Rameau and other revelations

I'd never have believed until Sunday that I could be so intoxicated with both the genius of Rameau and a production by Jonathan Kent, a director I'd always had down as a magpie plundering the ideas of others. But Glyndebourne worked its special magic and there we were, treading on air after five crammed-to-bursting acts. Hippolyte et Aricie, Rameau's first tragédie lyrique composed in 1733 when he was 50 years old, is a masterpiece, no doubt about it.

This is, above all, what you get when a fine team of singers and players - the magnificent, muscled Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment - works for over six weeks with a man who knows his Rameau inside out. As William Christie unquestionably does. I hear hair-raising tales about him from performers, but he gets the results, above all in the sometimes ferocious projection of that phenomenal string writing which puts Rameau in the top league of orchestration, the true ancestor of Berlioz and Ravel.

The composer brings on two tremendous frissons toward the respective ends of his third and fourth acts: the extraordinary effect of rushing waters as Theseus, believing himself wronged by his son Hippolytus rather than his wife Phaedra, invokes father Neptune (François Lis and Stéphane Degout pictured below as father and son) to punish the adulterer; and the grave divisions after the curse becomes a reality, Phaedra's exit to suicide.

Melodically, there are more pleasures than I'd have thought possible. Rameau is not all declamation, like Lully - who of course also has his exceptions - and among the loveliest set pieces are Phaedra's two arias of torment, the idyll of Aricia- drafted in as pallid contrast to the bad stepmother - having rediscovered her Hippolytus,  a nightingale number and, most memorable of all, a luminous Musette for chorus and orchestra (Glyndebourne Chorus, it should go without saying, superlative throughout).

To say that all these were well performed is an understatement. Style came hand in glove with beauty of tone from everyone involved, Sarah Connolly's Phaedra matched every inch by soprano Christiane Karg as Aricia. Ed Lyon (pictured with her above in the wonderful woodland scene),  travelling down on the train in a muscle-freeing vest, is not quite the hunk vocally, but cut the mustard; even more spirited tenor contributions came from Matthias Vidal in the first act and Loic Felix in the second.

And how some of us love it that Rameau has no cause for countertenors here, but favours the virile male voice, in which respect we could not have asked for more from Degout's tormented Theseus and Lis as three gods in one person (Jupiter, Pluto and Neptune).

The drama is as piled high with incident as the score, though we got the nub of the Phaedra-Hippolytus-Theseus tangle in a third act which Kent has been careful to locate downstage, making it a domestic drama in a clinical modern home.

Each act deserves a different style, which is where the genius of designer Paul Brown comes in so useful. The joky fridge-machinations of ice goddess Diana versus furry Cupid were fine given that the Prologues of tragédies lyriques tend to be a little bit boring and need as much livening-up as they can get.

In Act One, Diana's votaries frolic in white, blithely cut stag throats and roll around in blood; Connolly's Phaedra appears among them in striking red, while the lovers keep their purity costume-wise throughout.

The second act in Hades is an odd 'un, purely there for infernal spectacle - especially since this is our first meeting with Theseus. Pluto lives at the back of the fridge with sundry flies and spiders, cue for the more outlandish of Ashley Page's dances (which are pretty safe for the most part, more's the pity).

Great music only accumulates from the third act onwards, though. The pink-lit sailor ballet, so at odds with the domestic crisis, kept its queasiness, I thought, and the forest scene matched the 21st and 18th centuries with garish aplomb. Kent also, quite uncharacteristically, tied it all together with a finale in a mortuary (more iceboxes, of course). I didn't entirely buy the undermining of the happy end - and what's with the Fura dels Baus style old man's head on the curtain: old Theseus looking back? - but there was nothing to deflate our helium-filled delight. Another afternoon/evening of Glyndebourne perfection.

Unfortunately I can't detain you with any more shots of another summer idyll by the lake, because my laptop's gone into rehab and there are many things I can't do on the machine Juliette has so kindly loaned me. There's just time to recap on all the other new or live-new hearings I've been stunned by recently. Report on Britten's startlingly profound, almost Wagnerian Noye's Fludde in heavenly Tewkesbury Cathedral is now up on The Arts Desk, with glimpses of sundry other Cheltenham delights (including Poulenc two-piano stunners heard in concert for the first time). Here's a further flavour of my new/old hero James Mayhew's design for the ark with its dove-prow, photo by Malcolm Pollock.

On the listening front, I've had too few words (30 a disc on a BBC Music Mag 'In Brief' roundup) to wax lyrical about the sheer lacy beauty of a symphony and Shakespeare 'preludes' by that lovely romantic Joachim Raff; Neeme Järvi and the Suisse Romande Orchestra do it all proud.

Who says the Second Symphony doesn't have tunes? It starts with middle-European bucolics almost on a par with the beginning of Dvorak's Sixth, and its scherzo has wondrous woodwind writing. Best of all, perhaps, is the Ariel music in the Tempest tone-poem, though all four Shakespeare settings have their sensitivities.

It was serendipity that just after I'd been banner-headlining my hope of hearing the comic opera The Sacred Goose by Hans Gál (pictured above) following what Michael Haas had written about it in Forbidden Music, along came a recording of the Second Symphony. It's part of a cycle pairing the Austrian's four symphonies with Schumann's and comes from Kenneth Woods and the Orchestra of the Swan, which sounds like such a fine orchestra in the exemplary Avie recording.

The Second ought to be a profoundly tragic work; when he composed it in 1942, Gál was an exile in England. In that year, his mother died, his sister and aunt escaped Auschwitz only by taking their own lives and his youngest son committed suicide. Instead of darkness, though, the Second is more remarkable for the radiance and rigour of its laments. I find it incredible that it should end so peacefully. There's a comparison here with Martinů's Third, a greater work no doubt; and yet Gál's nostalgic style is so obviously the man, and a good man at that. Time now to investigate the other three symphonies.

All Glyndebourne production images by Bill Cooper

Dyre desire of Light

Heading his manuscript copy of The Dream of Gerontius, Elgar quotes John Florio’s translation of Virgil via Montaigne:  ‘Whence so dyre desire of Light on wretches grow?’ One of James MacMillan’s themes in his lecture for the Royal Philharmonic Society yesterday was how we wretches today, whether religious in the narrow sense of the word or the wider, still desire the light that music’s most transcendent passages can offer us. Actually, that sounds impossibly pompous, as JMacM’s soft-spoken, reasonable speech, eschewing all mention of himself in that visionary tradition, did not. I couldn’t quite work out the connection between his opening thoughts on Blake as an example of a broader visionary vein in English art and his central assertion of the importance of Roman Catholicism in Elgar’s life and work, but it was all food for thought. Bust of Beethoven in my shot below there to mark the RPS's 200th anniversary.

It’s true, we do tend to shunt Elgar’s Catholicism rather to one side, even in discussing the composer’s most overt assertion of his faith in Gerontius (though what more do you want than the Jesuits’ ‘A.M.D.G’ - ‘Ad majorem Dei Gloria’, ‘To the greater glory of God’ - at the top of the above page?). But perhaps it’s also true – a point not addressed yesterday – that the Catholic fervour which came from Elgar’s mother, and certainly not from his staunchly Anglican father, dwindled in later years. I can’t find the quotations I want, but I still have the hunch that the 'single short remark' Elgar made to Ernest Newman on his deathbed so ‘terrible’ that the younger man never repeated them to anyone might have been ‘I lost my faith in God’ (more frivolously, on hearsay, I’d wish it to be ‘I always preferred young men’, but no more of that).

No matter; the speech threw up plenty of points for discussion and, as Jude Kelly in fine presenting fettle said, we could have sat and talked for another hour. Nice to chat briefly to The Man afterwards, and I’m hugely looking forward not only to hearing his Oboe Concerto again in Glasgow on Friday – he will be elsewhere – but also his new Viola Concerto, due to be premiered by Lawrence Power as part of The Rest is Noise festival. I think I’m right in saying, at least from checking the index, that Alex Ross in his book of that name doesn’t give a single mention to MacMillan, one of the major voices in music today – and one of my two favourites (Adams being the other, of course).

Two hours later, I was in the chair alongside venerable composer Anthony Payne, whom of course we have to thank among other things for that rather miraculous realization of Elgar’s Third Symphony, and Heather Wiebe, Virginia academic newly arrived at King’s College London. Our moderator was Tom Hutchinson of the RPS, and the theme, supposedly, was 'The Edwardian Empire: Society and Culture', obviously with special reference to the performance of Gerontius due to follow in the Royal Festival Hall.

I was wrong in thinking that Heather was there as the cultural historian; she, too, is a musicologist, this time specializing in Britten. So we all had to readapt as we launched our little presentations by way of a start. Frankly, I think the esteemed AP should have gone before me, for clearly I’d stolen some of his thunder with the line about Elgar the European; but I also managed to contrast that with the perceived notion of the court composer to Edward VII. And in any case, Anthony was so genial, wise and good at batting the ball back and forth that it all became a delightful discussion in praise of our composer’s terrific originality. Maybe an antagonist could have stirred it all up more productively, but we had fun – even if I seem to have blanked out chapter and verse in all the after-euphoria (hoping there’s a recording. 15/7 Just discovered there is, here on soundcloud, thanks to The Rest is Noise festival's impressive soundarchiving. James's talk is there too).

We were all of us, JMacM included, seated in what’s supposed to be the royal box for Elder’s performance in the evening. I can’t say it moved me much. This conductor works so hard on revelatory textures, gleaming in the hands of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a superb chorus master, there with every word for the LPO Chorus and the Clare College Cambridge singers who served as the semichoir. But he doesn’t strike me as having the natural tempo rubato which late romantic music like this requires. Everything seems dotted and crossed with excessive precision; you can see the wheels at work. And sometimes he’s just too slow, in the tradition of his beloved Goodall, which sank the Angel’s Farewell for me, resplendently as the ever-dependable Sarah Connollly delivered it.

I did love Paul Groves’s hard work on extracting every inch of meaning from Cardinal Newman’s text, though, and in pushing his far-from-Helden voice to the right limits of agony and exultation when needed. The clarity of this truly world-class score came across beautifully. But for me, the desired light never quite shone. Have gone over to Sakari Oramo’s Birmingham recording at home to find out what was missing, and there is all the magic in all the right places.

So, from ‘A.M.D.G’ to Bach’s ‘S.D.G.’ (‘Soli Deo gloria’, ‘Glory to God alone’). Much less heavy weather results from this week’s Sunday cantata (someone told me Radio 3 is following the same calendar as I am; I had no idea). ‘Alles nur nach Gottes Willen’, BWV 72, is one of the short cantatas for the third Sunday after Epiphany* - short, it's argued, because the choir would have got very cold at this time of year; they were allowed to slope off before the hour-long sermon. Lucky them; in my treble days we had to sit and read Commando comics under the desks.

God’s will as exemplified, perhaps, in the day’s reading from Matthew 8 about Christ's healing of a leper (mosaic above from Monreale), is all there is to it. So it makes for a rather complacent sequence, shorn of questioning or suffering The striking minor-key launch of darting, rather agitated strings slightly undercuts the chorus’s sentiments (‘All only according to God’s will’); the music was re-used, not so interestingly in my opinion, at the start of the Gloria in Bach’s G minor Mass, BWV 235.

The alto reaches to the still-lively heart of the cantata. His/her recitative turns to arioso in the nine lines beginning ‘Lord, if thou wilt’ and moves almost seamlessly into the aria with the addition of two solo violins to the cello and continuo line, fugueing in one of the ritornellos. There’s a simple, dancing soprano number and a chorale based on a text by Albert, Duke of Prussia and an old French theme used in a cantata of the previous year, 1725. There – I’ve got off lightly this week**, but I’m looking forward to being tested rather more by JSB in weeks to come. Here's another from Suzuki's Bach series, Robin Blaze replacing Sara Mingardo whom I heard on another instalment of John Eliot Gardiner's Bach Pilgrimage 2000.

*As 'Uncle Toby' points out below, I've got my church calendar in a muddle. This year we miss out on the third and fourth Sundays after Epiphany. This is Septuagesima, so I'll have to add another cantata. But that gives me the excuse of two more (fourth Sunday and Sexagesima) next week.

**Clearly not. The Septuagesima candidate I have to hand is 'Ich hab in Gottes Herz und Sinn', on an altogether grander scale. Shall do my duty willingly some time this week

Bells and farewells

Invited composer and Radio 3 presenter Robert Worby to talk to my BBCSO City Lit class last night - one of the few folk who can discuss really complicated things lucidly. Indeed, I'd go so far as to say he is to contemporary music what that real gent Brian Magee is to philosophy. The subject was something of a bete noire for me up to now, Brian Ferneyhough, prior to an 'immersion day' at the Barbican, and the students were gripped, though not perhaps entirely converted. If only the composer wrote as intelligibly about his head-music as Robert speaks. And just look at the crazy complexity of Ferneyhough's writing for string quartet.


One of the many dimensions touched upon was that of space, how RW's great inspirer Stockhausen especially distributes his forces. Robert spent quite a bit of time pointing out how we've been here before in most of the details, and in this case of course our man Berlioz was the pioneer (well, after Gabrieli, at any rate). In last Wednesday's electrifying performance of the Symphonie fantastique, the brilliant Yannick Nezet-Seguin paid special attention to the handful of spatial effects. So an oboe replied to the shepherd's cor anglais from a box high on the right side of the auditorium - not offstage, but ethereally hovering aloft, thus conjuring up a mountain landscape like this one in Verbier rather than the flat plains I've usually visualised in the Scene aux champs.


And the bells for the witches' sabbath were not only placed offstage left, with the doors spookily opening on an eerie white light, but doubled with a gong each for extra resonance. You can only see one of the gongs in the picture above, but here's percussionist Ignacio Molins demonstrating (he also rattled the military drum after the execution of the March to the Scaffold before leaving the platform for his final contribution). I heard the sound as if in the next room from the LPO office while waiting to go on for my talk, when in fact it was at least 30 yards away, and went to investigate. This is the result, all 21 seconds of it (mostly reverb).



The concert was a great event from the first, exquisite notes of Ravel's Sleeping Beauty to the last witchy stomp, drawing a roar from the crowd (Anna Caterina Antonacci's Cleopatra was riveting, too, though the double basses stole that particular show). My friend Edwina, whom I saw sitting some way away clapping her hands high above her head, said she thought it was the best concert she'd ever been to.

So we had to go back on Saturday to hear Yannick conduct Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, even though the Arts Desk's chokka music allocation meant it couldn't be written up there. The companion work, Mozart's Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola, was not a happy experience: YNS's lively, graceful conducting sat uneasily with the precious, effete playing of Stefan Jackiw and Richard Jongjae O'Neill (very weak viola sound from him). I could only think of Julian Rachlin and Lawrence Power at the Mackerras Memorial Concert, and wondered why the LPO hadn't settled for its excellent leader, Pieter Schoeman, and guest principal viola Tom Dunn.


No matter; we were there to hear how Sarah Connolly and Toby Spence fared in Mahler's most profound eastern philosophising. And the answer was, very well indeed. We know that our Toby's no heldentenor, but I beg to differ with the home Siegfried: in my view, he did ride the orchestra, acted out the feelings much more vividly than he used to and served the porcelain delicacy of the third song very well indeed (I well remember Jon Vickers crashing bear-like through that. Must have been with Rattle and Jessye Norman at the Proms. And I see, eeuch, Sir Si's forthcoming Birmingham Das Lied will be with the hardly up-to-the-Abschied Lady R, Magdalena Kozena).

La Connolly certainly pushed all the right buttons, found the right breath control and all the colours. And yet. There's still not the individual sound you got with Dame Janet, nor the sense of going deeper which nearly broke my heart when Christianne Stotijn - a mezzo with a much less secure technique - unfolded her meditational Farewell with Ivan Fischer and the Budapesters back in 2008. What really carried it all, for me, was YNS's marvellous sensitivity with every phrase, his cushioning of the singers, the sheer chamber-musical sweetness he got at the end of 'Von der Schoenheit'.


It was so nearly perfect, and yet I have to admit - a bit grudgingly, because I was cross with Tom Service among others for implying that British orchestras aren't as edge-of-seat exciting as their grandest continental counterparts (it's the conductor, Tom, always the conductor) - that in sound if not spirit the Berlin Phil under Rattle went just that bit further on Monday. In the wider scheme of things, I believe that Nezet-Seguin's care over every detail is bound up with just a bit more sweep and phrase-lifting than Rattle's micromanagement. But something had happened with the Mahler Fourth: I suggested in the Arts Desk review that he and the Berliners had learned a greater sense of playfulness, partly through recording that gorgeous Nutcracker. Here he is with some of his handsome players at the Barbican - two of the three leaders on the front desk. Both photos are by Mark Allan (and by the way, who was that infuriating unofficial photographer in pink whose clicks could be heard from rows back at the beginning of the Fourth Symphony's poco adagio?).


I left wishing I'd signed up for more of their four-day residency (couldn't make the Schubert last night because of the Ferneyhough class). And then it turned out that colleague Alexandra couldn't make tonight's Mahler 3 (plus interesting prefaces from Brahms and Wolf). So I jumped at that, and now I can't wait. Because, despite any perceived shortcomings, oor Simon does know his Mahler. And on Monday night, although I sat through the performances feeling rather objective, the words just came pouring out in the review and then I couldn't sleep, there was so much to process.