Les Illuminations illuminated - Aldeburgh Festival 2016

 Britten's Les Illuminations - illuminated! This year's Aldeburgh Festival starts with typically provocative panache. Les illuminations, staged as theatre, with circus performers, sets, costumes and lighting effects. And why not?  Rimbaud's poems are highly dramatic, teeming with images, screaming out for expression.  Britten responded by creating vivid settings which bring out their manic exuberance. Was Les Illuminations Op 18 (1939-40)  Britten's first true opera?  It's infinitely more accomplished than Paul Bunyan, written around the same period.  Opera doesn't have to be grand in the Wagner/Verdi mode. Not for nothing that Britten would create smaller-scale opera, more suited perhaps to his personality.  Understand Les Illuminations. and comprehend  why Britten is the antithesis of Andrew Lloyd-Webber.

Les Illuminations is also a watershed in Britten's creative growth because he was finding his own, individual voice through what Auden was to call "mediterraneanising" - breaking away from the conventional world of a mainstream British composer. Britten's horizons looked outward to the North Sea and beyond.  He adored Alban Berg and would have been well aware of Lulu, where characters flit from persona to persona, and where proceedings are overseen by a Ringmaster.  Perhaps it's no accident that he responded to ever-changing circus in Les illuminations and it's keynote cri de coeur "J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage!" It's not a cry of triumph but the realization that the key - the illumination -  to creativity lies in being genuinely original.

Rimbaud completed Les Illuminations in Britain, amending the  drafts in a garret above what is now the A4, near the M4 junction.  London, for Rimbaud, was a liberation. After the confines of Charleville, he felt propelled into the future, a world where possibilities were infinite. It wasn't British tradition that aroused him, but the thrill of modernity: trains, technology, urban life and social change. Les Illuminations is a young man's vision of new frontiers.  Britten's Les Illuminations sounds nothing like an opera but it's an inherently theatrical work, surprisingly close to later, one-person monologues like Poulenc's La voix humaine., which, incidentally stages extremely well. Musically, Britten responded to the variety in the texts with endlessly inventive movement, bristling with energy, lending itself well to physical movement. There's an edgy restlessness, too,  in this music which may reflect the fact that it was written in the hiatus between one war and another.

At Aldeburgh, from 10th June, Les illuminations will be sung by Sarah Tynan, with Nicholas Collon conducting the Aurora Orchestra, with an ensemble of "international circus performers" devised and directed by Shaun Leslie. In principle, absolutely nothing wrong with seeing it staged : no no faux purist sneering. Adventure is an Aldeburgh Festival thing. They've been doing open air installations for years, so enhancing a concert at the Maltings, Snape, shouldn't prove too difficult. Proper fireworks (illuminations)  might upset Health and Safety, but there might be ways around that. The secret - to enjoy and get into the spirit of things

Rimbaud's dense images seem to scream out for visual expression. The illustrations I'm using come from Ferdinard Léger's illustrations for  the 1947 edition of Rimbaud's Les Illuminations. . The first is the title page, the second a portrait of Rimbaud and the third an illustration of Parade.

Exceptionally well written review Tippett Britten Elgar Prom 51

An exceptionally well-written review of Prom 51 Tippett, Britten and Elgar, Daniel Harding and Ian Bostridge. Read it HERE in Opera Today. It's by Claire Seymour, which is why it's so well informed and analyzed. If only more music writing were on this level!

On Tippett : "In the Adagio cantabile Harding placed more emphasis on the adagio than cantabile. The conductor took a risk not only with the tempo, but also with the dynamics, resisting the temptation to let the arching lines grow and swell, restraining the strings to a mezzo piano.

On Britten : "Bostridge totally immersed himself in this work, musically, emotionally and physically, at times leaning (dangerously?) far backwards, elsewhere thrusting his hands nonchalantly in his pockets, sometimes fixing his eye confrontationally on the audience. Willing to throw caution to the winds, Bostridge gave a technically flawless account, the arresting characterisation absolutely convincing. It is hard to imagine a better performance of Britten’s thrilling song-cycle. "

.On Elgar : "The racing scherzo, by contrast, wickedly transformed the theme of the first movement into a nightmarish vision of horror, and there was plenty of pomp and majesty in the final ‘Moderato e maestoso’, although here again the recapitulation did not fully achieve a sense of liberating affirmation. But, the final bars were wonderfully contemplative and whispered; a shame, then, that the spell-binding silence that Harding desired was shattered by overly hasty, impatient applause."

Dangerous Britten, Tippett and Elgar Prom 51

Rebels at the BBC Proms? In Prom 51, Daniel Harding conducted Tippett, Britten and Elgar with the LSO and Ian Bostridge. British greats, yes. But nothing Establishment.The Fanfare from Tippett's The Mask of Time might have heralded a conventionally stolid celebration of British music, but Harding drew out the "secret" background. This time, the Fanfare blasted us back to 1939, and the Concerto for Double String Orchestra. Context matters, for England was on the verge of war. Tippett, being politically aware could hardly have been confident or cheerful.  In the Concerto, Tippett builds conflict, pitting the two parts of the orchestra against each other and creates a sense of divisiveness by combining themes that seem loosely connected. Free of slogans and earnest wordiness, he expresses himself more effectively through abstract music. The Concerto works in purely musical terms because it isn't elevated agit prop (though that can make great music too). Its angular, jagged edges engage us in self doubt and contradiction. Prince Charles might find it all a bit too "modern" but this is Tippett at his best.

Benjamin Britten's Les Illuminations also starts with a Fanfare, but the strings are jerky and nervous, crackling with tension.  Les Illuminations was also written on the verge of war, when Britten was in despair about the future of Europe and his own future as a composer who wanted to create something new and original but hadn't quite found his mission. Although the text is in French, it is a mistake to assume that Les Illuminations is French music or that it must be performed in a French style.

It's vital, in performance, to appreciate what Britten (whose command of French was poor) was trying to do. Rimbaud's poems are short outbursts of feverish emotion. The imagery is highly condensed  meaning elusive. You can almost feel Rimbaud hyperventilating. Having escaped the bourgeois confines of provincial France, Rimbaud was intoxicated by London and its frantic sense of modernity but he was desperately poor. He completed Les Illuminations while working in a garrett in Reading, trying to scrape a living. Britten respects the almost kaleidoscopic fragmentation of ideas  by breaking words up into individual sounds, then elides lines into dizzying freefall. The last thing you want is "conversational". Bostridge captures the sense of surreal, almost hysterical psychic dislocation, so fundamental to interpretation. Again and again, the phrase ""J'ai seul la clef de cette parade sauvage!" explodes  as ecstatic revelation, but each time with slightly different colouring. Perhaps there is no "key" other than the immediacy of the moment.

"Tourillons, tourillons", turbulent, sudden switches of timbre and pace. Bostridge draws out the extreme in the music, reaching ethereally high pitches, growling along low passages, colouring sounds with sensual nuance. The piece was originally performed by a soprano, perhaps because the deepest levels in the piece might have been too hard to cope with in Britten's buttoned-up Britain.. Bostridge brings out the profound danger in the piece, twisting his tongue and projecting sound as if savouring some mind-altering potion, enjoying the delicious challenge of things unknown. Perhaps the violin solo functions as the snake offering an apple in Eden? Bostridge and Harding have been doing Britten together for years, developing a singularly original and very perceptive approach. Their recording of Our Hunting Fathers is absolutely brilliant, as is their Billy Budd. (more here). Perhaps some might prefer their Britten sweeter and prettier, but for me Britten's music can't really be performed by "ordinary" tenors. Imagine Placido Domingo!

Elgar's Symphony no 2 (1911)  is stylistically so adventurous, (for its time and place) that one wonders if the composer might have felt he was entering new territory he might not want to examine too closely, rather like Sibelius on the completion of his last great works. Harding emphasizes the clarity with which Elgar contrasts divergent themes. We hear the familiar "warm" Elgar confidence, but also a more subtle sense of unease, in the best and most creative sense of the word. Without a degree of soul searching and questioning, can good art exist? Elgar, despite his worldly honours and clubbability, was essentially an "outsider" as all true artists are on some level.  Listen to the whole broadcast HERE.  And for an exceptionally well informed and well written review of this Prom, read Claire Seymour in Opera Today.