Heavenly conversations in a year of Zoom classes

Ian Page, inspirational founder of what was originally Classical Opera and now goes by the collective vocal/orchestral heading of The Mozartists, wondered if his e-mail comment wouldn't look a bit pretentious out of context when I asked him if I might quote it. I'll still do so because it expressed what I've felt about those especially magical Zoom classes where musicians who haven't seen each other for some time - or even decades - find themselves together in the class and start conversing. Ian was referring to meetings with that wonderful mezzo Jean Rigby and her husband, the director Jamie Hayes, whom he hadn't seen for a quarter of a century, then with Mark Wigglesworth and Linda Esther Gray in the last Fidelio class, and added 'I've never been a particularly religious person, but it was almost like a vision of the afterlife, being able to chat about music with loved and respected friends and colleagues in a haven of timelessness!' Above, Mark (second from the right in the bottom row) is making us laugh. Ian is at the right next row up, Linda is on the left on the row above that and of course that's me second from left at the top (click if you want a bigger image).

The other three-way (four if you count myself as interlocutor) 'heavenly conversation' that brought us so much joy was between director Richard Jones and Wagnerian sopranos Sue Bullock and Dame Anne Evans. It was originally supposed to be spotlight on Richard, to talk about Act 2 of Götterdämmerung, but Sue and Anne had said they wanted to come along to see him. Sue was ready to speak, Anne had been wondering whether Zoom was for her and had asked to be a silent observer, but the other two shouted 'C'mon, Annie', so she did - and was still there at the very end as we were still shaking from emotion at her performance in Kupfer's Bayreuth Act 2. You can get a sense of the fun that was had from the below screen shot (Richard top left, Anne with a bit of husband and distinguished writer John Lucas top right, Sue centre of the second row).

So many connections made with the great and good in what now amounts to nearly a year of Zoom classes, starting out of pure necessity, have been serendipitous and charmed. I asked Ian to the Fidelio/Leonore classes because he's just released two superb CDs of 'Sturm und Drang' music familiar and obscure, and I wanted him to comment on Pizarro's raging. He then said that he'd been thinking the night before about scores he really wanted to conduct, which he was thinking about studying with a view to that, and Fidelio was at the forefront. So he came for the next four sessions. Similarly a New Best Friend made as a result of all this, the conductor (and top bassoonist) Catherine Larsen Maguire, based in Berlin, was recommended for my fourth class on the symphony, to talk about Schumann 2 and Brahms 1, and has been with us, on and off, ever since. Sometimes one of her cats, Lily, makes an appearance, though I confess the golden shot below isn't from one of our encounters.

It seems hard to believe that coming up to a year ago, I was grappling with the implications of taking my Opera in Depth class on to Zoom (we managed to reach the top of the mountain with Siegfried at Pushkin House on 9 March 2020). I was surprised and impressed by the number of students, especially the senior members, willing to give the format a try. The first class was bedevilled by poor sound quality for the excerpts, but I got some help before the second in finding how to do it perfectly. YouTube and DVD clips fell into place at a later date. The symphony course got more takers than I'd expected - after my 'Inside the BBC Symphony Orchestra' course at Morley college ended because the BBC doesn't support private classes, it had been difficult to drum up numbers for orchestral music. I'm eternally grateful to Dale Bilsland of the Wagner Society of Scotland for suggesting that, since the usual Gartmore House Ring adventure was out of the question in September, I should repeat Siegfried on Zoom. Many of the new visitors not only joined me for Götterdämmerung but have also signed up for other operas and the Russian music course which will enter its fourth term in mid-April. so we've been hitting the 60-students mark. A special debt of thanks to Kirk Davis of Southern California, who rises at 6am to join us at 2.30pm UK time: a born giver.

And so we've reached the Easter break, going out on a high with the second of my extra classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace, which ran to three hours and 40 minutes thanks to the unstinting and ceaselessly fascinating presence of Graham Vick (now a 'Sir', knighted in January) who stayed with us as I ran scenes from his 2014 Mariinsky production. He'd also been responsible for the 1991 Kirov experiment, again with Gergiev, and so was a witness to history - the new adventure beginning in the 1990s, which I also witnessed on my first visits to Leningrad as it transitioned back to St Petersburg, the shutdown well under way by 2014, when Putin invaded Crimea and an amazingly radical production had to jump through all sorts of hoops to reach the stage (I'm still surprised it did). Graham told us, among other things, that the manager of the Louis Vuitton shop below where he was staying told him that their prices were higher than any other store in the world. The Russian kleptocrats expected to pay more. Needless to see, this found its way into the 'Frenchified', corrupt world of Helene and Anatol. What I hadn't realised was that the 'retreat from Moscow' was supposed to represent the exit of western values in 2014.

It looks like boasting, but actually the below list is just a record for my own benefit of the astonishing number of visits we had from musical stars. All were happy to feel part of something at a time when isolation was the norm.

The Symphony

Class 1: Haydn with Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page

Class 2: Mozart's 'Jupiter' and Beethoven's ‘Eroica’ with Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan Bloxham

Class 3: Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique with Nicholas Collon

Class 4: Schumann's Second and Brahms's First with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Class 5: Brahms's Fourth and Tchaikovsky's ‘Pathetique’ with Vladimir Jurowski

Class 6: Mahler's Third with Paavo Järvi

Class 7: Mahler's Ninth and Elgar's Second with Vasily Petrenko

Class 8: Sibelius's Fifth and Nielsen's Fifth with Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste

Class 9: Martinů's Third, Prokofiev's Sixth and Vaughan Williams's Sixth with Mark Elder

Class 10: Shostakovich's Fifteenth with Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning

Class 11: Adams's Harmonielehre with Catherine Larsen-Maguire

Russian Music 1: Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition with Samson Tsoy; Tchaikovsky piano music with Pavel Kolesnikov

Russian Music 2: Stravinsky’s Petrushka with Gergely Madaras; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring with Andrew Litton; Scriabin with Alexander Melnikov and Peter Jablonski (Peter was driving to a recording session at the time but made a beautifully produced short film from his home in Sweden).

Russian Music 3: Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony and Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk with Elizabeth Wilson; Prokofiev ‘War Sonatas’ and Shostakovich Second Piano Trio with Steven Osborne and Boris Giltburg; Prokofiev’s violin sonatas with Alina Ibragimova and Benjamin Baker.

Opera in Depth Summer term: Strauss’s Elektra with regular commentary from Susan Bullock, Puccini’s Madama Butterfly with three separate visits from Ermonela Jaho, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder

Wagner’s Siegfried (Wagner Society of Scotland) with John Tomlinson

Opera in Depth Autumn term: Wagner's Götterdämmerung with Susan Bullock and Richard Berkeley-Steele, John Tomlinson, Anne Evans and Richard Jones

Opera in Depth Spring term: Beethoven's Fidelio/Leonore with Elizabeth Watts, Jay Hunter Morris, Ian Page, Linda Esther Gray and Mark Wigglesworth

Prokofiev's War and Peace, two extra classes: Graham Vick

These wonderful people have all come along for the love of music. I do like to send them various thanks, preferably books. My good Estonian friend Kaupo Kikkas could be called upon to supply the book of his Ansel exhibition to three contributors I knew would appreciate it. I won't mention the third yet because it needs to be a surprise, but the first two delighted recipients were Jay Hunter Morris, mighty Met Siegfried, whose YouTube film of the amazing Souper Jenny Kindness Tour he undertook with wife, son and friends around America showed me they'd visited the big natural wonders, and Boris Giltburg, who's a talented photographer as well as a great pianist. Kaupo sent me shots of the notes and dedication - this one to JMo.

And now, time to gather forces again, and enjoy what looks like it might be a rather clement Easter break. We return on 19 April to begin the summer term of Opera in Depth with Britten's Albert Herring and Mozart's La clemenza di Tito (coinciding with a new production at the Royal Opera: director Richard Jones and conductor Mark Wigglesworth have promised to visit us - hopefully together). Russian Music 4 begins with the shadow of the Zhdanov trials of 1948 on 22 April. If you'd like to join, drop me a message here with your email; I won't publish it but I shall respond.

Fidelio/Leonore and more Russians: Zoom 2021

Zoom has been my salvation in 2020, and not just in terms of keeping financially afloat. To realise how much it's meant not just to an ever-expanding group of students but also to the great performers who so generously found the time to make special guest appearances has been (and I don't use the term lightly) humbling. We've had wonderful appearances from Sue Bullock, Anne Evans, Richard Jones and John Tomlinson (captured below, looking more Gurnemanz than Wotan - he was in fact talking Hagen - at the class by a student) over the 10 Mondays on Wagner's Götterdämmerung, completing our Ring survey over three and a half years. In the latest Russian music term covering 1910 to 1917 there's been enlightenment on Stravinsky's Petrushka from Gergely Madaras, on his Rite of Spring from Andrew Litton and Catherine Larsen-Maguire (extended to two whole classes), and on Scriabin from Alexander Melnikov and Peter Jablonski.

For all of us involved on a regular basis, it's given a shape to the week, and for many, an alternative to live performances (for which, of course, there's no real substitute, but needs and circumstances must). Take the two one-offs on the Tchaikovsky ballets - The Sleeping Beauty on 30 December and The Nutcracker on the 21st. They came about because one student lamented that she would no longer be able to go to any of the planned, socially distanced Nutcrackers given the third, and severest, lockdown of the year. We could at least share our pleasure in the beauties of these amazing masterpieces. I can't resist featuring again the late, much missed Maria Björnson's most ravishing design for the Royal Ballet Sleeping Beauty that came in for so much stick (I hymned the whole achievement on the blog here). Watched the entire DVD again yesterday and for me it's still the most magical Beauty. This is the Panorama from the second act, turned into a winter's tale.

These were also interludes between terms on Russian music - the first two have taken us from Glinka to Prokofiev's observations on the end of 1917, while the next covers 1917 to 1953, mainly but not exclusively Soviet (we have to follow the adventures of Prokofiev and Stravinsky in the west, too). I planned the Opera in Depth term to begin on 11 January with Beethoven's Fidelio (image up top, of the excellent Garsington Opera concert staging, by Johan Persson) and its original version, Leonore - on the special urging of Mark Wigglesworth, who's just conducted Fidelio for Opera North and wants most of all to 'do' Leonore at English National Opera - before moving on for the following five Mondays to Prokofiev's The Fiery Angel; as far as I can remember - and my records are still stored on the previous computer which went bust - I haven't covered it in over 30 years of Opera in Focus/Depth and it would tie in with what we're doing in the other course. It's also unclear what the main companies will be staging, so why not take advantage of an opera that's not appearing in any repertoires for the foreseeable future? By summer it should be clearer what the two last operas of the season should be.

Here's my planned itinerary for Russian music 1918-1953, subject to change depending on circumstances and special visits. Pictured below: Nikolay Myaskovsky and Sergey Prokofiev, friends born 10 years apart, in 1927, detail of a photo taken from the first volume of my Prokofiev biography (sorry to link to Amazon, but my online seller of choice, hive.co.uk, reports it out of stock).

1: Adventures abroad, dark times at home  7 January

Prokofiev travels to America while Myaskovsky stays at home and remains true to his characteristic moods of gloom and pessimism. Myaskovsky's Fourth and Fifth Symphonies contrasted with Prokofiev's shorter works of 1918-19 and the exuberance of The Love for Three Oranges.

2: Stravinsky in Switzerland; the Ballets Russes transformed   14 January

Stravinsky's Russian trilogy begins with the small-scale experiments of Renard (Baika) and L'Histoire du soldat. Ever the seeker after novelty, Diaghilev engages a fresh range of artists to work with composers old and new. With special emphasis on Prokofiev's Chout (Larionov design pictured below) followed by Stravinsky's Pulcinella and Les noces (Svadebka).

3: Enter Shostakovich  21 January

With a prefatory look at Myaskovsky's biggest and darkest symphony, the Sixth, followed by the First Symphony with which the precocious teenage Shostakovich, Petrograd/Leningrad Conservatoire student, burst upon the scene. His first total masterpiece, the Prelude and Scherzo for string octet, is followed by a singular marking of the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution in what became known as his Second Symphony of 1927

4: 1927  28 January

The apogee of Soviet modernism, still strongly connected to developments in the west. We look at machine-age music by Prokofiev, Mossolov and Deshevov, and through Prokofiev's detailed diary entries for his first visit to the Soviet Union in 1927 look at the young musicians whose music he heard while he was there, chief among them Gavriil Popov with his remarkable Chamber Symphony.

5: A Gogol opera and two ballets  4 February

The young Shostakovich's reputation continued to grow with his wildly expressionistic opera The Nose and his two full-length ballets, The Golden Age and The Bolt - though proletarian musicians' organisations were now on the attack.

6: Two edicts, two masterpieces, 1932-6  11 February

The move to bring the querulous proletarian musicians' groups under one banner, the Association of Soviet Music, in 1932, looked like a good thing at the time, though it spelled trouble ahead. Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, completed at the end of that year, ran successfully in Moscow and Leningrad for two years before the blow fell with the Pravda attack on it in January 1936. Still he pressed ahead with his outlandish Fourth Symphony, but it was withdrawn before the scheduled public premiere at the end of the year. With special guest Elizabeth Wilson.

7: Soviet film scores, 1929-1938 - from New Babylon to Alexander Nevsky  18 February

Shostakovich worte his first film score for Kozintsev and Trauberg's New Babylon in 1929; Prokofiev worked on Feinzimmer's Lieutenant Kije four years later before becoming a true Soviet artist in 1938 with his music for Eisenstein's Alexander Nevsky. With clips from those films as well as Alone, Counterplan and Volga-Volga.

8: The 'Soviet' Symphony, 1935-1945  25 February

Picking up on the first Russian symphony to cause real controversy, Popov's First, performed in 1935, we see how Shostakovich followed a superficially safer trajectory in his Fifth before ringing the changes in the Sixth. We end with Prokofiev's own special circumventing of socialist-realist formulas in his Fifth, premiered at the beginning of 1945 and seen (wrongly) as a victory symphony. Pictured below; Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Khachaturian in 1940.

9: Chamber and instrumental 1938-45 4 March

Shostakovich's new journey in chamber music began with a kind of neoclassical purity, but Russia's dramatic entry into the Second World War opened up freedom in music again: the Second String Quartet and Second Piano Trio mark a dramatic change in course. Alongside them we also look at Prokofiev's so-called 'War' piano sonatas (6-8).With special guests Steven Osborne and Boris Giltburg.

10: The dangerous path to 1948   11 March

Two more towering symphonies, Shostakovich's Eighth and Prokofiev's Sixth, dare a naked sense of despair. After the war, it was time for the authorities to turn the screw again, which they did with Zhdanov's notorious trials of 'formalism in music', banishing the possibilities of dissonance and anguish expressed in music. Pictured below: Shostakovich in Leipzig, 1950.

I can see from this that I haven't managed to fit everything in: there will be two extra classes on Prokofiev's War and Peace. If anyone wants to join who isn't already on my list of students, just leave a message here with your email address. I won't publish it, but I shall certainly reply.

From Firebird to Revolution, 1910-17

First term of my Russian music course on Zoom went well, by which I mean there were lots of happy students and I enjoyed every minute of it, firming up allegiances and discovering more (especially in the sphere of chamber music). In the end we covered ground from Glinka to early Rachmaninov, stopping at 1900, with a few glimpses into the future. My original idea, to devote the 10th class to Stravinsky's The Firebird as a last great synthesis of the fantasy tradition, was postponed simply because the one class I'd intended on Musorgsky's and Tchaikovsky's piano music turned into two. 

That was because Samson Tsoy had so much to say about Pictures at an Exhibition and his partner Pavel Kolesnikov, who popped up briefly at the end of that class, was happy to return a couple of weeks later. When great musicians are willing to come along, as they did for every class of my course on the symphony, you have to be flexible (pictured below by Eva Vermandel, Samson and Pavel during their phenomenal Ragged Music Festival, from which I'm still recovering: read what one of my students described as a 'palpitating' review - that's got to be better than 'gushing').

I'd also intended to go straight on from the first term to Soviet music. But it occurred to me that those seven amazing years from 1910 to 1917 could take a term of their own, albeit one of seven classes (taking a break and mapping out the possible up to Christmas meant I ended up with that number). Here's the plan. We start on Thursday 29 October and each class runs from 2.30pm-4.30pm (longer under certain circumstances). £10 a class so £70 for the term. Special guests TBC, though two top pianists have already shown willingness. UPDATE (19/11) Seven classes have evolved into eight, due to an enrichment not unlike the one we had in the first term.

 1: The Firebird and the end of a tradition  29 October

Stravinsky's first ballet for Diaghilev - the exotic exported to Paris - reflected the fairy-tale compendium of its scenario with homages to the fantasies of his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov and others, but also nodded to the harmonic experiments of Scriabin and looked forward to the rhythmic revolution of The Rite of Spring. I'll be placing it in the context of the 19th century tradition as well as the early years of the 20th century. Pictured above: Mikhail Fokine and Tamara Karsavina in the 1910 Ballets Russes premiere.

2: Petrushka and Russian popular song  5 November

Stocked high with highly original treatments of familiar folk/urban song, Stravinsky's fairground ballet of 1911 features a radical use of orchestration which owes its originality to Tchaikovsky's example. But it is also startlingly modern in the scenes featuring the pathetic Russian Pierrot come to life. Hungarian-born conductor Gergely Madaras is our special guest.

3: The Rite of Spring I: mostly melodic and traditional  12 November

Often overshadowed in the stress on rhythmic iconoclasm is Stravinsky's use of singing themes - only three of them this time taken from folk sources. Again, the mix of modernism and tradition is startling. Pictured above: maidens in Nicolas Roerich's designs for the Ballets Russes premiere of 1913. Andrew Litton, whose BIS recordings of Petrushka and The Rite of Spring are such a revelation, joined us for this class, and going with the flow meant we were only halfway through what needed to be said and demonstrated about the work. A second hour was intended the following week, which stretched to two - hence the offer I've just made of a free eighth class.

4: The Rite of Spring 2: polyrhythms and unfathomable accents  19 November

Andrew's return yielded more fascinating chapter and verse, and the return of Catherine Larsen-Maguire gave us insights into the writing for bassoon - her instrument before she changed to conducting. Leonard Bernstein in his Norton lecture 'The Poetry of Earth', Pina Bausch's choreography and Stravinsky speaking again on the aftermath also joined the party.

5: ''Footballish' pianism and audacious orchestral tricks: the young Prokofiev  26 November

 

 

First appearing on the scene in the same St Petersburg Evenings of Contemporary Music where Stravinsky made his debut, a young Conservatoire student quickly created a sensation. With special focus on Prokofiev's first two piano concertos, early piano pieces and the Scythian Suite derived from his first ballet music for Diaghilev, Ala and Lolly.

6: Rachmaninov's The Bells and his Vespers as part of the revived Russian Orthodox tradition  3 December

 

The rediscovery of ancient church traditions only really took off in the early 1900s, and was flourishing when the revolution put a stop to so many schools of choral music. Before that happened, though, it produced its greatest synthesis-masterpiece, Rachmaninov's numbers for the All-Night Easter Vigil known as the Vespers, in total contrast to his choral symphony inspired by Edgar Allen Poe The Bells.

7: Scriabin: mystic chords and apocalyptic visions  10 December

 

 

Boris Pasternak thought him 'warped, posed and opinionated' but also as bright as the sun in his music; Prokofiev found his harmonic discoveries a millstone weighing down his options. But there's no doubt that Alexander Scriabin was a true original

 

8: On the eve of an earthquake  17 December

 

What kind of music were the Russian composers creating as the February and then the October revolutions broke? Prokofiev's diary gives a special insight into where he was and what he was doing at these times, with cinematic descriptions of being caught up in the chaos of Petrograd early in the year. We also look at Rachmaninov's last great compositional flowering before exile and the need to tour as pianist slowed down his creativity.

 

Do join us - and if you can't do so on the afternoon, I send out recordings (video if film is used, audio otherwise). You don't need to have attended the previous course. If you're interested, just send me a message with your email: I won't publish it, but I promise to respond.