YouTube Xmas concert at Greenacres Care Home

Here's my 93 year old ma being wheeled by my cousin Diana and her husband Lee to the conservatory of her care home. Marvellous Greenacres mover and shaker Sarah, who's managed to fill a whole month of special events for the residents, asked if I'd repeat the format I'd used for my previous hour of YouTube clips, rather chaotic in the lounge of mum's Cornflower Wing, but in the bigger room with the bigger telly so people might be more attentive. So I braved it through Storm Darragh, and the trains and buses all obliged. Frankly I was fine with whatever happened, but the crowd stayed and folk I've never heard talk before were very effusive at the end.

I thought it might be worth repeating what I showed here, so you can enjoy your own quality hour of concerts, ballet and opera. How better to start than with the opening of Bach's Christmas Oratorio? I like the old film with Harnoncourt conducting especially because it includes the Tölz Boys' Choir.

You can, of course, enjoy well beyond what I actually played. Next, an absolute winner: the lovely Wallis Giunta singing Brahms' 'Geistliches Wiegenlied' while holding her viola-player's very attentive baby. Wallis brought her own six-month-old, Bonnie, to one of the Zoom classes on Bernstein's A Quiet Place.

Another musician I adore as a person, though I haven't seen her for years, is the personable violinist Dunja Lavrova. I love her transcription of Tchaikovsky's 'Miniature Overture' from The Nutcracker, and her explanation of why she made it.

Then, of course, we had to have Tchaikovsky's original, followed by the glowing 'Decoration of the Christmas tree' and March. You can enjoy the whole ballet score here lovingly conducted by the vivacious Yannick Nézet-Séguin during his time in Rotterdam.

Taking a break before some Nutcracker dancing, I thought it was time for more choral music. First, my absolute favourite among Christmas anthems, the 'Shepherds' Farewell' from Berlioz's L'enfance du Christ, that unforced masterpiece with which I ended this Zoom term's 'Later Berlioz and Beyond' (having moved on to Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Franck, Chabrier and Chausson, I went back to the 1850s for a seasonal finale). At Greenacres, I used the Conlon performance from St-Denis, but it's blocked for reproduction elsewhere, so here's the excerpt from back in the day when Gardiner got on with the Monteverdi forces. You can see the whole thing on YouTube - Herod is none other than the magnificent young bass Will Thomas, whose socking at JEG's hands triggered the disgrace.

A carol from King's, of course - the one I used was from 2020, with lockdown conditions still pertaining up to a point, but the filming of one of the world's great buildings is such a pleasure. Again, there's a blocking of wider use, so I'll show another.

Then the grand Pas de deux from The Nutcracker in the traditional and gaudy but still classy Royal Ballet production with my favourite of the company's ballerinas, Marianela Núñez and Vadim Muntagirov. Heard it played with such panache by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra and its new Chief Conductor, Mark Wigglesworth, at Portsmouth Guildhall last Thursday.

'

I wanted to show a stretch of Richard Jones's Humperdinck from the Met, but there wasn't time, so for operatic brevity I ended with a nice potpourri from Rimsky-Korsakov's Christmas Eve as directed by Christof Loy in Frankfutt.

Footnote: I originally had the below on the list, would have squeezed in a woman composer, and not just for the sake of it: Augusta Holmès was a revelation of the 'After Berlioz' course for the incredible vigour of her symphony Roland Furieux. The version I used, with the splendid Marie-Nicole Lemieux, has been taken down, so this will do.

Happy viewing - you have potentially many hours there rather than just the one I filled at Greenacres.

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.

Samson & Delilah & Eugene & Tatyana on Zoom

It was Richard Jones, unlikely choice to direct the forthcoming Royal Opera production of  Saint-Saëns's Samson et Dalila, who finally persuaded me that I ought to go for it as the first of the summer term's Operas in Depth. I know I can circle around it entertainingly; but will the Biblical drama itself offer much meat? We'll find out later this month.

At least there's an interesting contrast with Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, the much more familiar second choice. The operas were written around the same time in the 1870s by two gay composers who enjoyed each other’s company. Even so, Saint-Saëns’s grand spectacle, with its big choruses and exotic ballets, was exactly the sort of operatic hokum Tchaikovsky wanted to escape from in his ‘lyrical scenes’ based on Pushkin’s verse-novel about very real people. The most famous set-pieces in both opera tend to belong to the women: Dalila’s two great arias, and the scene in which Tchaikovsky depicts the infatuated teenage Tatyana writing an ill-fated love-letter to dandy Onegin.

I'm delighted that in addition to Richard, who's promised to come along after offering his usual off-piste observations on Britten's Peter Grimes last term, we'll also be joined by the Tatyana of Opera Holland Park's impending Onegin, charismatic Armernian soprano Anush Hovhannisyan. The tradition of special guests, which has been so fruitful online since the start of lockdown, has featured appearances from, among many others, Ermonela Jaho and Antonio Pappano for Puccini’s Madama Butterfly, and Felicities Palmer and Lott for Britten’s Albert Herring.

After an introductory session for context, we'll be following the course of each drama with excerpts from a wide range of recorded performances on CD, DVD and YouTube.Admission fee is a snip - £100 for the whole term of 10 two-hour classes, Mondays 2.30-4.30pm from 25 April. If you can't attend live, I'll send the video the next morning. Anyone interested should contact me: david.nice@usa.net. On Thursdays I'll be running a course on Sibelius's symphonies and tone-poems,  but I'll post separately about that.

Season's greetings: sacred and profane

Two images to wish you a reflective day and a better 2021. The first is a detail of two Nativity panels from the magnificent medieval east window of St Peter and St Paul East Harling, greatest glory of our walk this year for the Norfolk Churches Trust. Between four of us we raised £2,700 - but the real achievement was being able to do it, and finding two-thirds of the churches open, with careful social distancing rules fully observed.

The second is a detail of our alternative presepe - Gloria alla Josephine Baker. Yes, we have some bananas. It's a fairly international scene including Czechs, Swedes, Italians, Indians and a famous Spaniard.

I doubt if you'll be short of things to watch, and the day is beautiful, so walk while it's light if you can, but this is what we saw this time last year - a consummate concert performance of Tchaikovsky's glorious score for The Nutcracker conducted by the adorable Yannick Nézet-Séguin. I used portions of it in one of my classes for the 19th century segment of the Russian Music course on Zoom, and again in the one-off session on The Nutcracker I held on Monday, to try and atone a bit for the fact that some students were bereft of the live Nutcrackers they'd planned to see. Today we'll finally catch up with Balanchine's Nutcracker - a quick dip shows that he does the crucial tumescing-Christmas-tree sequence justice, AND includes the usually excised Mother Gigogne number.

Enjoy the day and switch off from all dire news from the outside world. We meet again for two hours on the complete Sleeping Beauty score on the afternoon of the 30th - let me know if you'd like to join. More on next term anon.

Zooming from Kamarinskaya to The Firebird*

*Prefatory update (28/9) - having thrashed out new plans for a seven-week term between this and the Soviet music course, I've shunted The Firebird to the start of the 1900-17 sessions. So it's strictly From Glinka to Rachmaninov now. See revised schedule below.

 

So my last non-operatic Zoom class has run the symphonic gamut from Haydn to Adams, and I'm very proud of what we achieved - not least the participation of spectacular special guests each week, which waxed as lockdown dragged on. Just for the record, we had Jonathan Bloxham and Ian Page on Haydn, Mark Wigglesworth and Jonathan again on Beethoven 3, Nick Collon on Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique, Catherine Larsen-Maguire on Schumann 2, Brahms 1 and Adams' Harmonielehre (and much more from her as regular visitor to the other classes), Vladimir Jurowski on Brahms 4 and Tchaikovsky 6, Paavo Järvi on Mahler 3, Vasily Petrenko on Mahler 9 and Elgar 2, Kristiina Poska and Andres Kaljuste on Sibelius 5, Andres again on Nielsen 5, Mark Elder on Vaughan Williams 6, Elizabeth Wilson and Peter Manning on Shostakovich 15.  Friend and sometime student Juliette made an artist's impression of the Brahms/Tchaikovsky class; probably wasn't paying full attention but I'm amused to see this. 'Vlad' is in the centre of the bottom row (!) Click to enlarge if you really want to see the grisly details - and if you were there and on the second 'page', think yourself lucky to have escaped.

In that ripe time, Madama Butterfly on the Opera Course was also enriched by three major exponents joining us for three full two-hour sessions: Ermonela Jaho, Antonio Pappano and Mark Elder. A glorious complement indeed to Susan Bullock's presence throughout our Elektra classes.

Opera in Depth will resume with ten Monday afternoons on Götterdämmerung, starting late September and concluding our three-year survey of Wagner's Ring (any excuse to feature another of Anselm Kiefer's majestic apocalyptic visions from one of two White Cube exhibitions which knocked me for six, pictured below). It will remain on Zoom, as though Pushkin House is re-opening on a limited basis, I doubt if many students will want to return. I'm nearly halfway through Siegfried for the Wagner Society of Scotland, regretful at not returning to the woods of Gartmore this year; in September 2021 we'll probably embark on Tristan und Isolde.

At the same time I didn't want to disappoint the enthusiasm of the surprisingly big following for the symphony course - plus of course I need to be employed during this difficult summer, and I'm lucky that it can be on something I love - so this coming Thursday afternoon (6 August) I'll undertake a survey of Russian music from Glinka's Kamarinskaya to Stravinsky's The Firebird. If that's successful, we'll press on to the Soviet era in a second course.

For the outline, I only have to repeat what I wrote before beginning the symphony course.Below are the plans for all 10 classes, just so that I have them in something I can link to rather than just on an attachment. Message me if you'd like to join for all or some: it's a bargain (I halved the usual fees because I don't have room hire expenses and Zoom is, after all, not live with great equipment to hand, so it's £10 a class, ie £5 an hour. We meet on Thursday afternoons (exact time to be confirmed - one student suggested we start at 2.30pm rather than 3.30) tomorrow, 3.30-5.50pm. and if anyone misses a class or has connection/sound issues their end, I can send on a recording of the whole thing. Send me a message with your email and I won't publish it, but I'll be sure to get back to you.

Special guests TBC (though there will be fewer of them than during strict quarantine time...). Pictured up top: Glinka by Repin (detail), The Firebird by Bakst. The three illustrations below are by the Russian artist Ivan Bilibin, starting with the scene where Pushkin's Ruslan meets the giant head.

1: Glinka: Russian acorns  6 August

The indisputable father of distinctively Russian music, his operatic predecessors and his two major works for the stage: the nationalist-history opera A Life for the Tsar and the fairy-tale opera Ruslan and Lyudmila, the first of many to be based on a work by Alexander Pushkin.

2: To 'the Five' and beyond 1: national style  13 August

Glinka again kicked off with his short orchestral fantasia on two folksongs Kamarinskaya. It had, as Tchaikovsky noted, a huge impact on all Russian composers, not least those whom Balakirev briefly gathered round him to take up the legacy of a truly Russian style - Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Musorgsky and Cesar Cui.

3: To 'the Five' and beyond 2: the influence of the east  20 August
Composers, like poets, travelled far and wide, especially around the fringes of the Russian Empire, and absorbed Persian and eastern music into a new 'exotic' style. Again, Glinka paved the way with the dances at Chernomor's fantasy eastern castle in Ruslan and Lyudmila.

4: 'The intonations of native speech': a new kind of opera  27 August

Dargomyzhsky's The Stone Guest, based on Pushkin's original take on the Don Juan legend, pointed a way forward in the speech-melodic setting of verse. Musorgsky took it one step forward in the prose scene of Boris Godunov and his unfinished Gogol opera The Marriage.

5: The symphony: from Rubinstein to Tchaikovsky  10 September

Was there an element of anti-Semitism in Balakirev and co's rejection of symphonies by Anton Rubinstein? At any rate. the great achievements in the form did not come until the Second Symphony of Borodin and Tchaikovsky's experimentation with form.

6: Characterisation and style, opera and piano music 1 3 September

More on Musorgsky's Boris Godunov, aligned with his piano epic Pictures at an Exhibition. Pianist Samson Tsoy takes us through the piano work, with a later contribution from Pavel Kolesnikov.

7: The great Tchaikovsky ballets  17 September

Inspired by Delibes, Tchaikovsky took the art of piquant orchestration and original melody to supreme heights in Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.

 

8: Characterisation and style, opera and piano music 2  24 September

Tchaikovsky's characteristic romants style in Eugene Onegin, the songs and his piano cycle The Seasons. Pavel Kolesnikov joins us again to talk about Tchaikovsky's piano writing.

9: New paths in chamber music   1 October

The formation of chamber music circles and the advent of a supremely gifted composer in the form, Sergey Taneyev, brought big steps forward from the 1890s onwards.

10: Tchaikovsky's natural successor   8 October

Rachmaninov made his mark on the world of Russian music as a teenager with his C sharp minor Prelude and the one-act opera Aleko. We look at his specifically Russian works for both piano and orchestra. With special guest Kirill Gerstein.

UPDATE: latest thoughts are to carry The Firebird over to the first of seven classes starting at the end of October, dealing with Russian music in the seven years leading up to the Revolution. So one class apiece on The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, looking around and across at other related works, one on Rachmaninov's Vespers in the context of the Orthodox musical revival, the next on his Choral Symphony The Bells, a class on Scriabin and a last session on developments up to 1917, including the music of the young Prokofiev.

Rake afternoon reminder

Click on the above for better detail and come along if you can. What would normally be the last class of my Opera in Depth term has turned into a little gala with excerpts from Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress to raise funds for British Youth Opera. I'm confident that Spence, Nicky will match Spence, Toby, who gave a total performance on Saturday night as Vladimir Jurowski's Tom Rakewell. Our Rake people span productions from 1977 (Dame Felicity Lott, who will speak but not sing, at least live) to this year (Samantha Clarke, a stupendous Anne Trulove in British Youth Opera's fine production). It's been a joy dealing with the folk at St James's Sussex Gardens - total pros.

Meanwhile the last two of four classes on Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades will be, very appropriately, at Pushkin House, since the Frontline, 'gone corporate' as founder member Ed Vulliamy puts it, decided that they needed to have the room available to make more dosh - and I pay them quite a sum already - in 'the run-up to Christmas', which they regard as the whole of November. Well, the bonus is that the students also get to see a fine exhibition of Laura Footes's imaginative artwork inspired by Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita. I was at Pushkin House last Tuesday for a talk by my New Best Friend from a Bromsgrove Shostakovich Quartets weekend, Elizabeth Wilson, on the extraordinary pianist Maria Yudina. Which has led to a whole investigation of great playing. But more on that anon.

Rake and Spades at the Frontline: do join us

Yes, that's the great Dame Felicity Lott as our Opera in Depth end-of-term lunch guest last term, before she went on to talk with her usual natural charm, wit and insight on Britten (we were covering A Midsummer Night's Dream over five Monday afternoons, using the Peter Hall Glyndebourne DVD in which she plays an appropriately tall Helena. Yesterday she was a very impressed onlooker at the celebrations of the great director's life). There are, incidentally, many more of us than you see in the Frontline club room shot above.

For the coming term, which starts next Monday, I'll be covering Stravinsky's The Rake's Progress and Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades, two operas which climax in a crucial game of cards. Pikovaya Dama, to give it the proper Russian name (Pique Dame, incidentally, is nonsensical) will be staged at the Royal Opera in Stefan Herheim's Tchaikovskycentric production; having reviewed the DVD of its Dutch incarnation for the BBC Music Magazine, I can say you're in for a treat, a concept that's actually followed through, so let's forget that dramatically abysmal Pelléas et Mélisande at Glyndebourne.

Vladimir Jurowski will conduct The Rake's Progress at the Royal Festival Hall (no idea yet how semi-staged it's going to be). He made such poignant and light-of-touch work of it at ENO years back, in a quirky production by Annabel Arden with a profoundly moving Bedlam scene. Back to the Garden of Eden below in the recent British Youth Orchestra production I found so effective: Pedro Ometto as Trulove, Samantha Clarke as Anne and Frederick Jones as Tom Rakewell (image by Bill Knight).

Meanwhile, a Rake extravaganza linked to the above has already taken some shape for our last class on 17 November. As the Frontline Club flummoxed me a couple of months ago by telling me that they regard the 'run-up to Christmas' as including the whole of November, when they hope to make more than the substantial amount I pay them for my weekly two hours, I've had to find other homes for the last three Mondays. Which, it now seems, will be St James's Church Sussex Gardens, with its avowedly fine audio-visual set-up - I'm going to check it out on Monday - and its new Steinway Boston Concert Grand.

The idea for the proposed event took shape quickly after I'd been to see the BYO Rake. FLott, as Madame la Patronne of BYO (as she is of the Poulenc Society), had recommended I go, and I'm glad I did. So she has agreed to preside, a lovely connection back to the famous Hockney-designed Glyndebourne Rake in which she sang the role of Anne Trulove, happily preserved on DVD (the Bedlam scene above with Leo Goerke). Samantha Clarke, already a world-class Anne, will, we hope, reprise the aria.

Nicky Spence - who sang Tom Rakewell for BYO a decade ago, pictured above - will join with his pianist partner Dylan Perez, and Susie Self, a hairy-chested Baba the Turk for Opera Factory back in the 1990s, has agreed to come along too.

Students for the term will have this as part of their package, but we hope others will come along too, to help us raise money for BYO. A unique event - put it in your diaries, and leave a message here with your contact details (I won't publish it) if you want to join us either for that or for the entire term.

Seasonal sugar plums in Leipzig

A serendipitous double: on Wednesday evening I caught the legendary Leipzig Gewandhausorchester giving a nuanced performance of Tchaikovsky's heavenly Nutcracker score to lively choreography (ballet photos by Ida Zenna - featured below, Madoka Ishikawa as Clara, Francisco Baños Diaz as Drosselmeyer and David Iglesias Gonzalez as the Prince)

and then the following morning there was a full performance of Humperdinck's Hänsel und Gretel (premiered, incidentally, only a year later than The Nutcracker, 1893, just down the road in Weimar, conducted by Richard Strauss). While the ballet crowd was of all ages, including lots of young adults, this one consisted mainly of children (opera photos by Kirsten Nijhof).

The cast I caught included the perfect Gretel, Olena Tokar, regrettably not pictured, whom many may remember in the 2013 final of the Cardiff Singer of the World competition. I only just missed by a week her Rusalka in Leipzig. Here's why she would probably be incomparable in that role, too.

I was in Leipzig to see the Blüthner Piano Factory in operation, a unique opportunity to witness perfectionists in the art of pianomaking; I'll be writing about that on The Arts Desk. But of course I was equally excited to follow Bach from the font at Eisenach to the grave in Leipzig's Thomaskirche, for the choir of which, of course, he wrote all of his great choral masterpieces. More on that anon; in the meanwhile here's an Arts Desk feature on how to listen to Bach cantatas throughout the year, with a photo of Bach's statue outside the Thomaskirche at the top.

Anyway, it was clear from Tchaikovsky's Miniature Overture that this Nutcracker would be an interpretation, under Tobias Engeli, the like of which I've only once experienced in the theatre when Svetlanov conducting a run of the long-serving Peter Wright version at the Royal Opera House. The orchestral sound in the most recent theatre on the site, begun in 1956 and inaugurated in 1960, is so warm and immediate, with every timbre of the exquisite cor anglais and clarinet solos beautifully captured. For much of Act One Jean-Philippe Dury's choreography follows familiar lines. It's matched by elegant sets from Yoko Sayama that achieve all the necessary transformations with state-of-the-art effects as well as flats which fly up and down nimbly and costumes by Aleksandr Noshpal serving up a handsome contemporary bourgeois party (Drosselmeyer stands apart).

There's one interpolation - the opening and middle sequences of the delightful 'Marche Miniature' from Tchaikovsky's First Orchestral Suite as a variation for the quirky Fritz (Alessandro Repellini - I assumed the tap-dancer who makes a novelty addition to the Waltz of the Flowers was supposed to be Fritz too, but apparently not).

In both acts' narrative scenes the mice appear prematurely - pictured above, Kiyonobu Negishi's Mouse King and Flavia Krolla as Young Clara - but their battle with female as well as male soldiers is very well choreographed, and the first Pas de Deux for Clara-as-young-woman (Ishikawa) and her Prince (Iglesias Gonzalez) has plenty of novel spinnings to the second transformation scene. The snowflakes sequence has good visual effects, too.

On stage, it all goes a bit half-cock in Act Two. There's a lot in the programme from Dury about Clara's passage to womanhood, but whatever's intended, some of the character dances don't 'read' - least of all the three stomping, punkish folk doing a weird routine to the Mirlitons number (Mother Gigogne, as usual, is nowhere to be found - I love that musical number and always miss it). It's always difficult to thread some kind of narrative through the divertissement; Matthew Bourne's fun Adventures version is best for that - I see from the early days of the blog that I last saw it a decade ago - this one doesn't really try. Some of the costuming shows a penchant for bondage gear, too, though I liked the men's floral waistcoats in the ensemble waltz, even if the women had rather lopsided rose-tits.

The Leipzig corps de ballet is good and hard-working, though one of the six Arabian Dance men did threaten to sabotage the symmetry. The Pas de Deux becomes a Pas de Trois for Drosselmeyer, Clara and Prince, with the Sugar-Plum Fairy (Anna Jo) and her cavalier (Yan Leiva, hat on sideways, doing a Bob Fosse shuffle in the Tarantella) getting the variations. Still, the celesta player (Alden Gatt) was as fine an artist as many of the wind players.

The league of nations in any ballet company always intrigues me, and of course makes for photo-enlivenment of the foyer spaces. What a brilliant idea for Leipzig Opera and Ballet to promote its ensembles through pairs of contrasting photos by Andreas Pohlmann, updated every season. These were complemented on Thursday morning by first the rucksacks and then the interval snacking of the kids there for Hansel.

I have to say my expectation that the noise levels would abate during the actual performance, as they so impressively did at Glyndebourne-on-Tour's schools Falstaff, wasn't realised, but there were many younger kids here too. Quite a bit of the Overture was lost in the loud, long applause for curtain-up, even if it was only on a shooting star. And the restlessness crescendoed across Sandman, Evening Prayer and Angel Pantomime (why the whale? Because Gretel's main comforter is a toy one).

Still, it was a luxury to have Leipzig Opera Generalmusikdirektor Ulf Schirmer conducting. There were some frissony horns and lower-string activity; what a varied miracle Humperdinck's score is, always knowing when to slim down from the full Wagnerian works to the simple. Olena Tokar's little mushroom-Lied was so exquisite, likewise her morning wake-up call. She does some mean dance routines, too, which made me laugh aloud. The other standout among the voices was baritone Julius Orlishausen, and it was good to have a tenor in drag as the batt-y witch, Dan Karlström (though this morning I've been listening to Christa Ludwig on the peerless Staatskapelle Dresden/Colin Davis recording, perfect throughout).

The opera company as a whole seems in very good health. Among its regulars in the photo-parade, especially impressive in the parterre foyer on the first floor,

I recognised Faroese bass Runi Brattaberg, Hagen in the Budapest Ring and very good company at the aftershow gathering (on the right here),

and Wallis Giunta, at the top below and marked out as a star in the making in Opera North's Trouble in Tahiti.

She's Leipzig's resident Cenerentola.

On the way out, I found Tokar between handsome dancers (Yan Leiva and Francisco Baños Diaz, with fellow singer Gal James to the left)

 

and left the Opera House ahead of lines of departing kids.

And so, with an hour to catch my 14.15 train, I wandered back through town and snatched a quick bowl of excellent soup Zum Arabischen Coffe [sic] Baum, which I had to see

because Schumann's gang gathered here and even have their places marked - here, Schumann and Mendelssohn next to each other

while other musical giants line the walls.

Shame about the piped quartet music, but the place seemed to be inhabited by regulars. Bit difficult to tell, though, if the other diners might not have been German tourists here to visit the justly celebrated Christmas market, which fills the centre of town, radiating outwards from the Markt. More on that, too, in a future entry. Meanwhile,

Dmitri Hvorostovsky (1962-2017): this says it all

This is from the beginning, at the 1989 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, when he was up against Bryn Terfel. Yeletsky's aria from Tchaikovsky's Pikovaya Dama was one of those things Hvorostovsky sang like no-one else - the vintage cello of a baritone voice just loved those rising scalic phrases, and the breath control was always extraordinary. It was the first thing I thought of today, hearing the awful if expected news (he was four months younger than me). Tomorrow I'll turn to an Arts Desk tribute and listen to a lot more (the Russian folk songs disc, Verdi as well as more Tchaikovsky) when I have the time.

Update (23/11) My Arts Desk homage is here, with excerpts from a 1992 interview for Gramophone and two more YouTube clips. My thanks to Cheryl Madden over on LinkedIn for citing the folksong 'Nochenka' as her favourite Hvorostovsky number - unaccompanied, he is at his nuanced best.

Leonskaja's Schubert: CD gold

'Who are your idols?,' I once asked a colleague while we were waiting to record a BBC World Service chat in Bush House. 'I don't have idols, I'm a professional critic' came the ludicrous reply. Well, just as I haven't 'grown out of' Der Rosenkavalier, as another pompous Brother in Apollo told me I would, I still have idols, and Elisabeth Leonskaja is the living pianist I'd rather hear more than any other; readers of The Arts Desk will know that I cover every UK appearance of hers that I can, and I still count it as one of the musical highlights of my life that I got to hear four late-night concerts in her 2010 Schubert cycle at the Verbier Festival - the first time she'd ever tackled them all - even if the Verbier experience per se wasn't an especially happy one for either of us (I've no desire to go back, much as I loved the solitary walks in the heights).

My seminal experience in Schubert's piano music dates back to March 1989 and Sviatoslav Richter's Chichester Cathedral recital, when I first heard the heavenly and hypnotic length at which he unfolded the first movement of the G major Sonata D894.

Leonskaja has her own very distinct voice in Schubert, but as Richter's protégée she was bound to follow his example in several respects (there's also a DVD on the lavish set I'm discussing here of the two playing Grieg's two-piano transcriptions of three Mozart piano sonatas and C minor Fantasia which I have yet to watch). One is that you don't EVER omit a Schubert repeat. When I interviewed her in Verbier, she recalled Richter's demands of students who dared to cut the inspiration short: 'what, you don't love Schubert's music?' And how the hell did Brendel dare to inculcate in pupils like Imogen Cooper a truncation which would mean omitting as inspired a passage (eight and a bit bars of first-time link back to the repeat) as this?

That of course occurs in arguably the greatest, certainly the most heavenly, of all Schubert's sonata first movements, the Molto moderato of D960. Unthinkable not to have the seismic rumble the only time it appears ffz in the movement (though apparently there's been some debate about the dynamic marking). We get all repeats, of course, on the four CDs in eaSonus's luxurious presentation - and never have I been happier to see such a homage, made to follow on the heels of Leonskaja's 70th birthday in November 2015. It comes with 48 pages of mini-biography in the form of more in-depth interviews than mine, enriched with a fine selection of personal photographs you won't have seen anywhere else. I have to quote two specific answers by the great lady. One is to the question: 'what do you try to pass on to students in a master class?'

1.   Love of music.
2.   Respect for the composer.
3.   Avoiding laziness.
4.   Self-confidence without arrogance.
5.   How to master the technique of playing the piano freely. In Moscow they used to tell us over and over again to sit comfortably and play freely and that's my approach now. That means free thumb (very important!), free elbows and wrists, and sitting comfortably at your instrument. All this leads to an unobstructed energy flow. At the beginning I find all this much more important than to work on the details and specific aspects of a particular piece.
6.   It's very important for me to be friendly, without too much finger-wagging. I simply concentrate on whatever I believe is blocking the student's progress.
7.   Passing my experience on to students without being condescending to them. It is essential to have a good atmosphere in order to work intensely and constructively.
8.   During the lesson, life takes a back seat, only music is important while we work. Teaching is an intimate and transcendental moment.

And to 'What are your sacred rules, your everyday doctrine?':

I think every day about what [Heinrich] Neuhaus [the greatest of pedagogues] used to say: 'Don't look for yourself in the music, but find the music in you'.

And Richter always used to say, 'It is not the what that matters, but the how'.

The 'how' of Leonskaja's Schubert I've tried to grasp over the years, but its essence is absolute clarity, an ability to switch from well-weighted orchestral pianism (something I always think of as the essence of the Russian school) to delicacy in a split second. She talks of wanting the public to have left a concert 'with the feeling of having found the grail', and that's happened to me, right from the first re-connection in the second half of her Chopin recital back in 2009. In the performance of the 'Trout' Quintet at Crail Church as part of this year's East Neuk Festival, I found myself within minutes of the first movement's beginning in that profound state of transport yet total awareness you only get in the best meditations. It's a shame there wasn't an official photographer to document her appearances; my post-performance shots, taken without flash of course, are inevitably fuzzy. See this as an imperfect souvenir.

Nothing is more phenomenal than Leonskaja's 'Wanderer' Fantasy, like the work itself an encyclopedic wonder of the world - I hope a recording will feature on the sequel to this set, due early next year - but she can also be wry and funny with total lightness, as in the finale of the 'Gasteiner' (D850). The physical energy and focus of D958's tarantella-finale are something you have to experience live to quite believe. And not even Richter produced as much shattering power as the time-bomb of D959's slow movement explodes at its terrifying heart.

I'm so grateful to Leonskaja, too, for proving that Schubert's quirky and lovable personality is there right from the first, five-movement sonata, D557, which I heard both in Verbier and Crail (again, I trust it will be included in Volume Two). The relatively early A minor Sonatas sound pretty miraculous in her hands, too; D784 is simply colossal. It's only when you get back to the last five that you realise the difference between great and supernaturally great. Here's to many more years of performances; in her seventies Leonskaja has lost nothing of the strength and clarity which are her trademarks, so there's no reason she shouldn't carry on as long as she wants to.

By way of a Schubert footnote, though it deserves pride of place and should have been included in my 'Music for a few' post, the duo recital of Martino Tirimo and Atsuko Kawakami at the Reform Club back in May (pictured above) reminded me very movingly what a great masterpiece is the F minor Fantaisie D940. Martino, a real gentleman and a seriously underrated top interpreter of Schubert, Mozart and Chopin, understands the ethereal yet still humanly bittersweet quality of late Schubert so well, and the sound of his former pupil was perfectly co-ordinated to match (Martino took the lower part).

The real surprise was Eduard Langer's transcription of Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite - on the above front page it's clear that Tchaikovsky made the one for two hands, Langer for four - reminding one just how elaborate the composer's genius is in these miniature gems and how wonderful the counterpoint. An especially lovely touch was Atsuko side-tapping a tambourine for those essential ta-ta-ta-ta-taaas in the Arabian Dance. Afterwards I asked if they knew Rachmaninov's similar transcription of the Sleeping Beauty Suite, which they didn't, so I loaned the score to Martino when he came to the Frontline Club. Looking forward to their performance of it. Though if that, too, is to be at the Reform Club, the promoters will have to work a bit harder to get more folk in the audience than they did. These first-rate musicians deserve much better.

Well chosen, BBC Music Magazine

I wasn't able to be at the BBC Music Magazine awards this year - too busy Snow Maidening in Paris - but at the end of my write-up of last year's ceremony, I pointed out that the Smetana Trio's disc of Martinů Trios was already on my shortlist for best of the year already (pictured above, violinist Jiří Vodička, pianist Jitka Cechová and cellist Jan Pálenícek) . It won the chamber music category at the 2017 awards, and Czechia has been going wild with excitement. What it probably doesn't know is the golden thread that led to the nomination - my Czech friend Jan sending me the disc, my pressing it on reviews editor Rebecca Franks so that it made the pages as another glorious Supraphon issue that might have been in for an award, of Martinů's Ariane and Double Concerto mentioned here, didn't.

As a Martinůmaniac, I'm of the opinion that Maxim Rysanov's disc of sonata, duos and Rhapsody-Concerto could also have won the previous year, and this absolutely delicious tetralogy of cantatas ought to do so in 2018 (that review isn't found on the hopeless BBCMM search engine).

Golden times for the reassessment of the last towering figure of the 20th century not to be widely acknowledged as such. And on 9 May you can hear Nicola Said reprise her Ariane in the final scene from that little masterpiece at this year's Europe Day Concert in St John's Smith Square. That's all I'm saying on the subject for now.

Frankly I'd have chosen the trios disc as the top award over Vasily Petrenko's Tchaikovsky Symphonies 1, 2 and 5, though I'm proud that I enthused over that one, too, in the pages of the magazine (again, the search engine on the BBCMM website doesn't locate it). The May issue had a riven choice over raves - which should be Recording of the Month, Paavo Järvi's Strauss Heldenleben and Don Juan with the stunning NHK Symphony Orchestra, or 87-year-old Bernard Haitink's latest Mahler 3? Rebecca went with Paavo in the end. And in the June issue there's going to be a spotlight on another stunner, leader of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra Terje Tønnesen's transcriptions for string orchestra of the two Janáček quartets, the First also to be heard in the context of a thrilling adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata read in both English - brilliantly - and Norwegian by the actor Teodor Janson. It's the luck of the draw - months can pass with only three-star-max discs, and then all these glories come along at once.

Anyway, I'm proud that the magazine continues to flourish in difficult times. And now, on the BBC front, we have the Proms to get excited about - for me, it's one of the best seasons on paper for years. The launch is always fun, and that was another one I had to miss last week. A single highlight for me? Jakub Hrůša's all-Czech variations on a Hussite chorale with the BBC Symphony Orchestra on 26 August. On 13 August, before a double whammy of Rachmaninov's Second Symphony in the main Prom and the Vespers sung by the brilliant Latvian Radio Choir in the late-nighter,  I'll be talking about the composer's use of Russian Orthodox chant in his orchestral music.