Mirga and DG: a contract to get excited about

OK, so when Andris Nelsons signed up to Deutsche Grammophon, fine, wise choice on the company's part, but did the world need more recordings of Bruckner and Shostakovich symphonies (good as they are)? When his Lithuanian neighbour to the south of Latvia Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla (pictured above in what seems to be a nice new image by Andreas Hechenberger) brokered her deal, news of which has been released today, she clearly had take-it-or-leave it ideas about the repertoire she wanted to record.

Repertoire which will actually enrich us rather than just give another 'conductor's interpretation of...' (though I'd have been very happy if they'd gone for her individual and loving way with the Tchaikovsky ballets). The first release in May will be of Weinberg's Symphony No. 21, which the composer tentatively suggested might be called 'Kaddish', with the combined forces of the CBSO, Kremerata Baltica and its presiding genius Gidon Kremer - I raved about the live performance, coupled with Shostakovich's Fifteenth Symphony, here on The Arts Desk - and his Second Symphony (Kremerata Baltica only). Next are works by Mirga's fellow Lithuanian Raminta Šerkšnytė with the Lithuanian National Symphony Orchestra , Vilnius Municipal Choir and Kremerata Baltica. DG haven't specified what 'works by British composers' will be on the cards in the third project, to celebrate the orchestra's centenary.

It was serendipitous news on a day when I was working on a note for the performance she'll be giving with the CBSO of The Sea by Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis (1875-1911), her country's greatest composer. I'd expected to find this half-hour symphonic poem a bit wispy and second-rank, but it's astonishingly good. Listening to two recordings (by Svetlanov, right up his late romantic street, and  Gintaras Rinkevičius with the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra he founded in 1989 - I presume that's the same as the 'National' SO cited above), it's obvious how the young composer had absorbed the sound-worlds of Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra and Ein Heldenleben. Yet he eventually makes something of his own in the hypnotic nocturne that follows the storm. 

Not sure what to make of the art which took over in the final years of Čiurlionis's all-too-short life - he was committed to a psychiatric hospital with a severe bout of depression in 1910, and died of pneumonia there the following year, having never seen his baby daughter - but clearly there's a synaesthesic connection. The two above pictures are part of A Sonata of the Sea, painted in 1908. The first is entitled Allegro, the second Andante and the third Finale.

This gives a further fillip to my longing to visit the third of the Baltic countries - the first two, Estonia and Latvia, I love and respect beyond measure - to see Čiurlionis's house in Vilnius and the gallery containing his pictures. I also ought to think of travelling up to Birmingham to hear the concert, since I'm hooked on the work now. Here's Svetlanov's performance, a bit rough around the edges but right in spirit.

Shostakovich covers

Having been stunned by the Françoise-Green Piano Duo playing Mahler's Sixth Symphony in Zemlinsky's arrangement last night, I came across two rather more outlandish adaptations, this time of Shostakovich. Heavy metal wouldn't work for the greater part of the works in question, but to paraphrase Iestyn Davies, who drew our attention to the string quartet movement below, it's somehow how I also imagined the movements in question. Here's the whirlwind scherzo of the Tenth Symphony from Conor Gallagher x 4 (plus some wacky drumming).

There's only one snag - the very few bars of p and pp can't be achieved in this medium. Of course we also have an invaluable four-hand version from Shostakovich himself and his great acolyte Miecsylaw Weinberg, briefly available on the short-lived Revelation label but helpfully up on YouTube with a rather odd accompanying photo.

The whole performance is available in a single slice on YouTube too. Finally, let's hear the talented Mr Gallagher in the 'cover' which led to my finding the above, of the Eighth String Quartet's second movement. The quotation from the Second Piano Trio sounds especially wild and unexpected on electric guitars.

Munk's Passenger

Weinberg's opera The Passenger is, as we've seen for ourselves, an admirable, honourable attempt to grapple with the human issues of Auschwitz: what keeps the soul alive in an inmate, how strong are the instincts both for freedom and to forget (especially in the oppressor). It has, as I've insisted - and some won't even grant it that - masterly scenes, but overall still seems to me too unwieldy for anything like masterpiece status. Whereas I'd be far more inclined to bandy that phrase about with respect to the (absolutely non-operatic) film by Andrzej Munk now available on Second Run DVD. It's much closer - as the author said to me when we met at the London Coliseum on the opera's opening night - to Sofia Posmysz's original autobiographical novel. Its unfinished status raises more questions than answers; Munk was killed in a car crash on his way to Lodz to look at film designs on 21 September 1961, shortly before what would have been his 40th birthday. To complete a necessary memorial, Andrzej Borowski filmed extra scenes in Auschwitz, while the portion of the drama set on the liner Batory, where former SS overseer Liese Alexandra Slaska, pictured below) comes face to face with her spiritually indomitable one-time charge Marta, had been shot but not to Munk's satisfaction; so stills alone were used - incredibly effectively - against a commentary written by two Polish School acolytes. The result is that it's the present which seems unreal, while the mundane brutality of the camp comes across in all its chilling casualness, heightened by the almost unbearable use of the site 15 or so years after its abandonment. Chinks in the guards' armour are briefly evoked with the subtlety that only cinema can convey: Liese's expression suddenly changes from hard to worried as she looks through the fence at people on their way to the gas chambers; later, in a close-up on one such processional, a young soldier lets a little girl stroke his Alsatian dog, and again for a moment his face softens before he realises what he's supposed to be doing. Marta, who of course has such a strong and radiant voice in the opera, hardly speaks. Yet when, processing past a woman being ritually humiliated to stand semi-naked, she says 'head up!', it's all we need to know about her sense of pride and refusal to bow to Liese's 'help'. Marta is superbly played, with nearly all expression in the eyes, by Ewa Mazierska. Liese's account of their relationship, in the present editing, seems to unfold in two narrative flashbacks: once as soft-pedalled economy with the truth, the second time to reveal the sadism which develops from her own sense of not being loved, as Marta is by Tadeusz. This, too, is summed up in a single moment - when she enviously takes the flowers sent to Marta on her birthday, and walks away along the fence with them. It's all accountable only moment by moment, and I'm still left wondering exactly what the trajectory of Posmysz's book might be. Which means that we have to fight all the harder to get it translated into English, as we discussed with her interpreter at the reception before the ENO premiere. Anyway, here the lady is, so elegantly dressed and gracious, in much-needed colour after all that harsh black and white. And you can hear Weinberg's The Passenger in a recording from the Bregenz Festival (which means, in German, Russian, French, English, which all serve it well) on BBC Radio 3 tomorrow at 6pm. I mull over opera and film with Andrew McGregor before and between the acts. Curiously, tonight BBC 4 also screens Terry Gilliam's much more questionable, but fitfully brilliant, holocaust-related ENO production of Berlioz's The Damnation of Faust.

The ace

No question about the top choice in Radio 3's Building a Library this time - and don't read on if you still have to hear it on the BBC iPlayer - which, if you live in the UK only, I'm told, applies for the next five days - and don't want to know the outcome. We're not allowed to say 'winner', and usually I end with two or three versions with which I'd be equally happy for different reasons. But tenor Georgi Nelepp (pictured above) would be enough to stake out the 1952 recording of Tchaikovsky's Queen of Spades as easily the best.

His sensitivity, even production, characterisation and fabulous diction leave Atlantov - a more heldentenory Hermann on no less than three recordings, if you like that sort of thing, which I did at the end of the first scene and throughout the last - Grigorian (for Gergiev) and the rather interesting Peter Gougaloff (for Rostropovich) way behind. Grigorian, by the way, wore a powdered wig like the one Nelepp sports below in the very traditional Mariinsky Queen of Spades I saw in St. Petersburg, but was allowed to take it off, I seem to remember, for the filming, as it had turned him rather into the Frog Footman of Lewis Carroll's Duchess.


Decisive in the choice, though, was Melik-Pashayev's conducting: incredibly nuanced, getting superb articulation from the Bolshoi Orchestra and pacing unerringly. For once, the Pastoral of the Faithful Shepherdess that falls like a true 18th century intermezzo halfway through the opera doesn't outstay its welcome. Other recordings may have even better Tomskys and Yeletskys (Leiferkus and Hvorostovsky for Ozawa), but none comes close overall.


If you want the classic, you'll have to buy the 60-CD Tchaikovsky Edition, but it's to be found, I'm told, in some places for less than a pound a disc. There are other operatic rarities - The Oprichnik, The Maid of Orleans, The Slippers and The Enchantress are all here - though inevitably the performances are variable. I've just been listening to the Ansermet versions of the ballets which, though often cut, have such esprit.


Briefly, then, more Russian stuff this week. Tonight I interview the Pacifica Quartet (pictured above by Anthony Parmelee) in a Wigmore pre-performance event before the launch of their Shostakovich cycle; and next Saturday I plague the airwaves again, talking to Andrew McGregor about Weinberg's The Passenger before a Radio 3 relay of the Bregenz premiere. But the highlight of the week is somehow bound to be the two-concert appearance at the Festival Hall of the world's greatest living conductor, Claudio Abbado, with the world's greatest players, the Lucerne Festival Orchestra.

Why you must see The Passenger

It's an Auschwitz opera, but it could hardly be more responsible or unsensational in its approach. Zofia Posmysz, the Polish woman on whose novella it's based, was indeed interned in the camp and years later heard what she thought was the voice of her former tormentor in a group of German tourists on the Place de la Concorde (it wasn't, but she based her flashback technique on a 'what if?'). Mieczyslaw Weinberg, the composer, otherwise known as Moisey Vainberg, followed in his father's footsteps as a musician in Warsaw's Yiddish theatre, fled to the Soviet Union while his parents and sister were sent to the camps, and was imprisoned in the last year of Stalin's reign for 'bourgeois Jewish nationalism' (his father-in-law had been Solomon Mikhoels, whose fate he was spared only by Stalin's death).

So both had a right to such an opera. That wouldn't in itself make The Passenger great, and in the relatively cold light of twice viewing the Bregenz premiere on DVD - the first time to review for the BBC Music Magazine, the second time with a score to write a programme note - I still can't say with certainty that it is, at least by the conventional canons of operatic masterpiece status. Too much, perhaps, lives under the shadow of Weinberg's inspirational father-figure mentor Shostakovich (I argue in the programme, or rather speculate, since there's so little hard evidence, on the presence of a third voice who would certainly have been presented on a regular basis to Weinberg by Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten).


Yet what struck me especially on a second hearing was how restrained much of the musical invention is. It doesn't thrust itself on you with any false pathos; it only really breaks its leash in the impassioned love music between the imprisoned Sofia-figure, Marta, and the lover she's reunited with, Tadeusz. It places its dissonant climaxes very carefully; it makes use of a life-and-death tension between cheap music and Bach (a departure from the source). Its dramaturgical arches see the banality of evil ultimately wiped clean, or at least dwarfed into insignificance, by the voice that will never forget.


Above all it demands total integrity from its cast. Michelle Breedt, picture above right in the third of the Karl Forster photos from the Bregenz premiere, will surely be as magnificent at ENO - the eight-performance run starts tonight - as she was at Bregenz. Giselle Allen sings the other woman, originally sung by Elena Kelessidi (on the left). There are superb roles for a whole ensemble of women, whose barracks scenes remind me of the integrated acting in Sovremennik's vintage staging of Yevgenia Ginzburg's Into the Whirlwind. And David Pountney, knowing better than to exploit his recent trademark crazy crowd scenes, directs with restraint on Johan Engels's perfect set.

I'm facing tonight's UK premiere with just a little knot inside, but I know it's going to be quality work. I'm sure, too, that the opera itself will justify the five two-hour classes we're going to spend on it in my Opera in Focus course at the City Lit, starting this afternoon. Lucky that I have a full house of students willing to follow me into such arcane repertoire...


On a connected note, I spoke on the phone yesterday to Thomas Sanderling about the death, just before his 99th birthday which would have been today, of his remarkable conductor father Kurt. I needed to check some facts in my Guardian obituary, and though I gave him the option of not being disturbed, he rang me to talk about his father's last days and to read through the piece (which made me very, very nervous - needlessly, as it turned out).

Both Sanderlings have been intimately connected with Weinberg's work; the composer dedicated his Second Symphony to Sanderling Vater. Now Thomas is embarking on what he feels passionately sure IS an operatic masterpiece, Weinberg's treatment - with the same librettist, Alexander Medvedev - of Dostoyevsky's The Idiot. He's going to play through scenes from the piano score to convince me. So the wonderful continuity of the musical world goes on...

Stop press, 20/9: The Passenger was, as predicted, done by ENO at the very highest level. Fret though I may about what might be the authentic voice of Weinberg, there were huge strengths throughout and, yes, the epilogue was quietly affecting. Review here on The Arts Desk. And I got to shake the venerable hand of elegant Zofia Posmysz...

Name that opera

I'd have guessed an all-in-the-schoolroom reinterpretation of Britten's The Turn of the Screw. In fact Alastair Muir's ENO production photo is from Christopher Alden's even more radical re-think of A Midsummer Night's Dream, next in the Britten operatic canon: Iestyn Davies, whose throat infection meant he did a perfect mime job to William Towers singing very well from a box on the first night, is Oberon/Quint, with Dominic Williams as changeling boy/Miles and Anna Christy as Tytania/Governess. I've thought and thought about this superb realisation, which like Rupert Goold's vision of Turandot set in a Chinese restaurant oughtn't to work right across the board but somehow does, since I saw it on Thursday: read the Arts Desk review here.


To coincide with the new production, the latest in a series of new ENO-related series of opera guides has just been published. Building on the old ones, but even handsomer, they take me back to a more innocent time doing humble proofing for still much-missed Nick John alongside Henry Bredin, and happy days are here again with the very friendly Gary Kahn in charge. He asked me to write a piece on the production history of MND - haven't seen a copy yet, so can't tell you what else is in it - and I realise I've seen rather a lot, from luminously trad (the Peter Hall at Glyndebourne, three times) to luminously mod (Robert Carsen plus a short-lived Opera London version conducted by Hickox at Sadlers Wells) via one by Christopher Renshaw which made the score seem stiff and contrived at Covent Garden (saving grace: fledgling Mark Rylance as Puck) and one in a semi-staged performance at Snape (the diplo-mate sang Theseus).

The one I still wish I'd seen, apart of course from Aldeburgh days before I was born, is Baz Luhrmann's Raj-versus-protoBollywood Opera Australia production. I put up this YouTube trailer on the Arts Desk, but no harm in repeating it here. I've heard better performances of "Now until the break of day", not least last Thursday's, so bewitchingly as well as brutally conducted by Leo Hussain, but none - again, apart from ENO's latest departure from the norm - which looks more enticing.



ENO, of course, is on a roll. Though it's more hit and miss, Terry Gilliam's approach to Berlioz's already problematic Damnation of Faust has at least three visual scenes to compare with the coups of the C Alden Dream and continues the Bury regime's mostly successful incorporation of other media (the Dream is austerely straightforward in that respect, though the visuals - especially in an Act 2 sequence which I won't spoil - are no less amazing). Here's another blackboard shot for ENO, this time by Tristram Kenton - Peter Hoare as coxcombed, C D Friedrich Faust and Christopher Purves as Mephistopheles.


Next season has two surefire talking points which I hope will be great hits, and which I've taken the risk of including among the six operas we'll study at the City Lit. At the ENO's 2011-12 core is what I believe will be the London, though not the UK, stage premiere of Adams's The Death of Klinghoffer, which still hits idiotic pro-Israeli lobby reefs in the States (I've just read what Adams so eloquently and carefully has to say about the balance of sympathies in his superb book Hallelujah Junction). And the season kicks off with Mieczyslaw Weinberg's The Passenger in the David Pountney production, the Bregenz world premiere of which I've just waxed lyrical over for the BBC Music Magazine.


A more of-the-essence piece of work than Weinberg's The Portrait - don't miss the Radio 3 broadcast this coming Saturday at 18:00, with Christopher Cook chatting to me in one of the Leeds Grand Theatre boxes - it deserves its right to deal with Auschwitz; the author of the novel, Zofia Posmysz, was interred there and based her tale on the premise of what would happen if she came face to face in later life with her tormenting Kapo, and Weinberg escaped Poland and the fate of the rest of his family only to end up a near-victim of Stalin's antisemitic drive in the early 1950s. But none of this would figure if the score wasn't extremely strong, and I think it is, though haven't made up my mind pending the live experience whether it's a masterpiece or not.

My, these are culturally exhausting times. I've been to big events five nights on the trot, and I'm holding my breath about tonight's special-invitation Chamber Orchestra of Europe 30th birthday concert, on a hunch as to why the conductor isn't named on the invite. Wasn't looking forward hugely to the Glyndebourne Meistersinger on Saturday, given unquenchable loyalties to the WNO experience of Richard Jones's superlative production with Bryn Terfel last June, but it did its own thing and, while not surpassing the Welsh event, came close to it at times. Again, I tried to be as fair as I could to Gerald Finley, who did a good job and won a not undeserved standing ovation but still isn't Bryn or Norman Bailey, on the Arts Desk. And it was sheer bliss to be at Glyndebourne again on a perfect day.


I was lured away from my favourite picnic spot by the lake since we critics had only a ticket apiece, I wanted company, Ed Seckerson hadn't wanted to risk (wrongly) anticipated cold and discomfort, and so I joined him and a friend in one of the Wallops. Where the food was much better than I'd anticipated, even if service was in a bit of chaos on the first night. Anyway, I then got another little wander just as the sun had gone off the gardens.


At least one aspect of the new garden regime is redeeming recent misdemeanours: the abundance of papaver orientalis both in the beds on the lawn and in the formal garden was spectacular.

Portrait of the artist as opportunist

OK, so that's me messing round on the Leeds Grand Theatre stage, as snapped by my Radio 3 interlocutor, the ineffable Christopher Cook. But I'm talking about Chartkov, lonely protagonist of Nikolay Gogol's The Portrait as translated into music by Mieczyslaw Weinberg (aka Moysey Vainberg) in 1980. The opera, clearly, is no straightforward rendering of the short story, in which the portrait of a Satanic old moneylender is absolutely key throughout. That supernatural aspect wasn't much liked by critic Belinsky, whose more prosaic understanding of a central message about artistic compromise is shared by David Pountney in the Opera North production (the four production photos below by Bill Cooper).

In other words, he sees it more or less exclusively about what happens when a painter sells out, only to discover too late what dedication to real art is all about. Which is fine, up to a point. I like Pountney's central conceit, brilliantly supported by the sets and costumes of Dan Potra, that we start in a rainbow-oiled artist's studio in Petersburg c.1830


only to move forward to what society painters would have had to do in the Socialist-Realist world of the 1930s


and on to Warhol in New York.


That's fine. But, as has become Pountney's wont in more recent extravaganzas, the message is muddied. What are we supposed to make of the cracked-mirror 'portrait', the fact that the old moneylender with the evil eyes never appears, let alone steps out of his frame, to balance the vision of the artist's psyche muse, a leggy girl in bedshirt and high-heeled red shoes? Plus there are some declining old voices in the ensemble: Helen Field's is unbearable to listen to after a while, and I don't think it was just Peter Savidge's temporary indisposition which made his crucial, Death in Veniceish hymn to the true artist in Act Two so unpleasant to listen to (it's a tough sing, and we got a much better stand-in on Thursday, who sadly won't be heard on the broadcast).

Nevertheless it's tenor Paul Nilon's evening, and while this time he didn't have a character as interesting as Michel in Martinu's Julietta to get his teeth into, he did as good a job as he could to stop us wishing that the great Langridge had got hold of the role twenty or so years earlier.


So what of the music? A second hearing, not least because Rossan Gergov got far more impassioned and well-phrased playing out of the Opera North Orchestra than on the previous performance we'd heard, suggested pseudo-profundity in the last act when I'd been led to hope there might be real depths here. But Weinberg still finds inspired touches: the Lamplighter's ever more haunting ballads, in a simple vein that this composer could do so well, the muted violin solo for the evanescent Muse and the symphonic sweep from the A major eulogy in praise of the dedicated artist to Chartkov's panicky peripetaia. It never comes close to the operatic riches I heard once again in Saturday's Met screening of Adams's Nixon in China, so evidently a masterpiece even back in 1988 when I first heard it. But it's stageworthy and interesting. And the more I hear of Weinberg's music, the more I come to respect this composer who lived so much in Shostakovich's shadow after arriving in the Soviet Union from Poland.


Some of this I managed to say in our boxed conversation as we looked out on the splendours of the beautifully-restored Grand Theatre (above) before and during the show: we'll see what transpires when the Radio 3 broadcast is aired in May. I must say that I had a jolly time as always with CC - seen here framed -


as well as with producer Sam Phillips - who indulged me in a second visit to Hansa's Gujarati vegetarian restaurant, where I did indeed get to meet the great lady as I'd hoped - and the rest of the team. And, yes, I love Leeds now; though it seems unfortunate that Opera North couldn't have done more to fill the many empty seats in the Grand with young folk (I saw none on either visit). This is just the sort of piece that could have fired up many a school project.

A grotesque old friend

When we last visited the Tower of London, I was a little sad to find that my favourite piece of armour from childhood visits, the grotesque helmet given by the Emperor Maximilian to Henry VIII, had migrated northwards to the new Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds. That was the driving force which propelled me along the River Aire from my hotel the morning after a not too thrilling first acquaintance with David Pountney's Opera North production of Weinberg's The Portrait at the Leeds Grand Theatre (I have to make a return visit for the BBC Radio 3 broadcast, so I'll reserve judgment here until I've seen it again).


The helmet, as it turns out, is the symbol of the museum, lodged in a fortress-like new building with an imposing entrance and a curious staircase extension housing the 'hall of steel'.


Well, it's all free, so I shouldn't even carp, but in addition to my customary plaint about the dismal shortage of postcards (hence the DIY photos), I found it problematic that the museum is so exclusively geared to interactivity and kids as to exclude the kind of aesthetic pleasure you can still get walking through what's left of the Tower and in the handsome royal armouries of Les Invalides. A moan you might find as odd as my new-found interest in the beauties of armour. That I think I can justify by the analogy with churches and cathedrals: similarly built as expressions of power, but crafted by masters and artists whose genius outlives the original purpose. The grotesque mask, in any case, seems to have been decorative tournament armour.


I found an interesting discussion on this which told me that 'tourneys where masks were used were called "Husaria" and were introduced from Hungary, where many Polovtsy clans had fled from the Mongols.' Another suggestion is that 'this helmet looks more like a grotesque iron "mask of shame", made in the 17th century in some German towns [and featuring] hooked nose, horns and glasses...maybe today we are not fully able to appreciate the Emperor's practical joke?'

Other decorated armour in Leeds includes (only connect with the above) this 13th century Mongolian helmet shell covered with lions and Buddhist monks


and while I can't get enthused about Japanese samurai getup, I did spend most of the time on the oriental armour floor. The Armouries' other great treasure, I reckon, is the Mughal elephant armour from the late 17th or early 18th centuries, a gift from Lady Clive in 1800 which ended up in Powis Castle.



In the same room, I couldn't resist snapping a couple of powder flasks - one late 18th century Rajasthani with a dragon's head


the other from Lahore incorporating a nautilus shell.


And here's the Florentine equivalent a specimen from 1565 possibly made for the Medicis.


I must say Leeds began to open up its well-concealed treasures this time. In addition to the new developments and old warehouses along river and canal


there were a few things to see in the early 19th century parish church of St Peter (quite a fine tower, that, for the 1830s), including the Hardwick memorial of 1577



and a tenth century cross which the Victorian architect had the nerve to appropriate for his own back garden down south, only for it to be reclaimed after his death.


And now I know two good eateries in Leeds: the splendidly muralled Safran Persian restaurant just under the railway arch on Kirkgate - ah, memories of Persepolis -


and Hansa's Gujarati vegetarian restaurant at 72/4 North Street, just up from the theatre (thanks to Graham Rickson for introducing me to that). Looking forward to more dhosas on the return visit, and hoping this time to catch a glimpse of the famous Hansa: Asian Business Woman of the Year 2003, 25 years in the business and still running the same establishment.