Musorgsky's operatic versions which pulled me up short in the opera class last week. The poet uses one of his ancestors, a not exactly admirable plotting noble, to make the second of the comparisons above. 'He rules as did Ivan,' claims Afanasy Pushkin in James E Falen's admirable trnalsation:

What good that public hangings are no more;
That on a bloody stake, for all to see,
No longer do we sing our hymns to Christ;
That we're not burnt alive upon the square,
The Tsar to rake our ashes with his staff?
Are our poor lives in any way more safe?
We're threatened every day with some disgrace:
Siberia...the dungeon...or the cowl,
And there, in some forsaken place, to die
From hunger or a strangler's knotted rope...

Remove the religious associations - though those, of course, are coming back under a repressive Patriarch - and subtitute the psychiatric ward and the carefully chosen poison* for the cowl and the strangler, and you have a proper equivalent to how Putin wields his power as a Stalin for our times. In one way, it's devilish cunning: as Peter Pomerantsev puts it in his giddying evocation of his recent years in Russia, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible, this political system thrives on 'democratic rhetoric and undemocratic intent'. Plus the belief that if you lie often enough, people might start to believe you (look at Medvedev's bare-faced declaration that Russia is not bombing anybody but IS in Syria, that the west is creating a cold war. The Lithuanian President retorted that Russia is doing everything it can to make this a hot war.

Pomerantsev's subjects are chosen and paraded to give a lurid whirligig of absurdity and horror. He worked on Russian TV documentaries, so he knows that state control of Ostankino is making the country into one big grotesque (non) reality show. He gives us a terrifying portrait of Vladislav Surkov (pictured below speaking for his horrible creation Nashi, the new version of the Hitler Youth), the clever, cynical amoralist who has 'privatised the Russian political system', whose style of authoritarianism 'climbs inside all ideologies and movements, exploiting and rendering them absurd...The Kremlin's idea is to own all forms of political discourse, to not let any independent movement develop outside of its walls. Its Moscow can feel like an oligarchy in the morning and a democracy in the afternoon, a monarchy for dinner and a totalitarian state for bedtime'.

The different aspects are tellingly exemplified: the models and mistresses whose coaches turn back to pumpkins when their  multi-timing masters have tired of them, and who turn to the kind of cults not unknown here but operating on a more sinister scale there, a route ending in madness and suicide; the businesswomen who finds herself, totally innocent, caught in the mesh of corruption and an imprisonment which she's told can only be terminated by a large bribe to a lawyer - she turns to another route which only works because of a bigger political expediency; the hood who's a hero in his home town; the brutality facing army conscripts; the Russian 'offshore' in the rest of the world; the very differing fates of the former oligarchs now that all wealth is under state control: and the wholesale destruction of old Moscow - I knew very little about this and haven't been back since 2000 - so all businesses can be physically close to the Kremlin, the dead centre of all things.

What's fast being knocked down is chronicled by one of the few good guys in the book, Alexander Mozhayev, a kind of architectural Pimen (and definitely not to be confused with the pro-Russian separatist). What's going up, in the plethora of kitsch styles, includes such throwbacks to the 1950s as this

and this.

All government-approved politicians are adept at using the jargon of western capitalist companies, a trick learned by the proliferation of the latter in Russia during the 1990s. And everyone plays the game, knowingly or not; a dissident individual or organisation can be given a brief limelight, only to be dragged out of the spotlight the next day.

In fact this is the most potent aspect of the whole thing which reminds me what I read about Stalin's game - the rules could be changed daily or by the week, so that no-one ever knew where they stood. Keep everyone in a state of fear. At the moment, this is why it's impossible to win within the country, though some unimaginably brave individuals still keep on trying. Eventually this madness has to come to an end, but will Putin have succeeded in his biggest wish, to drag down Europe before Russia itself totally implodes? I know this: that I have never lived through worse times for the world. This article on The Interpreter, superbly expressed, offers no comfort at all.

We have our own Surkovs, of course, though they're not as clever. Thankfully we also have the freedom to bring pressure to remove them. It's hard work but it can be done.

Please sign this UK Government and Parliament petition against one of the biggest liars in the Conservative Party (and that's saying something) before he takes our precious NHS beyond repair. A reminder, too, that the ENO needs saving from its own management in a microcosm of what's happening with the junior doctors (chorus and orchestra shouldn't be in the line of fire). If you haven't already done so, sign and comment on The Spirit of Lilian Baylis's petition.

*17/2 Monday's announcement of the death of Nikita Kamayev, former head of Russia's anti-doping agency Rusada, prompts the worst thoughts in the wake of the doping scandal. A heart attack at 52? Well, it's Russia and men die young there, but still...he's the second person in the organisation to disappear conveniently from the picture within the past couple of months.

The bitter tears of Sergey Rachmaninov

 

Rachmaninov at the premiere of The Miserly Knight, 11 January 1906, with I. Grizunov (the Duke), G. Baklanov (the Baron) and A. Bonachich (Albert)

How glad I am Vladimir Jurowski still believes in the most haunting of Rachmaninov's three operas, The Miserly Knight, its text adapted practically word for word from Pushkin's magnificent 'little tragedy' (Skupoi Ritsar in the Russian - 'covetous' may hit the mark even better than 'miserly', especially since, as I only learnt a couple of days ago, Pushkin intended seven plays for each of the deadly sins, though he only reached four. For more on the origin of this frontispiece, see further down).

Nearly a decade on from his Glyndebourne championship, Jurowski (pictured below by Chris Christodoulou) conducted an orchestrally unsurpassable performance of The Miserly Knight in Wednesday night's London Philharmonic Orchestra programme, a fascinating double bill about gold and greed with substantial excerpts from Wagner's Das Rheingold in the first half. When he recently decided to join the pre-performance talk originally to have been given by director Annabel Arden alone, I was privileged to be asked to chair the chat. That meant handing over the review to my Arts Desk colleague Matthew Wright; he got it, I think.

Talk and performance were absolutely fascinating and challenging. VJ never views things from a conventional angle, and the way he manipulates the English language to express complicated thoughts simply is a marvel. Besides, who else would have pulled off this programme? The Rheingold sequence was infinitely more satisfying than Dudamel's disastrously paced and ineptly snippeted 'Entry of the Gods into Valhalla' the other week. It had been advertised as orchestral music only, but then Jurowski realised there wasn't enough to stand by itself. He found out that Sergey Leiferkus, his Baron, towering protagonist of The Miserly Knight, had sung Alberich and it all flowed from there. Thus we got the whole of the introduction, first scene and interlude up to the Valhalla theme, with the Rhinemaidens, in Arden's semi-staging, undulating above and below the front row of choir stalls. The Woglinde, recent Guildhall graduate Natalya Romaniw, took a minute to settle, but what a voice this is - I hear a potential Sieglinde in there.

Jurowski made the score gleam and undulate, as if we were in a finer acoustic that the RFH's (when I returned in the talk to his question of doing a whole Ring with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, which he'd brought up at an earlier meeting, he said they'd need a whole new construction to house it). There was perhaps a touch too much care for the descent to and ascent from Nibelheim, and the patching felt a bit conspicuous from here up to the final sequence, but the anvils - 8, said the programme; 18, said VJ; 10 came on for a bow - resonated marvellously. Nor were the gods very Wagnerian-divine, but it was good to have the Rhinemaidens at the back rather than offstage, chilling the blood. And yes, we got six harps.

The Rachmaninov was, by contrast, impassioned, absolutely sure in every gesture - having played for the Glyndebourne 2004 production, the LPO still seems to have the music in its blood - and enshrined the most magnificent monologue in the operatic world from a still-untiring Leiferkus (there was a point a couple of years ago where I thought the voice was worn out, but little sign of that here). Annabel's finest touch was to find, unforced, a second role for the singer-actresses portraying Wagner's Rhinemaidens, as young Norns hovering above the Baron - especially valid since, as she pointed out, Russian abstractions like Death and Fate are feminine. The three made it work chillingly well.

We also spoke of how Rachmaninov takes a leaf out of Wagner in his slow-burn crescendos. There are two, the biggest, which seems to go on for ever before imploding, when the Baron, Bluebeard-like, lights candles and opens his six jewel-caskets. But the one with the more poetry to go with it is perhaps the more haunting in both music and text. Thus James E Falen's translation, preserving the Shakespearean iambic pentameters of Pushkin's original:

Ah yes! If all the tears, the blood and sweat
That men have shed for such a hoard as this
Should suddenly gush forth from out the earth,
There'd be a second flood - and I'd be drowned
Inside my trusty vaults.

As luck would have it, the fourth instalment of the Glyndebourne film downloaded to YouTube - I don't know for how long (and I'd urge you to buy the DVD, which is beautifully presented) - starts at exactly this point. So you can hear how Rachmaninov develops the extraordinary four-note ostinato of the third movement from his Suite No. 1 for two pianos, 'Tears' ('Slyozi'). This in turn derives from the bells of Novgorod, which haunted Rachmaninov from childhood. So that comes first here in the partnership of Nikolay Lugansky and Vadim Rudenko - my CD benchmark is Martha Argerich and Alexandre Rabinovitch - and is followed by Leiferkus in the middle of Scene 2. Arden's production has the masterstroke of an aerialist, Matilda Leyser (now married to Phelim McDermott, Annabel told me), who scared the life out of me with her big eyes, as the fateful spirit of avarice.

Pushkin's monologue is great in itself: I've determined to learn it in Russian, as I started to learn Pimen's speech from Boris Godunov; let's see if I can get further this time  (Russians always appreciate you quoting some Pushkin - J can impress with 'Shto dyen gryadushy mne gotovit' since Tchaikovsky set Lensky's lines very faithfully). I'd also like to do my own translation and I've just discovered these illustrations for the Little Tragedies by a talented young artist, Ievgen Kharuk - very much in the tradition of Russian book illustration (though Ievgen is from Kiev, more power to his pen). Note the key motif from The Miserly Knight on the cover for all four works.

Look at more of his work here. It should, of course, be published. On which note, it saddens but doesn't surprise me to learn of the latest philistinism to dog the better part of Putin's Russia: the great publications known as 'thick' journals, a glory of the Russian intelligentsia even in Soviet times, are in danger of extinction and the dangerous fraud who's supposed to be the Minister of Culture, Vladimir Medinsky (the one who said Tchaikovsky wasn't gay - see the footnote here - and who went on to even greater glories), won't lift a finger to help. 

 In the meantime, the staff of Moskva, the journal which first published Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, are ploughing on this month and the next unsalaried to try and save their great institution. The Interpreter has its rigorous finger on the pulse of this as of so much else. I know, pace David Damant's comment to a recent post, that it's partial as an instrument of opposition, but it does its best to provide chapter and verse against the scandalously nebulous propaganda pouring out of Russia at the moment.

A final, not unconnected, point: a far more incriminating photo than the above from 2004, along with detailed facts, here point to why there should be an immediate end to Anna Netrebko's hit-and-miss career in the west. If she was naive to think that giving money to a Donetsk opera and theatre company to carry on had nothing to do with separatist propaganda, then she should definitely have stopped when they asked her to hold the flag. Simple equation: if you pay to see Anna Netrebko, you're funding the daily murder of civilians in a war within Ukraine's legal borders - no doubt by both sides -  which the Ukrainians did nothing to start. And as a general principle, applicable to Gergiev too, the author of the article, Julia Khodor Beloborodov of Arts Against Aggression, is surely right:

Artists and their art can stand apart from politics. However, artists who use their artistic reputations to further a political cause cannot then be allowed to hide behind that reputation and claim to not be political actors.

Anyway, Netrebko's Iolanta and Four Last Songs discs are poor. That may be beside the point, but at least I wrote about those before I knew anything about this. 

Proshchai, moya uchitel’nitsa

She always insisted, once we’d got to a certain stage, that only Russian should be spoken in the lessons, so I feel I’m bringing my dear teacher, Joan Smith, back to life and reviving our weekly hours together. Some of you will be familiar with her as Joan Pemberton Smith from the opera and song translation work she did for the record companies. She died several weeks ago after a series of strokes following a complicated illness. I hadn’t seen her and husband Jeremy very often in the past couple of years – the last time was under the sad circumstances of Noelle Mann’s funeral – but her impact has been lasting (especially since I don’t seem to have forgotten too much). I met her through Noelle, and we both sang in the Kalina Choir. So what I’d call my serious Prokofiev work coincided with making the acquaintance of two women who were quite extraordinary in their different ways.

I hadn’t thought we would actually be reading any classic Russian literature in the near future when we began, but within a year we tackled Chekhov’s Rothschild’s Violin. And rather foolhardily, bearing in mind all the Church Slavonic in it, went on to Pushkin’s Boris Godunov as well as various short stories by Paustovsky and Zoshchenko. Joan did rather reproach me that after two or so years battling out to Chislehurst, I didn’t go back for weekly readings of Eugene Onegin, though I did work through it on my own.


Yet though she could be schoolmistressly strict at times, she was fundamentally a genial person and what I remember most is the way her face would light up with special enthusiasms. So I’m glad the top photo was found by Fiona McKnight of the Prokofiev Archive, since one of the two I had didn’t catch the smile, and in the other she’s wearing the ridiculous I-See-You-Jimmy tam-o-shanter with attached red wig hat we foisted on all those who came to sup as a kind of visitors-book record.

At her short memorial service the other Monday, I learnt a few things about Joan I didn’t know as well as reviving the memory of others I did. Born in Leicester in 1929, she won a scholarship to read classics at Cambridge; and as this was only just after the war, she was one of only two women studying her subject (our shared classical training was one of the most helpful aspects to the teaching; Joan could explain the grammatical workings in a way I could understand, as perhaps a native speaker might not have done). Over her years as librarian and teacher, she took a Russian course and soon became an enthusiastic proselytizer. She’d get her little groups to sing Russian folksongs to her guitar accompaniment; she apparently escorted parties to every corner of the then-Soviet Union when it was far from easy to plan travel arrangements. She even played in a balalaika orchestra (this I didn’t know).

Her Czech friend Zdena read a very lovely and fitting Yesenin poem (alas, not in Russian as well as translation, because the minority feared the majority of non-Slavic speakers wouldn’t understand). Failing the possibility of getting a Kalina Choir recording played, I thought the Song of Simeon from the Rachmaninov Vespers would be a fitting piece against which to sit and contemplate. And generally, as the best of these things can be, it was a time to remember fondly, if still tearfully, rather than to wail overmuch.


I ought also to recall one other person of whom I was extremely fond who died this year (may that be the last, please), my good university friend Jerry’s father Michael Pratt, QC. This was, for me, a rather strange concatenation of events: after my Mahler 2 talk at Birmingham, a distinguished white-haired gentleman who looked vaguely familiar came up and asked if I recognized him. Edinburgh? I thought of tutors, drew a blank and then just in time realized who it was (we can’t have met in decades). He’d seen my talk listed in the CBSO programme and came along specially. He took me for a drink with his delightful old friend after the concert, and I was amazed at the sharpness of his memory, the ability to recall details about our happy university days which I’d completely forgotten.

Probably Michael had at that time been a bit of a replacement father figure; it would have been only a couple of years since I’d lost my own. Certainly his generosity knew no bounds, and though we all ribbed him for being, as we saw it, a frightful old reactionary, he was a lot wiser and more complex than that. Read more about him by a colleague who knew him better than I did in the Birmingham Post. Anyway, about a month after that reunion, on 21 June, he died of complications following a heart attack. And I felt a sense of wonder that I’d been able to see him, and that our meeting had felt so meaningful even before what subsequently happened.