Wagner Parsifal, Royal Opera House

Any new production of Wagner's Parsifal would be welcome, if only to banish memories of Klaus Michael Gruber's staging from the 1990's where the Knights of the Grail were so comatose they had to be wheeled across the stage on a conveyor belt. But the Knights wore Knight suits and it was a "traditional" production so no-one dared demur.  I'm glad that I went to this new Parsifal at the Royal Opera House, even though my initial misgivings weren't far off the mark. Aft6er watching the HD, I['ve cjhanged my minsd ona lot of things ! read my latest here.

Antonio Pappano saved the day. Parsifal seems to have unleashed something in him. He's not an idiomatic Wagner conductor, but he knows what turns abstract music into drama. The notes, of course, are the same, but he intensifies colours so they seem to shimmer, taking on invisble extra richness. The music seems to exist as a living organism, the Grail Made Real. Bernard Haitink's final performance of the Gruber Parsifal stretched tempi to the point of disintegration, Pappano's approach isn't faster so much as more visceral, and well, red-blooded. We don't see Amfortas fight Klingsor, but the music suggests titanic struggle, and a panorama of cosmic extremes. Pappano feels the emotional pull so instinctively that he imparts his enthusiasm to the orchestra, and to us. Wagner as Verdi, perhaps? The better the music, the more interpretations it generates.

Jonas Kaufmann's Parsifal (more here) was miraculous : no-one else comes close. Parsifal comes from nowhere and finds his identity by struggling with himself. In that sense, Simon O'Neill's Parsifal worked. There are three Parsifals in Parsifal, each at a different stage of spiritual development. As the young Parsifal, O'Neill's harsh metallic tone suggests steel being forged by fire. Parsifal embodies the spirit of the Spear. O'Neill's best moments come in his encounter with Kundry, when the hero finds himself, and the singer's strengths reveal themselves in moments of gleaming power. O'Neill's voice is so individual that it's  difficult to cast. His Siegmunds are good, but he's not a natural Parsifal version 3, where the character emerges into transcendant light, becoming a Jesus substitute. Becuase this new staging underplays the transformation, it sidelines the singer - any singer - reducing the pressure on him to shine.

When I last heard Parsifal , in August (see here), John Tomlinson sang Gurnemanz, or rather acted his way through the part, his experience informing the performance though the voice was tired. This time, René Pape sang the part, bringing out its urbane elegance.  Gurnemanz is one of Nature's aristocrats. Amfortas screws up: Gurnemanz survives to tell the tale.  Pape sang the long first act monologue with elegant poise - beautifully shaped phrasing that shaped the long text into music, rather than words alone. This time, the staging let him down. While it's true that Gurnemanz doesn't do direct action, here he was relegated to the sidelines, barely distinguishable  even in the orchestra stalls. I tracked him with my ears.

Angela Denoke's experience as Kundry stood her in good stead, for here the character seemed woefully under-directed. Denoke hits her notes like arrows aimed at targets. Perhaps this connects to Parsifal shooting the swan, but that's almost certainly far too esoteric for a production as simplistic as this. A different production, with more emphasis on the way the role works as drama, would show Denoke in better form.

Gerald Finley's voice has been through rough patches, but now seems to have settled well. His Amfortas was lucid: nice rich tones, a king rather than a man dying  slowly from wounds that cannot heal. Again a case of good singing, without direction.  When Robert Lloyd sang Titurel, it came as a shock. An extremely loud and sudden outburst, far too forceful for the role. Perhaps Titurel hates Amfortas for denying him the Grail, but it goes against the musical line. Willard White sang Klingsor, who has existed, like a dark angel from the beginning of Time. Audiences love famous names. White's Klingsor delivered enough to appeal, but sounded tired. Fresh. lively singing from the Flower Maidens , especially the one in the pink shift, who might be Celine Byrne. O'Neill looked very happy with them, and so he should, they were so vivacious that they almost stole the show.

This year, The Royal Opera House brought Stefan Herheim, at last, to London. His Verdi Les vêpres siciliennes (more here) was, like his other work, exceptionally erudite and well conceived, growing in stature with each new encounter. It would have been too much to expect another Parsifal from him while his Bayreuth Parsifal is still so fresh, but he's not the only good Wagner director around. Perhaps Stephen Langridge was chosen because he's so very different to Herheim. Previously, I've only seen his staging of Harrison Birtwistle's The Minotaur.(much more on that on this site)., so I had a completely open mind.

Langridge dispenses with the pseudo-religious claptrap that bedevils Parsifal and distorts its true meaning, whatever that might be. Titurel, Klingsor and Kundry are figments of the imagination. The Knights make a fetish of the grail, imbuing it with supernatural  powers. For them Good Friday has similar magical qualities. Yet Good Friday is the one day in the Christian calender when bread isn't turned into the body of Christ. Read my piece on Religion vs Religiosity in Parsifal – Wagner subverts Christian theology so thoroughly that Parsifal could be read as blasphemy.

Susan Chitty's set is dominated by a large box-like structure. It's an extremely effective device for bringing together different planes of action neatly on stage. It also serves as a metaphor for the Knights' Grail fetish. The box is empty! Instead a young boy emerges, semi-naked as if coming out of a sauna, not that we should be too specific about images. There's even steam. As a concept this is perfectly valid, because material objects like a physical Grail don't confer spirituality. A squeaky-clean boy is a perfectly good symbol of a pure, Holy Fool. In the Final Act the boy comes back older but by this stage he's served his purpose, just as Freia drops out of the Ring. The Gods of Valhalla won't die without their fix of golden apples, unless, like Titurel, they're so hung up on ritual that they can't live without it...Compassion isn't a material object.

That insight redeems Langridge's Parsifal.  Otherwise, the production is pretty static, and the characters underdeveloped. It will be very successful, though, for precisely that reason. Audiences seem to prefer one-dimensional productions where they don't have to engage with complicated ideas. They scream at the word "Regie" as if it were a fetish like the Grail. It does not carry the connotations of "regimentation"  that scares people who speak only English.  All the word means, and it's the same in French, is "directed", pure and simple So all the hysteria about "Regie" is a meaningless crock. There are good productions and bad, but that depends on what's in them  Those who really care about opera are, one hopes, mature enough to get something out of many different approaches. Productions which ignore depth of interpretation, like Warner's Eugene Onegin  or the painfully shallow ENO Wozzeck are the real "Regie" villains because they ignore the real depth and complexity in a good opera.

That said, though, Langridge's Parsifal is a good show. because it at least attempts to deal with the ideas. It's infinitely better than the Met Parsifal, stage-wise, with its overstated blood fetish.  Without the Met's classy cast, that production belonged in a minor provincial house, though it might have seemed radical to Met audiences. Langridge's Parsifal will, like the hero, grow and mature, especially if he fixes the characters. Give me real "Regie"like Herheim any time :

 photos copyright Clive Barda, courtesy Royal Opera House

Hello Walls !

What I listen to when I don't listen to Schubert

Richard Strauss Die Frau ohne Schatten Munich Warlikowski

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Jacques Imbrailo Wigmore Hall

I'll be at The Royal Opera House Wagner Parsifal  Monday. Review here. But first: Jacques Imbrailo at the Wigmore Hall, with pianist Alisdair Hogarth.The programme didn't look promising in theory but Imbrailo is the kind of artist who can make anything interesting and individual.  At the end I was so glad I came that I didn't miss the rush at Covent Garden!

What thread would connect the songs of Liszt, Vaughan Williams, George Butterworth and Stephen Hough? Imbrailo's choices revealed great intelligence and sensitivity. He began with RVW's early Songs of Travel, unfortunately marred because latecomers were allowed in while he was singing.T he ushers at WH are kind hearted but it's really not fair on the audience and on the performer. Luckily the RVW songs are not the composer's finest works but served to highlight what was to come. Imbrailo sang them with his customary warmth. When Terfel and Roderick Williams sing these songs they sound robust, the kind of "Muscular Christianity" that appealed to Late Victorians. When Imbrailo sings them, his lighter, more lyrical voice broiught out something more sensitive. His "Let Beauty Awake", "Youth and Love" and "Whither must I wander?" felt like sincere songs of love and regret. RVW ends the cycle with  " I have tread the upward and the downward slope", where the piano describes clodhopping footseps : Hogarth played them with a flexible touch, to match Imbrailo's gentleness.

Only ten years separate Vaughan Williams's Songs of Travel from George Butterworth's Six Songs from a Shropshire Lad but the two cycles are worlds apart. The Songs of Travel bear the heavy, suffocating hand of Charles Villiers Stanford, from whom RVW only escaped when he went to France and studied with Ravel. Butterworth was only 13 years younger than RVW but his mindset was radically different. When Butterworth was a student at Oxford, one of the dons remarked "There goes more Red Revolution than in all Russia". Considering that the remark was made after the Uprising of 1905, this was not small talk. Butterworth was also far more upper crust and Establishment than RVW. He was an Eton man, not easily intimdated by Stanford, Cambridge and the Royal College of Music. This year, with so much attention on Britten's alternative British music, we should be reassessing Butterworth more deeply.

A E Housman's poems from A Shropshire Lad were set by Butterworth and RVW a mere two years apart. Anyone seriously interested in the composers would do well to compare them. It's not my job here in this review, but I might write more sooner or later. There is more on Butterworth on this site than most anywhere else, and some first-hand research. Please explore.

Imbrailo's "Loveliest of Trees" was thoughtfully phrased. He lingered on the words "stands about the woodland ride" so one thought about the tree, rooted to its soil. Then, when Imbrailo sang "wearing white for Eastertide", his voice glowed with beauty. Men grow old, but each Spring, the cherry tree blossoms and grows anew. English singers tend to stress vocal lines at the expense of more abstract musical values  Imbrailo, with his extensive opera experience, showed masterful control of the legato in "Look not into my eyes", revealing the beautiful structure of the song. Like the Grecian lad, its beauty is elusive : danger lies in those seductive lines.

Butterworth's "The Lads in their Hundreds" has become connected with the mass slaughter of the 1914-18 war partly because the composer himself was a casualty (Please read my account of his death in battle). Housman, however, was writing about the Boer War, and the terrible waste (to him)  of handsome young men. But the Boer War was gruesome. It saw mass ethnic cleansing and the invention of concentration camps. We would do well to ponder the Boer War as a prototype of what was to happen in Europe, in the mass public "celebrations" that start next year.  When Imbrailo sang "The Lads in their Hundreds", he sang with such poignant tenderness, that he made me think of the wide-scale human tragedy that lies beneath the song. My partner's eyes filled with tears. We've all heard this song s often that we forget what it really means.

"We couldn't follow A Shropshire Lad" with something upbeat, said Imbrailo, in his usual understated way, introducing his first encore. So he sang My Sarie Marais, an Afrikaans folk song referring to the Great Trek, the mass migration of the Boer people across Southern Africa, and the wars which followed. The song has been adopted by military marching bands, which is ironic. Imbrailo, however, sang it with exquisite tenderness, so it felt poignantly personal.  As music, the song is naive, but Imbrailo's performance gave it emotional power greater than the "art" folk songs RVW and his peers collected. Sincerity makes all the difference!


Imbrailo's many fans had come to hear him sing the gloriously Italianate star turns he does so well. With Franz Liszt's Three Petrach Sonnets S270/1 (1842-6) he delivered.  Exceptionally lyrical singing, richly coloured and resonant. Yet, being the opera singer he is, Imbrailo doesn't simply make beautiful sounds, but infuses them with meaning. "E nulla stringo, tutto l'mondo abbracio" he sang.  His technical control is superb - this is how rubato should properly be used. His chest opened out and soared so you could feel "i sospiri e le lagrime e 'l desio" welling up from deep within. The piano lines are almost more beautiful, delicately sculpted by Hogarth. He and Imbrailo are an excellent team.

Like Liszt, Stephen Hough is a pianist who writes song. Imbrailo and Hogarth premiered Hough's Herbstlieder at the Oxford Lieder Festival in 2010. Please see my detailed review here.  Hearing it a second time, I could appreciate the subtle images, diminuendos like falling leaves and mists settling on a landscape. Curling lines that circulate like autumn breezes, smoky lines that blur. As a mood piece, it's atmospheric. Yet there's suppressed pain here, too. "Welcher wie ein weisses Stadt" leapt high up the register like a scream of anguish. Hogarth's piano pounded like an oncoming train "Bestürz tmich, Musik, mit rythmischen Zürnen" sang Imbrailo. A good performance, but what weill remain with me is the meory of Imbrailo singing Butterworth and My Sarie Marais.

Timings Tyranny and other aberrations

When databases got going, there was a fashion for finding "perfect" recordings, as by hoarding data it might be possible to distil all the variants of performance into one ideal.  The logic was that timings were often used as a measure of quality. But can performance really be measured in pseudo-science terms? It's much easier to say "Haitink takes 25 minutes, Gergiev takes six" than to analyse why.

It's human nature to control chaos by imposing order even if the order is nonsense.  A spin off from Timings Tyranny was the idea of database surveys.  Reviews were collected and entered into  database. Press the right spec formula  and out would pop the right recording! There was even an attempt to systemize the Ring. That presumes, however, that somewhere along the line someone had actually listened, and listened enough to know why performances work, assuming quality is even throughout. Listening takes decades of experience and knowledge. It's a progress without end.  Every time you listen to something, you're hearing it new. The disc might not change, but you have changed since the last time you listened even if it was only a few hours ago. And I think, the better the work, the less likely you "need" listening guides.The fun is in the learning.

It's human nature to seek order from chaos and in busy modern times it makes  sense to depend on preprocessed information. But what would be the fun in that?  The idea of discographic purity falls apart when technology allows hundreds of ways of accessing what we listen to. Instead of timings and record label numbers, the alternative might be artist-based information. There is a study of Elizabeth Schwarzkopf's recording sessions, so we know when she sang what and where. The same song might be replicated a hundred times in the catalogue, but at least we can figure what else she was doing at that point in her life. If she'd come fresh from singing a role somewhere, it might have shaped the way she sang a song by a composer. But it would be impossible to pinpoint. By its very nature, listening is intangible, and subjective, and can never be measured.

Handel Acis and Galatea Wigmore Hall Early Opera Company

Handel Acis and Galatea at the Wigmore Hall with the Early Opera Company. HERE is a link to Claire Seymour's review in Opera Today.

"Christian Curnyn launched into the overture with verve, the dynamic, animated playing of the instrumentalists setting the high standard of playing that was sustained throughout the evening and establishing a gripping dramatic momentum. Ensemble was exemplary, and the stylish execution, full of intensity but always elegant, was impressive, as the players painted an Arcadian scene....;"

"The opening chorus instituted the mood of Arcadian serenity, the five voices intermingling with ease and simplicity, initially creating a sense of breadth, before the introduction of some relaxed counterpoint and points of imitation. In contrast, ‘Wretched lovers!’, which commences Act 2 was full of foreboding, and in the unaccompanied lament, ‘Mourn all ye muses’, sung over the body of the slain Acis, the consort of voices was touching but not sentimental, particularly at the line, ‘The gentle Acis is no more’.

Robert Murray, tenor (as Acis); Sophie Bevan, soprano (as Galatea); Samuel Boden, tenor (as Damon); Matthew Rose, baritone (as Polyphemus); David de Winter, tenor (as Coridon); Christian Curnyn, director, harpsichord.

Jell-o, an American Art Form

Anyone who's ever entertained or been entertained ins small town America has come across the thriving native art form - Jell-o creativity! A packet of gelatine can unleash the creative demon in the most unliberated suburban Mom. Pink, green, blue, purple, orange and sulphur yellow. Objects formed in strange moulds, sometime with even stranger moulds embedded within. The wackier the flavour combination, the better - Heston Blumenthal has noithing on this uncelebrity sisterhood.  HERE is an article about these unsung glories of the American kitchen. Europeans have no idea what they're missing !

Mainstrean creativity favours male dominated public genres, while women are relegated to the background. Literally, the kitchen. Obviously real equality would be better, but women made do with what they could.  Far from being entirely cowed women created their own sphere. Rozsika Parker's seminal book The Subversive Stitch : Embroidery and the Making of The Feminine first published in the early 1980's has now been reissued in a new edition. Needlework gave women an outlet when they had few others. When Ellen Orford sings "Embroidery in Childhood" in Peter Grimes, you realize how much her dreams, too, have been thwarted by society.

So celebrate the fine art of American jell-o salads and desserts - the ephemeral creations of decades of anonymous women doing what they could to brighten their lives and please those around them. Someone should document their wit and humour - families all round must have photos of some forgotten feast or clippings from magazines that taught "home craft".

Courtesy of a friend, a tribute to the Art of Jell-o by William Bolcom

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.

Alice Herz-Sommer, 110 years old today

Alice Herz-Sommer is 110 years old today. Anyone reaching 110 is special but Alice has defied more odds than most. Born in Prague in 1903, she was a professional musician. When the Nazis came, she was shipped to Terezin (Theresienstadt) where she played in the notorious camp orchestra. Even then, she was unusual because she had a young son to live for. He made her laugh when he sang songs from Brundibar. To laugh, in a concentration camp?  But that sums up Alice's personality.  When she was "just" 97, she told Christopher Nupen in his film "We Want the Light" that her twin sister was a pessimist and  that "tension" shortened her life. "Nature and music, that is my religion" she says, her face lighting up radiantly. "I am grateful to my mother who wanted us to learn, to know, to be thankful for everything ..... seeing the sun, seeing a smile, hearing a nice word. Everything is a present to be thankful for".

"Life is a gift", she often said. "Hatred eats the soul of the hater, not that of the hated"   Alice is an inspiration, positive therapy in human form. She's had a tough life, but hasn't become bitter. "Music is God", she has said, in difficult times you feel it most". Think of the famous quandary, is a glass half full or half empty? But the glass is always full. The other half is air, without which we cannot live. Drink it gratefully!  Some people, alas, get their kicks out of being miserable and inflicting it on everyone else. Not Alice!

The Prague Monitor carries a report today of Alice's birthday. "Her health has finally started to fade, and her family has requested that she is given her peace from the media. Her birthday will be spent without visitors and fuss, and her grandson Ariel will spend the day by her side at her flat. He said: “The image given on the internet is that she is quite active but the reality is quite the opposite and in fact her health is failing both physically and mentally, unfortunately”.

It's not how long you live, some have said, but how well you have lived. Not in material terms, but in terms of what you've learned and given back to others. In that sense Alice will be immortal.

Once I met Anita Lasker-Wallfisch and told her how she inspired me."But I didn't do anything, I just survived", she said, which is an understatement, but utterly sincere. People take responsibility for themselves. Another camp inmate (also with a young son) told me about grass shoots emerging from the ground after a hard winter."We ate them" she said, totally matter-of-fact.

Barbican Britten Albert Herring Pickled

Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring is a red herring  The hero Albert Herring gets pickled. In the process, he finds himself and sends up those who thought he was simple. The opera is comic, but the laughs are on those who ignore the double meanings fundamental to Britten's idiom. At the Barbican Hall, Steuart Bedford conducted a performance so vivid that you wonder why Albert Herring is still one of Britten's Cinderellas, doomed to stodgy retro stagings that emphasize the leaden text at the expense of the music. Bedford rescues Albert Herring from provincial Loxford and liberates him into the modern world.

After the Rape of Lucretia, Britten wanted to write something light that could be staged in the relatively limited resources of the Jubilee Hall, Aldeburgh, a few yards from Britten's home at Crag House. Albert Herring premiered at the very first Aldeburgh Music festival in June 1948, with Britten's own English Opera Group, with which Steuart Bedford was later connected. The Jubilee Hall is now far too small for modern audiences and its backstage facilities almost non-existent, so in 2011 Bedford conducted the opera at the Maltings, Snape, where the stage was a mock-up of the original, complete with a determined "community" atmosphere. Locals were asked to contribute home-made cakes for Lady Billows's (Felicity Lott) tea party.(read more here). That production recreated not just the opera, but the whole spirit of early Aldeburgh and make-do Austerity Britain. A hopelessly amateur video circulated for a while, which I rather liked because it was so doggedly in period.  Because Bedford elucidates the music so clearly,  Kenneth Richardson's modern dress staging at the Barbican Hall was well received.

Britten's Albert Herring is an adaptation of a short story by Guy de Maupassant, set in Catholic France. Translation to Middle England causes problems. But that suited Britten. He and Crozier were able to create a satire on English social pretension and hypocrisy. Loxford is a polite middle-class, suburban version of the Borough where Peter Grimes was hounded to his death. Victorian grand dames would probably have been more interested in the sex lives of horses than in the suburban proletariat. Lady Billows is nuts, her lady friend Miss Pike filhty-minded, but powers that be in Loxford do their bidding without question. Some things don't change!

Even before he's made May Queen, Albert's looking for a way out. He knows he has to break away, but how? When Sid and Nancy spike his lemonade he loses his inhibitions. He becomes both Titania and Bottom at the same time, both dreamer and down to earth. When Albert is drunk, woodwinds entwine, ever so slightly off-colour, as if they're embracing in a dream. Alcohol is just a shortcut to something that's been fermenting in Albert for a long time.

Britten uses the Tristan chord but even more significantly the horn themes from Siegfried, and even the call of the Wood Bird, which he used as early as 1939 in The Sword in the Stone (more here)  Andrew Staples's voice rings clear and pure, glowing with promise. he's not a Wagnerian Heldentenor, but English tenor as Hero, which is quite something in the understated British way. There's a lot more to the part than the singing, as Britten's music makes clear.

Much has also been made of the inconclusive ending. Is Albert gay, as has been suggested? It probably doesn't matter either way., though he's attracted enough to Nancy that Sid gets worried. Kitty Whateley sang a specially toothsome Nancy: the part is one of the most womanly Britten ever wrote, and she did it justice. Marcus Farnworth's Sid was characterized enough that I wondered if Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen  knew Albert Herring 

The cast was well chosen. Lady Billows always gets attention, and the role is well suited to Christine Brewer's timbre, shrilly imperious yet softly billowing in the middle. The part isn't "funny". As Nancy observes, it's not nice to humiliate a shy man like Albert. The girls of Loxford don't deserve shaming, either. Albert's mother is no heroine either. Catherine Wyn-Rogers, who has a true gift for singing character, gives the part a tough edge: this mother smothers and will sell her son for £25.  One wonders what happened to her husband. Gillian Keith sings Miss Wordsworth and Gaynor Keeble sings Florence Pike. The villains in this opera are women, but the male roles are cast so strongly that they have more substance. Roderick Williams was a particularly effective Mr Gedge, suggesting the parson's saner, gentler side. Adrian Thompson sang Mr Upfold and Matthew Rose was a powerfully arresting Superintendent Budd (note the name, which Britten would use three years later in a very different way).

"What I like is a clear cut murder", Rose sings. In the original French story, the hero dies. In Albert Herring, the hero throws his crown of orange blossoms to the ground. It's a very "British" compromise. In a way, Albert has been murdered because his life has been overturned. .Will he be bullied back into submission? Or, having slayed his Mime (Mum) emotionally, will he continue to run the shop, in a very Brittenesque way by doing what he wants whatever others might think? Perhaps the clue is in the nature of his business. He's a greengrocer, in an area full of organic farms. Will his life bear fruit and prosper as vigorously as the vegetables he sells? Listening to Steuart Bedford and to Andrew Staples, we're left full of hope. Lady Billows serves cream cakes that will clog your arteries. Albert Herring sells things that are good for you.

photo:  Paul Mitchell

Unorthodox Symphonist Britten 100 Centenary Aldeburgh Knussen

The legacy of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears lives on in Aldeburgh with the Britten-Pears Foundation. At the Maltings, Snape, in the concert hall Britten and Pears loved so dearly, Oliver Knussen conducted the keynote concert of the Aldeburgh Music weekend marking Britten's 100th birthday. Given the significance of the occasion, some conductors might have opted for safe and solemn, but Knussen's interpretation was innovative, even dangerous, reaching into the maelstrom of Britten's visionary darkness.  Yet it was also exceptionally beautiful, suggesting the majesty of Nature, and the skies and seas around Aldeburgh. Those who deride Britten because he didn't write formal, conventional symphonies need to hear Knussen transform the piece. The Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia may derive from Peter Grimes but this is no mere suite based on an opera. Knussen shows how it becomes a pure (five movement) symphonic masterpiece on its own terms.

The.opening chords of "Dawn" shine with almost preternatural brightness. It feels cosmic, more than a picture of the sun breaking through clouds. We feel the gravitational pull of currents stronger than the tides of the sea. "Sunday Morning" didn't feel religious (and the pious of the Borough don't practise Christian values). When the lively upwards passages shimmered, I thought of Apollo, and Tadzio dancing on the beach, images much more central to Britten's inspiration than the grizzled Peter Grimes. The viola solo in "Moonlight" was exquisite, its mystery undercut by the tense, brisk brass and scurrying strings. Oddly enough, I thought I heard echoes of the Rite of Spring, which isn't inappropriate, as the sacrifical "Storm" is about to break loose.When the viola returns, it feels achingly poignant. The surging tensions were well judged, so the woodwind figures emerged all the brighter. Knussen is a master of contemporary repertoire: he shaped the jagged edges of the Storm so the music exploded in wild dissonance, surging forward to the shocking, sudden conclusion. There's nothing "picturesque" about Knussen's Sea Interludes. He's no tourist. He inhabits Aldeburgh and Britten's music like a native.

Knussen programmes are always esoteric. It was fascinating to hear the Four Sea Interludes and Passacaglia (op 33a and 3b) together with the Spring Symphony (op 44, 1949). Britten's ideas on symphonic form were heterodox, so highly original that they still confound. Forget the usual old clichés about Mahler, which are red herrings that obscure its true originality.Britten knew Mahler long before Donald Mitchell did. Like so much Britten wrote, it can be approached on different, contradictory levels. its sprawling structure brings together symphony, chorale, western tradition, bird song and show tunes, Latin, English and Middle English. Of course it's a showpiece, the sort of thing Copland or Leonard Bernstein might have liked to have written. The choristers whistle and the soloists twitter.  But it's also satire. Britten is sending up the idea of a symphony "containing the world", whatever that meant in the first place. "Big", he's suggesting, doesn't mean "better".There are also parallels with the Simple Symphony, where Britten alludes to cartoons, and to Paul Bunyan. Perhaps Britten is commenting on American music and the McCarthy era. It's a much more complex piece than meets the casual ear, and filled with cryptic hints.. Listen carefully to Stephen Johnson's analysis HERE ,a superb introduction to Britten's irony. Knussen himself loves whimsy. Who else could have written Higgelty Piggelty Pop! (more here),.He also knows American music. A fabulously fun performance which didn't conceal the bitterness within. "Rejoice" sing the voices, but the brass bleats raspberries.

Britten's  Cantata Academica (op 62, 1959) extended the concept of Britten as unorthodox symphonist. This piece was commissioned by Paul Sacher, so it automatically earns Britten a place among the great and good of modern European composers. It's also by no means a typical "academic overture" weighed down by pomp and solemnity. It's theatrical, for one thing. As the dons of Basel University gather in their finery, the piece entertains them with tableaux of Basel's past. Again, Britten is monkeying about with form, combining mock medieval with modern.

Oliver Knussen was involved with the Aldeburgh Music Festival for longer than most, bar Britten and Pears themselves. Fundamental to the Britten-Pears ethos is the idea that music should not fossilize but grow. Thus, as part of the Britten tribute, Knussen programmed a new commission by Ryan Wigglesworth, Locke's Theatre, receiving its world premiere. Wigglesworth was attracted to Matthew Locke's "idiosyncratic and daringly advanced harmonic and rhythmic language...... (and  the) very rawness and directness of Locke’s theatre music". Wigglesworth's layering of Jacobean non-naturalism with modern clarity is very different from the way Britten adapted Tudor and Stuart music. It's not pastiche,  but firmly constructed. and original.

Britten Canticles Bostridge Broadcast

Revelatory and Rare! Britten's Canticles, though individually well known, are seldom performed together because the forces they require are so diverse. But they need to be heard together so their significance can be truly appreciated. Although written separately over thirty years, they "embody a musical journey" as Roger Vignoles has written. "Not quite the Seven Stages of Man, but at the very least Five Stages of Britten". 

Watch the performance of Britten's Canticles recorded at the Linbury Theatre ROH in July this year. Brilliant performance from Ian Bostridge who catches the many complex moods and undertones. "My dear Darling" his Abraham sings to Isaac, sweet words laced with poison, for dad intends to kill.  The Third Canticle, Still Falls the Rain is powerful. Bostridge captures the very non-Christian mix of religious piety, erotic tension and anti-war protest.  The staging adds political context, fundamental to its meaning. Listen to the "sour" horn, a pointed subversion of the way the instrument is so often used in military music. There's also a connection to Britten's Serenade for Tenor, horn and strings, where sweetness conceals death "O Rose ! Thou art sick", completed in war time, nearly twenty years before Still Falls the Rain. .

In 1947, homosexuality was illegal and careers could be destroyed if any whiff  of scandal became public. Canticle One, My beloved is mine and I am his is a shockingly bold statement of The Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name.  "I give him songs, he gives me the length of days". The text is Biblical, and refers - we assume - to the relationship between God and man. The piano introduction is tender, almost lullaby-like. Perhaps it is a morning after, as this Jones staging suggests. The juxtaposition between religious text and homosexual love is audacious. This Canticle could still shock the pants off Middle England and the Choral Evensong culture.

Abraham and Isaac, the second Canticle (1952), takes its cue from medieval mystery plays, but revitalizes them with Britten's characteristic asperity. A dominant God, for which one might read authority, society and patriarchal values, demands that Abraham sacrifice his beloved son. Exquisitely beautiful cadences, gruesomely horrible meanings. Iestyn Davies is a much better Isaac than David Daniels was eleven years ago. Davies's voice is purer, stronger, less rococo and much more idiomatic. Isaac agrees to being sacrificed, which suggests that he's more than a typical "innocent". Like the Boy in Curlew River, (another key work in which Britten explores stylized symbolism), Isaac's death has redemptive power. This time it's God who is moved and relents. Britten's Innocents are not as passive as one might think.

Still Falls the Rain (1955), based on Edith Sitwell's poem about the Blitz, is even more equivocal. A horn drones (Richard Watkins). It evokes the sound of an air raid siren, the drone of a bomber's engine, the sound of vast mechanical processes grinding away, mindless and impersonal. The staging was particularly evocative. We saw the white cliffs of Dover, as pale as the bodies of innocents, then shots of munitions factories churning out missiles - pointedly phallic. The gloom is punctuated by staccato piano,  making the connection between bombs and the hundreds of nails in the Holy Cross, and in Christ's body. Julius Drake played with adamant ferocity. This isn't pretty music, even when the horn leaps into a jaunty march. Bostridge sings the long arching lines so they ache and tantalize. Wails of agony or something more?  The poem is a curious blend of religion and the horror of war. Britten suggests that there might be even stranger, possibly erotic elements. Consider Isaac's sacrifice, and ultimately the surreal imagery in Canticle Five, written when Britten himself was confronting death.

Bostridge, Davies and Drake are joined by baritone Benedict Nelson for the fourth Canticle.  The Journey of the Magi (1971) may seem oddly quaint after the drama of Still Falls the Rain  The Three Kings speak in matter-of-fact conversation. They're preoccupied with the coldness of the night and the physical difficulties of travel. The birth of the child at Bethlehem seems almost an afterthought. Yet listen to the curious blending of the three voices. This isn't a chorale.

In 1974, Britten was so ill that he could not play the piano. The Death of St. Narcissus is thus scored for harp (Sally Pryce). The harp gives this last Canticle a curiously ethereal quality. Its strings seem to shimmer, evoking light and frragility. But is this light the natural light we'd expect from the modern equivalent of an arcadian lute?  At first, we're lured into the shadow of a rock, lured by "something different". The poem, by T S Eliot, blends references from classical antiquity with the image of St Sebastien, pierced by arrows, dying for one he loved. Quite probably, Britten didn't read Yukio Mishima on St Sebastien, but he must have understood that the symbolism wasn't strictly Catholic.  Someone, perhaps a tree, a girl, or a fish, has been ravished and corrupted. But the poem continues. "because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows, he danced on the hot sand until the arrows came. As he embraced them, his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood and satisfied him". How does one read this image?  One thinks of Tadzio, dancing on the beach in Venice, watched by dry, doomed Aschenbach. Perhaps Britten is contemplating beauty, fragility and the nature of creative life.

Hide in Plain Sight :Benjamin Britten's true legacy

Benjamin Britten was born 100 years ago today. He changed British music - and Britain - forever. He's become a celebrity this anniversary year. Thousands all of the world who wouldn't normally think much about "classical music" know who he is.  That's quite some achievement for an intensely private man who didn't play to the crowd or court public adulation. He enjoyed honours when they came his way but they didn't compromise him as an artist and visionary. Yet I wonder. Is Britain really ready for Britten?

Britten was fortunate to come into the world when the world itself was about to change. Empires were collapsing, giving rise to a creative renaissance in all aspects of life - politics, philosophy, literature, visual arts, theatre, film. Music could hardly remain unaffected.  Luckily for Britten, he didn't grow up stifled in the kind of Establishment conformity represented by Charles Villiers Stanford. Yet, more than any other British composer in his time, bar Ralph Vaughan Williams, he absorbed Tudor and Stuart music to create a new, uniquely English idiom. Britten was never part of mainstream "British" music, even diplomatically avoiding the Three Choirs Festival, the finest expression of that tradition.  Yet the Britten industry would have his legacy recreated in cosy, theme park style, as a kind of retro Britishness. Britten is British, yes, but in a distinctively modern way, not insular but receptive to outside influences. Britten may not have been a wild-eyed radical, but he cared about integrity, new music and new ideas.

But is Britain really ready for Britten? There is something very alien and so unclubbable about Britten. So much of his music operates on multiple levels. The War Requiem, for example, (read more here) or Gloriana which has confounded critics since its premiere.(read more here). Do we really begin to understand the moral complexities of Billy Budd or The Rape of Lucretia or Death in Venice? We probably won't, given the popularity of one-dimensional, simplistic productions that skim the surface. But for me that's the fascination of Britten. We've hardly even begun to appreciate just how visionary he really was.

For many years, Britten drove me crazy because I couldn't penetrate his emotional elusiveness. But that's exactly why he fascinates me now. Oddly enough, he's like Boulez, whose emotions are so deeply embedded within his intellect that those who aren't listening carefully might not understand. Britten doesn't wear his heart on his sleeve, like Bernstein. He's detached and opaque, but all the more challenging for that. Perhaps his music reflects his personality. It has a dark side, attuned to the supernatural and to moral complexities. Being gay must have had an effect, too, though not in a sensationalist way. If I were to write a book about Britten, I'd call it "Hide in Plain Sight".

Britten's life has been exhaustively documented that there's no real need for more. Instead, we should focus on new ways of interpreting and evaluating. What was Britten's relationship with his father, for example, and why are his women so wooden? What was the effect of the American Adventure?  What do Britten's Innocents really mean? And what may live in Britten's "dark side"? And Britten in the intellectual climate of his times. So much could be done, beside the obsession with trivia. Britten reached out to simple ,ordinary people, but he did not dumb down.

We need to hear Britten in the context of European and even non-European music to appreciate how individual he was. Aldeburgh represents Britten's legacy in an ideal form.  Contrary to populist music history, good composers don't work in "schools". The Britten-Pears Foundation helps composers and musicians find their own way. Britten's commercial pull is so strong that he attracts hangers-on who might think they write in his style, but, almost by definition any paint-by-numbers composer would have been anathema to him. Britten's successors include anyone with a truly individual, original style, like Harrison Birtwistle, Oliver Knussen and even Elliott Carter, a near contemporary who found his personal voice fairly late in life. They carry on (or did, in the case of Carter) the legacy of irreverence, wit and dogged individuality.

Today we celebrate Britten 100, his centenary. But the date is also associated with the assassination of John F Kennedy, on the very same day 50 years ago. Britten and JFK had a common enemy in J Edgar Hoover (read my post on Britten and the FBI here) . Both were liberal for their time and didn't ascribe to what we'd now call "traditional" values. The traditions they respected went much deeper. Sadly, the world of 1963 seems so innocent compared with our world of corporate banditry, political paranoia and wars of attrition. What, one wonders, would Kennedy and Britten have made of our times?  Music doesn't exist in limbo, but in our hearts and minds. Now, I think we need to listen to Britten 's complex moral dilemmas more acutely than ever.

There's more on Britten and Aldeburgh on this site than anywhere else that's not Britten only. Please explore. See also my review of Knussen's centenary concert at Snape Here:

ENO Satyagraha - puppets with purpose

Why is the ENO Philip Glass Satyagraha in Sanskrit? Why are the intertitles in turgid Victorian prose? What's the point of an opera where words have no meaning? But that's exactly the point Philip Glass is making. Words, in themselves, have no meaning.  What really matters is communication. In his early life, Gandhi wrote in newspapers, endlessly churning out words that had no impact. Once he dropped verbiage for direct action, he changed the world. When he swapped his three-piece suit for a dhoti, he made a statement. Material things and the power structures that rest on them are meaningless. What matters is purity of spirit. The juggernaut of Empire was felled by humble peasants and non-violence.

Philip Glass's music is maddeningly repetitive but once you stop trying to make sense of it, it kicks in. Many cultures employ repetitive chant because it works. Self consciousness and self awareness contradict each other..Chant keeps the body occupied so the soul can run free. Freedom, though, is  a dangerous concept, which is why many resist it, preferring the certainity of social constructs. Loosen up, guys!   Read what I wrote here about Bianca Jagger being sharper than "clever" folk . As has been said by persons wiser than us, it's harder for a rich man to enter heaven. Glass's structure connects to the epic saga of the Mahabharata but you don't need to know that in detail. Millions have got the ancient story without mastering the literature. Perhaps it's best to approach Satyagraha in the same way. Listen past the language of text and music, not to it, and relax.

 Puppets abound throughout this brilliantly theatrical staging by Improbable, Phelim McDermot's innovative company. Puppets are representations, not reality : inaminate objects that don't exist until manipulated by others. The turgid intertitles are claptrap designed to confuse readers. Just like puppets, we should be able to see through them.  Arjuna and his foes from the Mahabarata loom like ghosts in the first act. Giant grotesques loom over Gandhi and his colleagues. But they're just paper. Later the puppeteers dispense with puppets altogether, walking across the stage with strips of transparent tape, gradually creating cats cradles. The sticky filaments could tie them down and choke them, but from the maze they create a vaguely humanoid monster that rises upwards. Once it's served its purpose a puppeteer crushes it, and it becomes, once again, a worthless mess. What a metaphor for the way we are manipulated by the media and by society!

At one point, the chorus sits stretched across the stage, singing hahahahahahaha. They're reading newspapers, expecting the "natives" to wipe their boots, As an image of power, it's very effective. But the joke is on the rich, not the poor. Gandhi showed that humble people don't need to play games. During his lifetime, he knew Tolstoy and Tagore. He inspired Martin Luther King, whom we see in the final act. Gandhi and King were assassinated. Perhaps they were threatening because they represented an alternative to traditional power structures.  As the actor playing King addresses the heavens, Gandhi (Alan Oke) sings a surprisingly beautiful series of songs.  We don't know what he's saying, but he conveys more complex meanings through abstract sound and nuance than words might articulate. Should we shoot Satyagraha down because we don't like its implications?

 Alan Oke has grown into the role over the years. Although there aren't great florid technical displays in this music, it isn't easy to sing. Miss one bar and it falls out of synch. The purity of Oke's voice is ideal for the part, and now, with experience, he imbues his singing with intuitive confidence and dignity. He might be too tall and too pink to be a facsimile of Gandhi, but he creates the idealized personality in the opera. An "athlete of the spirit", whatever that might mean. His avatars, Arjuna (Eddie Wade) and Krishna (Nicholas Masters) are very good, bringing individual character to the roles. Wade's cockinesss is particularly well thought through.

The ENO chorus are in excellent form, so well drilled by chorus master Philip White in Glass's strange cadences that they make the music seem oddly natural. Stuart Stratford conducted: an act of concentration above and beyond the call of duty. Miss one bar or repeat and the whole opera goes awry. To my surprise, I was humming the "tunes" all the way home. Clare Eggington sang Miss Schlesen, Janis Kelly Mrs Naidoo ,with Stephanie Marshall, Nicholas Folwell and Sarah Pring in other roles. I don't know if I could cope with Satyagraha audio-only but live it works, thanks tp  Phelim McDermot, Peter Relton and the Improbable troupe of multi taskers.  Perhaps Glass might have jazzed things up in waltz time, but Improbable and Alan Oke make Satyagraha worthwhile as theatre.

Plenty more on this site about Philip Glass who can be very good (In the Penal Colony) or not as the case might be (The Perfect American) 

photos : Alastair Muir, courtesy ENO

Florian Boesch Schubert journeys online

Florian Boesch sings Schubert. with Malcolm Martineau. Quite probably the best baritone in this rep in the business at the moment - exceptionally intelligent, elegant yet profound.  An antidote to pretty and shallow! Available now online, internationally and on demand for 7 days on BBC Radio 3 :

Schwanengesang HERE

Die Schöne Müllerin HERE

Winterreise HERE 

After 40 years of listening to Lieder, I've heard a lot. But Boesch and Martineau reveal so much more with the depth of their interpretation and the clarity of expression.

 HERE is a link to my review of their Winterreise at the Wigmore Hall in Dec 2012.   

HERE is a link to my review of Die Schõne Müllerin at the Wigmore Hall in March 2012. When he sang it in October that year at the Oxford Lieder festival, he was even deeper, even more convincing.  I was so overwhelmed that I could not write it up.  Just as Matthias Goerne's first Die schõne Müllerin with Eric Schneider changed the way we hear the songs, so too does Boesch's Die schõne Müllerin help us find new depths in this amazing music. Please read Boesch's insights here in this keynote interview "Strong minded Die schône Müllerin"