Hartmann Simplicius Simplicissimus Independent Opera

K A Hartmann Simplicius Simplicissimuss with Independent Opera at the Lilian Baylis Studio this week, with Stephanie Corley, Timothy Redmond conducting the Britten Sinfonia. This was the first ever staging in the UK, and for a good reason. Simplicius isn't really an opera at all and much of its pungency derives from the fact that it's written with some Bavarian dialect.  Hartmann's source was H J Chr. Grimmelhausen,  whose book Der Abenteuerliche Simplicismuss (1669), is set in  the Thirty Years War, one of the defining traumas of German history, and indeed world history, since it was the first truly global war, acted out in South America and Asia as well as in Europe. "Anno Domini 1618 wohnten 12 millionen in Deutschland" quotes Hartmann in his introduction. "Da kam der grosse Kreig". Thirty years later, only 4 million remained.  In  Hitler's Proclamation to the German  People, he invoked twelve years of humiliation and two million dead to justify Nazi control. The myth of "The People" legitimized the Third Reich.  By reverting to  Bavarian dialect, Hartmann pointedly underlined that there was no single "German People", and that, in any case, the German past was bathed in blood.

Until now, there has been no English translation but this is no demerit. If non-Bavarians have to struggle with the text, that's a good thing since it makes a difference to enter into the arcane, folksy internal logic of the piece. It is not "our" world but a lost world we need to make an effort to penetrate. Though it portrays the past, Hartmann's Simplicius is in no way naturalistic. The "roles" as such operate as symbols. The narrative lies disguised in the music.  Its disjointed character and embedded references reflect a fractured society falling in upon itself. There are hints of Catholic chant, of Jewish song and of modern music, all things the Nazis despised, wrapped in quaint pseudo-medievalism.  Significantly, Helmut Scherchen, champion of new music, worked with Hartmann on  the concept.  Again and again, Hartmann's contemporaries like Braunfels, Schreker and Honegger (all of whom I've been writing about for ages) used history for subversion, not as dreamy romance.  Nazis glorified nostalgia. Sharp-minded composers saw through the bluff.  Hartmann's angular lines are meant to grate, not soothe.  Hartmann's Simplicius is didactic: Brecht's ideas on theatre adapted to music, "imagined theatre" as Henze called it, concepts of music drama still evolving today. Please read my piece on Beat Furrer's FAMA HERE.   

This has a bearing on performance, which is why I'm not at all convinced about naturalistic staging, whatever the period. A friend said of this Independent Opera production that the work might not have the cachet it has, had it been written ten years later. A perceptive comment, since it takes no brains to look back now on Nazi times. But there's a whole lot more to Hartmann's Simplicius than an anti-war narrative.  Hartmann's message is far more disturbing now that we may be entering troubled times where "the people" whoever they might be, are easily fooled by technological manipulation and demagogues without scruple. 

Simplicius is "Ein kleiner Bub bei den Schafen, kannte weder Gott noch Menschen, weder Himmel noch Hölle, weder Engel noch Teufel. Notice the pattern of opposite images, which flows throughout the opera. The text is set in rhyming couplets, typical of German tradition, and the music moves in a similar grave two-step. Simplicius is a "Holy Innocent", so pure he knows nothing of heaven or hell. In Tarot the Fool signifies someone who goes forth into the world without fear, facing danger but protected by his purity. Siegfried without the selfishness. Hartmann sets the part for high soprano though the role is male, to emphasize youth and innocence.

"Beware of the Wolf" warns the farmer. Wolf of course was Hitler's nickname, which he was rather proud of.  Simplicius doesn't know what a wolf is. so when the Landknecht  appears he thinks the Horseman is the vierbeiniger Schelm und Dieb the farmer warned about. "Weiss nit, Herr Wolf" cries Simplicius but the Landknecht attacks the farm and kills the Knän, die Meuder und das kleine Ursele (these archaic words give the piece a deliberate old-world air). A long passage describing the horrors of war, which ends with O armes geknechtetes Deutschland. Now Simplicius has wised up and heads into the forest where he meets a Hermit (another Tarot figure). The Hermit sings music like stylized monastic chant, wavering weirdly. He teaches Simplicius to sing Unser Vater (Our Father). Give us our daily bread". Simplicius, incorrigibly naive, asks auch Käs dazu? (and cheese, too?) Eventually the Hermit dies, leaving Simplicius to face the world alone. Provocatively, Hartmann writes into the death music an echo of the Kaddish.

After another powerful intermezzo,with swirling strings, plunging brass, evoking storms and storm clouds perhaps, Simplicius flies into the Governor's mansion. The soldiers boast of their tyranny and blaspheme. This chorus sound like drunken communal singing in a beer cellar, also a reference perhaps to the Nazis. This time Simplicius pipes up "that's no way to speak". "Can you hear the Mauskopf piepsen shouts the Governor. And of course, Simplicius's music is flute and clarinet. The Governor recites rather than sings, not Sprechstimme but something discordant, a lot like the speeches made where sense mattered less than sound. Some things don't change!  Then Simplicius speaks, at length. Words pour out at a shrill rapid pace, almost no time to take a breath. 
Simplicius harangues the listeners, without music to soften the effect. As she finds her strength her words are supported by drums. A militant but not military march?  And why?

Suddenly, Simplicius's voice rises in song. Es dröhnt die Stadt, es stapft daher, schäumende bitt're Jammersg'walt.  She's joined by the chorus, now representing farmers. The music suggests march: an unnerving reminder that the victims of war can easily become perpetrators of another.  The peasants sing "Ein gleich Gesetz, das woll'n wir han, vom Fürtsen bis zu Bauersmann" but they kill the rich folks anyway. Is this a revolt? The peasants simply stand and stare.  What's changed?  Darkness falls. Simplicius stands by the corpses. "Gepreisen sei der Richter der Wahrheit!"  The peasants hum quietly, wordlessly. Does this signify smoke or unthinking acquiesence? The Specher reminds us that by 1648, 8 million Germans were killed, nearly a quarter of the population at the time.  The music erupts in manic march. Is the cycle repeating?

Hartmann's Simplicius might well be something left unstaged, or minimally staged, since it is theatre of the mind.  In times when The People's Will takes precedence, maybe the mind, or the conscience preserves an individual, as Hartmann discovered in his "internal emigration".   I've written a lot on  Simplicius Simplicissismuss and on other works by K A Hartmann over the years, and also about other composers of the period. Please use labels below and at right.  Two recordings of Simplicius stand out : Heinz Fricke from 1985, and much better and punchier, Ulf Schirmer conducting the Münchener Rundfunksorchester with Camilla Nylund, Michael Volle, Willi Hartmann and Christian Gerhaher in 2009.  I have also heard Markus Stenz from Netherlands Radio, it's no match for  Schirmer and the idiomatic Munich style.

Gatti Berlin Phil : French Modernism Honegger

"Masterworks of French Modernism", the title of Daniele Gatti's concert with the Berliner Philharmoniker. Debussy La Mer, the key piece that opened new horizons, a magical work which, like the ocean keeps changing, revealing its depths in good performance. "God is in the detail" said Gatti in the interval interview, explaining how the arc of a performance is built upon many layers of detail.  The term "Impressionism" is a tag that's stuck because it does describe the idea of creating a whole made up of tiny cells of pure colour.  Impressionist paintings shocked viewers because they seemed to shine from within, because each stroke of paint seemed to glow with inner light.   Now, perhaps The Shock of The New has worn off with millions of reproductions on coffee mugs, t shirts and so on.  But in music, every good performance is new, an original recreation in its own right.    Daniele Gatti is too good to do routine, and with an orchestra as good as the Berliner Philharmoniker, there was no way this performance would fail.  There are so many brilliant La Mers around that we've all heard better, but also even more that are infinitely worse, and that's something to be glad about in a world where mediocrity is increasingly prized over excellence. Not a "coffee mug" performance by any means, even if the real revelations on this occasion came in Honegger and Dutilleux.

Arthur Honegger's Symphony no 3 and Henri Dutilleux Métaboles have both been part of the Berlin Philharmonic's repertoire for some years. Simon Rattle conducted Métaboles as recently as 2013, with more or less the same musicians.  Although much of Dutilleux's best work lies in miniatures and chamber pieces, Métaboles  is scored for large orchestra.  It flows over five movements each wiuth a distinctive personality : not variations but a series of developments, characterized by meticulous detail - a kind of refined embroidery.  To borrow metaphors from painting, Pointillism, as opposed to Impressionism.  Gatti's approach is softer grained than Rattle's, which may be more authentic but which might appeal to the already converted than to those coming new to the composer.  There is a powerful Dutilleux lobby, so influential that it could demand chapters on Dutilleux in books about Messiaen.  A bit petty, since both composers are very different indeed, and there's no need to play silly status games. Better to absorb the music on its own terms.  A few years ago, I attended a Dutilleux recital at the Wigmore Hall (read more here). The composer, then aged 92, was present, enjoying himself hugely because Jan Pascal Tortelier's father was a close personal friend.  Afterwards, my friend and I had a long dinner, leaving close to midnight. And who should we see but Henri Dutilleux, walking back to his hotel around the block. We waved. He beamed.

Herbert Karajan conducted Honegger's Symphony no 3 (Symphonie Liturgique)  with the Berliners in 1969, so long ago that it's pointless to compare.  Whoever uploaded the performance to YT knew what they were doing by illustrating it with a drawing by George Rouault. Connections to painting again.  No pretty pointillism for Rouault : his work is marked by ferocious dark outlines, defining the images within . The colours in his famous series of paintings of Christ seem to glow like stained glass even though they are oppressed by savage framework, which is utterly appropriate.

Written in the winter of 1945/6, Honegger's piece deals explicitly with the horrors of war, and the challenges of a new era. The Dies Irae with its ferocious outcries, expresses anguish.  Rouault's suffering Christ, depicted in sound.   Honegger, being Swiss was a neutral in occupied France, but no less involved with what was going on around him.  The second movement, De profundis clamavi, is a slow, but not peaceful meditation. What must we do that to counter violence and hate ?  Slower, more amorphous figures, long lines that seem to float on a stream of mysterious detail.  Gatti's unhurried attentiveness works well: we cannot afford to gloss over these complexities. This is the dark soul of the whole symphony.  The movement concludes with intense outbursts from the brass, angular shapes against the horizontal keening in the strings. The last movement, Dona Nobis Pacem, doesn't, however, "grant us peace". Instead, it moves in the form of a solemn procession, lit with violent alarums from brass.  One could visualize a cortege marching at night,  the darkness broken by malevolent flames, whipped by turbulent winds. Obvious connections with Honegger's masterpiece Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher written in 1938, when Honegger was well aware of the threat posed by Hitler.  Joan of Arc stands up to invaders, but is martyred.  As the flames rise round her, though, she sees visions of saints and angels, and the voices who lead her return at last, taking  her up to heaven. Peace, of a sort, is achieved but only through confronting evil and suffering : no avoidance, no prettying up.  Honegger's Symphony no 3 isn't just a masterwork of modernism but a powerful document of how music can inspire the mind and soul.  Please read my other work on Honegger and especially on  Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher by following the links below and on the right.

Cantique de Pâques - Arthur Honegger

For Easter, the glorious Arthur Honegger: Cantique de Pâques  for  soprano, mezzo-soprano, contralto, female choir and chamber orchestra. It was written in 1918, when the composer was in his mid twenties but it's a surprisngly "modern" work. It isn't heard nearly as often as it should be, because the ensemble isn't the easiest to programme, and the piece runs 6 minutes.  Perhaps that's why Honegger transcribed it for soprano and piano in 1924. But the original version is so beautiful that it really needs to be better known

Abel Gance Napoléon RFH Saturday

Almost unique event this Saturday, 30th November - a screening of Abel Gance's epic Napoléon at the Royal Festival Hall, London.  This version, curated by Kevin Brownlow,  runs from 1330 to 2130 with two intervals and a 100 minute dinner break. A marathon! This screening will be accompanied by the Philharmonia Orchestra, playing Carl Davis's score for the film.

Gance's Napoléon is legendary because it's a masterpiece of cinematic art, with sequences and shots way ahead of its time, and a dramatic intensity that makes spoken dialogue superfluous. This was film as the highest form of art. Albert Dieudonné played Napléon, Antonin Artaud played Marat and Gance and his wife played subsidiary parts. The original music was composed specially by Arhur Honneger and can still be heard - separately from the film - as his Napoléon Suite.

So why is a milestone in film and music history,  made nearly 90 years ago, still excluded from public life? I won't go into the legal ramifications here, but read the article in the NYTimes for background.  But what artistic integrity lies behind some things. How much of the profits actually accrue to those who made the film in the first place? It also raises questions about the stranglehold of the English language media,. The NYT article quotes a US review of an early version released in the US. "The film “doesn’t mean anything to the great horde of picture house goers over here......“Nap wasn’t good looking enough and they didn’t put in the right scenes for the flaps here.” Oh well. Maybe we're wiser and more mature nowadays.  Or not, as the case may be.

L'Aiglon Honegger Ibert RARE broadcast

Unmissable!  The opera L'Aiglon, by Arthur Honegger and Jacques Ibert on BBC Radio 3 online for a week. This is the performance at Opera Lausanne in April 2013, not available as a recording or online. Quite a discovery!

L'Aiglon, "The young Eagle" was the son of Napoléon Bonaparte and carried his father's name. Even before he was born in 1811, the boy was a pawn in a grand dynastic alliance between two empires. Napoléon was at the height of his powers, able to force the Hapsburgs into a showdown. By marrying the daughter of Marie Theresa, Holy Roman Empress, Napoléon could hope to unite all Europe. Yet by the time the child was three, Napoléon had been defeated and sent into exile.  Suddenly the child was a misfit, an embarrassing reminder that power games don't last. The boy was retitled Herzon von Reichstadt and kept in gilded isolation at the Schönbrunn in Vienna. He died, perhaps conveniently for the Hapsburgs, aged only 22. 

What must it have been like to have been L'Aiglon? The opera portrays the boy as a romantic dreamer, inspired by the glory of his father's achievements, even though he was brought up in a hostile atmosphere where his father's memory was reviled. What psychological mind games must the boy have faced ? His story lends itself to dramatic interpretation.

Honegger and Ibert were writing in 1937. The traumas of the First World War were still fresh in memory, but Europe was once again sliding into war. Honegger and his contemporaries re-examined the past as a route to the future.  L'Aiglon is part of a meme that runs from Abel Gance's 1927 epic Napoléon (for which Honegger wrote the music) to Carl Th Dreyer The Passion of Joan of Arc and to Honegger's own Jeanne d'Arc au Bucher, and even to the wartime anti-fascist resemblance to dramas of Braunfels and Hartmann. 

L'Aiglon has an interesting structure. The First and Fifth Acts were written by Ibert and act as decorative frames for the three  darker inner acts written by Honegger.  L'Aiglon (soprano Carine Séchaye) has a young friend Séraphin Flambeau  (Marc Barrard). They're longing to escape the confines of the palace where they're kept in a kind of golden prison. Bonaparte, rose from ignominous origins to glory. Shouldn't his son dream of glory, too?  The picture at right was made in 1830, the period in which the opera is set, and the year before the historical Reichstadt died. How the portrait accentuates his Hapsburg features. The earlier portrait, made in his infancy, accentuates his Bonaparte looks. Political art!
 
In the second act we hear what L'Aiglon is up against. Nearly the whole Act is sung by Prince Metternich (Franco Pomponi). The role is a tour de force, The lines crawl almost bass-like along the lower reach of the register: a snake, slithering quietly but with menace. Metternich was the greatest schemer of his time, and an arch-reactionary who despised everything Napoléon stood for. In 1937, the implications were pretty clear. There's also a parallel with Frederick the Great, who as a young prince tried to escape the Prussian military machine. Honegger softens the portrayal with moments of reflection, and the sound of distant war-horns, but L'Aiglon cannot possibly compete. Séchaye sings wild, almost shrill staccato as L'Aiglon falls crushed.

Act Three is set in a ballroom. Dancers are masked, circulating in neat, formal .rituals. Masked ball as metaphor for power struggle. The orchestral music is elegant, but the voice parts are tense, jerky interjections. L'Aiglon and Flambeau run off into the night to the strains of the Marsellaise. The Fourth Act is as powerful as the Second. Driving, swirling chords, like smoke, wind, storm, suggest the sounds of battle. One "hears" The March on Moscow. L'Aiglon sings of Wagram, his father's decisive victory over the Austrians in 1809, which led to the Hapsburg alliance in the first place.. But Honegger reminds us of defeats to come. Like Frederick the Great's companion, Flambeau dies so L'Aiglon can survive. Trumpet calls, alarums : we can almost see flags flying and horses running into battle. "A Wagram!" cry the chorus, muted as if in fear. L'Aiglon, crazed by his vision, gets carried away. Suddenly, though, the climax ends mid-flow with a few tentative notes. The young man's moment is over.

Carried back to the Schönbrunn, Reichstadt is surrounded by the voices of Maréchals and soldiers and his mother the Duchess of Parma. The sadness in the music is palpable, slow tempi speeding up towards the inevitable conclusion, diminuendos falling like snow. As the young man dies, he hears the song "Sur le Pont d’Avignon". This isn't simply a twee  reference to folk song which a young prince in Austria probably didn't hear too often. The song continues "L'on y danse, l'on y danse". It can be sung as a round, the dancers repeating formal patterns that lead nowhere.

Ingrid Bergman in Honegger's Joan of Arc at the Stake

Ingrid Bergman made two movies about Joan of Arc. The first (1948) was directed by Victor Fleming. Any film with Bergman as the star is watchable, but the script (Maxwell Anderson) is wooden, and the production is pretty daft. Shortly after, Bergman met Roberto Rossellini and they had a torrid affair which scandalized Hollywood. But one positive outcome was that together they made serious art movies.

Bergman's second Joan ofArc was Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher (1954), (Giovanna d'Arco al rogno) a filmed version of Arthur Honegger's oratorio, directed by Rossellini.  It's a very good example of how film can enhance music. Honegger's work is psychodrama as oratorio, and Rossellini understands its context.

The set is minimal, shot against a dark background with small lights like stars. Joan is alone with her confessor Frère Dominic. These are her last moments as she waits by the stake, and Joan is examining her conscience. She's manacled, but her mind roams free.  Honegger deliberately sets her part as speech, not song, to show how simple and vulnerable she is. It may be hard for those used to "ordinary" oratorio to appreciate that this heroine doesn't do heroic grand display. Joan is a heroine because she's pure and humble.

Even dressed in sackcloth, her hair shorn, Bergman radiates. Rossellini doesn't need special effects. Bergman's beauty comes from within. Honegger's narrative, such as it is, unfolds in a series of tableaux, like the Stations of  the Cross in Catholic churches, which people follow stage by stage as they meditate on Jesus's journey of suffering.  Rossellini frames Joan's way to the stake with two deliberately stylized scenes of heaven. Saints float in a sky of primitively painted clouds - the kind of painting you might see in a wayside shrine in the countryside, as Joan might have seen, centuries ago. Saints and angels move in a huge circle, the image of a halo, a crown or of the voices closing in on Joan's mind.

Rossellini understands how Honneger's music works. Each tableau is shown as a vision, opening out of the bare stage on which Joan and Frère Dominic are standing. Moreover, each tableau is shown from Joan's perspective. The judges are seen as animals, as a traumatized girl like Joan might have imagined. Honegger sets their words as comic grotesque, which is perceptive, for Joan didn't understand Latin, the language of the Church. It also underlines her peasant sensibilities, so far removed from the intrigues of state. Rossellini puts masks on his actors, so they look like players in medieval mystery plays, who probably did sing in grunts and squawks.

Honegger describes the camp of the English knights with mock-heroic pageantry. They're playing an obscure card game just like they're playing a game with the French nation. Then Honegger writes quasi-folk dance, and Rossellini shows a group of peasant girls dancing in a circle - as the saints and angels did - and Bergman joins them. "It was so, in my father's house" Joan tells the monk, meaning her earthly father. But Rossellini shoots the scene in a surreal mist and there's a mound behind, like the pyre at the stake. Je vais, J'irai! cries Bergman, for she's already on her way. Rossellini uses a technique where he superimposes Bergman's image over the background so she's partly transparent, between two worlds.  Again,this expresses Honegger's music perfectly, for the composer superimposes different threads of music - the folk song, the pageantry and exquisite crosscurrents of abstract music. It's amazingly daring, sophisticated writing.

The mob (the choir) taunts Joan as she's chained to the stake. Now their singing disintegrates to semi-speak, while Joan sings for the first time. Not a glorious triumphant aria but the folk song the girls sang before. It's so basic that even Bergman and the actresses who play the part can sing it. Honegger is telling us that Joan's an ordinary human being, ennobled not by her deeds but by her faith.  Je ne veux pas mourir! J'ai peur! she sobs, but then the song of the angels returns. Je n'ai pas seule!

Discords as the flame rise and the mob shouts, but the music of the angels wins out. Rossellini shoots Bergman, rising upward through the mists suggested in Honegger's ethereal music, until she joins the heavenly circle in the sky. It's tempting to read Rossellini's love for Bergman into this film, and his anger at the way she was vilified in Hollywood, but I think Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher stands on its own merits as a superb example of sensitive, musically informed film making.

Lots more on Joan of Arc, art film and music on film on this site and more to come!

Magnificent Honegger Jeanne d'Arc Barbican

Arthur Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher (Joan of Arc at the Stake) is magnificent. Rarely does an ensemble this size grace the Barbican stage,  but the extravagance was totally justified.  This massive oratorio is amazing, but you can hear why it hasn't been adopted as part of the British choral tradition. It's not because Honegger blames the English for the invasion and Jeanne's death but because it contradicts so many assumptions of what oratorio should be.

Ténèbres, Ténèbres, the London Symphony Chorus intones, but don't expect a solemn Latin Mass. The massed orchestral and choral forces are screaming accusations at the "heretic, sorceress, demon" and then we see Jeanne, (Amira Casar) a small, gamine figure who really does resemble Joan of Arc, her metallic blouse looking like a  shining breastplate. Joan led the defeat of the English at Rheims, and united France under the Dauphin.  But she was just a shepherdess from Domrémy. How could such things be possible?  Joan was a pure spirit, who saw nothing odd about speaking with saints and angels.

Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc is oratorio as psychodrama.  While the trial progresses, Jeanne's mind moves outside the courtroom, back to her youth, her visions and her simple faith in her mission. Signifcantly, Jeanne doesn't sing but speaks, usually unaccompanied.  At times she slips into a kind of Sprechstimme as she dreams about her past. Frère Dominique, her sympathetic confessor, (David Wilson-Johnson) sometimes sing an approximation of plainchant but shifts into speech. The other main roles (Nicolas Dorian and Marc Antoine, playing multiple parts) are taken by actors who can handle unusual demands, such as speaking in "donkey" voices. Otherwise voices come from within the chorus, the crowd of accusers. It's an interesting mix of stylization and naturalism, which fits well with the idea of Jeanne examining her conscience, as she's told to do, even if she doesn't come up with the approved answers. When she says "No", her accusers say "She's saying Yes!". The "Porcus" farce (Paul Nilon) is pretty wry. Despite the grim situation, there's a lot of good humour in this work, which keeps it down to earth. 

Some fascinating musical writing too. As the crowd bay for blood, Jeanne swoons in fear. Perfect moment for ondes Martenot (Cynthia Millar)  to wail above the tumult. Does it suggest supernatural forces good or ill, or does it suggests Jeanne's fear?  A boy alto (Jason Panagiotopoulos) sings a long solo, completely separate from the children's choir, and Jeanne suddenly starts to sing a simple melody when she reverts to reverie.  Honneger employs different rhythms and tempi, which evoke the many cross-currents in the situation, so the orchestra itself seems to be acting as polyphonic chorus. (For more on Honegger's style see my previous posts HERE, HERE and HERE).

Honegger's style in Jeanne d'Arc is almost deliberately cinematic. He cutrs between moods, like a film director cuts between scenes, gradually building up denser images. We hear an approximation of country dance (oddly modern and jazzy, perhaps on purpose), snatches of mock-liturgy. But mostly it's a constant sense of movement between states.  Honneger was an avid cinema goer, closely linked to the French movie world. He wrote the score for Abel Gance's epic Napolean (1927), the most ambitious movie of the time,  a silent which was shown in cinemas with live ochrestra, so he knew the technical demands of writing for film. Almost certainly he would have known Carl Th. Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) and moved in the same arty circles. Perhaps Jeanne d'Arc (1935) is Honegger's response to the film? It doesn't follow the narrative in the film, and Honegger's Joan is a very different personality, but the idea is intriguing.

Marin Alsop conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the LSO Chorus, and the New London's Children's Choir. Ten soloists/actors: Amira Casar,  David Wilson-Johnson, Nicolas Dorian, Marc  Antoine, Klara Ek, Katherine Broderick, Kelley O'Connor, Paul Nilon, Jonathan Lemalu and Jason Panagiotopoulos. While the soloists were clear, much of the choral singing was unidiomatic, so even French speakers would have needed surtitles.

No expense spared, for this is a work that needs complete committment. A great pity then that the programme notes were useless. They're cut from something else and pasted into the booklet without context, so there's no actual description of the music or drama, or even an indication of why Arthur Honneger is significant.  Since Jeanne d'Arc au Bûcher is a rarity and so un-English, it deserves a more detailed introduction. Why spend all that money producing a performance when the audience isn't primed to appreciate it?  The focus of the Barbican Joan of Arc weekend seems to be Joan as cultural archetype, symbol of "Women in Leadership", a theme which runs through other events. Many women in leadership are far too busy to get drawn into events like these, but one participant told me they were excellent.  But was Joan of Arc a "woman in leadership"?  She was just following what her voices told her. Today such folk get drugged into silence. As Honegger and his librettist Paul Claudel suggest, when Joan is burnt at the stake, the flames free her from the chains of worldy power games. They're making a parallel with matrydom. "Who lays down their life for others", as it says in the text.

I'll be writing about the film version of Honegger's Joan of Arc by Ingrid Bergman and Roberto Rossellini on Monday. Please come back, as I am doing a series of Joan of Arc (click labels below)

This was one of my top picks for the Barbican 2011-2012 season. For more please read HERE (vocal) and HERE (non vocal).