Debussy, Ravel and Co. on Zoom 2: 1912 to 1937

Our first term with the two French maîtres and their contemporaries brought revelations, to me, at any rate: those which stand out especially, because I didn't really know either, are Chausson's exquisite incidental music for a puppet-theatre production of The Tempest - first ever use of the celesta - and the incredible subtleties of Debussy's piano Images, enriched especially by film of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

There will be less Debussy in this term's 10 Thursday afternoon classes, starting in two days' time, more Ravel, for the simple reason that Ravel lived longer, into the post-war era of Les Six and even that of early Messiaen. We start with Jeux, a score that still baffles me: is it as great and exploratory as so many people suggest? Then there will be the 'late' Debussy sonatas; at the 2024 Sheffield Chamber Music Festival I was amazed at several of the late specimens for wind by Saint-Saëns, which will also feature. Ravel then enters the jazz era, and the ferment of 1920s Paris, an amazing scene. 

Here's the flyer - click to enlarge and contact me if you'd like to sign up. You can get the videos if you can't attend any or all of the classes. Don't forget it's not too late to sign for the Monday course on Wagner's Die Walküre, as I only started last week and yesterday was a Bank Holiday.

French music after Berlioz: the next Zoom step

After a Zoom term and a half on Berlioz, I moved on to Saint-Saëns and Chabrier (total originals, earning their places in the front rank of composers however light they may mostly have kept it), Franck and Chausson, with the adventure in fascinating Fauré launched but to be continued. I'd originally thought of this term on Debussy and the summer spent with Ravel, but because their fellow composers still need to keep making appearances, decided to do both chronologically: this term will take us up to 1914. 

I've discovered some real rarities along the way - Saint-Saëns's early chamber music, Chausson's incidental music to a puppet-play version of Shakespeare's The Tempest (which starts with the first ever appearance of the celesta). I'm sure more will emerge from Thursday afternoon onwards (looking forward, for instance, to discovering more of Mel Bonis). Join us live from tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon onwards or get the videos if you can't attend. Details below (click to enlarge). 

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.

Kikkas and Rouvali: two Nordic masters

Last Thursday I only just had time to pop in to the Estonian Embassy in South Kensington for the launch of Kaupo Kikkas's Treescape exhibition - or rather half of it, since the whole couldn't be housed in the two rooms. Here he is in the centre surrounded by Estonian friends and friends of Estonia (I am, ostensibly nerdily but rather more tongue-in-cheek, displaying my Pärnu Festival bag):

And then I hopped on my bike and only just made it in time for Finn Santtu-Mattias Rouvali's first concert as co-Principal Guest Conductor (with the equally superlative Jakub Hrůša) of the Philharmonia. My photo of him in his conductor's room at the Gothenburg Concert Hall back in September (and a perspective on his Sibelius Kullervo here).

Certainly I'd put these two on the highest artistic level. Kaupo is one of the few who have you answering the perennial 'is photography art?' question with a passionate 'yes' (the contrast I would make might be with the excellent photographs taken by the Frenchman Jérémie Jung of the Kihnu women which ran at Europe House's 12-Star Gallery - superior documentation).

Indeed, the somewhat periphrastic description 'visual artist' fits Kaupo better than 'photographer'. He takes the best shots of classical musicians I know, but this was on a different level. I'd already seen the PDF of what should, must, be a proper book of his Estonian tree photos, but encountering them on the bright white walls of the Embassy in full symmetrical compositions - in two cases, the big image flanked by icon-like photos encased in wood - was something else altogether.

I should reproduce at least part of his accompanying mini-essay, which begins by declaring that he can find no words for what he feels about trees, saying it with a camera instead. He continues:

I am not a tree-hugger, an esoteric or particularly religious, but when I'm standing in the forest, I always get this indefinable feeling and the desire to describe it. I have been aided a lot by the writings of Hermann Hesse [see here, glorious] and Valdur Mikita, or perhaps not the texts themselves but the authors' desire to describe a feeling that cannot be described.

[Writing about his 'great love' of old houses and fishing sheds':] I have also used...wood in my work - in the first hundred years the tree matured, the next hundred years it spent as part of a wall and now that that building has decayed and nature has taken over again, I picked up the old wood and gave it a role in my own story.

In order to stress what is important and to remove as much of the natural environment from the picture as possible, I have chosen the classical black and white medium. The pictures have a lot of texture and patterned dynamics accompanied with several double exposures.

So far I can only gloze superficially - I need to go back and see the pictures without the social context in which I half-glimpsed them last week. But I do know that this chimes with my own tree-love, the reading of Mabey, Deakin, MacFarlane, Picton-Turbervill the Younger et al. Anyway, here below are two of my favourite women, multitaskers extraordinaires but first and foremost a bassoonist and a pianist, Tea Tuhkur and Sophia Rahman, at the table nearest to the camera listening to Kaupo's speech last week. The wonderful Kersti Kirs just behind them; many of the other folk I don't know.

Rouvali's Thursday territory, on the other hand, was almost too known, with the exception of Kabalevsky's Colas Breugnon Overture, an opening glass of champagne which has the right to be called the Soviet Candide or Till Eulenspiegel and which I know from recordings but had never heard in the concert hall before. Rachmaninov's Paganini Rhapsody had much more interest in the orchestra - the typical Rouvali skill of suspending a phrase in mid-air captured by the cor anglais at the end of the variation just before the first appearance of the Dies Irae - than in Denis Kozhukhin's clear but deadpan delivery: no fantasy or flight there.

What was most exciting wasn't so much the superb performance of the Musorgsky/Ravel Pictures at an Exhibition but the way it brought the many teenage school or undergraduate groups in the hall to their feet the minute 'The Great Gate of Kiev' had finished resounding. Rouvali (pictured above by another KK, a Finnish compatriot of Rouvali, I guess, Kaapo Kamu) is one of those conductors, like Jurowski, where what you see is what you get. His hand gestures are both beautiful - especially the circular movements - and meaningful; the rest of him dances. No wonder 'Tuileries' and 'The Ballet of the Unhatched Chicks' scintillated. And this seemed like a different Philharmonia string group from the impassive lot which went along with Salonen's faceless Sibelius the previous week: the unison power of 'Bydlo' and 'Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle' was astonishing. So yes, what was already confirmed in Gothenburg had extra impact here given a harder-to-impress London orchestra. Great things ahead.

Proms hat trick

That's partly a reference to Falla's vibrant ballet El sombrero de tres picos, but chiefly to an historic seven days at the Proms, with not only a Ring cycle at the highest level possible but also two other impressive feats: squeezing in Tristan und Isolde between Siegfried and Götterdämmerung, all three of which I had to miss because of my proud association with the Brittenfest in north Norfolk, and the participation of the stunning Antonio Márquez Company in Juanjo Mena's BBC Philharmonic spectacular of Beethoven, Falla and Ravel.

Had the dancers made it into the Proms prospectus, I would have noticed and made a special effort to go (bulletins were subsequently sent out to advertise their addition, but I somehow overlooked those). I can't regret going to the English National Ballet triple bill that Thursday night instead, and I love the only-connect fact that shortly after we'd seen a state-of-the-art Petrushka with Benois's designs and Fokine's choreography, orchestra and dancers at the Albert Hall were to some extent recreating a Ballets Russes hit of 1919.

That second half with Ravel's Boléro following The Three-Cornered Hat, at any rate, I managed to see on its BBC Four transmission, and colleague Jasper was absolutely right in his five-star 'Danza Erotica' review on The Arts Desk. On the platform where Anja Kampe, Nina Stemme and Bryn Terfel had sung and acted their hearts out two nights before, the dancers gave us sex without the usual cliches. Founder and star Márquez justifies his position, electrifying in the Miller's Dance of the Falla one-acter (pictured below) and dripping buckets of sweat as he launched Boléro shirtless.

The patterns of various dancers outlined the different phases in the slowly crescendoing tune; the stamping only heightened the orchestral excitement. And let's not forget the fact that Boléro started life to choreography by Ida Rubinstein's company, mixing factory rhythms and sensual provocation. Is this a first for the Proms? I know there's been dancing before an orchestra before, chiefly when Rostropovich conducted Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet at the Barbican and the Lithuanian Ballet joined in, but surely never at this level.

It won't eclipse memories of a slower, deeper-digging Boléro at the Proms conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen with subtler Ravel at the other end of the scale in the shape of the complete Ma mère l'oye ballet, but it was certainly something I've never seen before. Here's it is on YouTube. I fear they've clipped the first few seconds of side-drum, but at least it's otherwise complete. You can still watch the whole BBC Four transmission on the iPlayer for the next few days.

In its way, this was every inch as much of an achievement as 'the Barenboim Ring', though less widely noted. Much as my attention was riveted by every note and gesture of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, the climax to the week would have been the Götterdämmerung - I was bathing blissfully in a warm North Sea off Holm Beach as it began - and clearly Barenboim's afterspeech thanking the Prommers for their silence was deeply felt.

I need to disgorge all my impressions about Britten in South Creake, Wells-next-the-Sea and Holt, but I can't download my own photos at the moment for several complicated reasons, and I still need some Yorke Trust snaps of their Midsummer Night's Dream. I'm sure it can wait; happy memories keep me going meanwhile. And now to the Proms Tannhäuser. 

5/8 Still buzzing from it. Duly eulogised on The Arts Desk. Another Prom for the history books. And how could I resist a couple more of the indefatigable Chris Christodoulou's shots, others of which feature above? As I wrote on TAD, Runnicles is a gift for him - and a match for Barenboim, which is putting it mildly.

This big handsome man, Estonian bass Ain Anger, is a new god on the block. Read why over there.

Tombsongs

Only connect - Berlioz's first score of total bloody-minded genius, La mort de Cleopatre is really about Juliet after all; and so it's back to my idee fixe of last month. I listened to it again - Janet Baker with Alexander Gibson, both electrifying - in preparation for tonight's pre-performance talk before the LPO concert conducted by the electrifying Yannick Nezet-Seguin, another born galvanizer, with statuesque Anna Caterina Antonacci as the serpent of old Nile. Do come along to the main Festival Hall auditorium at 6.15 and I'll take you through some of the extraordinary sounds Berlioz gave birth to, in later composers as much as in himself. It's a help that Ravel, the other greatest orchestrator of all time, shares the programme.

So. Not only is the first part of the Cleopatra monologue hardly what the Prix de Rome judges were looking for in 1829 - it breaks up, it modulates restlessly, the aria proper never settles - but the ensuing 12/8 Invocation, vintage Berlioz, is really a preparatory study for Juliet's death (though its inspiration and final shudders are completely different from the tomb scene in the 'dramatic symphony').


Wrote Berlioz to a friend: 'I wish you could hear the scene where Cleopatra wonders "how her shade will be received by the shades of the Pharaohs entombed in the pyramids". It's awesome, tremendous! It's the scene where Juliet meditates on her entombment in the vault of the Capulets, surrounded alive by the bones of her ancestors and the corpse of Tybalt: the growing dread, the thoughts that culminate in cries of terror, accompanied by cellos and basses plucking the rhythm [which he writes out]. Oh!, Shakespeare, Shakespeare!'

Indeed. And this is another Berlioz inspiration where the music, if not the text, does the Bard justice. Anyway, I'm looking forward hugely to the performance. Better dash now, but if you can't make it, here's the peerless Dame Granite in the second-half Invocation: