Dark Mirror Bostridge Zender Winterreise Part Two

At the Barbican, London, Ian Bostridge's "Dark Mirror", a brilliant response to Hans Zender's response to Schubert's response to Wilhelm Müller's poetry. Bostridge's journey into the dark soul of Winterreise explores uncharted territory, opening new routes into meaning. Winterreise is a work of such genius that you can, like Bostridge, spend a lifetime contemplating it yet still find more to learn. Hence the numerous reworkings and stagings to which Winterreise lends itself so well. This, however, must be one of the most fascinating, since it generates so many insights.

Zender';s Winterreise delves into the inner musical logic, bringing out the  mechanics of the protagonist's mind, going round in obsessive circles. yet always compelled forward.  Hence the mysterious rustlings, and almost hypnotic pizzicato heartbeats, and tense bursts on wind instruments, exhaling and drawing breath. Very physical. As the pace picks up, a familiar melody, but oddly mechanical. The protagonist is determined to keep going lest his feelings overwhelm him. The vocal part starts normally enough, but suddenly, from "von einem zu den andern", words repeat mechanically, and the orchestra whizzes into a manic march.  Just as suddenly, a switch back to normal with Fein Liebchen, Gute Nacht but now we know the lyricism is forced. The protagonist can't give in to mere beauty but must struggle on.  The stops and starts and sudden flurries of recitation illustrate the protagonist's dilemma. Like a machine, he winds down, yet lurches back into life. Like an animal, he listens, picking up clues as to direction. Schubert's music is often quite driven - think Der Musensohn - so this obsessiveness is valid. 

Zender's music is graphic, but also abstract enough that it's not mere illustration. Sudden turns, strange distorted sounds. Sometimes the singer recites rather than sings, as if he's trying to pick up an invisible trail.  The music throws you off-course, so you're as disoriented as the protagonist and  start thinking like him. The instrumentation evokes the sound of wandering folk musicians, reminding us of the tradition from which the Leiermann comes. The protagonist rebels against constraining systems.  It's no accident that he strides away from houses into the wilderness. The "Expressionist" visuals were also a good reminder that the boom in German art film in the 1920's had its roots in Gothic Romanticism.

Netia Jones's images focus, too, on this "inner landscape". Though we see the ghost of a tree and glimpses of barking dogs, the stage resembles an infernal machine, with dangerously sloping angles and hard metallic surfaces. We catch glimpses of cogs and wheels, grinding relentlessly together. The hurdy-gurdy is a primitive instrument which drones, and is ground relentlessly, rather than played. At the end, we don't see the Leiermann as bedraggled beggar, but the image of the cogs and wheels grows huge, behind Bostridge's gaunt figure. Seldom has the identification between the Leiermann and the protagonist connected with such power.  "Wunderlicher Alter ! Soll ich mit dir geh'n ? Willst zu meinen Liedern, Deine Leier dreh'n ?"  Jones's images also connect the first song with the last. Dogs howl. The protagonist will ever be an outsider, threatening  conformity, whatever might be his fate.  Is the Leiermann a harbinger of death or the hallucination of a deranged mind? Perhaps some need such comforting thoughts to distance themselves from the protagonist, but I think there is much evidence to suggest an even more challenging outcome. Although the images in Winterreise are pictorial, their symbolism runs much deeper. 

This Dark Mirror Winterreise also benefits from the unique quality of Bostridge's voice. He can infuse seemingly straightforward lines with layers of complex meaning. His voice stretches, as if probing the recesses of the mind, teasing out the surreal from the straightforward.  He's incomparable in Britten.  Bostridge's voice curls, tightly coiled like a spring, leaping upwards when Zender's lines erupt. There was a wonderful, haunted quality to this singing,  utterly faithful to the undercurrents in meaning. The wunderliches Alter is a vision, whether he's real or illusion.  Bostridge's hushed tones  suggest both horror and wonder in the English sense of the word.  As so often, Bostridge's timbre suggests an exotic instrument, again, in this case , in keeping with the implicit musical logic of Zender's conception.  Baldur Brönnimann, a sensitive interpreter of new music, conducted the Britten Sinfonia.  When - it's not a question of "if" - Bostridge's Dark Mirror reaches DVD, it will be a must for anyone seriously interested in Winterreise. Those of us fortunate enough to experience it live will never forget the experience.  Please also see my previous post on Hans Zender's Winterreise.

Photos: top, Hugo Glendinning; bottom, Roger Thomas

Barbican Britten Curlew River Bostridge review

Perhaps if I hadn't been looking forward so much to the Barbican Britten Curlew River, I would have been less disappointed. Tradition dictates that Curlew River should be done in a church because that's how it was first done in Britten's time. But what counts above all else is artistic merit.  If this had been a concert staging, in the Barbican Hall or Barbican Theatre, this Curlew River might have worked. St Giles Cripplegate is just all wrong for this. It's the wrong period, for one thing, its late Reformation and Puritan connections unsympathetic to the mysticism of the early Dark Ages fens, where being a Christian was something to be remarked upon. As a work of art, Curlew River is strong enough to make a powerful impact on its own terms, without needing a specific setting.

The physical constraints of St Giles don't make for good theatre. The nave became an extended stage,. Netia Jones's film projections were good, their monochrome starkness appropriate for the piece, but their impact was  spoiled because they could only be seen in full by the orchestra. Sightlines were blocked by pillars. The audience was crammed into the margins of the building. Perhaps one should not feel comfortable in Curlew River, but neither should the experience be penitential. Stages are usually horizontal for a very good reason. The Procession is important to the meaning of this piece,. Though the monks did walk down the nave,  they were kept busy changing their clothes while the Britten Sinfonia played. While the monks do become protagonists in the drama, this re-costuming is a clumsy misuse of space.

Fortunately, when Ian Bostridge started to sing, the drama at last began to kick in. The Madwoman is sneered at because, in her extreme grief, she has lost all conventional decorum. She''s an aristocrat but wanders alone in the wilds, wailing. Her speech is too "high born", too alien for the Fensmen. For me, this is critical to interpretation because the Madwoman is an outsider, a refined person of taste, driven to behave in extremes by the loss of her son, her pride and joy. Bostridge sings the part with all its contortions, fragments and wayward swoops, but does the staging show him trying to knit while he sits on the ferry?  She's no ordinary Mum. After the Madwoman hears the story of the Boy and his death, Bostridge's voice became firm, with almost demonic force. For all we know,  the Madwoman conjures up the vision of the Boy in her mind? Bostridge's purposeful singing suggests that she does have that kind of creative strength. Bostridge was  relatively restrained, considering what he could do with the part, given the right staging, but this bland directing was not the occasion. .No doubt the Madwoman finds peace hearing that the dead will rise. But why do the river people treat the Boy as a saint and giver of miracles?  The plaintive cry of the curlew recurs, suggesting primitive animist mysteries, and the "Japanese" cadences suggest alien worlds where western doctrine has no meaning. There is a lot more to Curlew River than straightforward Christianity.

Mark Stone sang the down-to earth Ferryman  and Neal Davies the Traveller, like the Madwoman, an outsider from places beyond. Gwynne Howell sang the Abbot, grown weary with experience, and Duncan Tarboton sang the Boy, as youthful as the Abbot is old.  William Lacey directed the Britten Sinfonia. Unfortunately, St Giles is perpendicular, so voices are funnelled upwards and muffled. Only Bostridge, right in the middle of the nave was fully audible. With a cast as good as this, it was a waste of good singers.

More thoughts : fomal ritual is central to the interpretation. In the original production Britten supervised, the ,monlks worte masks, the way Noh actors did.  It intensifies the surreal emotional distance so important to the piece. If Britten was writing "naturalistric" why then the use of Japanese form and cadences ? Why not simply writre it like Waly Waly ? Perhaps audiences prefer Britten minus his music.. It's sad that this anniversary years should be taught to disregard the music. If German directors tr8ed this, audiences would scream "Regie!"

More on Benjamin Britten on this site than only any other non specialist site. Please explore ! For Curlew River please read here and here. For Netia Jones please read here and here. (Knussen's Sendak operas, Jones's best work to date. This Curlew River,was an amateurish, superficial  Sunday School homily in comparison. See also the comment below. The Barbican should be professional enough to look after its customers properly.

Barbican Britten Our Hunting Fathers Bostridge

The Barbican's Britten celebrations continued Friday with a concert by Ian Bostridge and the Britten Sinfonia conducted by Paul Daniel, featuring Britten's breakthrough masterpiece, Our Hunting Fathers. To this day the work remains strikingly advanced, with its strange stabbing rhythms, contradictory phrases and  quirky twists up and down the scale. Medieval dance becomes a  vehicle for modern inventiveness. At its premiere in Norwich in 1936 it must have seemed bizarre. To Britten's credit, it still is. Indeed, I'd say that Our Hunting Fathers is Britten in microcosm,  adapting ancient ideas to modern sensibilities. Even if the good burghers of Norfolk had appreciated the musical inventiveness, they might have been discomforted by the message.

"They are our past, and our future" the cycle begins. But what are "they", who we "cannot voluntarily move, but await the extraordinary compulsion of the deluge and the earthquake" ? We hear an incantation invoking the saints for the banishment of rats, who populate the earth in greater numbers than man.  Messalina weeps because her monkey lies dying. Then The Dance of Death (Hunting for Partridge) where the names of hunting falcons are recited. The text is early 17th century, but the effect is utterly modern. "Whurret ! Wanton, Sugar, Mistress, Sempster" each word clearly defined and separate. You can almost see the falcons take to the air, like a squadron of fighter planes, off on a mission to kill. The Spanish Civil War was the first major occasion when aeroplanes were used to bomb civilians, a point not lost on Britten and W H Auden. The Epilogue and Funeral March draws a connection between the killing of animals and cruelty to men. One class kills, another is condemned "to think no thought but ours, to hunger, to work illegally, and be anonymous".

For a far better insight into Britten's Our Hunting Fathers. please read Claire Seymour's detailed review in Opera Today. Although the work was originally written for soprano, I think it needs the stronger, more assertive voice of a tenor to bring out its darker,more dangerous nature. In 1936, Britten was only 23. Perhaps even he baulked at its disturbing implications. Bostridge's recording, with Daniel Harding and the Britten Sinfonia, dates from 1998. His voice has matured, and is much more impressive now, though he was under the weather on Friday. If  only he would record it again!

Britten's Young Apollo op 16 (1939) is almost as creative. The strings spring jauntily upbeat, with the suggestion of wild dance, with exotic undertones: Dervishes, perhaps? Then savage downward chords from the piano, establishing strange tensions. Apollo shines in the string harmonies. We are dazzled. For a while the orchestra and pianist Lara Melda frolic together playfully. Tiny repetitions on the piano suggest awe and wonder. Then the sun seems to hide behind clouds. The piano protests, but in a glorious final glow the music disappears. A miniature Death in Venice in less than 7 minutes.

More than most British composers, bar perhaps Ralph Vaughan Williams, Britten immersed himself in Elizabethan and Tudor music. yet he adapted this firm foundation in a unique way. At the Barbican, Paul Daniel (one of the best Britten conductors) led the Britten Sinfonia (somewhat misnamed as they don't do mainly Britten)  in Britten's arrangement of Henry Purcell's Chacony in G minor, and later Britten's Suite on English Folk Tunes (A Time There Was)  (1974). While looking backwards, Britten looks ahead.

Michael Tippett's Fantasia concertante on a theme of Corelli( (1953) was a timely reminder of what British music might have been without Britten. Britten's originality still discomforts some who would prefer him domesticated in the British mainstream, though he's often misunderstood by those who associate modern music with the European avant garde. Britten is interesting for me because he's too good to pigeonhole.  James Bowman once asked Britten if he'd like to be buried in Westminster Abbey. "No!" came the reply. "I don't want to spend Eternity next to Hubert Parry".

My review of Britten's War Requiem Royal Albert hall Bychkov is HERE.

More on Britten on my site here than anywhere else that's not solely Britten. Please explore and k3ep coming back

Dancing Barbican Britten Phaedra Richard Alston Dance Company

Many, many thanks to the Barbican Centre for commissioning Britten's Phaedra choreographed by Richard Alston Dance Company at the Barbican Theatre. Of the numerous Britten homages this centenary year, this is one of the most inventive. Absolutely, it makes sense to dance Britten, to find new ways into his music through physical, non-verbal expression.The worlds of dance and music don't mesh nearly as often as they should. so this was stimulating for everyone, though it was by far a better dance performance than a musical experience. But Richard Alston's danced Phaedra is something that will last, long after this centenary year has passed.

Britten's Phaedra was made to be moved to. Maze-like, recurring patterns, mirror images. The orchestration is bizarre. It's scored for percussion and harpsichord, with small string ensemble and soprano, Its textures are stark and stylized, with the directness of Greek or Roman art: no fancy background decoration. Percussion and harpsichord? The timpani and metallic instruments add a raw edge, militaristic perhaps, or maybe ceremonial. Phaedra, after all, is a queen and she takes her regal responsibilities seriously. Britten's cycle feels like state treason, (which of course it is). Against the grim percussion, the harpsichord struggles, the thinness of its tone perfectly portrays Phaedra's vulnerability. Harpsichords are percussion instruments too, and Britten makes no pretence at writing anything harmonic or baroque.

Britten's nine songs evolve like tableaux, each a stage in Phaedra's journey from her wedding day to her death. Phaedra's feelings are not love, but a curse. "I faced my flaming executioner Aprodite, my mother's murderer". Phaedra's mother was Pasiphaë, who slept with the bull and died giving birth to The Minotaur.  Kinky. Britten sets the vocal part in a combination of long, soaring arcs and short staccato interspersed with tense silence. "I could not breath or speak", she sings , describing the compulsion that overwhelms her. She rasps, "Love. Love. Love" heavy and hollow like ostinato, against wildly turbulent, twisting discords, marked by high, screaming strings. "Alone" she suddenly shouts : no adornment, no softening. Indeed, by this stage words are bursting out almost randomly, without any attempt to civilize feelings into conventional form.

"Death to the unhappy is no catastrophe" she intones. At last the strings rise in a sort of elegaic anthem, almost recognizably melodic, but quickly surge into a whirring, rushing torrent. "Chills already dark along by boiling veins" Phaedra faces death heroically. In the end, a solo cello plays a sweet, lyrical passage : Phaedra is no more.

The Britten Sinfonia were shrouded in darkness: an  atmospheric touch. The music seemed to materialize out of nowhere, like the mysterious workings of Fate that have cursed Phaedra.  The dancers of the Richard Alston Dance Company appeared in strict formation: disciplined, unsentimental, like a Greek chorus. Costumes (Fotini Dimou) glowed scarlet like blood, purple like Phoenician royal. Hippolytus (Ihsaan de Banya) dances among his friends. He's magnificent - so muscular, so lithe, so physical. Phaedra (Allison Cook) is smitten. Because the music moves in tableaux, there are opportunities for different ensembles. Pekka Kuuisto's violin was particularly evocative, suggesting sensual, but sinister curves. Kuuisto's strong, charismatic personality makes an impact even when he's in the background. The dancers weaved languidly when he played, then snapped into fierce angular stances, as stylized and unyielding as the music itself. Alston also made more of the role of Theseus (James Muller) and Oenone (Nancy Nerantzi), fleshing out the drama as counterparts to Phaedra and Hippolytus.

Cook isn't a singer of the calibre of Janet Baker or Sarah Connolly, but she moves well.. Simon Keenlyside, an athlete and dance devotee, used to specialize in singing with dancers, an art which is quite different from just singing. He moved in sympathy with the dancers, without affecting his singing.  Cook projected impressively, and made the part convincing.

The Barbican Centre also commisioned choreography for Britten's Sechs Hölderin Lieder. Dance is episoidic by nature, so songs lend themselves well to small scale scenas. The dancing was pleasant enough but these songs are far too condensed and complex to translate into movement. Their rhythmic pulse also compromises the piano line and the singing. RobinTritschler and Christopher Glynn needed to be more flexible and fluid, especially since the dancers were so lyrical.

Richard Alston's choreography of Illuminations was first created for Aldeburgh in 1994, titled "Rumours, Visions". (a quote from the final song Départ), together with Alston's Lachyrmae, which opened the evening at the Barbican.  In Illuminations, Alston also creates protagonists Rimbaud (Liam Riddick) and Verlaine (Nathan Goodman) and the muse, in Being Beautous, was Elly Braund.  These characters don't, strictly speaking, appear in the text, but give a danced performance dramatic context.  Rimbaud and Verlaine had a torrid affair which shook provincial society. They escaped to London, then the most modern, cosmopolitan city in the world. Rimbaud was fascinated by the mechanical processes of city life. Dance brings out the subtle recurring patterns in the music, often obscured by the sheer brilliance of virtuoso performance. But therein lies the contradiction of interpreting a piece through a different medium. If the singing is too good, or too idiomatic, it draws attention away from the dance. Tritschler's voice is low for the piece, with a tendency to sing under the note, struggling at the top. Les Illuminations needs a soprano, or a very specific kind of high "Britten tenor" to bring out the surreal craziness in the piece. It also didn't help that the performance was over-miked, any subtle nuance drowned by sheer volume. But the audience at the Barbican Theatre, most of whom seemed to be dance people, were delighted, because the music served the dance. That's as it should be. We can listen to Les Illuminations any time, but we don't often get to see it danced.

Richard Alston Dance Company's Barbican Britten; Phaedra is part of Barbican Britten, a two week celebration of Britten's centenary that examiness Britten's music from stimulating new perspectives. For more information please read here.  Claire Seymour (author of The Operas of Benjamin Britten) and I will be covering most events and more here and in Opera Today.  Please keep coming back ! (Our Hunting Fathers on Friday)  More on Britten on my site here than anywhere else that's not solely Britten.

Night and cloud : Britten Sinfonia, Bostridge, Barbican

Here is a link to Claire Seymour's review in Opera Today of the Britten Sinfonia concert at the Barbican.  Interesting that they paired Schubert's Notturno for piano trio with Britten's Nocturne. Hands down Britten came off best. I wondered how the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth would work out with small (ish) ensemble

"Although technically accomplished, the Mahlerian climaxes were a little underwhelming; it’s just not possible to attain the lustrous, penetrating string sound required with such a small number of players. But, there was a clear sense of contour and overall structure, and a haunting ambience was established.

"............Fortunately, Bostridge raised the level of expressivity and musicianship in Britten’s Nocturne for tenor, seven obbligato instrumental soloists and strings. Here Britten’s nuanced scoring allowed the voice, and text, to come across clearly, even in the more dream-like, shaded passages. The individual movements melted into one another as Bostridge conveyed both the rapture and ethereality of night-time worlds. The woodwind soloists were all excellent - the cor anglais was touchingly beautiful in Wilfred Owen’s ‘The Kind Ghosts’, in Keats’ ‘Sleep and Poetry’ clarinet and flute danced an elegant arabesque, and there was some impressive virtuosic bassoon playing. The final movement, a setting of Shakespeare’s ‘When most I wink’ (Sonnet 43) possessed a rhetorical stateliness which was quite troubling, Britten’s setting of the final lines - ‘All days are nights to see till I see thee,/ And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me’ - disturbing in its restless intensity and visceral impact."