Heil! scream the toddlers

On the recent incident when an actor turned on a heckler and yelled "You're ruining things for everyone else"

".....incessant loud booing in theatres, appears to be a sign of changing times. It’s not so much that everyone is a critic, rather that everyone is such a bad, incompetent critic, the kind of critic who is too impatient and lazy to fashion a proper critique so resorts to boorish disruption instead.
I would have thought that, if you don’t like a play, you’d quietly leave, maybe ask for your money back, and fair enough. However, now there seems to be a new breed of uber-consumers who “know their rights” and (here’s a crucial shift) won’t sit passively as mere audience members but rather demand “equal billing” just for their reactions. In short, it’s the era of the self-sanctified right to reply as an instant dominant force that cannot be silenced or pacified." 

Read more HERE.

Precisely. Booing isn't about art. It's about suppressing opinion, denying everyone else the right to think for themselves. It betrays the very fundamentals of creative art. And of society for that matter. Booing is bullying, an obsession with suppressing others to promote oneself.   It's the Triumph of the Will. It's born of fear. Groups like ISIS and the Westboro Baptist Church etc.need to impose their will because they're not really strong in themselves. Demagoguery is self-fulfilling bluff, toddler tantrum in disguise.

Jurowski Zemlinsky Die Seejungfrau LPO - a new benchmark

Marc André Hamelin was the soloist in Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto no 3 with Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Festival Hall, this week. Hamelin and Rachmaninov were clearly the crowd puller,  and rightly so, for it was a very fine performance indeed, well poised and expressive.  Hamelin and Jurowski play to each other's strengths. I enjoyed it very much,  but for me the draw was Alexander Zemlinsky Die Seejungfrau (1905)

Although Die Seejungfrau  (The Mermaid) was loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Little Mermaid, don't expect Disneyfied prettiness. The tale is tragic and, for Zemlinsky, had personal resonance.  Even the most charitable would not call Zemlinsky good-looking, while Alma Schindler was so beautiful as to be almost unattainable: the mermaid and the prince, sexes reversed.  Alma dumped Zemlinsky overnight, when better prospects came her way. Losing Alma might have been the best thing to happen to Zemlinsky. The pay-offs included Der Traumgörge,  The Florentine Tragedy and Der Zwerg.  The mermaid tries to kill the prince she cannot imitate.   The dwarf cannot become what he is not however hard he tries to pretend. But by creating works of genuine originality, Zemlinsky proved that he was no ugly dwarf.

Jurowski captured the menacing depths in the introduction. Small, sparkling figures served to highlight the sinister gloom. The violin melody suggests the upward movement of the mermaid swimming upward: the LPO playing with energetic sense of purpose. Jurowskiu didn't bask too long in the sunshine. the urgent, almost violent theme which might represent the prince as huntsman churned up dissonance. Already we know this fairy tale will end in death.  Jurowski and the orchestra delineated the churning undercurrents. Frequent turbulent contrasts between lyricism and violence.  Jurowski didn't steer clear of the innate ugliness lurking within. The two-minute Sea Witch passage unearthed and edited by Anthony Beaumont makes a difference, intensifying the violence and the ultimate tragedy.   Jurowski's interpretation is even more perceptive than Riccardo Chailly's 1996 recording, which leaves all the others for dead.

Jurowski's background as opera conductor helps greatly, too, for he emphasizes the inherent drama in the orchestration. Jurowski's Die Seejungfrau is an opera where the orchestra sings. It's vivid in a cinematic way without being maudlin or sentimental.

Descending diminuendos prepare us for the final confrontation. Jurowski lets sounds surge forth, yet holds it back, creating extreme tension.  The LPO play with such richness that you could  feel the intensity of her loss. Had she had legs instead of a fishtail, she might have been a princess, but in her sacrifice, she finds Isolde-like transfiguration.

Listen again HERE on BBC Radio 3. This is an important performance, a new benchmark.

Hubert Parry's Jerusalem - more dangerous than you'd think

Jerusalem is so embedded in the British national consciousness that it seems to have been around forever. Yet Hubert Parry's setting of William Blake's poem was written and premiered only 100 years ago this month.  Simon Heffer has written an informative  account of its genesis in the Telegraph which is strikingly prescient in a Britain that's turning inward, embracing insular, xenophobic values that neither Blake, nor  Parry nor even Elgar would have countenanced.  In the UK, we're all immigrants apart from a few pure-bred Celts.

Jerusalem is interesting crossover, written and orchestrated by serious classical composers, which has taken on new life as an icon of popular culture. But what does it say about Britain when we read elsewhere, bluntly and without further elucidation, that  "Hubert Parry is famous for just this single work, he composed hugely influential chorales and symphonies". So Parry doesn't have street cred, but he's hardly unknown.  Jeremy Dibble's biography, C Hubert H Parry : His Life and Music was published in 1992. But just as Parry was getting the recognition he merits,  his reputation was commandeered into the PR machine of HRH the Prince of Wales. The real Parry, who wasn't a monarchist, doesn't deserve to be rebranded into that niche. Pushing Parry "back to the ghetto" of stereotype does no favours for British music history, nor indeed for national self respect.

 So for Parry, as well as for Britain, we should
".... not cease from Mental Fight, 
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand: 
Till we have built Jerusalem,
 In England's green & pleasant Land"

At this time of Brexit and UKIP pressure, we should also ponder what Jerusalem really means.  It is significant that Blake's first line starts with the word "And". Blake refers to the legend that Joseph of Arimathea came to England either before or after Jesus died, bringing with him a cutting from the bush from which was cut the Crown of Thorns used in the Crucifixion.  At Glastonbury today, there are hawthorn rtrees supposedly brought straight from Jerusalem where early Christians were being persecuted by the Romans.  Glastonbury is an ancient sacred site, connected to prehistoric religions and myth. The whole landscape can be "read" in mystical terms.So "those feet in ancient times", connect pre-Christian religion to the legend that Jesus himself escaped death. So the lines "And was the holy Lamb of God, On England's pleasant pastures seen? And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills?".  Hardly orthodox.

 Blake lived in a period in which the Established Church  was being challenged by many other strands of Christianity, like the Primitive Methodists -- more radical than Wesley. Today's millennials don't have a patch on  millenarianism as it was in Blake's time.  The "dark Satanic mills" Blake mentions could refer, literally, to industrialization and the end of pastoral innocence, or to the machinations of temporal power.  We don't really know what future Blake envisioned, except that it would be apocalyptic. the "Bow of Burning Gold", the "Arrows  of desire", the "Spear" and "Chariot of Fire".. Yet there will be no rest til "Jerusalem", whatever that might be. is built in "England's green and pleasant Land".

On the Last Night of the Proms, and elsewhere, Jerusalem is sung with unquestioning fervour by huge crowds, armed with the certainity that doing something in a large group must mean it's right. The music is so stirring, and so emotive, that anyone can interpret it as suits them. Nothing wrong with that at all: in fact, I think it is actually better to leave things open ended than to go for simplistic dogma.  For me, being British means being heterodox, liberally embracing different strands of belief, standing up for the rights of man (and women).  In an increasingly intolerant world of willful ignorance and bigotry, maybe that's no bad thing. 
.

Vindicated at Salzburg: Harnoncourt's magnificent Mozart 2012

Why is it "news" that Karajan hated Harnoncourt's guts? Surprise, surprise. Harnoncourt stood for everything Karajan wasn't.  The thought of Bernstein and Harnoncourt, well...;.   Harnoncourt, like most truly original personages,  didn't need anyone else to prove himself.  HERE is a link to Harnoncourt's magnificent Salzburg Mozart concert in 2012 : "Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento KV 243 et la Messe longue en do majeur KV 262. Les solistes Sylvia Schwartz (soprano), Elisabeth von Magnus (mezzo-soprano), Jeremy Ovenden (ténor) et Florian Boesch (bariton) ont été accompagnés par le Arnold Schoenberg Chor et l'Ensemble für Alte Musik d'Harnoncourt, le Concentus Musicus de Wien." Total vindication !  Please also see my piece Nikolaus Harnoncourt : his true significance.   Harnoncourt and those of his mindset - even with very different repertoires -  transformed modern ideas on performance practice  and made European music what it is today.

Trifecta : Equilbey links Harnoncourt, a Concert Hall for London and women conductors

New on medici.tv a superlative concert in which Laurence Equilbey conducts Beethoven at the Philharmonie de Paris. The performasnce is brilliant, but it also illustrates three themes in the news this week :

The Legacy of Nikolaus Harnoncourt

Equilbey's career is based on firm foundations in baroque and early 19th century repertoire. Her style embodies the principles that Harnoncourt so passionately believed in.  But read my article Nikolaus Harnoncourt : his true significance  for more detail.  Equilbey also inherits long-standing French cultural values, which go back to Descartes, Rameau, Voltaire and even Louis XIV - the values of clear-headed intelligence, clarity of concept, audacity and inventiveness.  It is no accident that Pierre Boulez was French, and exceptionally well informed. Modern European performance practice absolutely stems from the combination of these influences. It is also no accident that there are many specialist orchestras that can experiment with highly individual approaches. Equilbey works with the Insula Orchestra, which uses period instruments.  Listen to their Beethoven, where valveless horns and gutsy (literally) strings created a taut, muscularity which makes Beethoven feel radical.  Assumptions based on 1960's and 70's styles elsewhere are irrelevant, a sign of generalization based on guesswork rather than real understanding.

The Importance of a World Class Concert Hall

This concert took place in the new Philharmonie de Paris. Even on broadcast, the sound quality is exceptional. yes, you can hear audience noise but that only makes the experience more direct.  The Paris Philharmonie ( based on Boulez's idea of a Cité de la Musique) raises the benchmark for everyone. Since the future of music almost certainly lies with an international market and with new technology, such standards of excellence are paramount. London absolutely needs a truly world-class concert hall if it is to compete . It's all very well to prefer second rate and small time but  that is short sighted and petty minded.  London needs a world-class centre maybe more than it needs Julian Lloyd Webber! Please read my article London's New Concert Hall - the wider perspective  and many others on the lack of vision in British arts policy (and indeed in modern Britain).

Women in Music

Perhaps the BBC and British media don't really take the idea of women in music seriously. If  they did, they'd realize that there are quite a few top-rank, world-class women conductors around.  What's more, some of them have the originality and panache that marks them as world class.  It's simply not enough to rely on the novelty of gender.  Why doesn't the British media wake up to Equilbey, Susanna Mälkki, Emmanuelle Haïm and others. Women conductors aren't necessarily niche unless they're forced to be.  Tokenism is a niche, too, and far less worthy of respect.  In any case, it's offensive and insensitive to make too much about "milestones" about women conductors that mean nothing to the millions of women all over the world who struggle simply to stay alive, and often don't succeed.  


 

Auf eine Christblume Real life Eduard Mörike Magic

Auf eine Christblume : a poem by Eduard Mörike , set by Hugo Wolf at Percholdtsdorf in April 1888, encapsulates so much of the spirit of Mörike  that it's worth deep contemplation.  One evening in October 1841, Mörike  came across a rare bloom in a wintry graveyard, shining white and glorious in the gloom.  It was all the more miraculous to him because he had never seen such a flower before, especially in such a grim setting.  Being of an erudite bent like his friend the doctor/poet Justinius Kerner, he rushed home to check his botanical treatises and find out what the bloom was.  It was Helleborus Niger, the Christmas Rose, a flower of deep woods, rarely known in cultivation at the time. Here it was flowering out of season and out of context.  Mörike  put it in a glass just outside the window for he felt it needed to breathe out in the moonlight and in the free, open air.

 Next morning he found that the wind had ravaged it and it was no more than a lieblisches Geist ( a lovely ghost)..The poem grows out of the botanical journal, referring to the plant's natural habitat hidden deep in the woods, and commenting on the wonder of finding it in a windswept cemetery.  It is lily-like and exotic, yet hardy enough to brave the grim winter barrenness. Then Mörike's characteristic curiosity - whose grave was it growing on? how was it planted? He then connects the mystery of finding the flower with the wider realms of magic and wonder. Deep in the woods he finds the image of the crystal-clear pool, a "Heimat zaubbereich" ( epicentre of magic). This "Kind des Mondes, nicht der Sonne", so unlike other ordinary plants; is ephemeral and spreads its invisble magic by a heavenly scent which seems to emanate from no less than the robes of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mörike was a Lutheran pastor but he was known for his heterodox tolerance and married a Catholic.  Many of his poems show a fascination with the Virgin Mary, not necessarily in a purely theological context, as here where there's a strange juxtaposition of conventional piety  and pagan earth magic.

Mörike  enters a secret spirit world of elves and mystery. An elf, on his way to a wild midnight party, gazes in wonder at the glory of the mystical flower.  Then the poet makes another leap into transcendence. Now we are with the butterfly, another ephemeral being, hibernating in winter, waiting for spring, emerging from its chrysalis and flying bravely into the sun. It may never taste the wonder of the Christblumes's nectar, for by then the fragile flower will be no more.  Or will it? As Mörike says: Wer aber weiss? Perhaps, when the gaudy joys of summer are gone, and the butterfly too becomes a ghost, it might be drawn, in spirit, by the magical scent of the flower. This for me is a truly cosmic metaphor. A long ago commentator, von Weise, in his interpretation of this poem, says the mystery of all being is revealed in the image of this flower

As is typical of Mörike, there are metaphysical aspects to the poem. The flower emerges in the depths of winter, against all odds, braving darkness and freezing temperatures. The flower Mörike found was in an old graveyard, a cemetery so neglected that he couldn't figure out whose grave it was growing from. As a poet, he assumed that the grave may have been that of a young man or maiden,who died before their time, becoming immortalized, symbolically, in a fragile flower. In a sense that's a metaphor for all human life: a cycle of regeneration that never ends. 

I originally wrote this piece nearly twenty years ago. Amazingly, it's lasted fine. I was then working on ancient archives in a very hot part of South China,  Exhausted, and with no music or poetry around me, I unexpectedly came across an early edition of Mörike's poems!  It was like a sudden flash of magic, so uncanny that it took me a while to realize it wasn't a dream.  Opening the book to the page with Auf eine Christblume with its crisp, frosty imagery was like a sudden, sharp shock. In steamy, subtropical South China no Christblume will ever grow, though we have frangipani instead, and other exotics like Michaelia Alba (pikake)  whose  minute, unseen  flowers  fill the air with heady perfume,. So much like the mystery of the Christblume.  Pondering on the last two stanzas, I reflected on the mystery of how things which don't seem to have anything in common can find a correspondence, even if its on another plane than surface reality.  Good old Mörike! Magic does happen.

Another Unknown Soldier - Lilian Elkington

For my review of the Andrew Davis BBC SO concert featuring Elgar, Lilian Elkington and Raymond Yiu, please see HERE. On International Women's Day, I'd like to remember another Unknown Soldier, Lillian Elkington (1901-69), of whose music so little is known that even her own daughter didn't know she was a composer until an interviewer contacted her.  Perhaps more can be traced through Census information. I'll leave that to intrepid archivists. There's bound to be something.

What little we do know about her comes from Lewis Foreman, who wrote the notes for the first recording of Elkington's Out of the Mist (1921), the score of which was discovered in a second-hand shop in Worthing, presumably inadvertently dispersed with her effects after her death. Elkington studied with Granville Bantock in Birmingham, and some of her works were heard in recital at the time. On her marriage (unknown date and place) she gave up her career altogether: unfortunately not such an unusual situation in those days.  Alma Mahler apologists should take note. All the more respect to the many women who did continue their careers, and to those who couldn't and are forgotten.

The title Out of the Mist refers to the heavy mist that hung over the Channel when the ship carrying the body of the Unknown Soldier arrived back in England.  I have no idea whether Elkington saw the event, or whether she read about it in the papers or saw newsreels. Her response, in this music, was dignified and elegaic.  The piece runs just under 8 minutes, but is ambitiously scored for large ensemble . It begins mysteriously : one can imagine the ship materializing in port, out of the mists, docking and unloading the coffin,which was then ceremoniously taken, by carriage, to rest in Westminster Abbey, as seen in the photo above. The Unknown Soldier is "home" at last, carrying with him , symbolically, the memory of millions of other who would never return.  Thus,Out of the Mist ends with transcendent brightness, as if the Unknown Soldier and the men and women he stands for are bathed in glory.

Although we only know Elkington through this one piece, it, too, stands symbolically, for the work she might have done had she lived in a different era, and for the works other women may have written which have been forgotten,  and for those who,like the soldiers of 1914-1918, were never able to fulfil their potential.  Fortunately for us, Out of the Mist is preserved on the seminally important recording on Dutton, where top billing goes to a superb Elgar Spirit of England.. in the first recording of the version for twovoices. This CD also includes the first recording of Philip Lancaster's performing edition of Ivor Gurney's War Elegy (1921) and also F S Kelly's Elegy for Strings  In Memoriam Rupert Brooke and Charles Hubert Parry's The Chivalry of the Sea.  I've written about Elgar's Spirit of England HERE and HERE and about Gurney's War Elegy HERE. 

The information above comes from Lewis Foreman's notes to the 2006 Dutton recording.  As I thought, there's more recent research, from Pam Blevins'  Maud Powell website on women in music :

"There is an excellent article in the Maud Powell Signature mag on Lilian Elkington by David Brown (the guy who found her stuff in the Worthing bookshop). This fills in a lot of the gaps you refer to and means they are not gaps. Seems she definitely did compose at least a bit after her marriage. And we only have the word of her daughter that she stopped (the daughter who didn't even realise she had composed at all so how would she know? Other works might have gone missing)."

http://www.maudpowell.org/signature/Portals/0/pdfs/signature/Signature_Autumn_2008.pdf

The article is at page 45 of this PDF:

From a reader of mine 
 "Daughter also says, though, that Lilian born in 1900 not the widely said 1901. Daughter says Sep 15 1900. I can confirm from BMD records that birth was registered in the Oct-Nov-Dec quarter of 1900 (in Birmingham).I have also found her in 1911 census aged 10 (which would be right cos her 11th birthday is after the April census day) Her father was a "coffin furniture manufacturer". Interesting! "

Nikolaus Harnoncourt - his true significance

Nikolaus Harnoncourt has died, weeks after posting a hand-written farewell note on his website, a personal touch which shows the measure of the man (Read it here). Harnoncourt's values.transformed the whole way in which music is approached.  His insights into the spirit of the baroque illuminate approaches to repertoire far beyond his own areas of expertise - respect for the composer and period, respect for individuality and well-informed experimentation. Note, well-informed and  disciplined, not self-indulgence for the sake of ego. Harnoncourt connected the adventurous spirit of the baroque to modern music making, connecting European performance practice to its fundamental roots. He wasn't the only one to do so, but it's no exaggeration to say that, without him,  European music wouldn't be what it is. I've written quite a bit about the way baroque values apply to new music - there are connections between baroque values and Boulez!

It's highly significant that the start of his career coincided with the boom in commercial recording, where music was packaged and made available as consumer product, reaching audiences who didn't necessarily have musical grounding but were shaped by what they bought. In principle, that's no bad thing, but consider the values of the Cold War - conformity, fear of the unknown, dependence on the trappings of success. Hence the taste for "classics", for "interventionist" interpretation, for big, flashy orchestras.    Harnoncourt's interest in the baroque stemmed from reappraising the past, when live performance connected players and audience, when music was made in nice surroundings, but where the emphasis was on serious listening.

Harnoncourt made his own instruments, not just because he was a sculptor but also because he wanted to understand the physicality of sound and how each instrument has an individual voice. He studied original manuscript  scores to get a better idea of how music might have sounded to a composer.  The idea that historically-informed performance is wimpy and weedy is nonsense.  "(We) don't eat baroque food!" he said, meaning that no-one can truly replicate the baroque mindset. "I'm not a warden in a museum".  What mattered were principles - clarity, discipline, integrity.   Maybe even the idea that maybe we don't know everything and need to keep learning.

HERE is a link to a documentary made for Harnoncourt's 80th birthday. At first, it might seem  it hasn't much to do with music, but persist. Its real title is "A Journey into the self". What we see is a portrait of the man and the motivations behind what he did.  Hence, no dogmas, no formulae.

See also my "Harnoncourt against the safe and bland"  which has a link to a BBC interview which is still live.

Philip Glass Akhnaten ENO

Philip Glass Akhnaten with the ENO, at the Coliseum, London, in a new production directed by Phelim McDermott, who created the extraordinary Glass Satyagraha, one of ENO's great hits, regularly revived.  Akhnaten is even better known than Satyagraha, and has received many productions over the years, so if this one succeeds, it will be a good thing.

Akhnaten, is part of a trilogy about conceptual ideas,: it's more than narrative entertainment, and needs to be assessed from that perspective. What's scary about conceptual thinking?

All three operas deal with the minds of men (and women) who changed the way we think to a degree : In Einstein on the Beach (read my review HERE and Why I defend Bianca Jagger HERE)   Glass dealt with Einstein, an ordinary man whose ideas made him a celebrity even though most didn't really understand what he was doing. In Satyagraha, Glass showed how Gandhi scrapped pamphleteering for direct action. Read my numerous pieces on Satyaghara HERE and HERE. In Akhnaten, Glass picked the one Pharoah in millennia who tried to substitute a single, unitary God for a complex of mythological entities.

Akhnaten is possibly the strongest, musically, of the whole trilogy. The texts are sung in Eygptian, Hebrew and Akkadian without English translations for a very good reason. Akhnaten believed in an abstract God who couldn't be defined in narrow terms. As we listen to the incantations in languages we don't understand we respond as an abstract experience. Anyone who grew up with the Latin Mass shouldn't have any problem connecting spirituality with mystery. As Gandhi discovered, there are ideas that go beyond words.

Hence the importance of listening . Sure, the repetitions can be soporific. When Glass is opaque,  eg the awful The Perfect American (read my review HERE) he can be mind-numbingly dull.  But when Glass connects form to meaning, as in In the Penal Colony, he can produce taut works of near genius. Read my pieces on In the Penal Colony HERE and HERE. Listen to that audio CD of In the Penal Colony to appreciate how the music itself tells the story, drilling itself painfully into your subconscious, just as the infernal machine drills itself into its victim.  It's not easy listening, but when you focus, you can hear the myriad, tiny, changes of inflection and colour. At least in a Phelim McDermott production, there's lots to look at.

Thus to Akhnaten as music.   There are long stretches where no-one sings anything at all.  But once again, listen attentively. It's almost a piano concerto in that a piano weaves through the orchestral textures, sometimes assertively, sometimes concealed. It is the voice of purity, the voice of a young Pharoah who believes in a single God of Faith while multiple godheads chatter around him, often with menace. Hence the use of counter tenor, a voice type at once vulnerable and assertive. Akhnaten gets wiped from history, but his basic idea applies in other systems of belief.  Are human beings  programmed to prefer graven images and idols  When Nabucco was done at the Royal Opera House, |(my reviews here and here)  there were many in the audience who were enraged because the set was so abstract and so austere.  Surely  some of the booing mob might have realized that the Hebrews worshipped an invisible God and rejected graven images, however golden? Verdi knew. He'd read the Bible and respected Judaism. Nabucco is also a subtle dig at religions that verge on idolatory.  Hopefully, when this Nabucco is revived later this season, audiences will appreciate it better.

Please see also  the ENO chorus and the death of 1000 cuts plus numerous other posts i've written on the ENO crisis and on British arts policy (or the lack thereof) 

The ENO Chorus and the Death of 1000 Cuts

The primary purpose of any serious arts organization is to create excellence. High artistic standards are the Golden Eggs that give the goose its reason for existence. Compromise those standards and you might as well cook the goose and carve it up for dinner. Which would be fine for those guests who benefit from the immediate proceeds, but what happens when there are no geese to produce golden eggs any longer? That is the real crisis facing the ENO, and, indeed, British arts in general.

British arts policy suffers from a perfect storm of short-sighted superficiality, the  presence of vested interests, and sheer bloody mindedness. I've written many times about the need for joined-up thinking, acknowledging the role the arts play in the national and international economic system.  But pigs might fly. Business and politics have become Supermarket Sweep: the Tv game show where you fill your trolley to maximum value in a limited time, whether you need the goods or not. The electorate get what they deserve.

That the ENO is in crisis isn't news, but given the level of media coverage on it and on the arts in general, one wonders if journalism isn't in crisis, too. Once, in theory, journalism was independent,  analytical and informative.  I've given up on the Telegraph.  At least, to the Guardian's credit, they've changed their Arts Correspondent to someone who makes an effort.   The Murdoch-owned Times wisely lets its readers provide the story, rather more revealingly than a house writer might dare. But the BBC coverage has reached a nadir. Shameful, especially worrying since the BBC itself is under serious threat.

No, the crisis at the ENO isn't caused by the current CEO, Cressida Pollock. She's inherited problems so great - and not just of the ENO's doing - that I feared she'd be a lamb to the slaughter. That she's survived even this long deserves respect.  While much of the original restructuring plan - especially the café - probably won't work.

Hence the idea of cutting back the chorus and orchestra to save money.  This isn't good. The ENO chorus is wonderful, the foundation on which most productions are built, since the ENO can't afford top international stars, other than those it talent spotted when they were younger. The loyalty of some ENO big names, like Stuart Skelton, Iain Paterson etc. says a lot about the high regard they have for the ENO's artistic standards. Take heed! The ENO chorus and orchestra are good because they are a team of professionals  who work together well. You can't replace that expertise with the equivalent of a pick-up band chosen at random according to who happens to be around at any given time. Anyone worth hiring needs consistency of employment, not zero-hour contracts.  So the ENO doesn't operate year round   Neither do most arts organizations. In any case, summer festivals would be pinched out if they were. To avoid cutting back on chorus and orchestra, the ENO management is taking voluntary cuts in pay. Respect that.  Potentially the biggest source of revenue is production-sharing, which reduces cost and risk.  The opera business is international, and integrated: the ENO is part of a wider network. It's sheer nonsense to assume, as has been suggested, that this tried and true system was an ego trip by any one individual.  The ENO is part of this system because it does good work. Mess with the quality of the ENO artistic team and mess with the system.

We don't really know the state of ENO finances. In the last year for which figures are available, the balance sheet was in the black (just).  These figures are audited: demanding to see the books makes one wonder what the motivations really are.  Things cut both ways: The Arts Council England hasn't been specific about the reasons behind the special measures. So where is the pressure coming from?  Much of the debate has focussed on divorcing the ENO from its base, the Coliseum, the biggest theatre in London, situated in a prize position in the heart of the West End's showland. The freehold of the Coliseum is the ENO's greatest assets - a veritable goldmine.

In the course of the debate in the Times, Sir Peter Jonas, former Chairman of the Board of the ENO,  revealed on 12.12.15 that the ENO board "secured the Coliseum for £12.4 million to ensure ENO’s future. The funds were raised directly from government with £1 million of lottery funding. An extra £1 million was donated privately to kickstart the building’s renovation. The Arts Council did not contribute and, perhaps out of pique, demanded a charge be put on the title whereby if ENO should cease to exist in its present form the Arts Council could appropriate the freehold.".

Since the Arts Council doesn't itself operate as an arts organization, it could presumably find ways of passing the freehold onto others. whose priorities might be different.Many winners ! But the losers will be the British arts industry  as a whole.

See also my What's really ahead for the ENO ?

Poisoned perfumes : L'invitation au voyage Diepenbrock

Baudelaire's mysterious  L'invitation au voyage, not in its famous setting by Henri Duparc, but in a setting  by Alphons Diepenbrock (1862-1921). The song comes from the Diepenbrock Anniversary box set (more HERE), the most comprehensive collection of his non-symphonic music. Highly recommended. Riccardo Chailly conducted a lot of his music with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.  I discovered Diepenbrock when his  Im grossen Schweigen was paired with Mahler 7th in Chailly's Mahler RCO series.  The photo above shows Diepenbrock (left) with Mahler and Willem Mengelberg on the Zuiderzee in 1906.

Diepenbrock's l'invitation au voyage (1913) is a very lovely work which captures the poisoned perfumes of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal . The piano part rolls gently, suggesting the gentle rocking motion of a small boat being rowed in placid waters.  Perhaps the "voyage" is on a boat; perhaps it's something else altogether more physical and intimate. Baudelaire quite explicitly describes a bedroom, with furniture "polished with the patina of  many years". Given the provocative first lines "Mon enfant, ma sœur,songe à la douceur d'aller là-bas vivre ensemble!" it could well be some forbidden love - Baudelaire could just as easily have written "cœur" for "sœur". "Mon enfant" and "Ma sœur" are terms which don't necessarily mean "my offspring" or "my sister",  but with Baudelaire, one doesn't rule anything out. The gentle, rolling figures in the piano part could even suggest the distorted sensuality of opium or the perfume of supposedly hypnotic flowers.  Diepenbrocok alludes to the "splendour orientale"in the poem with figures reminiscent of generically "Eastern" music. The voyage leads to a world where "tout n'est qu'ordre et beauté,luxe, calme et volupté".  .

The singer on this recording is Aafje Heynis, well known for her Bach.  She died last December, aged 91.

.

Mendelssohn Elias (Elijah) Rheingau Festival

Thomas Ollemans sings the title part in Mendelssohn's Elias (Elijah) Op 70  at the Rheingau Musik- Festival in 2015, with the Akademie für Alte Musik conducted by Hans-Christoph Rademann, with the RIAS Kammerchor and soloists Marlis Petersen, .Lioba Braun and Maximillian Schmidt. 

I'm hoping to hear Elijah at the Three Choirs Festival this summer in Gloucester Cathedral with the Three Choirs Choir, which combines the formidable forces of the combined choirs of the cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester which make the Three Choirs Festival a momentous experience. Mendelssohn's oratorios are very much a part of the English choral tradition. Elijah was written for and premiered in Birmingham in 1846. But I have a weakness for Elias, sung in German, having learned it from the wonderful 1993 recording with Wolfgang Sawallisch, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and choir and soloists Theo Adam, Elly Ameling,  Annalies Burmeister and Peter Schreier.  In German, Elias just seems to sound craggier and more uncompromising than in English: important, I think, to interpretation, for Elijah was a hardbitten prophet of the Old Testament, having more in common with the Lutheran values of the Reformation than with the established Church of England, despite the superlative choral singing we so often get with English Elijahs (especially at the Three Choirs Festival). 

With its period instruments and spare textures the Akademie für Alte Musik creates the spare gritty texture I love so much in Mendelssohn, a composer much tougher and more assertive than many give him credit for. It helps, too, that this performances employs only 34 chorus members, nothing near the 270 at the Birmingham premiere. Also, the abbey at Rheingau is small enough to concentrate sound: the cameras focus thoughtfully on its rough-hewn stone columns and walls.  Elijah connects to something much deeper and more personal in Mendelssohn's spirit. Ollemans is striking: from the very first, his Elias carries authority "So wahr der Herr, der Gott Israels lebet, vor dem ich stehe" The Overture that follows feels like an extension of this message.  

A drought has descended on the land, the people are dying. Elijah appears in the desert, revives the widow's son and prays, successfully,  for rain. The people are happy, but as so often, success attracts jealousy. Ahab prefers Baal. On Mount Horeb, Elijah is joined by angels. In this performance, the singing in Part 2 is gently lyrical: this beauty contrasts well with the resolute firmness that has gone before.  Thus the kindness that permeates the final chorus, where the emphasis is on enlightenment, not triumphalism  "Alsdann wird euer Licht hervorbrechen wie die Morgenröte, und eure Besserung wird schnell wachsen, und die Herrlichkeit des Herrn wird euch zu sich nehmen". Quite close, I think, to Mendelssohn's core values. 

Totengräbers Heimweh Schubert's homesick gravedigger

Franz Schubert Totengräbers Heimweh D852 (1825) to a text by Jakob Nikolaus, Reichsfreiherr von Craigher de Jachelutta. Composer and poet were almost exact contemporaries, and knew each other personally. Craigher de Jachelutta lived to 1855 having led an eventful, adventurous life.  Schubert of course died young. "O Menschheit, o Leben! was soll's? o was soll's? Grabe aus, scharre zu! Tag und Nacht keine Ruh! Das Drängen, das Treiben, wohin? o wohin? Ins Grab, ins Grab, tief hinab!«" O, Mankind, O Life ! what's, it all for ? "  The heavy pedalling rhythms suggest the repetitive, mechanical process of digging, the physical effort of hollowing out a grave. Yet, like Sisyphus, the gravedigger's work never ends: no sooner than the grave is dug, it's filled. All that struggle, to what avail?

Then the final strophe which would be quite melodramatic were it not so heartfelt. 

(O Homeland, O peace, O blissful country to which the soul is inextricably destined. You call me from far beyond, you eternal light!)  Slowly, the stars grow dim, though the piano part still twinkles to the very end. The gravedigger's eyes go blind and the gravedigger drops dead, presumably collapsing into the grave he's just dug.  The last words "Ich komm" are repeated, ever more gently, for the man has found peace, joining those he loves who have gone on before.  Being a Lieder person, I had a vivid dream about this song and woke, drenched in cold sweat, but it wasn't scary, because on a deeper level the poem isn't about death but about life. The relentless struggles we go through might seem pointless, but we go on because life is sacred, and precious, however compromised. Ultimately, Romantiker doom and gloom is life affirming. And if you believe in "das selig Land" there's a bonus. The painting above is The Death of the Grave Digger by Carlos Schwabe 1866-1926)

Louis Andriessen at the Barbican

Now 76, Dutch composer Louis Andriessen is philosophical about the past and the future when interviewed on BBC Radio 3 about the series of concerts devoted to his music at London's Barbican Centre and the Guildhall School of Music & Drama's Milton Court nearby. He doesn't think of the series (which took place on 9, 12 and 13 February) as a retrospective since much of the work played is "recent" -- with a 60-year composing career behind him, he regards anything written after 2000 as recent. He listens to this work in terms of what he can do better for the next composition, recognising, though, that there might not be "too many years left" to write. But he adds with a chuckle: "You never know of course -- maybe Elliott Carter."

 Claire Seymour reviewed for Opera Today the first concert in the series: works by Andriessen's pupil the late Steve Martland and by Steve Reich framing Andriessen's La Passione for "large ensemble" (as he puts it), mezzo soprano, violin and chorus. She writes:

In La Passione, Andriessen’s 2002 song-cycle on texts by the Italian poet Dino Campana (1885-1932), the two soloists, singer and violinist, are both accomplices and adversaries. Though stylistically and formally the work has more in common with Stravinsky than with Bach, there is a nod in the direction of the latter’s Passions in the quasi-obbligato function of the violin part, which, in Andriessen’s words, ‘shadows the voice in a diabolic way, exploring the threatening nature of much of the poetry, like the world of a Bosch painting'. 

For the full Opera Today review, go here.. The full concert is available for the next 18 days on the BBC Radio 3 iPlayer, go here to listen. 

The series continued on 12 February with the UK premiere of Andriessen's opera La Commedia (available on the BBC iPlayer for 28 days -- go here to listen) and on 13 February with works including De stijl, and the UK premieres of Rose's Horses and Mysterien (available on the BBC iPlayer for 21 days -- go here to listen).

There's lots more about Louis Andriessen on this site (go Andriessen in the Search  This Blog box).

Wigmore Hall's Complete Schubert Lieder

London's Wigmore Hall's traverse of the complete songs of Schubert continued on 16 February with a programme of settings of poems by Goethe, Mayrhofer and Schulze performed by tenor Ian Bostridge and pianist Graham Johnson. Claire Seymour writes of the concert:

The duo gave a thought-provoking performance which was notable for the searching dialectic between simplicity and complexity which it illuminated. ... 

Bostridge's ability to employ his extensive technical capacities to diverse expressive effect was ever evident. There was not a single song that did not have something to surprise us, or command our attention.

(For Claire Seymour's full review of the concert on Opera Today, go here.)


Photo: Roger Thomas