Bizet in Provence

Last Tuesday I went into BBC Broadcasting House to record this coming Saturday's Building a Library for Radio 3's CD Review: by my own choice, following on from the sunny time spent with Delibes' Coppelia, the subject was Bizet's incidental music for Alphonse Daudet's Provencal tragedy L'Arlesienne. It was actually a chance remark by my friend and unofficial former mentor Dr. Roger Savage that Bizet's Adagietto must be behind Elgar's most introspective moments that led me to listen again, and fall in love.

Of course I can't give even a hint of the 'winner' among the 20 or so recordings. But I would like to sing the praises a little more of the work itself. As I've discovered, all of Bizet's 27 numbers for Daudet's play are worth doing, though they need some kind of dramatic context - and only one of the three contenders there gives that, though unhelpfully it uses German actors (excellent all) rather than French. So it boiled down to a choice between various versions of the famous Suites: the first put together and re-orchestrated by Bizet himself, the second assembled by his friend Guiraud after his death (with a not exactly appropriate borrowing, the Minuet from La Jolie Fille de Perth).


Beyond the striking sax-solo portrait of L'Innocent, the hero of the drama's slow-witted brother who 'comes to his senses' just as Frederi, the protagonist, is abandoning his, and the tragic lovesickness of Frederi himself, there's not much here to tell you what a predominantly dark work this is. You need to hear all the melodramas for the play proper to know that it all ends badly, with a dramatic defenestration. As in Carmen, the merrymaking of the crowd - in the opera, for the bullfight, in the play, for a celebration of the feast of St. Eligius - serves as background to the tragic denouement.


And what a strange play it is, beyond the evocation of Provence which has so much in common with the later images of Van Gogh I've reproduced here. The 'girl from Arles' who gives the hero so much grief never appears: is she a Carmen-like vamp or just an ordinary woman with a history? There's a morbidity about our Frederi which apparently casts back to Daudet's unfortunate experience in his youth: one in which he contracted the syphilis which was to lead to a slow, lingering death (I've just picked up a copy of his sketches on the subject). Like Don Jose, his passion is unquenchable, but the violence is turned against himself. And there's also a Micaela, the village girl Vivette who loves him unquestioningly. Her music provides the real raison d'etre of the Second Suite, apart from its brilliantly effective orchestral combination of Farandole and old Provencal marching song, which we used to sing in Christmas carol services as 'De bon matin, j'ai recontre le train de trois grands rois'.


What did I take away from repeated hearings of the music? That Bizet's woodwind scoring, like Glinka's, is simple but perfect and goes straight to the heart. That the Menuetto's quiet ending may have influenced the Gavotte of Prokofiev's Classical Symphony; that the four-part string writing of the incredibly brief but profound Adagietto, which really ought to be played in the original by a string quartet, undoubtedly made its mark on Elgar, Mahler and Strauss.

This is potent writing on a miniature scale which finds it hard these days to carve out a niche in the concert hall, just as the fastidiously wrought, discreetly sensuous operas of Bizet's devoted friend Massenet no longer play a major role in the repertoire. And I doubt if that will change with the Royal Opera's production of Cendrillon, much as I love the piece and enjoyed most of the production. Read all about it on The Arts Desk, where I've also briefly commented on the Opera North vs Lee Hall presumed-homophobia kerfuffle (fellow blogger Jon Dryden Taylor wrote the response Opera North should have given). In the meantime, enjoy this striking production shot by Bill Cooper of simpatica if surprisingly pale-voiced Joyce DiDonato as Cinders with the stunning mezzo Prince of the real star, Alice Coote.


And don't forget to tune in to Radio 3 on Saturday morning, or go to the iPlayer for a week thereafter. I hope you come to love Bizet's music as much as I do. Next season it's back to the Russians, and I intend to give Prokofiev Vol. 2 a much-needed kick this summer, but I've enjoyed my Gallic interlude beyond measure.

Swapping angels for balls...and sunflowers

Until I had a closer look at it with my BBC Symphony class, I'd been sad at the prespect of missing Friday's Barbican concert performance of Peter Eotvos's operatic Angels in America. I did somehow doubt that Tony Kushner's seven-hour millennial work of genius could be distilled into two hours of singing featuring less than ten per cent of the text. And I was right - though the big set pieces could have had really inspired treatment. The jangling celestials of the portentous angel conjured up by much-drugged HIV-positive Prior Walter, the trips taken by neglected Mormon wife Harper Pitt, scenes of love and tenderness in hard times; all these might work in more inspired hands. What I guess I most resented in what I watched - a really rather awful Chatelet production - was the proportion of cop-out spoken dialogue delivered over minimal mood music.

The students, an open-minded and diverse bunch, confirmed my doubts last Tuesday. I only had to show them fifteen of the opera's best minutes and then a stretch of Mike Nichols's masterly movie for them to wonder what they'd let themselves in for and whether it mightn't be better to stay at home with the DVD. Don't get me wrong: I'm delighted that such a hard-hitting subject has made the operatic stage. But after you've had Meryl, Em, Al Pacino giving the performance of a lifetime, the wondrous Jeffrey Wright and an unbeatable team of young actors scouring your soul, the opera does seem third best, stuffing in as much of the plot as possible when it could have been something completely different.

All this, anyway, is just preliminary to relating what I did see on Friday night at the Finnish National Opera. The Finns I'd met told me to expect a serious new slant on Verdi's Ballo in maschera from all-rounder director Vilppu Kiljunen. The idea of a Berlusconiesque Italian reality-TV setting isn't necessarily bad in principle. But it turned out to be a bit of a muddle, with confusion over what's supposed to be private and public in the drama, and, worse, Kiljunen didn't get the cast I saw to relate to each other. The ball was fabulously, gaudily costumed, and the lady string quintet shone, but Kiljunen desparately needed the kind of movement co-ordinator/choreographer we take for granted in the UK.

The men, apart from the house Sam and Tom, were disappointing, and that includes the erratic conductor, Alberto Hold-Garrido. A useful but hardly poetic Riccardo, Giorgio Cascarri, simply stood and delivered, though at least all the top notes were totally secure; Hannu Niemala's Renato had the right Verdi-baritone colour but belted, rarely phrased.

It was worth seeing, though, for the revelation of Chilean mezzo Isabel Vera, one-time Cardiff finalist and born to play Ulrica, Amneris, Azucena and Eboli.


Also very much the real Verdian thing is our Claire Rutter. She was pretty good when I saw her as Amelia in Bieito's diminishing-returns shock Masked Ball at the Coli. Now she has an absolutely secure spinto technique, ringing top and artistry with melismas, messa di voces, you name it. She didn't look great in power suits, it has to be said, and like the other singers was more or less left to her own devices, but the rapturous ovation she richly deserved shows that this isn't the famed Britcentricity so derided by La Cieca on Parterre (and it was good to hear her singing in Italian). Wouldn't mind hearing her as Brunnhilde in due time. Here she is in the 'Truth Time' section of 'Il Nido d'amore' with Niemala's Renato:


Anyway, the aria and duet in Act 2 caught fire, which was quite enough. And I'd already had my vision when charming press officer Heidi Almi took me to see a children's opera performed before parents and friends. I know from the Savonlinna premiere of Markus Fagerudd's Seven Dog Brothers how seriously Finns take these more-than-merely-educational projects. Auringonkukat (Sunflowers), composed by the prolific Atso Almila and led by repetiteur Kari Hänninen at the piano, used the life of Vincent Van Gogh to involve the children not just in some very hard to memorise, sometimes rhythmically complex choruses but also in issues around art and mental health.


It was all very responsible, unpatronising and musically memorable. I couldn't understand much of the Finnish, to say the least, but I did grasp that the children dressed in capes with Van Gogh's night picture on them played not only disapproving forces of society but also Vincent's dark side, repeating a haunting ostinato as he sinks in to depression. The ending, too, was far from blandly celebratory. The three adult singers involved proved immensely sympathetic, though I reckoned the Vincent in the cast I saw, Ville Salonen, was probably a baritone rather than a tenor. Company member Olli Tuovinen, playing Theo Van Gogh, had one of those Finnish oaky voices we all know and admire so much - surely he'll make an excellent Renato in time. Here he is with the other Vincent, Tero Harjuniemi (also pictured above), and the kids.


Finally, no visit to the Finnish Opera would be complete without an interval mustaherukkaleivos or blackcurrant pastry (if you think that's a mouthful - and of course it is, in reality - I reeled at a 27-letter Finnish word in the leader of a newspaper the man in front of me was reading on the plane. Which beats my favourite, the Russian for highly-qualified, which is viisokiqvalifikatsirovaniye).


My good friend Anneli, holding one of these sinful creations above in the first interval of Ballo, says she can't find them outside the hallowed sanctum of the opera house. A weird Google translation tells me that the mustaherukkaleivos consists of 'mustaherukkainen cream pastry, which tastes like lemon humidification' with 'blackcurrent jelly cakes on the surface'. Never mind, it tastes wonderful.