Berlioz Requiem Grande messe des morts BBC Prom 39

Hector Berlioz Requiem (Grande messe des morts) needs grand performance spaces, so hearing it at BBC Prom 39 at the Royal Albert Hall was a rare treat. Read what Claire Seymour says in Opera Today: 

"Whether the choral forces were an equal match for the brass eruption, probably depended upon where in the vast hall you were seated. Certainly there was some outstanding choral singing; and in any case, despite its Napoleonic scale and celebratory, even aggrandizing air, the Requiem is a work of both spectacle and subtlety. The thunderous passages may be the most well-known, even notorious, but they are short-lived, and much of the score is restrained, Berlioz’s fine ear for instrumental colour always in evidence - even the 10 pairs of cymbals are employed softly en masse."

Leoš Janáček The Makropulos Case Edinburgh International Festival

Leoš Janáček The Makropulos Case at the Edinburgh International Festival. Juliet William's review in Opera Today; 

 "A mysterious diva, Emilia Marty, appears in town, transfixing all males who cross her path. In addition to her spell-binding powers, she appears to have mysterious knowledge of the matters of the case, to the consternation of the male company. Played out is a contrast between masculinity and femininity; logical and intuition; the tangible and the supernatural."

Elder Elgar Apostles Prom 37

Mark Elder's Elgar The Apostles (BBC Prom 37) is exceptional, and could be a contender for best Prom of the season. It outclasses Sakari Oramo's performance in 2007, good as that was. It isn't fair to compare the Hallé and the CBSO, for both have long Elgar pedigrees, but Elder has the advantage because he has the ideal Jesus in Jacques Imbrailo.

How can one sing Jesus? And in the context of Elgar's good natured, humane Apostles? or no matter how much Elgar focuses on the Apostles, it is Jesus who who eclipses all else.  Jesus speaks in simple, almost aphoristic sentences, no rhetoric, no fuss. Imbrailo's voice is rich, but pure and calmly confident, his voice so pure and calm that it seems to glow from within. Magnificent trumpet call soars forth, and the choir sing triumphantly, as they announce that the Apostles are being sent out into the world. "We are the Servants of the Lord!" sing the Apostles.  Yet Jesus's words are simple, almost aphoristic. "He that receiveth you, receiveth me.. And he who receiveth me receiveth he that sent me", Imbrailo breathes richness into the long "sent". The Apostles are flushed with pride, but Jesus is humble. Absolutely no need for histrionics. The Apostles are calmed, and the orchestra ends with a simple flourish.

"Blessed are the pure in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven" Imbrailo's natural purity of timbre expresses Jesus's true nature with gentle, understated confidence. Imbrailo's Beatitudes seem to glow from within, lit by genuine sincerity. Where does this beauty come from? I listen, stunned by this sheer grace. You can hear in his Jesus why no-one sings Billy Budd as intuitively as Imbrailo. This is a voice composers should be writing for. In our age more than ever, we need spiritually resplendent singing like this.

The other soloists (Alice Coote, Rebecca Evans, Paul Groves, Davd Kemspter and Clive Bailey) are good, even if I'm not keen on vibrato in the Vigin Mary. and the Hallé choir is magnificent. They fill out the three named apostles when deeper textures are needed. Elder does wonders with the orchestra and singers. This Prom is a glorious reprise of the Manchester performance, captured on CD.

The painting of Jesus and the Apostles is by James Tissot. I chose it because it's so simple - watercolour goache, not oil - and so very different from Tissot's usual portraits of society ladies in fancy gowns.

Delius A Mass of Life - Edinburgh Festival

The Edinburgh International Festival trumps the BBC Proms with Frederick Delius A Mass of Life.  This year's Proms have been big on massed choirs and Masses and on Delius, but Edinburgh has pulled off perhaps the biggest of them all.  Performances are rare because Delius wrote for huge forces. Juliet Williams was there. Please see her full review in Opera Today.

After hearing Leonard Bernstein's execrable Mass, deeply offensive on every level, and James MacMillan's dull, but at least sincere  Credo, Delius's A Mass of Life is a far better experience. Indeed, its flaws make it more human. Which one could never say about Bernstein's self-indulgent ludicrousness. (Let's pray Nico Muhly doesn't even try.)  Tonight, another "real" Mass, Berlioz's Grand Messe des morts, also rarely performed.  Here is what Julie has written about Delius's Mass in Edinburgh :

"It is not often one thinks (The Usher Hall)  may be on the small side, but the piece opened with an effect which I can only describe as a 'wall of sound', a joyous blast surging out. This forceful opening broadens out into first an introductory recitative for male voice, with musical accompaniment of a sparkling character, calling to mind a brook running through a forest; and then a 'dance scene' to which all soloists contribute in turn, together with chorus. These, arguably the highlights of the performance, both strongly recall the soundworld of Mahler.

There is then a sudden shattering of the sunny mood, as night falls on this scene, and the hero cries, 'Woe is me' and confronts his own mortality. Here the change of mood was perhaps gradual rather than sudden, not quite having the dramatic tension which would have drawn out the change of mood with immediacy. The melancholy became much more apparent only later in this fourth scene, when in contemplating impending death, Zarathustra is tortured by visions of a spider spinning its web around his corpse." Please see her full review in Opera Today.

First Habanera recording 1891

My friend and regular reader has written about the first ever recording of Bizet's Carmen Habanera. It was made in 1891 by Julius Block , a businessman who bought a phonograph off Thomas Edison. This was way before the concept of commercial recording developed.  But fashionable, well-heeled people were fascinated by the novelty. When Block demonstrated the phonograph to the Tsar, the Tsar bought one too. Block persuaded the big stars of the day to play and sing for him. Block's wax cylinders were long thought missing but Ward Marston has cleaned them up and made them available on CD. (read more here)

The first Habanera recording was made with Italian mezzo Adele Borghi (b 1860). The recording lasts 1.33 so isn't complete, but the wonder is that it exists at all. Carmen was "new music" at the time, probably quite racy stuff. Borghi's recording was made only 16 years after the premiere. It's interesting that 19th century people didn't have hang-ups about "traditional" or "conservative" music. Once Carmen caught on, it became a classic. What's more people of the time were sufficiently technology-friendly to experiment with the latest inventions.

The photo shows Emma Calvé as Carmen with her arms uncovered, smoking a cigarette and looking provocative. Calvé also recorded the Habanera, in 1902. In 1905, Jeanne Marie de L'Isle made another recording. Her aunt and teacher was Célestine Galli-Marié, Bizet's first Carmen. Listen HERE for Calvé and HERE for de L'Isle.

Atom bombed children of Hiroshima

Today, 9th August, is the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki, three days after Hiroshima. The irony is that Nagasaki was the most westernized, cosmopolitan city in Japan. Madama Butterfly wasn't set there for nothing. Read more about the irony of Nagasaki here, and lots more on Hiroshima, non violence annd even Puccini on this site. And watch the movies I've written about, like The Human Condition (Kobayashi) Black Rain and The Burmese Harp.

For today, a full download of a unique "home movie" made with the ordinary people of Hiroshima, released after the American military occupation of Japan ended in 1952. The film, directed by Kaneto Shindo is based on a novel by Arata Osada.  A young woman called Takako has been living on an idyllic island for five years but finally returns to Hiroshima where she grew up. She meets a beggar, blinded and scarred by radiation burns. He's Iwakichi, a servant of her family. "Go away!" cries Iwakichi, who can't bear for her to see him in this way. But Takako bows to him, a gesture of respect. It helps  to understand non western society to really appreciate this reversal.

Iwakichi's grandson Taro lives in an orphanage. Thousands of bereaved children: a city of survivors haunted by those who are no longer there. Takako wants to adopt Taro but Iwakichi can't bear to lose the last vestige of his former life. Takako, who was a teacher, tracks down her former students. One girl lies dying in a hospital, comforted by thoughts of heaven.  To die so young, but with such dignity.  Eventually Iwakichi sends Taro to Takako and kills himself. The film is badly shot and the subtitles hard to read, but it's such a quiet, moving story that it's worth watching.

Oldest Recording in the world?

Is this the oldest recording in the world? The original was made by inventor Emile Berliner,m who patented the first gramophone technology in 1887. The recording itself was lost, but a photograph was printed in a German magazine of 1890. With modern technogy, which I can't comprehend,  it's now possible to hear the recording again., Please read this article about the discovery. There's a soundclip, too. It's Emile Berliner himself reading a verse from Schiller.

Lots more on this site about very early recordings, like Theo Wangemann's first ever Schubert recording 1890!   Wangemann worked for Thomas Ediuson who really got recording off the ground. He'sthe one who from m189 was in Europe rrecording Bismark, bvon Moltke and Jiohannes Brahms himself, the first  recording savvy composer. Follow the link above for sound clip. Elsewhere on this site, the first ever Carmen recording (1905) and clips of composers  recording their own muisc. Even Brahms, playing Brahms ! Mahler playing Mahler, Grieg playing Grieg and Jascha Heifetz before his voice broke.  

photo: Ludmila Pilecka

Horenstein conducts Janáček

Jascha Horenstein conductrs Janáček in 1955 with the Wiener Symphoniker. This is robust Janáček. Pianists don't understand. Thank goodness, Bělohlávek in Prague gets the respect he deserves.

Lucerne starts with a Requiem - Mozart

The Lucerne Festival starts tomorrow with a Requiem, albeit Mozart's Requiem, conducted by Claudio Abbado. Soloists Anna Prohaska, Sarah Mingardo, Maximillian Schmidt and René Pape. The rich, well connected and the usual host of freeloaders will be out in force, but us common folks who listen for the music can catch it LIVE on Medici TV from 1730 Swiss time. 

Oliver Knussen : Symphony no 3 and 2, NMC

Oliver Knussen burst into British music with an unprecedented flourish. In 1967, the London Symphony Orchestra premiered Knussen's First Symphony, with István Kertész scheduled to conduct. Kertész was unwell, so 15-year-old Oliver Knussen conducted it himself. Two weeks later, Daniel Barenboim conducted the New York premiere. In an equally unprecedented gesture of maturity, young Knussen then disowned his first great success.

Knussen's Symphony no 2 (1970) is thus his first major work, written at the age of 18. It's a surprisingly adventurous work, given his age, but already the germs of Knussen's style are present. This is a song symphony, inspired by poems by Sylvia Plath and Georg Trakl, with oblique but unsettling images of unpeaceful dreams. Knussen even combines the two poets in the first movement, further blurring boundaries. In the second movement, the soprano ((Elaine Barry), sings long, arching lines, and the orchestra is "drone-like", as Knussen has said himself. Rather than building density, Knussen lightens texture, pairs oif instruments dancing briefly, then go quiet, leaving two flutes alone in a final, whimsical cadenza. Does Knussen's Songs For Sue have its originals in his first "real" symphony, completed when he first went to America?

Gianandrea Noseda conducted this symphony in Prom 22, BBC Proms 2012, with Gillian Keith as soloist, but I prefer this recording, conducted by Knussen himself in 1983.

Knussen's sojourn in the United States also resulted in his Symphony No 3 (1973-79). Knussen took his cue from Shakespeare's Ophelia, distraught with grief, singing "mad songs" in Hamlet.  The symphony is abstract, but Knussen has referred to its "cinematic" nature and "the potential relationship in film between a tough and fluid narrative  form and detail  which can be  frozen or 'blown up' at any point."  Without words, Knussen creates drama, in the shifting layers and tempi. Each permutation unfolds like a frenzied dance, or perhaps processional, given the size of these orchestral forces. Michael Tilson-Thomas, the dedicatee, conducts on this recording, made in 1981. Knussen's Third Symphony is rarely heard live so when Knussen himself conducts it at the BBC Prom 56 on 25th August 2012, it should be a major occasion. Already, I'm contemplating how Knussen will conduct it with the BBC SO. 

 
From this same period, Ophelia Dances and Trumpets arise like offshoots from the Third Symphony. In Trumpets, the soprano stretches like a trumpet call, three clarinets in attendance. Ophelia Dances reiterates the concept of fragmented dance-like motifs in confluence. Coursing (1979), isn't connected to the symphony but its surging flow relates to the image of Ophelia, dead and no longer singing, borne along the river. It was written foir Elliot Carter's 70th birthday. Carter is now 103, and Knussen ewill turn 60 this year. NMC Records, the independent specialist in British new music, has released this recording as the first in a retrospective of Knussen's music, ideal for those wanting to discover more about Oliver Knussen as composer. Get the CD HERE.

Glyndebourne Ravishing Ravel Double Bill

Surrealist fantasy with wit and style!  Ravel Double Bill at Glyndebourne,: L'heure espagnole and L'enfant et les sortilèges mixes charm, intelligence and nightmare.The audience applauded the scenery, but this time the praise was sincere. Ravel's music and ideas come alive. I'm tempted to say "beyond our wildest dreams", because dreams release the creative imagination. Ravel begins  L'enfant et les sortilèges with strange mock-orientalism, to emphasize the alien nature of what is to come. The child (Khatouna Gadelia) throws a tantrum, reflected in the stamping ostinato in the music, and the repetive, angular  vocal line. "Méchant! Méchant! Méchant!". Table, chair and Maman's skirts loom menacingly, overwhelming the child. This is what it feels to be little, dwarfed by the world of adults. The child rebels and rips his room apart. But the objects he wrecks have feelings, too.

"L'enfant et les sortilèges" says director Laurent Pelly "lasts about 45 minutes, but has the depth of an opera of three or four hours". (read the interview  in Opera Today here). Ravel's music is extraordinarily vivid, but his concepts don't easily translate into visual images. Pelly, however, is a master at bringing abstract ideas to life, as anyone who has seen his Glyndebourne Humperdinck Hansel und Gretel would know. The Teapot and the Chinese cup dance, their "human" bodies exposed beneath the hard exteriors of their form. Ravel glories in mad chinoiserie, which conductor Kazushi Ono plays up with manic relish. The words aren't real but dadaist invention, even in Colette's original. At Glyndebourne the surtitles flash "Sessue Hayakawa" .Since this Glyndebourne production is a co-production with Seiji Osawa's Saito Kinen Festival, it will be seen by Japanese audiences who will get the joke (and can read the nonsense "Chinese" writing). Hayakawa was a Hollywood megastar from the 1920's, who subtly subverted western stereotypes of Asian people. Ravel is sending up the whole notion of western attitudes to the East.

And by exploring exotic genres, he expanded the palette of mainstream western music. Even in Colette's original French text, the Teapot and teacup sing in cod-English "Sir, I punch your nose. I knock out you, stupid chose (thing)". Shepherds and Shepherdesses jump out of the wallpaper the Child has defaced, singing  of bizarrely coloured dogs and lambs. Everything safe and familiar is transformed. Ravel writes mock-pastoral,while the pastorals do a solemn mock baroque dance. Visions of Le petit Trianon! Revolution is afoot. The Fire explodes, threatening to engulf the room. Kathleen Kim shoots out of the fireplace in a structure that resembles flame. Kim also sings the Nightingale and the Princess. As theatre, the Fire is a dramatic stunning device, but also reminds us this Child has unleashed dangerous forces.

Some of Ravel's concepts are so abstract that they're a test of any director. Arithmetic, for example, which is so important to Ravel that he embeds the formal logic of mathematics into his music. (The connection with L'heure espagnole is obvious.) In the 1987 Glyndebourne production of  the opera, The Little Old Man who represents Arithmetic was surrounded by cardboard cut-outs of numbers. Pelly, however, brings out the true inner significance. The Child has rebelled against maths homework, and now the Glyndebourne chorus appears as identikit Child to mock him. The formality of rows and series - is this a droll in joke about Ravel's music, and the music which followed? Kazushi Ono defines the structure with clarity, and the chorus moves with precision. Surrealism liberates the imagination, but art needs an element of intellectual rigour,

Sofas, chairs and clocks, Cats, animals and insects, all confront the Child with their human-ness. In the Garden, adult values no longer dominate. Here, the Child will learn the true nature of humanity  Pelly, who designed the costumes,  doesn't trivialise the "animals" but shows them as realistically as is possible (given that Bats and Squirrels don't sing).  So different from the twee "animals" in Melly Still's The Cunning Little Vixen (review here). Here, animals are treated with dignity, for that's the message of the opera, that no-one is supreme in this universe.The Glyndebourne chorus transform into trees, each one individualized. Even "statues" move. The darkness now is less nightmare than transformative dream. At last the Child recognizes that selfishness is cruel. He caged and tortured the Squirrel, but now looks into her eyes and sees things through her perspective. The Squirrel was sung by Stéphanie d'Oustrac, who also sings the Cat. At last, the Child can be a child again and call "Maman! up towards the lighted window. Laurent Pelly's L'enfant et les sortilèges is  a masterwork of emotional intelligence and sensitivity,  absolutely informed by Ravel's music. 

Stéphanie d'Oustrac also sang the main role of Concepción in L'heure espagnole. Elliot Madore sang  Ramiro the Muleteer who carries clocks around so effortlessly  that he becomes a Grandfather Clock in L'enfant et les sortilèges  (where he also sings the Tom Cat). This constant role-changing might stress singers, but is very much part of the meaning of both operas.  They all performed extremely well. Torquemada the clockmaker thinks life can be regulated by clockwork, but as his wife discovers, things don't always go as planned. François Piolino sang Torquemada, and also the Teapot, the Frog and the Old Man of Arithmetic). The staging of L'heure espagnole seems relatively dated compared with the sheer genius of Pelly's  L'enfant et les sortilèges  but its clutter also suggests why we need clocks (and Arithmetic, and indeed of the mechanisms of the world around us).

This production will be screened online and in cinemas from 19th August.

Please see Opera Today for more detail and full cast list.

photos: Simon Annand

Shostakovich Secret Twin

Harry Bicket Bach Mass in B minor, Prom 26

Robert Hugill examines Harry Bicket and the English Concert, Bach Mass in B minor at the Royal Albert Hall, BBC Prom 26 in Opera Today.

"Bach probably never intended the full Mass in B Minor to be performed, so it is tricky to talk about what forces he meant it to be performed by. But the Kyrie and Gloria certainly were sent by Bach to the Royal Court at Dresden (which was Roman Catholic), and these movements could be used in the Lutheran Church as well."

"So we are entitled to start postulating about what Bach intended. But performing the work in the Royal Albert Hall is entirely different again, a space far bigger than Bach could ever have conceived of being used for his work. So that whilst I was listening to the performance of Bach’s Mass in B Minor on Thursday 2 August at the BBC Proms, given by the English Concert conducted by Harry Bicket, inevitably I was thinking not only about the quality of performance, but about the decisions taken to realise the work in the space and how successful they were as well."
Read the full review (link above) which deals in depth with issues of period performance in a large performing space.

photo: Richard Haughton, Askonas Holt

More on Tippett, A Child of our Time Prom 25

As promised, Here's an extract of Claire Seymour's review of Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time Prom 25/Robertson in Opera Today.

"Tippett’s masterstroke was to include within his universal reflections and specific narrative, five Negro spirituals: “I felt I had to express collective feelings and that could only be done by collective tunes such as Negro spirituals, for these tunes contain a deposit of generations of common experience.” (Tippett, ‘Poets in a barren age’, in Moving into Aquarius (London: Palladin, 1974), p.152.). But, it was also a decision which resulted in an inherent technical and aesthetic difficulty: how to successfully assimilate a sophisticated western classical idiom with the simple, pure language of the spiritual?"

"The problem of integrating opposing musical genres was not entirely overcome in this stirring and uplifting performance by the BBC Proms Youth Choir - the massed forces of several UK youth choirs who, having attended an intensive course in Birmingham, were brought together with the BBC Symphony Orchestra under the baton of David Robertson."

Incidentally this Prom was the first major London event for Simon Halsey, who for so many years conducted (and still does) The CBSO Choir and the Berliner Philharmoniker Choir.  On this form, he should raise the stakes in London, too (more here)

Blacks, Jews and Nazis - Tippett A Child of our Time Prom 25

Intelligence and sensitivity went into creatiung the programme for David Robertson's  BBC Prom 25. Because the 2012 BBC Proms are focussing on big choral masses and oratorios, and youth ensembles,  Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time would have had to be included. But placing it in the context of this brilliantly thoughtful programme elevated it way beyond "just" music, and made this Prom the most intellectually profound of the whole season (and that includes the Barenboim Beethoven which was moving but not deep).

Robertson started with Charles Ives The Unanswerreed Question. It's highly conceptual. Three sepaate units operate at different tempi. They don't connect, so what we hear comes from how we ourselves combine the layers. Strings intone a quiet, almost hypnotic line. Against this emerges a solo trumpet repeatedly  calling  out into aural space. Is this the questioner asking "serious things" as the composer suggested? A woodwind quartet chatters angular clutter, but the trumpet keeps searching, seeking and receives no answer. It's astonishing that this piece was written in 1906, for it employs concepts of multiple disaparate layers and the acoustic properties of the performance space. In six minutes, Charles Ives is metaphorically creating the world where there's data coming at us from all sides and levels.  It's  up to us to process it, if we can.

Everyone knows Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings op 11, in many different contexts, but at this Prom, Robertson had it grow fluidly out of Ives, as if the two were companions, each amplifying the other's meaning. On this occasion, I was struck by the hymn-like low rumble of the strings, thinking oddly enough of Morton Feldman's Rothko Chapel as the strings floated upwards, higher and higher.A threnody for troubled times.

Solo trumpet (Håkan Hardenberger) and reduced orchestra again for Bernd Alois Zimmerman's Nobody Knows the Trouble I've seen. It was written in 1954. Zimmermann, who didn't grow up with Black music, was responding to the Holocaust and what it meant for Germany and for humanity as a whole. It's a mistake to make too much of the jazz and gospel aspects of this piece, because Zimmermann is using the kind of Black music the Nazis hated in a spiritual way, almost reminiscent of Bach. Robertson wisely underplayed the "bluesy" aspects, and the processioinal towards the end was much more a procession for lost souls than New Orleans funeral. It's not meant to "swing". .Zimmermann killed himself in 1970, never finding his "unanswered questions".(lots on him on this site)

Michael Tippett's A Child of Our Time can be heard in many different contexts, but Roberston's Prom 25 highlighted its true significance. It's more than "English Oratorio" even though Tippett clearly references Handel and Bach. The piece was inspired by the man who assassinated a German diplomat in Paris. Tippett describes the traumas that drove the refugee to revenge. "Among them was a young boiy of 8 who was kept in hiding" intones the Narrator (Jubilant Sykes, glorious name). Tippett develops the man's relationship with his mother. Sally Matthews sang ringing tops and Paul Groves was plausible as the son. But it'ss no mystery that oppressed people want to strike back. Ultimately, Kristallnacht and the Holocaust would have happened anyway, regardless of any one person's actions. Far more interesting is what one act of violence can mean against a far greater maelstorm of madness, but Tippett doesn't go there. Sarah Connolly lifts the solo alto part so it satisfies, even if Tippett doesn't ask the questions no-one can answer.

Perhaps Tippett is using him as a symbol of the oppressed of all times and places. Hence the framework of Black spirituals framing the narrative, distancing it from Europe. But that replicates the way Black culture has been exploited and "colonized".  Two wrongs don't make a right. Ideologically I'm not comfortable with that, so I was glad that Robertson didn't overemphasize this aspect of the piece, but let the very British choirs do their natural thing. Robertson is best when he's conducting music he cares about, and in this Prom his disciplned rigour brought out the best in the BBC SO.

There'll be a more detailed review of Tippett by Claire Seymour, the Benjamin Britten specialist, in Opera Today.