wandering

St. Stephen Walbrook

2012-01-18T12:35:00.002+11:00

I took this photo while walking around in May. I was attracted by the contrast between the new buildings and the church. I didn't know the name of the church; and when I was back in Sydney posting photos to Flickr it took me some time navigating around on Google Earth to identify the building. I found it was St. Stephen Walbrook one of the many churches designed by Christopher Wren (1632 – 1723) after the Great Fire of London in 1666.

So I returned for a closer look in November. I found that the building and its history provided some fascinating insights into the way we appreciate historical structures and monuments. What is the significance of an old or ancient monument; what is a "Wren church"; and how important is it that old buildings are kept as they were when built ?

There is said to have been a church on the site since at least 1090 when Walbrook was a stream flowing into the Thames. The one destroyed by the Great Fire was built in 1428 by which time the stream had gone and Walbrook was a street. Construction of the Wren church began in 1672 and was completed, except for the spire, by 1679. It is one of the hundred or so churches in the City of London, many of which were destroyed by the Great Fire and rebuilt to designs by Christopher Wren or his office.

The spire was added 1713-15. It may have been designed by Nicholas Hawksmoor. The whimsically elaborate design has a lot in common with his work.

There is a general history in a leaflet available for download on the church's website.

From the outside the church could hardly be called impressive:

Like St. Mary Woolnoth, a short distance away, it shares its site with a Starbucks shop. This is not as strange as it seems, like many other City churches, the building has never been free standing and in the past  has been more obscured by surrounding houses, shops and offices than it is at present.

Once inside things are very different:

we find a space well lit by from large plain glass windows, with attractive bench pews around a central altar, sculpted by Henry Moore. The altar and the circles of pews are very modern.  The original interior had a different pattern.

In the seventeenth century Church of England, instruction was more important than ritual and churches were designed for the preaching of sermons. Wren designed St. Stephen as an auditory. The pulpit was the focus, and the body of the church was designed to enable the whole congregation to see and hear the preacher.

The original wine glass pulpit and altar have survived war and restoration and are still there:

but the pulpit no longer dominates the church.

This engraving from early in the nineteenth century shows the box pews for which the church was designed. At time the engraving was made the large east window was occupied by an altarpiece The Burial of St. Stephen by Benjamin West R.A. (1738 – 1820) While Wren did not design the box pews, it can be seen that the columns have very high bases designed to accommodate them.

Various repairs were made in the first half of the nineteenth century and in 1850 The Burial of St.Stephen was moved to the north wall, and the windows filled with Victorian stained glass. In 1886-7 substantial remodelling took place. The box pews were taken out and replaced with movable seats, and the original paving stones were replaced with a mosaic floor. The octagonal pedestals of the columns, as seen in the engraving above, were replaced with the square ones seen today. It is unclear whether or not this change restored them to their original form.

The church was not hit by high explosive bombs during the Nazi air raids of the Second World War; but the structure was damaged by a land mine and incendiary bombs damaged the part of the dome which fell in flames into the body of the church. Seats and choir stalls installed in 1887 were lost to the fire, but not the wine glass pulpit. The Victorian stained glass windows were destroyed.

The church was repaired after the war and re-opened in 1953. In 1963, new stained glass windows by Keith New were installed.

A photograph of the interior in Wren by Margaret Whinney (1971) shows the altar on the east wall and the pulpit, with rows of open backed pews and chairs in front of them. The window above the altar and the two smaller windows on each side are filled with the new stained glass.

Meanwhile, excavations for large buildings in the surrounding area had altered the level of the water table, and the flow in the now underground Walbrook was reduced. The ground under the church, dried out and the building became unstable. Further substantial works were required.

Very substantial structural alterations were done to provide support for the dome. The floor was rebuilt in steel and concrete and the mosaic floor replaced with stone paving. The altar by Henry Moore was installed during these works, but not without controversy. Alterations of this kind require the approval of church courts: and installation of the new altar was refused by the London Consistory Court on the grounds that the altar was not a table as required by church doctrine; and that in any event it was unsuitable and incompatible with Wren's design. This first issue, which goes back to the replacement of altars with communion tables as part of the protestant reforms of Edward VII, doesn't directly affect the issues of authenticity and aesthetics which interest me, but it did result in an appeal being heard by the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved as the case involved questions of doctrine, ritual or ceremonial. This court constituted by Two High Court judges and three bishops, allowed an appeal and the altar, which had been installed in the course of renovations, remained.

The doctrinal question turned on whether something without legs could be a table, which at least in argument led to a discussion of "the quality of tableness". I would be happy to leave this to the ecclesiastics were it not for the facts that the "table" is a cylindrical piece of marble 3'5" in height and 8' in diameter weighing 10 tons, which looks to me more like a sacrificial altar than anything I have ever seen in a church.

When I was in the church, I found it had the same uplifting feeling of openness and light which I have experienced in other English churches of the period with clear glass, for example, Hawksmoor's St. George's Bloomsbury. I was not aware at the time of the controversy about the interior as we see it now.

London Consistory Court held that the issue turned on the departure from Wren's intention. I learned that architects talk of "reading a building". So in this case, entering from the west door with the box pews in place, one was faced with a church of the expected longitudinal, nave and aisle pattern. But as you moved forward and saw the dome above another "reading" of the building became possible. The interior was deliberately ambiguous. By placing a circular altar and surrounds under the dome, the present arrangement breaks the tension between the two aspects of the design. I imagine this would be seen as wrong by those who believe that preserved buildings should be, as far as possible, in their original state. It is not possible now to experience the spacial ambiguity in the same way.

In allowing the appeal, the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved rejected the notion that there was an objective test to be applied. Departure from Wren's perceived intention could not be "wrong"; it was all a matter of personal taste. There were a number of experts in art and design who liked the new proposal, and the appeal court held that this weighed strongly in its favour.

The new arrangements were said to have great artistic merit and to be in harmony with the building notwithstanding the loss of some of the force of the original design. I think the experts and the members of the court were very much influenced by the reputation and standing of Henry Moore at the time. Of course, all art is constantly being re assessed; and I gained the impression in watching Alastair Sooke's TV program Romancing the Stone, that Moore's reputation has entered an eclipse. The reclining figures, recognisably his work, which can be seen in many galleries and public places around the world were described as "British Council art". I took this to mean stylish but anodyne objects which could be safely exported as bits of official culture.

I will need to have another look at the church with all this in mind. However, I think it may well be that the altar and its surrounds will be viewed in the same light as the stained glass, installed when it was in fashion and now removed. But I suspect that if box pews were installed in its place they would rarely be occupied.

When the most recent alterations to the church were completed this inscription was placed at the entrance:

A true reading? Maybe, with a new ambiguity.

eighth blackbird in Sydney

2011-09-24T16:54:00.001+10:00

When I travelled to Bexhill-on-Sea in May to see eighth blackbird perform I didn't know they were going to alight much closer to home. On 22 September they gave a concert in The Studio at the Sydney Opera House.
I have been thinking about how much of the enjoyment of music is confined to the performance itself. When I hear new music, or music that is new to me, I am unable to take as much of it as I would like away. If I hear something I like, I want to hear it again but this is not always possible; and there is so much to hear ( and such little time ) that music that which makes a bad impression, or none, on a first hearing is lost forever. And when I hear something I like it is sometimes difficult to find a CD or other recording and again the memory fades. I found an echo of this thought in Wallace Stevens' fifth blackbird:

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

Since I encountered them at the seaside, eighth blackbird has made the second change in its membership since it was founded in 1916: Yvonne Lam has replaced Matt Albert on violin and viola.
Their Sydney program included two of the pieces I heard them play earlier and four which were new to me.

Swedish composer Fabian Svensson, who was born in 1980, wrote his Two Sides for piccolo, bass clarinet, vibraphone, piano, violin, cello in 2007 for the Italian ensemble Sentieri selvaggi. It was to be played at a concert with the theme “the right to dissent”. He says:

Deeming it impossible to write a piece about as abstract a concept as that of the right to something, I decided instead to portray the actual concept of dissent. This was done by dividing the ensemble into two halves, one playing only in the high register, and the other only in the low register. These two groups are pitted against each other in an antagonistic and confrontational manner.

As performed by eighth blackbird, this involved the two groups of players entering from opposite sides of the room and facing each other as they played. At the end the players left one by one as they finished their parts leaving only two for the final confrontation. This was a lively and enjoyable piece. An excerpt from it,played by Sentieri selvaggi, is available on the composer's website.

Next came Mayke Nas: DiGiT #2 (written in 2002 ) for piano four hands, or so the program said. Much of it was for four forearms with the addition of rhythmic clapping. You might describe it as the obverse of John Cage's 4' 33". The avant guard is still around.

Mayke Nas was born in the Netherlands in 1972. Her works include: I Delayed People's Flights By Walking Slowly In Narrow Hallways ( 2005 ) and Anyone can do it (2006) for six completely unprepaired players, not necessarily gifted with any musical talent". The avant guard is still around.

It's easy to be dismissive about self consciously modern performance works, and I won't miss not having a CD of DiGiT #2 ; but it was worth hearing and seeing it played with amazing musical and balletic skill by Lisa Kaplan and Matthew Duvall.

Dan Visconti, who was born in 1982, composed Fractured Jams (2006) for clarinet, violin, cello and piano.   The quartet is in four movements. Some parts of it are written to simulate a performance by players not necessarily gifted with any musical talent, though in this case talent is certainly required. At one point the pianist drinks from a pitcher and blows across its top to make sounds. Again, while fun to watch and hear, I think this kind of music is for the moment and not repeated listening.   The last movement is a burst of ragtime a sample of which can be heard here. This extract is not representative of the whole piece; it's quite traditionally musical when compared with some of the spare and aggressive sounds in the earlier movements.

Phillip Glass wrote In Similar Motion in 1969, and it's one of the pieces I heard eighth blackbird play in May.   Then I was impressed by the repetitions and other minimalist gestures in this music from the beginning of his career. This time I heard a lot more warmth and colour in the music. I wondered if the change in the venue was part of the reason. I think both the hall and the performance space were smaller in Sydney and there was a much larger audience in that space.

Timothy Andres, the youngest composer represented in the program, was born in 1985 in California.   We heard his Crashing Through Fences (2009) written for piccolo, glockenspiel and two kickdrums. (The kickdrums are attached to the piccolo and glockenspiel players.) The composer says:

I was interested in creating a contrast between these innately unfeasible timbres and a long melody, unspooling over a sweet harmonic sequence .It’s an almost uncomfortably intimate sort of piece—the two instruments interact hesitantly at first, then with increasing boldness. And at opportune moments, they savagely kick each other.

I'm not sure what he means by "innately unfeasible", as the two instruments make a unique and very beautiful sound. The explosive interruptions by the kickdrums are arresting, but the thought crossed my mind that it would have been nice to hear the piece without the savage kicks. Fortunately a recording of Crashing ( played by Ian Rosenbaum, glockenspiel & kickdrum; Mindy Heinsohn, piccolo & kickdrum ) can be heard on the composers website.

Stephen Hartke’s Meanwhile: incidental music to imaginary puppet plays, (2007) concluded the program. I was fascinated by this music when I first heard it at Bexhill in May and excited to be able to hear it again. As far as I know, it's not available on CD, though many of Stephen Hartke's music is, and I hope to explore it. I previously mentioned that the members of eighth blackbird play this piece from memory and that it has been choreographed, so that they move about the space and form groups temporary ensembles as they play. As with the piece by Philip Glass, the performance didn't match my recollection of the earlier one. Everything seemed closer together in The Studio; and the sound more cohesive. Or was it my memory?

eighth blackbird at The Studio Sydney Opera House 22 September 2011.

La finta giardiniera

2011-09-18T12:47:00.001+10:00

Con Opera at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music provides achance to hear some infrequently performed operas and some excellent singingfrom the students there. Last year I sawDie Lustigen Weiber von Windsor by Otto Nicolai, whose overture at least iswell known, and the Les malheurs d'Orphée of Darius Milhaud, an appealingwork in three very short acts, which is so obscure that the only recordings ofit are very difficult to obtain.

This year Con Opera is performing La Finta Giardiniera an early Mozart opera. It was written in 1774, when Mozart was 18years of age, for performance in Munich. Alfred Einstein wrote that it " was simply a local event in Munichwithout consequences ". But Mozart was anxious to write operas; and it is delightful to catch his enthusiasmin a letter written to his mother:

GOD be praised! My opera was given yesterday, the 13th, andproved so successful that I cannot possibly describe all the tumult. In thefirst place, the whole theatre was so crammed that many people were obliged togo away. After each aria there was invariably a tremendous uproar and clappingof hands, and cries of Viva Maestro! Her Serene Highness the Electress and theDowager (who were opposite me) also called out Bravo! When the opera was over,during the interval when all is usually quiet till the ballet begins, theapplause and shouts of Bravo! were renewed; sometimes there was a lull, butonly to recommence afresh ...

The plot is not very convincing. Most critics blame the lack of interest in,and performances of, the opera on the feeble libretto. It isalso lengthy: an unedited performance would take almost three and a halfhours. Professor Imre Palló, the Musical Director of this production hadprepared a performance version of the opera which takes about two hours. He says that he "particularly worked onthe recitatives, compressing them as much as possible without losing the storyline". I think he was right to dothis. While it would be interesting tohear all of Mozart's score, there isn't enough dramatic interest in thelibretto to sustain a long evening in the theatre. And Iimagine it would be difficult for the singers and musicians to prepare andperform the piece in full. In fact, weknow from Mozart's letters that the first performance was postponed twice toallow the singers time to learn their parts.

The music is well worth hearing for its own sake and for theuncanny pre echoes of Mozart's better known and more popular operas. Hedidn't conjure up Figaro and Don Giovanni from nothing - and while this mightmake them less super human achievements in themselves, it's no less incredible that some of theirmusical ideas were formed when Mozart was so young. The orchestration is wonderfully varied withsome arias including parts for individual woodwinds which weave in and out ofthe accompaniment in a most effective way. The members of the Conservatorium Chamber Orchestra played these withgreat effect. The small size andexcellent acoustics of the Music Workshop enhanced the clarity of theirplaying.

La Finta Giardiniera is described as an opera buffa, part ofan established comic tradition. However,it seemed to me on listening to some of the arias that they derived from themore formal tradition of the opera seria. (This impression was confirmed by an article on the Mozart Project website.) The varied styles of the music gave the performance a somewhat muddled and episodic feeing. Though I can't be certain, the cuts in the performing version we heardmay have contributed to this as originally one aria may not have led on to thenext so abruptly.

It's also a reminder that while Handel's operas have enjoyeda recent period of great popularity and operas by other eighteenth centurycomposers are regularly heard, there is a huge number of works leading up toMozart which are known only to musicologists. So La Finta Giardineira may give an idea of how the early opera buffasounded, and can be heard as a precursor to Mozart's mature Italian operas in more ways than one.

The jagged musical trajectory of this piece, jumping frombroad comedy to angst ridden monologues, must make it a nightmare for adirector. John Milson's production,using a single set, is fluent and gives ample scope to the singers. Con Opera performs the work with alternatecasts. The singers I heard on 17September were excellent.

Midsummer Night's Dream at ENO

2011-08-05T12:48:00.001+10:00

Pharaoh told them his dream; but there was none that could interpret them unto Pharaoh. Gen 41:7

The new production of Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by English National Opera was powerful and fascinating. The production was directed by Christopher Alden, three of whose productions I have seen in the last eighteen months. Opera Australia has presented his Tosca, originally for Opera North, and Partenope, originally for ENO. I thought Tosca was appalling and rantedabout it here. His Partenope, which was within a now established tradition of presenting Handel’s classical stories in a modern setting, was effective in the theatre and allowed full scope to the singers.

I would like to look at why I was moved by A Midsummer Night’s Dream, when Tosca made me angry and annoyed. Some critics were angry and annoyed with A Midsummer Night’s Dream and it is interesting to look at their reactions as well as the production itself.

Opera Australia has presented two versions of the work, the second of which directed by Baz Luhrmann was first seen in 1993. When I wrote about a revival of thatproduction, which is set in Imperial India, I was interested in the extent to which both discrepancies between the text and the production, and the need for the audience to unravel a puzzle were important. I want to look at how these questions affect the ENO production.

The ENO production is set in a school, probably in around 1960 when the opera was composed. The single set is an intimidating school building. It is an exact replica of an unidentified school appearing in a black and white photograph in the program.

There is some mimed action at the beginning. A tall man in a suit walks across the stage and sits against wall on the right near the front. He takes off his tie. A younger man in school uniform appears and sits beside him. In synchronised movement, they both put on school ties.

The first puzzle. Who is this man? Perhaps Britten himself? Perhaps Oberon? A supernumery or a character? And he looks strangely familiar.

I would have been saved some of the confusion if I had read the synopsis in the program:

On the eve of his wedding, a man returns to his old school. Long forgotten memories of his schooldays come back to him in the form of a dream …

The man is Theseus in the Dream, and, I had I paid attention, I would have noted that he was sung by Paul Whelan, who I have heard and admired before and must have half recognised.

Once the music began there was a little more confusion: on the first night, Iestyn Davies, who was to sing Oberon was ill, and acted the part which was sung from the side of the stage by William Towers. It took me a little time to work out where the disembodied voice belonged. When I saw the show a second time a couple of days later, Oberon had found his voice.

My beloved companion pointed out later that the synchronous tie tying showed that the younger man, who we find to be Puck, is the older man’s remembered self as a boy. Or probably: the older man is mostly a bemused watcher of his younger self, but he is directly attacked by school bullies at one point.

To complete the transformation: Oberon is a schoolmaster and Titania a music teacher, the fairies are school boys, the pairs of young lovers are older pupils and the mechanicals an assortment of school staff.

In the context, I did immediately wonder if the tall and silent figure crossing the stage was intended to represent Britten himself. Some critics so identified him:

He is, of course, Britten, later Theseus (Paul Whelan), and in a stroke of genius on Alden’s part the boy whose lost innocence he carries with him through life – his younger self - is none other than the much-abused and put-upon Puck (Jamie Manton), plaything and fag of the manipulative Oberon whose affections are now diverted to a still younger and fresher “changeling boy”. The Independent.

A man on the eve of his wedding and who bears more than a resemblance to the composer himself is seen visiting his old school and falling into a reverie – in the final act he is revealed to be Theseus, and what follows is a conflation of his half-submerged memories and fantasies, woven around his alma mater. Guardian

Others thought Britten appeared as Oberon:

The cruelty is in the identification between Oberon the stealthy paedophile and Britten the boy-lover. It’s done cleverly and tactfully, with no representation of physical abuse apart from a caning session: Puck’s trauma is that, having been picked out as Oberon’s favourite, he is then passed over.

And that, we know, is what happened with Britten and his boys. Telegraph

Since the revelations about Britten's serial infatuation with a succession of 13-year-old boys — each one groomed, adored like a young god, and then brutally discarded — some opera directors seem to have decided that all the composer's stage works must be treated as autobiographical testaments of shame. Alden characteristically carries this approach to a sordid extreme. The Times

Or a bit of both:

For this is not The Dream but A Midsummer's Nightmare, based on Britten's experiences at school and his lifelong attraction to young boys. Musical Criticism

( not all of the critics quoted were angry and annoyed)

As I don’t think any of this is correct, it’s not a worthwhile criticism of Christopher Alden or his production.

The Puck/Theseus figure is someone who is resentful and bitter about his school experiences. It is true that, quite apart from his befriending of boys, Britten had a peculiar obsession with his schooldays. For many years until his death in 1976 he used Letts Schoolboy Diaries; and I learn from recent unpublished research that as late as 1970 he was using blank pages in his old school exercise books for keeping notes. This suggests a wistful nostalgia rather than resentment. He was apparently successful at both schoolwork and games and was not, and did not see himself as a victim, though his recently published diaries show that he thought other boys in his study were “vulgar”. The thing that distinguished him as a schoolboy is that he wrote huge quantities of music.

Thanks to John Bridcut’s book Britten’s Children we now know more than we are entitled to know about Britten’s friendships with boys. The ENO program includes an essay by Mr. Bridcut containing a passage which is a summary of his book’s conclusions:

“Tongues wagged and whispered, yet all these boys looked back - often with amusement but -always with delight – at the memory of a unique and unsullied friendship.”

Although we can dispense with the idea that the production is intended as biography of the composer, it’s clear enough that it is inspired by his life and character. I don’t understand how this can be seen as offensive. After all, Britten wrote Peter Grimes, The Turn of the Screw and Death in Venice which are driven by Britten’s own need to explore and imagine the very themes which some now find it wrong to associate with him. Where is the error in finding these themes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as well?

I previously quoted W.H. Auden who said that Shakespeare…

"..mythalogically anthropomorphises nature, making nature like man.." so that "..mythological characters are used to describe certain universal experiences which we cannot control."

Oberon tells Titania:

Out of this wood do not desire to go:
Thou shalt remain here, whether thou wilt or no.

Just as people might be trapped in their own personality; or a schoolboy trapped in an institution which is full of emotional strings and contradictions which he doesn’t fully understand. So in this production schoolmaster Oberon writes Out of this wood do not desire to go on his blackboard, but also amo amas amat.

If we assume that Oberon anthropomorphises forces which are out of our control, what could be a better metaphor for this than the school in which we were trapped; and not permitted to even desire to escape.

You don’t have to look far for discrepancies between the text and the production, for example why a school mistress would favour a pupil because

His mother was a votaress of my order:
And, in the spiced Indian air, by night,
Full often hath she gossip'd by my side

is hard to imagine; but I have an answer: the Dream.

Dreams can be multi faceted and strange. Dreams can lie within dreams. Surrealism was based on dream. Why shouldn’t a dream drawing on school memories wooze in and out of a half remembered play, studied or acted in school. “I woke up and it was all a dream”, is an old and hackneyed storyline which is rarely acceptable. David Alden’s own staging of Tosca Act III as a hallucination is an example. However, Shakespeare’s play is about a dream:

If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber'd here
While these visions did appear.

with at least one dream, Bottom’s dream, within it.

The Times says:

Alden has no convincing way of accommodating the six Mechanicals in his concept.

I can see overly clever schoolboys studying or performing the play imagining their sportsmaster (slow of study) and the grounds staff as the mechanicals; or even a snide and knowing schoolmaster planting these ideas in their heads. Here the mechanicals and their play were presented as pretty broad farce, which I thought somewhat overdone. A good deal of the comedy in this part of the Dream comes from Britten’s witty pastiche of bel canto opera in drama of Piramus and Thisby and the subtlety of this was lost.

The lovers were depicted as older adolescents and this notion fitted very well with their characters and music. I enjoyed the singing of Kate Valentine (Helena) and Catherine Young (Hippolyta), Benedict Nelson (Demetrius) and Allan Clayton (Lysander).

The more I see Shakespeare’s plays performed the more fascinated I become with the protean quality of some of his writing and characterisation. Every new production can throw new light on text which I thought was familiar, or present a well-known character in an entirely new form. ( It’s hard to know where to draw the line between Shakespeare’s conscious intentions and the ingenuity of some interpretations of his plays.)

Even bearing this mind, the way in which Puck was portrayed here was quite amazing. The text was turned on its head and somehow emerged undamaged. Since this was Puck’s dream he was much more than the incidental character he usually seems to be. And the much of the force of the production turned on the way in which his words were delivered.

Pucks response to Oberon's command -

I'll put a girdle round about the earth
In forty minutes.

takes on a bitter irony when spoken by a sullen schoolboy sitting on the ground and plainly intending to go nowhere in forty minutes or ever.

Similarly Puck’s words which end the play, usually a bright and cheery good-bye:

If we shadows have offended…

are spoken by a confused and angry youth as if to say: “ As usual I have offended everyone - as if I care …” There was no actual discrepancy with the text, it was all in the manner of its delivery. It was a very clever idea which was carried into effect perfectly in Jamie Manton’s performance.

For me it was powerful and moving, but looking at some of the critical reaction, I wonder if a production which has too many puzzles and questions to be answered can sometimes defeat its own purpose: at least for those who get the wrong answers to the questions.

Two Boys

2011-06-27T02:22:00.001+10:00

I hadn’t heard of Nico Muhly until early last year when I read that he had been commissioned by the Met in New York to write an opera based on a bizarre attempted knife murder in England in 2003. I found a detailed account of the crime in a 2004 Vanity Fair article by Judy Bachrach . The weird scenario would make a fascinating contemporary opera. I was also glad of the introduction to the Nico Muhly’s music, which I began to explore.

The opera, Two Boys, with a libretto by Craig Lucas, has now been composed and performed at the English National Opera which has co- produced it with the Met. It opened at the London Coliseum on 24 June, in what might well be a trial run for performances in New York said to be scheduled for 2013. In any event, Peter Gelb the General Manager of the Met was there, seated one row behind the composer, literally breathing down his neck.

As I keep saying, it’s very hard to grasp new music at a first, and often only hearing. The effect is multiplied in the opera theatre where text, singing, movement, staging and so on, while essential to the experience, distract attention from the music itelf. This is certainly the case here as the production by Bartlett Sher is fast moving and visually stimulating. I have never seen such an inventive and proficient use of projections and the overall effect is breathtaking.

As related in Vanity Fair and elsewhere, the case on which the libretto is based was the first in which anybody in England had been charged with inciting his own murder. A teenage boy was almost fatally stabbed in a laneway by another boy. The victim had, by assuming various persona in internet chatrooms, convinced an older boy that his murder was required in the interests of national security. This narrative with all it’s bizarre details could be the apotheosis of the cliché truth is stranger than fiction; but it happened.

Opera is famous for incredible plots and amazing coincidences but Two Boys is anchored in fact. It is a work which might be the more easily dismissed as fanciful if it were not. As it seeks to bring the ability of opera to open up and explore experience to a contemporary theme, it should not be seen as a surreal fantasy.

The story is presented as it appears to Anne Strawson, a (fictional) detective sung by Susan Bickley, who investigates the stabbing. At first the crime is inexplicable; but as the investigation develops and she learns more of the ways of the internet and its chat, things become clearer until, as in the original, the common use of an eccentric spelling of the word “maybe” by various chat room inhabitants establishes that they were all invented by the victim as part of his scheme.

The opera follows the facts of the actual case fairly closely; in both the older boy, called Brian in the opera, and sung by tenor Nicky Spence, is 16. The victim, called Jake here, is, I think, younger than the actual victim. He appears first in one of his chat room identities sung by baritone Jonathan McGovern, but as the story develops in his younger and real state sung by treble Joseph Beesly.

The internet itself is a character, partly sung by the chorus murmuring and voicing, and partly in the orchestra with minimalist phrases which I thought were more reminiscent of John Adams than Philip Glass. Mr. Muhly is the first composer to capture the virtual cloud in the same way that Debussy and Britten have captured the sea. The internet will never be the same again. As I am writing, I can hear a ceaseless whir of activity somewhere beyond the modem.

Meanwhile, chatroom ID’s and text appear as projected images with all the speed and urgency of the net itself. Often fully sung words are represented in surtitles by chat language: asl, brb and cu and so, on which made me cringe and resolve, at the time anyway, never to type them again. There was never any meh.

The original events might be explained, at least partly, by the younger boy’s infatuation with the older. The original is followed closely here, down to the instruction given by the victim that his assailant was to say "I love you, bro," as he knifed him. Liebestod in a back alley.

Infatuations like this and the associated sexual games have been the stuff of memoirs and “coming of age” novels for a long time now, and I doubt if there is much new to be said about them. I suppose some relationships go completely off the rails and end violence but this is surely rare. What is peculiar here are the internet and the invention of chat room characters by the instigator/victim; not to speak of the credulity of the older boy.

While Two Boys follows the original story faithfully in these respects, it adds something which changes the story from a true crime story with music into a work with emotional force. I have mentioned that in his true person the victim is sung by an alto. The fictional victim,Jake, is a boy soprano in a church choir. We see him in this role in a scene set in a church in which Brian, the older boy, is a member of the congregation. Some Anglican liturgy is sung and Jake sings a solo piece, all the time staring at Brian. Brian sings “Why is he looking at me”. ( I have no text so quotes might not be right.) The music stands apart from what has been heard so far. It is, I think, the keystone of the work, in the same way the Sunday Morning scene in Peter Grimes, marks the point from which it is impossible to turn back the sky.

Later, the choirboy victim says how he wanted to be remembered after his murder– for beautiful singing. The music in the church scene is not unique, Nico Muhly has written a lot of church and other choral music. And, he was himself an accomplished soloist in an Anglican church choir. At some point, I realised that it wasn’t true crime with ingenious internet music but a moving personal statement.

The high point of my career as a boy soprano was singing Christopher Robin songs to a Methodist Church social evening; quite a different level of achievement from that of a chorister who learns to read music, takes part in innumerable performances of great music and, if a soloist, performs at a level he will never reach again, even if he continues to sing as an adult. There is a combination of childhood innocence with a very high level of accomplishment. Then his voice breaks and it is finished.

I don’t think Two Boys is saying that, in any literal sense, discarded altos are at risk of ingenious suicide plots, but this thread gives the piece an emotional appeal which would be absent if only the detective story were told. It can even be seen as a more general allegory of lost innocence. Apart from the fascinating internet music, it seems to me to be the basis of the musical and emotional structure of the work. And as I said, I haven’t properly heard all the music yet. I know for one thing that there are gongs somewhere which are a tribute to Britten and his use of them in Death in Venice. I missed them completely.

Back to the Coliseum on Wednesday to hear the gongs !

eighth blackbird

2011-05-15T18:00:00.001+10:00

I had heard of eighth blackbird without knowing much about them, and when I saw they were performing at the Barbican in London, I thought it would be an opportunity to catch them. As well as performing a lot of Steve Reich they had a more varied program which included something by Missy Mazzoli whom, and whose music I happened upon in New York last month; but this program was shown as sold out. Then I saw they were repeating the program at the De La Warre Pavillion in Bexhill-on Sea, and in a spirit of adventure I set out to find them there. It proved to be an excellent adventure: I heard an exciting concert, experienced the decayed surroundings of Bexhill-on-Sea, saw an interesting building, and learned something of the ninth Earl De La Warr, who was a prominent politician in his day but whose chief memorial is the Pavillion.

A tourist website describes Bexhill-on-Sea as “frozen in time”; but if it were frozen it would be better preserved. I stayed at the Cooden Beach Hotel a couple of miles from the Pavilion. It was pleasant and well run. I could have chosen a bed and breakfast where “guests are given their own key”, or a larger hotel half of whose population is “resident guests”. I may have seen some of the residents, as while walking around I was met with the special accusatory stare that inmates of old peoples’ homes give to strangers on their territory.

The colonnade built to celebrate the coronation of King George V was being renovated but Union Jacks still flew proudly above it. Further along the seafront the Royal Air Forces Association’s Albatross Club was open, but the café next door was no longer operational. A business called AMUSEMENTS was closed and boarded up. It had offered ALL WINS PAID IN CASH, but how this happened when following advice of Sussex Police NO CASH KEPT ON PREMISES, I cannot say.

The De La Warr Pavillion which stands near the sea immediately behind the Colonnade, was opened in 1935. It was the first public building the in the UK built in the modernist style. Its architects, Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff won a competition for the design of a building that would be “simple, light in appearance and attractive, suitable for a holiday resort”. It was damaged by bombs in the Second World War and then fell into disrepair. A refurbishment commenced in 2003 and it re-opened to the public in 2005.

It is still the most modern building in sight, everything around looks Edwardian at the latest so it must now be much the same part of the landscape as it was when first opened. It has exhibition halls, balconys overlooking the sea and a restaurant as well as a concert hall. The concert hall interior had some contemporary features and might have been altered in the refurbishment.

The Pavilion was built at the instigation of Herbrand Edward Dundonald Brassey Sackville, 9th Earl De La Warr, who was Mayor of Bexhill, among other duties, in the nineteen thirties. According to the wiki he was the first hereditary peer to join the Labour Party and held a number of ministerial positions between 1923 and 1955.

It will delight genealogists to learn that a De La Warr, known as Lord Delaware at the time, was governor of the Jamestown Colony, and the Delaware Bay in the seventeenth century and is thus the source of the name of the bay, the state of Delaware and other places in the United States. So what better place to hear eighth blackbird flown in from Chicago.

The name eighth blackbird comes from the Wallace Stevens’ poem Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird :

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

Leaving aside the gnomic conclusion, it’s a very suitable verse for this group. As I was listening, I realised that a feature of all the music they played that night was texture and rhythm. You can hear these in almost any music you listen to, but a lot of modern music seems pared down to texture and rhythm alone. I am increasingly drawn to these aspects of music and particularly in performances where I am close to the players and can hear sounds that get lost in a large auditorium or on record.

It was lucky then, from my perspective that only about 40 people came along to hear eighth blackbird in a hall that would have held many more. I know this is exceedingly selfish but I hate crowds and will most likely never again hear eighth blackbird in such a personal way.

The group was formed in 1996. It’s present members are:

Tim Munro, flutes

Michael J. Maccaferri, clarinets

Matt Albert, violin & viola

Nicholas Photinos, cello

Matthew Duvall, percussion and,

Lisa Kaplan, piano

Their nominated instruments don’t do full justice to their skills. I think all of them played percussion at some stage, and at at least three played harmonicas of various shapes and sizes.

The program was:

Missy Mazzoli: Still Life with Avalanche (2008)
John Cage: Aria (1958)
David Lang: these broken wings (2007)
Philip Glass: Music in Similar Motion (1969)
Thomas Adès : Catch (1991)
Stephen Hartke: Meanwhile (2007)

It was a journey from self-conscious modernism to the less anxious music of the present time.

My introduction to Missy Mazzoli’s music was her Death Valley Junction played by the JACK quartet in New York last month. Still Life with Avalanche, was similarly approachable and lyrical, with the exception of the avalanche: the piece represents the composers response to a rural landscape in New Hampshire punctured by news of a relative’s death. As a listener, I don’t usually find such programs helpful; there is no way the music itself can convey the details. As there was no printed program, I didn’t know details of the composers inspiration until it was explained after the piece was played.

The explanation was given by Lisa Kaplan, who was interrupted mid sentence by weird vocalising from Tim Munro. He sang the voice part in Aria by John Cage. This is a very strange work and I have since discovered some details of it here. I didn’t have any of these details at the concert, but the notes explain that while it was written for Cathy Barbarian, who was a suburb interpreter of contemporary music - but quite dissimilar in voice and appearance from Mr. Munro - it can be performed in all kinds of ways by all kinds of people.

I was also unaware at the time that Tim Munro is the only member of eighth blackbird who has joined since its inception, or that he is Australian. Had I known, I could have shouted the occasional Cooee as he walked through the hall singing and vocalising in many tongues. No one would have noticed.

The accompaniment included something that looked and sounded like a conch shell and ended with a music box playing There’s no place like home.

It was fun to hear this work, but it is, I think, an example of how strained musical ideas became under modernist influences which have thankfully now retreated.

Next came David Lang’s these broken wings, a 16 minute work in three movements. This was my introduction to the music of David Lang. He is a member of Bang on a Can, a collective which promotes new music. (In 1992, they brought the Bang on a Can All - Stars into being.)

these broken wings was commissioned by eighth blackbird and first performed in 2008. Its title suggests some whimsical association with birds if not blackbirds but nothing was said about this and the music gave no clue.

Music in Similar Motion written in 1969, must have come soon after Philip Glass established his familiar minimalist compositional style. The repetitions and layers of sound reminded me of how exciting and different his music sounded when I first heard it, and how soon I tired of the novelty. It was my mistake to be so easily turned away. His music has changed and developed with time, and I enjoyed the concert he gave in Sydney earlier this year and am still playing the records I bought after hearing him.

Speaking after the piece was played Lisa Kaplan mentioned a notice posted outside the hall …

and wondered if the prohibition was somehow connected with her music blowing onto the floor. The performance was not affected; I think it was a copy of the full score she had on the piano and played from without missing a note.

I first heard Thomas Adès Catch played by the Australia Ensemble in 2008. It was the first of his music I had heard. Although I have heard more since, including during his appearances as conductor and pianist in Sydney last year, I have a way to go before I hear as much in Adès as I could. So I was pleased that I heard a lot more in Catch than I did the first time. The clarinettist is required to move around and play on the move, which Catherine McCorkill did at the Australia Ensemble concert; but I don’t think I saw her play while running really fast across the stage as Michael J. Maccaferri did this time.

Stephen Hartke’s Meanwhile: incidental music to imaginary puppet plays, the last work on the program, was also commissioned for eighth blackbird. The composer was inspired by Asian puppet theatre, and the piece is an amalgam of impressions from Japanese Bunraku, to puppets in Vietnam, Indonesia and Turkey. It is in six short movements played without a break. It is presented in a staging in which the instrumentalists move around to form different groups and configurations. This emphasised their amazing skills, doubling of instruments was involved, and everyone played from memory. The music was rhythmically complex, as was much of the other music played, and it was perfectly realised without a conductor in sight. It was a fascinating piece and a perfect ending to a great concert.

eighth blackbird at De La Warr Pavillion Bexhill-on-Sea 12 May 2011

2011-05-08T19:13:00.000+10:00

The Met’s 2007 production of Orfeo ed Euridice has been revived this year, with Antony Walker conducting; and I saw its opening night.

I had heard this production via the Met’s radio broadcast in 2007 and remember it as probably the most thrilling opera broadcast I have ever heard. The countertenor David Daniels sang Orfeo in a way which gave the familiar music a different and vital sound. I imagine that, like me, many people were introduced to Gluck’s Orfeo by recordings of Kathleen Ferrier singing I have lost my Euridice, in her rich and distinctive voice. Opera Australia’s production gave the role to a tenor with good effect. However, I felt that David Daniels performance was not only beautifully sung, but also added a completely unexpected emotional edge.

Later the same year, I heard David Daniels in the theatre for the first time in Handel’s Julius Caesar in Chicago and was disappointed that his voice seemed to be swallowed up by the huge space of the Lyric.

The Met is a big theatre too, and I wondered if this production is the largest Orpheus and Euridice ever mounted. There is a chorus of about 75 members and 22 dancers. The set is made of large mobile structures that move and reconfigure from time to time. At one point, Orpheus is seen on a large metal fire excape which descends from above and partly disappears into the floor of the stage. This is not, as I wrongly guessed, the stairway for the ascent from the underworld: there is a different more stygian configuration of the set for that.

The chorus is located on three levels of the inside of a cylindrical structure which forms one element of the set. Each member of the chorus is dressed as an historical figure: Henry VII, Abraham Lincoln, Ghandi etc. The idea is that the performance of the ancient myth is being observed by figures from history. Their vantage point could be three of the circles of hell, but I’m not sure if we are being asked to identify which three; the identification of the figures is a little distracting, but for me the performance was too engrossing to be troubled by a game of Trivial Pursuit.

The use of dance in this production is a real stroke of genius. There are, as mentioned, 22 dancers and their style is completely modern. They dance during the choruses as well some of the more specific dance music. A program note explains:

“ For the Met’s production of Oprheo ed Euridice, director and choreographer Mark Morris and Music Director James Levine (who conducted this staging when it was new, in 2007) returned to Gluck’s 1762 version from Vienna, written in Italian for an alto castrato and later revised for Paris productions. Their intent was to stay true to the composer and Librettist’s original ideas by stripping away additions from late revisions, including the Dance of the Furies, which Morris feels breaks the flow of the opera. The Dance of the Blessed Spirits, which was part of the original 1762 version, will be heard but without accompanying choreography.”

The use of dance gave a sense of vigour and excitement to the whole show. It helped solve what I believe to be a problem in staging more intimate works, including Mozart, on the Met’s huge stage. For example, in 2006 I saw the Met’s Idomeneo, (which available on a video in a Luciano Pavarotti performancedating from the early nineteen eighties). The stage action, and emotional force of the opera, seemed to get lost among the huge pillars and monumental staircases of the set. Here, however, the staging adds what is needed to make a work of this kind viable in the large space.

David Daniels' performance as Orfeo met the expectations aroused by the 2006 broadcast. His voice was not lost in the space and he was able to add an elusive quality which I have not otherwise heard in a countertenor which gave the role the emotional edge I heard in the radio broadcast. He was well supported by English soprano Kate Royal as Euridice and Lisette Oropesa, who first appears on a swing from above, as Amor.

Antony Walker, as musical director of Pinchgut Opera in Sydney has given us so much musical pleasure over the last ten years; so it was very exciting to chance upon his debut at the Met. Although the more appropriate size of the production had something to do with it as well, his performances of Idomeneo in the City Recital Hall Angel place in 2006 following close on my hearing the Met production I have mentioned seemed to me at the time to have everything which the New York production lacked.

Now the situation was reversed. A small space was replaced with nearly 4000 seat Met auditorium and the familiar forces of the Orchestra of the Antipodes and Cantillation with the Met Orchestra and a chorus of 75. The Met orchestra was quite a small ensemble for Orfeo, but I didn’t count the players.

My long term planning was effective, and I had an excellent view of the conductor’s podium from our seats in row B of the Orchestra. The conductor’s podium at the Met is raised so that the Maestro can always be seen. The two seats directly behind him are sold at a discount to compensate for the obscured view. I heard a story this year of how this came about – at first the podium was lower and the conductor didn’t obscure anything. Then Herbert von Karajan came to the Met and required to be elevated into public view. After that, no conductor was prepared to work in the old, less conspicuous position.

In any event I had an excellent view of Mr. Walker at the podium; his face illuminated by the lights from the music stand. On his arrival, there was a pause, some eye contact with the musicians and we were away with a lively account of the overture. With 75 historical figures to indentify and some outstanding singing, I didn’t spend much time conductor watching and can only say that the overall performance was completely satisfying. At the conclusion, it was nice to see the dancers’ applause when Mr. Walker appeared. They played an important part in the success of the performance and obviously appreciated the support from below.

Orfeo ed Euridice, Metropolitan Opera New York, 29 April 2011

Capriccio

2011-04-24T05:50:00.000+10:00

The Met has revived for the first time the John Cox production of Richard Strauss’ Capriccio first seen in 1998 with Kiri Te Kanawa as the Countess. The production brings the period forward from the eighteenth century to the 1920’s. There is a sumptuous and elegant set designed by Mauro Pagono with costumes and interior design by Robert Perdiziola. I think Capriccio is an opera which actually benefits from being performed in a 20^th century setting rather than the original one, as, apart from some period pastiche for dancers and singers who perform during the action, the music belongs, with Strauss, in the 20^th century and it fits the production so well that occasional period references in the libretto can easily be ignored.

Capriccio can be looked at in two ways: as a comedy of manners which requires attention be given to the text and as musical theatre which creates a unique situation or mood as only opera can. In this case a mood coloured by Strauss’ distinctive musical voice.

The Met does not use surtitles. Instead there is a small screen on the back of each seat which displays the words and translations. I discovered this year, that in some seats, I can no longer read the screens, although sometimes the screen a row in front is readable. I doubt if a special pair of bifocal glasses for the Met would be justified. These screens are multilingual and the person in front of me, whose screen was legible to me, chose to read the German version. I couldn’t follow the text but was very happy to hear the music and enjoy the general atmosphere, in the same way I experienced opera before surtitles.

My beloved companion had a different problem, the woman in front of her allowed her hair to fall down over the back of her seat obscuring the screen. What is the correct etiquette here? Is one permitted to throw the hair back over the seat or re-arrange its fall? Remember that a whispered request would create a small disturbance for others; and might well lead to a regrettable altercation.

Renee Fleming sings the Countess in this production. I have now heard her in La traviata, Thaïs, and Rosenkavalier; and feel that her voice is best heard in Strauss. “Creamy” is a bit of a cliché but is the best description I can come up with for her lower register. I doubt if I will ever hear the Strauss soprano roles better sung.

La Roche, a theatre director, was the English bass Peter Rose who we have heard with Opera Australia as Baron Ochs and Osmin. It was a pleasure to hear him in a role which seemed to suit him so well; and which contains extended passages, including La Roche’s famous defence of the theatre, which he enhanced with beautiful singing.

Flamand was Joseph Kiaser,who I have heard as Tamino at the Met and who is clearly developing a great international career. Olivier was sung by Russell Braun, who I failed to identify until reminded by a program note that he was Chou En-lai in Nixon in China which I saw in the HD transmission.

Although all the singing was close to perfect, I was impressed with English mezzo Sarah Connolly as Clarion. At times she seemed to outsing Ms. Fleming a little; and it maybe that Ms. Fleming needed to preserve her voice for the great final scene which she sang so brilliantly. It may be poor memory on my part, but I had the impression that the final monolog in which the Countess is faced with a decision between poet and composer – words and music – was somewhat detached and ironic; but Ms. Fleming brought an emotional intensity to it which was quite thrilling.

Capriccio by Richard Strauss, Metropolitan Opera New York, April 19, 2011

Taka Kigawa at Le Poisson Rouge

2011-04-22T07:51:00.000+10:00

I had read some reviews of concerts at Le Poisson Rouge, a new venue, founded by musicians, in Bleeker Street, New York. It is “dedicated to the fusion of popular and art cultures in music, film, theater, dance, and fine art, the venue's mission is to revive the symbiotic relationship between art and revelry; to establish a creative asylum for both artists and audiences.” Its programming is varied but includes classical and contemporary music performed by established artists.

I was eager to find out how music worked in an alternative venue, obviously at some distance from the formality of a concert hall. As it happened, the first opportunity for me to experience the venue was the result of terrible events, a concert given to benefit the victims of the earthquake and Tsunami that occurred on March 11th in Japan, by pianist Taka Kigawa. The concert also introduced me to the music of a number of contemporary Japanese composers.

I don’t know much about night clubs or cabarets but Le Poisson Rouge is definitely some such place: there are no tickets to be collected, people wait in line to be identified and marked by a rubber stamp on the hand and to be fitted with a robust paper bracelet before admission is granted. After this processing, I passed down steps, worn hollow in the centre by the ceaseless tread of drunken feet; and by the light of a flickering lamp above the door I made my way into a large very dark room with a small stage in one corner and a bar along the far wall.

Through the gloom one could dimly catch a glimpse of bodies seated in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back, and chins pointing upward, with here and there a dark, lack-lustre eye turned upon the newcomer. Most sat at long tables in front of the stage, behind which were tall tables surrounded by bar stools, yet to be occupied. I found a seat with a good view of the stage and the piano in a raised area furnished with settees and coffee tables. Soon all the seats were occupied and latecomers had to stand - this was a first-come, first-served partially seated event.

Mr. Kigawa grew up in Nagano currently lives in New York. He studied at Shinsyu University, Tokyo Gakugei University and The Juilliard School in New York.

The venue works very well for music. Although drinks and food are served during the performance I was only aware of this activity when consciously paying attention to it. The audience is as quiet as you would wish. And the atmosphere of the place adds an exciting new element to a recital.

There is a small stage and the Yamaha piano, while perfectly adequate, is not a concert grand. I enjoyed Mr. Kigawa’s playing and would like to have the opportunity to hear him play in a more formal setting on a larger piano.

The program included Joule by Dai Fujikura (b.1977) a student of Pierre Boulez. Haiku for Pierre Boulez by Toshio Hosokawa (b.1955), atardecer/a…retraced by Hiroya Miura (b.1975) and Crystalline by Karen Tanaka (b.1961 ). The pieces were short and overall characterised by the spare piano sounds which I associate with serial music; but, unexpectedly, Haiku for Pierre Boulez which included some striking lyrical passages, was the least Boulezian of the group. For me, it was an brief introduction to some composers I didn’t know, and it wouldn’t be reasonable to complain I didn’t hear any individual voice.

We also heard from a more familiar Japanese name, Toru Takemitsu, Rain Tree Sketch II (In memorium of Olivier Messiaen).

The generous program also included more familiar works from Mr. Kigawa’s repertoire:

Chopin’s Ballade in F minor Op. 52 and Prelude in C-sharp minor Op. 45

Debussy’s Images, Book I

Ravel’s Pavane pour une Infante defunte

Stravinsky’s: Trois Mouvements de Petrouchka.

Altogether, Mr.Kigawa played for over two hours without a break; and even added some encores, ending with a peaceful rendition of Bach’s C major prelude which somehow reflected the sad events which led to the concert being given.

A Benefit Concert for Japan at Le Poisson Rouge, 2 April 2011

Making Music: Christopher Rouse

2011-04-20T01:05:00.001+10:00

Making Music: Christopher Rouse, a concert in Zankel Hall gave me the opportunity to learn something of a major American composer and his work. Christopher Rouse ( b. 1949 ) is best known for his orchestral works, which I have not heard. I began with the four chamber works on this program which included a commentary by the composer taking the form of interviews with Jeremy Geffen, director of artistic planning at Carnegie Hall. Many of his orchestral works are on CD, including some recordings by Alan Gilbert and Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra

First was a short work for percussion, Ku-Ka-Ilimoku (1978 ) “scored for four percussionists on a vast array of instruments”. It is inspired by Hawaiian music and legend: Ku is a Hawaiian god. Mr. Rouse said it was a reaction to the “swish – ping” school of percussion writing which prevailed at the time its writing. He said that, for him, the whole purpose of percussion was to beat the heck out of it; and this he proceeded to do. I know little of percussion music of either school, but I can say that this piece had a great deal of rhythmic drive and that it was very loud.

The next piece was more complex but also contained a good deal of loud percussion. Rotae Passionis (1982). It is intented to present a view of the crucifixion in harmony that of with Northern Renaissance painters like Hieronymus Bosch. Its music is also in the German tradition, as it was written as a tribute to Carl Orff, who died during its compostion. Mr. Rouse admires Orff’s music and based this piece upon the “Wheel of Fate” from Carmina Burana. It begins with a motive quoted from Orff.

It is scored for Flute, Clarinet, Violin, Viola, Cello, Percussion (2) and Piano; though this doesn’t give an accurate idea of the sound as the instruments often play alone and the piano is introduced late. The first passage, Circular Lament – The Agony in the Garden, is followed by representations of the 14 Stations of the Cross. The players are directed that each of these 14 sections have a duration of precisely 20 seconds. Each section is separated from the next by a mighty blow from a Mahler hammer. The final section Parallel Wheel –Christ Asleep had a more lyrical tone. I am unfamiliar with the religious and musical traditions which inform this piece, and I found it abrasive and, again, very loud in parts. I hoped that the passages for string trio towards the end of the piece were an indication of what was to come in the second half, and it proved to be so.

Not all of it was loud however and softer passages were disturbed by the by the subway noise which is an unfortuanate feature of Zankel Hall. The Hall opened in 2003. It is a very attractive modern Hall which lies beneath Carnegie Hall itself and virtually in the subway. The noise is not trivial, I rate it at plus 10 on the Verbruggen scale of concert hall railway intrusion. It is remarkable that the Hall came to be built in this location without adequate insulation.

After the intermission, the Calder String Quartet played Mr. Rouse’s String Quartet No. 3 (2009). This was his first chamber work since Compline, the work following on this program, and only the second since his second string quartet composed in 1988. It was first performed in New Haven last June by the Calder Quartet.

The quartet was intended to be difficult to play. It the parts are written in rhythmic but not melodic unison. I imagine that, as a listener, I would hear rhythmic unison in percussive instruments, but here, even with the knowledge that the quartet was playing in unison, I didn’t hear the music as such.

In his discussion of this piece, Mr. Rouse mentioned an aspect of composition that had never occurred to me. The complexity of this quartet required the Calder Quartet, which was familiar with his music, having played his first and second quartets, to work for about 200 hours to learn it. Orchestras do not have 200 hours or anything like it in which to rehearse new music so, if a composer wants his music played at all by an orchestra, it has to be written so that an orchestra can play it after two or three rehearsals. (This does not mean that the music must be easy). I guess this must be correct; and it might be worth investigating whether say, Beethoven’s quartets are more difficult in this sense than his symphonies.

The quartet itself presented the usual problems of trying to get some understanding of music on a first hearing. Although I didn’t hear it as rhythmic unison, my overall impression was of a work of great tension and intensity. There is a lot of sliding about with glissandi adding to the prevailing air of anxiety.

The final work in the program was Compline (1996), which was commissioned to be played with and by the same ensemble as Ravel’s Introduction and allegro for flute, clarinet, harp and string quartet.

Compline has a kind of program: Mr. Rouse explained that it relates to a trip he made to Rome, in which the busy activity of sightseeing was replaced by the spiritual atmosphere invoked by visits to the various Roman churches. I found it to be the most accessable work on the program and will seek it out again. There is a recording of it which also includes the first and second string quartets.

Making Music: Christopher Rouse; Zankel Hall 15 April 2011.

More from Russia: The St. Petersburg Philharmonic

2011-04-16T01:43:00.001+10:00

The St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, which is on a 35 day tour of the United States arrived at Carnegie Hall on April 14.

The program describes it as Russia’s oldest symphonic ensemble, founded in 1882, although it suffered some name changes in Soviet times. The conductor was Yuri Temikanov, who has been the orchestra’s artistic director and principal conductor since 1988. He conducted with broad sweeping movements of his arms, rather like the traffic cop I had watched at intersection on Sixth Avenue earlier in the day. After the intermission he arrived on the podium and commenced while much of the audience was still finding its seats: tardiness must not be acceptable in St. Petersburg.

The first piece on the program was Rimsky-Korsakov's Prelude to Legend of the invisible City of Kitezh, which is very short – about 5 minutes. I don’t think I had ever heard it. It begins as a Russian forest murmurs developing into a robust folk melody. It was a pity it was so short; Rimsky-Korsakov had a distinctive musical voice and it would be nice if we heard more of it than frequent iterations of Sheherazade.

Next was the Cello Concerto No.1 of Shostakovich, in which the soloist was American cellist Alisa Weilerstein. There are two types of cellist in my opinion: attack cellists and sweet and beautiful tone cellists. Ms. Weilerstein is definitely an attack cellist, who played with great energy and vigour. She was matched at times by the orchestra, which played some passages louder than I think I had ever heard in accompaniment of a soloist. My categorisation of cellists is not an adverse judgment of either genus and in this performance there was some beautiful lyrical playing in the second movement leading into more attack work in the cadenza.

After the intermission, the orchestra played Brahms symphony No.4. During the break, I was able to walk past the stage and look at the music stands. The orchestra played from scores which might have been published before the communist revolution. The paper was yellow, and many of the parts had been ripped and repaired with sticky tape, itself warped with age. In some cases, the paper had completely disintegrated and pages were replaced with photocopies.

The performance was absorbing, although some passages particularly in the brass and timpani were very loud. I think this was intended, although perhaps not to the extent I heard, which may have resulted from the fact that an orchestra playing in Carnegie Hall is in a sound shell behind a proscenium which gives an excellent acoustic but which may play tricks with orchestras which are not familiar with it.

For an encore, the orchestra played one of Elgar’s Enigma Variations; not very Russian, but the string playing was so good that I wished they could have played the whole piece.

Complaint about audience behaviour #2: when I was in kindergarten circa 1951, our teacher Miss Lydon taught us many things about good manners, one of which was that you must not turn the pages of the program at a concert as this makes a noise, which will annoy other people. The woman seated on my right had never heard of this rule. During the Brahms and Elgar she was engaged in speed-reading the mass-market paperback edition of Emperor Norton's Ghost (a Fremont Jones Mystery) by Dianne Day. This involved much rustling from page turning and adjusting. A person who preferred to hear Brahms through the swish and crackle of a vinyl record might have enjoyed it.

St. Petersburg Philharmonic, Carnegie Hall, 15 April 2011

RUSSIAN VOICES

2011-04-14T00:54:00.000+10:00

I decided to go to the concert given by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall on April 12 because they had included the Shostakovich Piano Quintet in the program. This work has been a favourite of mine since I first heard it on my first visit the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville. Hearing it was an important part of the experience which made me pay a lot more attention to chamber music than I had previously. I vividly recall Michael Kieran Harvey who played the piano part with a manic enthusiasm staring fixedly at the string players urging them on to greater heights.

Andre-Michel Schub, the pianist at the Alice Tully Hall has a completely different style. Much of the time his playing was cool and precise as if he were playing a Bach transcription, or a Shostakovich prelude for that matter. He and the string players were appropriately vigorous in the Scherzo, but overall the performance lacked the excitement I sought. However, there was much interest in looking at the quintet in a different light. I particularly enjoyed some exquisitely delicate string playing in the second movement.

A new string sextet Seraphim Canticles by Russian born composer Lera Auerbach (b. 1973) followed the quintet. Lera Auerbach is a person of remarkable accomplishment.

According to the concert program, she has composed nearly a hundred works including chamber music, concertos, symphonies and opera and ballet. She is also an accomplished pianist. And she is a writer and poet having published two novels and five books of poetry and prose. She has the unusual distinction of being one of the last of many artists to defect from the former Soviet Union, which she did in 1991 (the year of its dissolution) while on a concert tour of the United States.

Seraphim Canticles is a fascinating work in which, except for a short period towards the end when the strings come together, each instrument follows a separate path. The paths are somehow integrated into an overall sound which varies from a great intensity to almost inaudible quiet.

Some of the quiet passages were accompanied by some very loud coughing from more than one member of the audience. I usually ignore these manifestations of disease by people who should have remained home in bed and concentrate on the music; but this time the interruption to serenely quiet passages in the music was so crass and insensitive that I thought Ms. Auerbach could be the victim of sabotage by former agents of the KGB.

After the intermission a differently constituted sextet played Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence. It was a most enjoyable performance of this well known work. I have noted the players below. The only one of them I knew of was the great violist Paul Neubauer who has visited the Townsville festival more than once. I have a fond memory of hearing him play Joan Tower’s piece for solo viola Wild Purple one morning to a tiny audience in the Sacred Heart Cathedral. He has recorded this work for Naxos.

It was a great pleasure to hear him in a number of prominent passages for viola in Souvenir de Florence. The stage of the Alice Tully Hall looks too large for the small number of musicians gathered in the centre, but the acoustic is very clear and the voices of the individual instruments are clearly audible.

Shostakovich: Andre-Michael Schub piano; Erin Keefe and Shmuel Ashkenasi violins Yura Li viola Nicolas Altstaedt cello;

Auerbach: Yura Lee and Erin Keefe violins, Paul Neubauer and Yura Li violas, Fred Sherry and Nicolas Altstaedt cello;

Tchaikovsky: Shmuel Ashkenasi and Yura Lee violins, Paul Neubauer and Yura Li violas, Nicolas Altstaedt and Fred Sherry cello.

Russian Voices; CMS at Alice Tully Hall, 12 April 2011

Monodramas

2011-04-13T06:18:00.000+10:00

To the New York City opera for Monodramas, which is a performance of three otherwise unrelated works for soprano and orchestra:

La Machine de l’Être by contemporary New York composer John Zorn;

Arnold Schoenberg’s Erwartung; and

Neither, a setting of a Samuel Beckett text by Morton Feldman.

The show was directed and designed by Michael Counts, who works on “large-scale immersive installations and theatrical productions, often in unconventional spaces”.

The performance began about a quarter of an hour before the advertised starting time with the appearance of a man and a woman, both formally dressed, who stood in front of the curtain surveying the audience. They didn’t interact with one another: distancing themselves from experiencing a crystallized totality both in the social world and in the self. I’m not quite sure, but the man might have been doing the party trick of rolling back his eyes in a scary way so only the whites were visible. They were there until about twenty minutes after the advertised starting time as “patrons were being seated”; or so it was said. I suspect the audience was in fact experiencing an immersion in Erwartung by design.

John Zorn’s description of La Machine de l’Être is – “ there is no text, no plot, and no stage directions whatsoever”. The title is taken from the name a drawing by Antonin Artaud and Mr. Zorn hopes it’s stage presentation will be inspired by his works, which this one was.

As the work is only ten minutes long and as the production provided much distraction, I couldn’t form any opinion about Mr. Zorn’s music. The soprano part, as the description suggests, is wordless vocalising, and was sung by Anu Komosi from Finland. The singing was a highlight of all three performances. I imagine that each part, in it’s own way, involved some extraordinary feats of technique and memory and each of the singers was amazingly good.

When the curtain eventually rose for the first piece, the alienated couple entered the stage to find a crowd of people dressed in burkhas or the like. The couple disrobed one, to reveal Anu Komosi, and another to reveal a man in bright red suit with wires attached. Surely it would not be too long before this man was lifted into the air: and so he was.

It is a known fact that people who levitate do not have wires attached. Magritte knew this and never drew in the wires. My complaint is that stage magic is not magic if you can see the working parts. I also have a problem with the distraction caused by actors and dancers holding poses for lengthy periods of time. I can’t help wondering if the pose is painful to hold, and the diversion was compounded during Neither when the same man in a another suit was left, hanging in mid air, in a stylised pose, for what seemed like about half an hour.

The composer’s request for reference to the work of Antonin Artaud was honoured. Cut out speech bubbles appeared from the floor and as they hovered over the performers Artaud’s images were projected onto them.

Next was an Entr’acte in which to the sound of amplified forest murmurs, mainly crickets chirping, some ninja or buraku puppeteers joined the hooded ones, one of whom was disrobed to reveal Kara Shay Thomson the protagonist of Erwartung. There was a speech bubble over her head and some very attractive images of trees and leaves by video artist Jennifer Steinkamp were projected.

Erwartung was the best known work on the program, but I don’t recall having heard it before. The score is rich and interesting and the mood similar to that of Verklärte Nacht. It concerns the varying emotions of a woman who searches for her lover and then stumbles across his dead body. It may be carping to say that it is now over 100 years old. It draws on Freud’s outmoded emotional world of hysteria and alienation, which led to a dead end. The less sophisticated passions of nineteenth century opera have survived better. Since I would have preferred to hear and concentrate on the music, I may not be the best judge of the production, which was a distraction to me. It was only partly descriptive. Some symbolism, which I did not unravel, may have been involved. For example, the lover, alive and dead was duplicated. One lover must have been a contortionist from the remarkable way in which he rose from the dead.

For me the highlight of the night was the final piece on the program Morton Feldman’s Neither. I only discovered Morton Feldman’s work a couple of years ago when I heard a performance of his Rothko Chapel in Melbourne. That is a remarkable piece but Neither even more so, if only because it is longer. The music is very difficult to describe; if I said it was translucent it would convey very little, but it the best word that comes to mind. In harmony with the text by Samuel Beckett, it seems to be going nowhere, hovering somewhere in space, until close to the end when it develops a sense of menace leading to the final words “unspeakable home”.

The collaboration between Feldman and Beckett must be the most unusual in opera: assuming Neither is, in fact, an opera. Beckett simply supplied the text. At the time he wrote it, it is said that he had heard none of Feldman’s music. Although Feldman began composing before he had received the text, the work is accordingly more like the setting of a poem than a collaboration between composer and librettist. Some of the text is sung in syllables very high in the soprano’s range, so that it is not intelligable as a text at all. At times the soprano has passages of pure vocalisation as well as the sung text. I have not found any comment by Beckett on the fate of his text. As he could be very particular with stage directions in his plays, it would be interesting to know if he approved of such a free treatment of his text in the completed work.

The soprano part was beautifully sung by Cyndia Sieden.

The setting was a bright space of changing colours with ( as well as the suspended man mentioned above ) many mirrored cubes which rose and fell. This was an effective visual expression of the whole piece, which might be called an inconclusive introspection.

Monodramas: New York City Opera, Friday 8 April 2011.

JACK QUARTET

2011-04-09T06:34:00.001+10:00

If there is anything better than an exciting performance by a great string quartet it’s hearing them play from about five feet away. I had this wonderful opportunity at the concert given by the JACK Quartet - Ari Streisfeld and Christopher Otto, violins, John Pickford Richards, viola, and Kevin McFarland, cello, in the Greene Space at WQXR Thursday night.

Without the internet, which shows its value in all kinds of ways, it is unlikely that I would have heard of either the JACK Quartet or the Greene Space.

I only found out why the quartet is named JACK at the concert; but it is obvious enough and spelled out on the group’s website. JACK is an acronym made up from the players’ names: John, Ari, Chris and Kevin. The history of the name is more complicated. The players met and first played together as students at Eastman School of Music. Before they constituted themselves as JACK, they played a string quartet by Helmut Lachenmann: Grido, (scream in Italian), which is also an acronym for the then members of the Arditti Quartet, (including Australian violinist Graeme Jennings) for whom it was written. So they took the JACK acronym as their name.

The concert was presented by Bill McGlaughlin of WQXR who managed to be both unobtrusive and very knowledgeable in his explanations. Various radio announcers and lecturers I can think of would benefit from listening carefully to his work.

The first piece was Death Valley Junction by Missy Mazzoli, who was present and introduced the work, which is descriptive of a location of that name which Ms. Mazzoli happened upon during a car journey. The settlement comprised a restaurant, hotel and unexpectedly a theatre, Amargosa Opera House, where Marta Becket (b.1924), a dancer, performed ballet and mime. Death Valley Junction is an imaginative piece in the tradition of descriptive works like Small Town and Knoxville: Summer of 1915. It includes a passage inspired by the dancing of Marta Becket and ends with a memorable solo passage for the cello.

Mr. McGlaughlin asked the quartet to play the last 90 seconds of the work a second time. He mentioned that the conductor Lukas Foss often played new music twice when introducing it at a concert. I wish more performers would do this. Musicians who learn and play new music have a huge advantage over their audience. I often get no idea what a new work is about on one hearing and then it is gone forever. Sometimes, but not always, it’s possible to find a recording of the music but often there is none. The music must make some kind of impression to motivate the search – and, as with the piece by Xenakis which concluded this concert recordings can sometimes convey only a little of what is heard in performance.

Next, the quartet played violinist Ari Streisfeld's arrangements of three motets by Carlo Gesualdo (1566–1613). Mr. McGlaughlin read the words for which the pieces were originally a setting before each was played, and at the conclusion asked the players to demonstrate some features of the arrangements which he said might be better described as orchestrations. There seems to be a new interest adaptations and arrangements of early music by contemporary composers, which brings welcome new light to the pre classical period. But Mr. McGlaughlin mentioned with approval a remark by Neville Marriner, assigning original instrument movement to a “brown sandals and granola” set. How any body who has heard the tone and colour of a good performances on original instruments could say this is beyond me.

The great highlight of the concert was the last work performed Tetras by Iannis Xenaxis (1922-2001). Thanks to the innovative programming of Roger Benedict, director of the Sydney Symphony’s fellowship program, I was not completely ignorant of Xenaxis’ music. Composers have now escaped the clutches of the serialist police and we can listen to a great variety of interesting and involving new music. However, having learned that Xenakis used mathematical models including stochastic processes and other incomprehensible techniques in his work, I can’t help approaching him with fear and trepidation.

But this was swept away by hearing Tetras played with overwhelming energy and precision. Emerson like, Christopher Otto had replace Ari Streisfeld as first violin. The players almost shredded their bows, which were dripping with strands of hair at the end. No recording or hi fi system could reproduce the effect or of hearing this music seated five feet away from these outstanding musicians.

At the time of writing, this concert was available on streaming video at the WQXR website.

JACK quartet at The Greene Space WQXR, 7 April 2011.

GYPSY RONDO

2011-04-07T03:30:00.000+10:00

It was pouring with rain when I emerged from the subway at Houston Street; fortunately only a block from WQXR where I was headed for a free mid – day concert by members of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. I had seen the Greene Space at WQXR on streaming video which, apart from giving an idea that the space is quite small, gave no real indication of what the venue was like. It is surrounded by windows onto the street so that passersby can look in.

There is no fixed seating: portable chairs surrounded the small stage, which was overlooked by a radio control room. It holds 200 – 250 people. The notices advising of maximum occupation over which things become illegal and unsafe mentioned two possible configurations. The space was full

Brahms’ Piano Quartet in G minor was played by Wu Han, piano; Arnaud Sussmann, violin; Lily Francis, viola and Nicholas Canellakis, cello. It was a lively and passionate performance. To my mind chamber music takes on extra excitement in a small space like this where I was very close to the musicians. Some of the texture that can be heard from strings is lost even in a small hall.

CMS of Lincoln Center at The Greene Space New York 6 April 2011

Nixon in China

2011-03-12T18:25:00.003+11:00

According to Google Earth, my house is 15,968.78 kilometres from the Metropolitan Opera New York, so it isn't practical to go there as often as I would like. I would have liked to have seen the recent production of Nixon in China, a marvellous work and a turning point in the development of modern opera. At least these days we have internet streaming and the live HD broadcast's to cinemas, although here they are not live, probably because few of us, no matter how good our intentions, would be there at 5 am of a Sunday morning. So we saw a recording two weeks after the Saturday matinee which was telecast. Good as these transmissions are, it is quite a different experience from being there.

Nixon in China has music by John Adams to a libretto by Alice Goodman. It was originally devised and produced by Peter Sellars, who directed the Met production. John Adams conducted in his Met debut.

The music is remarkable and memorable. There may be exceptions, but I think there should be music in opera which engages us as we listen; and which we can remember later on. I was pleased to see this thought echoed in Michael Tanner's article in The Spectator about the recent premier of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s new opera, Anna Nicole. He said that ...one of the cardinal musical weaknesses of the piece (is) that it sends one out of the theatre with nothing musical going on in one’s head. When I first saw John Adams' Doctor Atomic in 2005, I had the impression it was a work that would last for this very reason. The powerful aria Batter my Heart, and Am I in Your Light, were not only engaging at the time but, remarkably for a piece newly heard, remained with me long after.

In Nixon we have the thrilling soprano aria I am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung, a little of the music more developed in Adams' orchestra piece The Chairman Dances and the pastiche which satirises the revolutionary vogue for group composition accompanying the revolutionary ballet.

We also have the RN's long aria News ... has a kind of mystery, which is an example of the sympathetic way in which the libretto and the music treat him. The other example is his monologue in the third act about his experiences in the second world war. Nixon's character is carefully developed to avoid the stereotype Watergate villain. Speaking at an event webcast on WQXR/Q2, John Adams said that at the time the opera was written all most people saw of Nixon was a succession of comic mimics on late night television.

On the same webcast, Peter Sellars saw the writing of an opera about recent historical events in a various ways. He said that the usual television commentary made a snap judgement and then moved on; it presented historical events inconsequentially so that we don't have the same feeling about the significance of historical events as we have about the history of past centuries. Music and poetry can lift you past the facts into a visionary space which offers us something much more profound.

He also saw Nixon as an instance of what opera can do: we go to a place that was never announced at the beginning . He saw this as a place for secret thoughts, a place you don't have words for, which creates feelings which none of us know how to process.

I think this gives us a good idea where we are headed in Nixon. The opera begins in a documentary way, depicting the arrival of the Nixons in Beijing and the his meeting with Mao. It then veers off into a surreal landscape inspired by a performance of the revolutionary ballet The Red Detachment of Women, in which Henry Kissinger somehow becomes a sadistic landlord and Pat Nixon intervenes in the action to save his victim. The last act consists of monologues by Nixon, Chou En Lai and Mao in which they provide a historical context which, up to that point, was missing, and an imagining of what was going on inside their heads.

Of course we have no idea what was going on inside their heads. History books which invent dialog are often and rightly condemned. Opera is not a history book; and one of the things it can do is create a world which simulates the kind of thoughts we have when thinking about past events. I don't think when we read history we always convert the story into a catalogue of established facts; we do the opposite. We imagine what it would have been like to be a Nixon or a revolutionary in China, and the opera give a voice to such thoughts and feelings, just as opera gives a voice to the thoughts and feelings of a Tosca or a Violetta.

Max Frankel, a journalist who covered Nixon’s trip to China, does not accept this. In an article in the New York Times, he argues that operas shouldn't be based on contemporary events. He is not very convincing. The article suggests that Verdi and Shakespeare wrote of long past events for aesthetic reasons, overlooking the political censorship which constrained both of them. He concludes:

It is easy to mock the story lines of most operas, but that is not my main purpose here. I mean to suggest, in all sympathy, that when living reality is so blatantly harnessed to bait the audience with familiarity and to create a heightened sense of excitement, it risks being constrained by that same reality from reaching true depths of drama and character. At the sudden and surprisingly ambiguous end of “Nixon in China” we hear Chou’s plaintive aria asking, “How much of what we did was good?/Everything seems to move beyond/Our remedy.”

I left wondering whether the opera’s creators might not share his anxiety.

I would like to ask him: why shouldn't familiarity be an element in a work of art? and doesn't any heightened sense of excitement achieve exactly what Peter Sellars set out to do - remove the events from the babble of the daily news and suggest their real significance. And what are the "true depths" of drama and character? The drama and character in Nixon are absorbing and creative. Surely nobody would mistake an opera for an attempt at an all encompassing and definitive historical narrative, even if it was possible to produce one.

Nixon is sung by James Maddalana who created the role in 1987. He also sings on the recording made at that time with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and Edo de Waart on which his youthful voice sounds a little out of character. He is now more of an age with the Nixon he portrays. When I heard the internet stream of the opening night, and a stream of the performance seen in the movie theatre, I wondered why he was allowed to continue. His voice was breaking up and he sometimes coughed. The reviews were surprisingly favourable,and seeing his performance in the cinema showed why this was. It's certainly not great singing, but he inhabits the part so well that this doesn't seem to matter. He doesn't look much like Nixon, but very soon he becomes Nixon.

The other highlight of a uniformly excellent performance was Kathleen Kim's portrayal of Chiang Ch'ing. The aria I am the Wife of Mao Tse-tung was thrilling, and a complete answer to those who would not see recent history on the operatic stage. It might be a stereotype but in both the aria and her performance of it were a memorable depiction of a fanatical revolutionary woman.

Henry Kissinger was sung by Richard Paul Fink. He was excellent in a difficult role. My one reservation about Nixon in China is the way in which it portrays Kissinger as a pantomime villain, in contrast to its empathy with all the other characters. Doctor Atomic did something similar by making General Groves, the military head of the Trinity project, very unfairly, a kind of buffoon. Perhaps there is thought to be a need to offset the serious plot with some comic relief. An itinerant scholar suggested to me that this was a tradition of American musical theatre: cf. and cp. Officer Krupke in West Side Story. If so, I am not convinced it's a tradition that should have been followed here.

Ships made in Japan

2011-03-04T08:30:00.000+11:00

On 15 February we had a visit from MS Asuka II ( 飛鳥II ), operated by the Japanese line Nippon Yusen Kabushiki Kaisha (日本郵船株式会社). She was on a Pacific cruise from Yokohama and Kobe and return.

The ship has an interesting history: she was built at the Mitsubishi yard in Nagasaki in 1989.

She commenced service in 1990 as MS Crystal Harmony for Crystal Cruises. Crystal Cruises is owned by Nippon Yusen.

In 2006, the ship was renamed Asuka II under current ownership. Asuka II has a gross tonnage of 50,142; and is 241 metres long.

The name Auska II suggests a first Askuka, and she is still afloat under the name Amadea. The first Asuka ( of current times: there were earlier ships of this name) was also built at Mitsubishi in Nagasaki, and commenced service in 1991. In 2006 she was sold to Amadea Shipping Company and is operated under charter by the Germany-based Phoenix Reisen. She also visited Sydney this year and was at the Overseas Passenger Terminal on 26 February.

Amadea has a gross tonnage of 28,856, and is 193 metres in length.

Her itinerary would suit those who like to spend some time at sea: she departed Nice on 22 December 2010 and travelling around the world from west to east will arrive in Hamburg on 7 May 2011. The itinerary gives an indication of the many and varied ports accessible to smaller cruise ships.

( Facts in this post come from wikipedia and are hence as accurate as the wiki. )

Shipping News for 5 February 2011

2011-02-06T08:30:00.000+11:00

This weekend Seabourn Soujourn made her first visit to Sydney. Her maiden voyage was in June 2010, and she is one of five ships of this line.

The ship has length of 198 meters; beam 25.60 meters and a deadweight tonnage of 32,000 metric tonnes.

I think this makes her similar in size to the old P&O liners Arcadia (219.9 m; 27.6m) and Iberia, though I am completely confused by the changes in measurement to the mass of ships. ( I know the displacement of ships I saw 50 years ago but the changes in measurement make comparison difficult. )

The Seabourn Sojourn, however, carries only 450passengers, less than half the number on the Arcadia.

She was berthed at Wharf 5 Bangaroo: a new name for the former Darling Harbour terminal.

Rhapsody of the Seas was also in Sydney on 5 February; berthed at the Overseas Passenger Terminal, Circular Quay. She has been coming and going from Sydney all this summer.

Rhapsody of the Seas has operated since 1997. She is one of 42 ships operated by Royal Carribean International. The ship as a length of 279 metres; beam 32.2 metres and a Gross Tonnage of 78,491 tons. This makes her a little smaller than Cunard's Queens Victoria and Elizabeth. So maybe a little more crowded with 2435 passengers.

Geoffrey Rush: The King's Speech and The Diary of a Madman

2011-01-06T18:13:00.003+11:00

It was fascinating to see Geoffrey Rush in a film and on stage in the same week.

I don't see many films and can't easily compare The King's Speech with other recent releases but it is reported to be in line for major awards this year. Apart from thinking it was perhaps twenty minutes over long I enjoyed it, though not as much as Deborah Ross who wrote in The Spectator "... I love it so much that, if I could, I would take it home and put it down for a good school and wrap it up warm in the cold and, should it catch a chill, I would nurse it and offer hot lemon and maybe even oxtail soup...". In fact, I am surprised that such an old fashioned and low key movie is so well received; but, as I said, I haven't seen the others.

The King's Speech is about the relationship between the Duke of York, later King George VI, (Colin Firth) and, Lionel Logue, an unorthodox Australian speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush). The Duke had a very bad stammer and was unable to speak effectively in public. He engaged Logue to assist him at a time when events leading to the abdication of Edward VIII and his own accession to the throne made his ability to cope with the impediment all the more critical.

Colin Firth mastered the stutter, and the accompanying frustrations and outbursts of temper very well. Geoffrey Rush's portrayal of Logue was very restrained, you could say underplayed, depicting an otherwise very ordinary man with a particular gift going about his work almost unaffected by the status of his royal patient. As a former and failed actor, Logue was a slightly unconventional father to his growing sons. There was a silent but brilliant flash in his portrayal when, on the outbreak of war, Logue looks at his elder son and realises, I think, that the boy may become a victim of the conflict.

His acting was in great contrast to his Aksenth Poprishchin in The Diary of a Madman at the Belvoir Street theatre and the comparison shows the great range of his talent.

If Geoffrey Rush's acting was restrained, you could say the same of the whole film which avoided the clichés of royal costume drama, particularly in the music. The film has an original score by Alexandre Desplat. But, interestingly, towards the climax, the King's first radio speech of the second world war, Beethoven was heard. A slow measured passage which I found came from his 7th. symphony. Royalty and Empire usually demand Elgar, who was absent, and the King's coronation, seen as a black and white newsreel being watched by the participants, could have had Walton's coronation march Crown Imperial which was written for the ceremony, but may have been thought too grandiose for the established mood.

And then to Belvoir Street for The Diary of a Madman. This play was written and first performed by Geoffrey Rush at Belvoir Street in 1989. It's revival marks the retirement of its director Neil Armfield as Artistic Director of the theatre. The play is based on a short story by Nicolai Gogol (1809 - 1852), adapted by English playwright David Holman with Neil Armfield and Geoffrey Rush.

We have all heard of Gogol but is he known than read? The story is in the form of a diary by a member of the lower orders of the Russian civil service. We first learn that, like many in structured organisations, such as schools and some parts of the legal profession today, he is both trapped in and fascinated by the intricate hierarchy of which he is an insignificant member.

"I'm only forty-two, that's an age nowadays when one's career is only just begining. Just wait my friend, until I'm a colonel or even something higher, God willing. I'll acquire more status than you."

Then, in the most innovative part of the story, he hears a conversation between two dogs, which doesn't surprise him over much as he had read of cows asking for a pound of tea in a shop. He then claims to have tracked down some letters between the dogs and relates their content in some detail. Finally, on reading that the throne of Spain is said to be vacant, he realises that he is the King of Spain; and mistakes the men who come to take him away for the royal entourage. If there is a fault in the narrative, it is that the final delusion appears from nowhere. It doesn't seem to develop smoothly from the character's illusions about the dogs, or his hopeless infatuation with a woman well out of the reach of a junior clerk. You might say that it was an appropriate delusion for a man obsessed with position and rank, but it happens suddenly nevertheless.

The story was written as a satire on aspects of Russian life at the time: such things as a quotation from an obscure poet Poprishchin wrongly attributed to Pushkin, a contemporary newspaper nicknamed the Little Bee, and the sharpening of quills in goverment offices - in which Poprishchin takes such delight -and which a note to the Penguin edition of the story tells us was, unsurprisingly, the responsibility of the most minor clerks. However, all this is similar enough to aspects of modern life not to matter much.

The story as written is ready made for adaptation for the stage. Although in the form of a diary, the writing quickly jumps into what must be intended to be read as the stream of Poprishchin's thought rather than a transcript of his diary; so it translates very well into a monologue for the theatre. The adaptation includes large sections of the story unaltered.

The Blevoir street theatre is unusually configured with banks of steeply raked seats looking towards the stage which is in one corner of the space. It's similar to, but not quite a thrust stage. The amazing thing about it which we noticed as soon as we came in was the way in which this unpromising space is transformed by each set built in it. The set for The Diary of a Madman depicts Poprishchin's decrepit but brightly painted attic bedroom. It's so different from the very modern hotel room on a revolving stage used for Measure for Measure that you immediately feel you are in a different place.

The play cleverly adds a context for the narrative of the diary by placing Poprishchin in the attic attended by Touvi a faithful Finnish servant, charmingly portrayed by Yael Stone, who also takes two other minor roles. However, it soon moves into the diary itself.

Geoffrey Rush depicts an engagingly eccentric man, whose first steps into another world - his contacts with the talking a writing dogs - are almost believable. There is a little improvisation, including some interaction with the musicians, which is never allowed to detract from the narrative. The performance is very physical; seemingly out of control at times. Gradually the character collapses, so that by the time he reaches an asylum he is a grotesque and frightening figure. A truly remarkable performance.

Postscript added 12 March 2011

Since this was written Geoffrey Rush has missed out on the oscar for best suporting actor for The King's Speech and Diary of a Madman has opened in New York: here are reviews from the New York Times and The New York Review of Books.

French Connection

2010-11-30T12:15:00.000+11:00

Chance events can provoke an interest; and it was the appearance of Pascal and Ami Rogé at the Australian Festival of Chamber in 2005 and 2006, together with a chance encounter with them in New York that encouraged me to fight jet fatigue and attend Pascal Rogé’s concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on 29 April.

It was also fortunate that the day prior to the concert the Rogés appeared on In Tune on BBC Radio 3. This discussion was valuable not only in getting an understanding of the concert program, but also for the information that, following their performance of a work by Matthew Hindson at the Townsville festival, which I must have heard but am unable to recollect, the Rogés commissioned him to write a concerto for two pianos which they will perform with the Sydney Symphony next year. I have always enjoyed hearing Matthew Hindson’s music. My forgetfulness is related not to the quality of his music but the difficult task of bringing newly heard new music to mind after a single hearing.

When I learned of the new work I thought that Matthew Hindson’s usual fast pace and rhythmic drive will make for a very exciting concerto. I have since heard his short piece Beauty, written for the anniversary of the Australia Ensemble, and his 2010 work Light is both a Particle and a Wave. Beauty is not manic at all, I found it very moving, I don't know if he has achieved this kind of thing in any earlier compositions or if it's an new development for him, but whatever the answer, I now like his music more than ever. There are also some excellent contemplative passages in the second movement of Light... The awful thing is that if I travel as planned, I will not be here in Sydney when the concerto is performed in May 2011.

Of the concert itself, Pascal Rogé said that he designed the program to make the case for Chopin as a French composer. Chopin’s mother was French and he spent 15 years in Paris. He also wanted to show Chopin’s influence on the French composers who followed him Fauré, Ravel, Poulenc and particularly Debussy.

He says in the program:

I have interwoven the Chopin pieces with those of the other composers with hardly any pause between them, moving from one to another, as if walking from one artwork to another in a gallery. In this way, I was able to make connections between the works, and we could transport ourselves into a journey of sounds and colours.

And this is exactly what happened.

The Queen Elizabeth Hall was packed, with part of the audience seated right alongside the piano on the stage. By great good luck when I booked on line at the last minute about the only seat available was in the front row; a wonderful place to be for such a marvellous concert. Pascal Rogé played with an intensity I didn't see at Townsville, and there was, as promised, almost no pause between the works.

I have never been a great follower of Chopin, but I suppose I became familiar with his music by a kind of osmosis by hearing it from time to time on the radio and such. Almost all of the music was familiar to me, and the argument about the connection between Chopin and the French composers seemed unanswerable. Among the French pieces was The Girl with the Flaxen Hair, which has been known bring me to tears, which it did again.

The influence of Chopin cannot have been direct: none of the French composers can have known or heard him. Fauré's dates are the only ones with a small overlap:

Chopin 1810 - 1849

Fauré 1845 - 1924

Debussy 1862 - 1918

Ravel 1875 - 1937

Poulenc 1899 - 1963

so the selection gives some idea of the dominance Chopin's music must have had in Nineteenth century France.

Pascal Rogé made a recording of many of the pieces played in the concert last year, and I have now bought one. There is only one CD, so some of the pieces played in the concert are omitted. Having heard the concert, listening to the recording was a special experience for me, but I'm sure most would find well worth hearing on its own.

International Piano Series Queen Elizabeth Hall London 29 April 2010.

Das Rheingold

2010-10-05T12:55:00.001+11:00

I am determined not to become a Wagnerite. It's not that I don't like Wagner - or The Ring; but there is so much more music to hear and enjoy. George Bernard Shaw wrote:

It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searching philosophic and social significance.

That was in 1898 and they are still around, only now they take to the air themselves and congregate on rocky outcrops wherever a Ring cycle is performed. I have no wish to join them.

But I have bought a ticket to the Met's new Das Rheingold on 2 April 2011 ( as well tickets to all kinds of other things ). And at the risk of seeming obsessive, I am approaching this occasion by stages. First, I was able to hear the opening night of Rheingold streamed on the Internet. And before long I will see it in the cinema - though not live in my time zone.

The Met has invested large sums in the technology required by Robert Le Page's production. An early version of it was deployed in his Damnation of Faust, which I saw in the theatre in 2008 and 2009. When I first saw it I wasn't much taken with the visual effects and thought that the strength of the production was the playing of the Met Orchestra. But on seeing it again, I changed my mind and found the staging to be very effective. The physical part of that staging was a scaffolding like structure at the front of the stage. The structure for the Ring is much more complicated. Some of it didn't work on opening night.

I live in a critical desert where inane and decaying newspapers sometimes manage to print 250 words about a show. The Met is more fortunate and the piece I heard streamed attracted many writers, most of whom were given the space to say something of interest.

There are more but I have seen:

The New York Times
The New York Post
The Washington Post (Associated Press)
The Times
The Financial Times
The Daily Telegraph
The Guardian &
Daniel Stephen Johnson

though some of the links my die with time.

As heard on line, it sounded wonderful. Even at a distance and though medium fidelity speakers the orchestral sound was overwhelming. No explanation is required for the reception the audience gave to James Levine.

As a dedicated non Wagnerite, I was a little disappointed to find how familiar the music was - even after a long break. The singing seemed uniformly excellent and I did not feel at all deprived in not being part of the magic on stage.

The critics confirmed my hearing of the orchestra at a distance:

The true star of the night though was James Levine, who stood through his first full performance at the conductor's podium for seven months due to a serious back complaint. As he has done so often over the past 40 years at the Met, he inspired a great orchestra to give of its best, culminating in a mesmerising climax. The Guardian

Almost as if determined to prove something, he conducted the score with exceptional vigor, sweep and uncommon textural clarity. New York Times

But what chiefly galvanises the drama — as so often at the Met — is the quality and power of the orchestral playing under James Levine's painstaking direction. The Times

The production worked for some ...

Lepage treated the audience to a mesmerising display of virtual magic, giving them plenty to feast their eyes on in the intimate scenes between the coups de théâtre. Telegraph

...keeping the gadgetry low-key and respectful and intelligently enhancing Wagner's mood rather than imposing his own. Guardian

but there were also mixed feelings ...

For the most part it was an impressive success: an inventive, fluid staging and a feat of technological wizardry that employs sophisticated video elements without turning into a video show. Wagner buffs tend to be a fanatical sort, and no doubt there will be debate about Mr. Lepage’s work. Here he received a mostly enthusiastic ovation with scattered boos. I had mixed feelings. New York Times

and a craving for Eurotrash which I find hard to fathom:

Forget meaningful symbols or sociopolitical undertones. In New York, a tree looked like a carefully painted tree in a canvas forest. The principals struck traditional poses, modelled quaint breastplates and winged helmets. This was no thinking-person’s Wagner, but it made a lot of conservatives happy. Financial Times

But what's already depressingly clear is that Lepage has virtually nothing to say about the political, social, moral or ecological subtexts of The Ring. You might have thought that, in this of all cities — and after everything that has happened in the past two years — a tale about the corrupting lust for gold would be staged with a modicum of irony, if not outright satirical venom. The Times

Until converted, my opinion is that productions should by and large be faithful to the composers' intentions and that the universal appeal of myth isn't enhanced by narrowing its scope.

I remembered Wotan as a overbearing figure declaiming about this and that in a way which relied on the subtlety of the orchestral accompaniment for texture. I have heard Bryn Terfel's powerful voice but unlike some critics have not been impressed by his acting. On both counts I was surprised to get the impression of a conversational, domestic Wotan with excellent variation in his tone and delivery. The critics were divided:

The formidable bass-baritone Bryn Terfel sang his first Wotan at the Met, a chilling, brutal portrayal New York Times

Bryn Terfel, making his US debut in his celebrated role of Wotan, the lord of the gods, was brooding and dark. Guardian
The Welsh bass-baritone Bryn Terfel was riveting as Wotan, playing him as a vigorous, hot-tempered god, full of youthful pride and daring. Vocally, he was overpowering, ringing top notes alternating with gently modulated phrases. Washington Post

Not even Bryn Terfel, who hurls out Wotan's lines with customary verve (though edging nervously sharp on some big notes) but musters only a fraction of his usual charisma. For once the big Welshman seems overawed. The Times

More problematic was bass-baritone Bryn Terfel in the central role of Wotan, king of the gods. He deployed his world-class voice with skill, but when the score called for rich, flowing sound, he tended to yell and go sharp. A stringy wig concealing half his face blunted his usually razor-sharp acting. New York Post

Eric Owens' Alberich was amazing. My memory of Alberich was of a cringing and unattractive dwarf, a typical bully, tormenting Mime as an outlet for his own rage. Again there were two surprises: the audio stream revealed an Alberich as powerful as Wotan, their dialog resembling a prize fight. And having heard Eric Owens as General Groves in John Adams' Doctor Atomic, I didn't expect such a strong performance. The portrayal of General Groves as a figure of fun, probably done to give some variety between the characters, was about the only thing that annoyed me about Doctor Atomic and this may have affected my appreciation of his singing.

Everyone loved him:

And the bass-baritone Eric Owens had a triumphant night as Alberich...Mr. Owens’s Alberich was no sniveling dwarf, but a barrel-chested, intimidating foe, singing with stentorian vigor, looking dangerous in his dreadlocks and crazed in his fantasy of ruling the universe. New York Times

I guess part of the reason I was uncomfortable is that Alberich, in this production, is not the stupid little clown we're used to seeing; in fact, he's fucking terrifying. Johnson

A vocal standout was Eric Owens, whose bass-baritone retained its essential beauty and heft even in Alberich’s moments of rage. New York Post

Another distinctive feature of the audio was the Loge of Richard Croft. My memory is of Loge sung by a wispy high tenor; and I enjoyed the much richer sound I heard here. Loge was only mentioned in passing by the critics and perhaps my strong impression came from the broadcast medium: he may not have sounded as strong in the theatre:

...tenor Richard Croft made for a lively Loge, perhaps lacking quite enough volume to rise over some of Wagner's orchestration. Washington Post

I also enjoyed the creamy mezzo soprano of Stephanie Blythe as Fricka, and so did the New York Times:

the powerhouse mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe was a vocally sumptuous, magisterial yet movingly vulnerable Fricka.

Watch this space for Das Rheingold parts 2 and 3.

Metropolitan Opera New York Internet stream Das Rheingold heard Tuesday 28 September 2010 (local time).

Victorian Opera: Julius Caesar

2010-08-25T13:38:00.003+10:00

The second event on my visit to Melbourne was the Victorian Opera production of Handel's Julius Caesar at the Recital Centre. I had been less than enthusiastic about three VO productions heard earlier; and was also sceptical about the use of the Elizabeth Murdoch Hall in the Centre for opera. I'm not critical of the use of a space without a traditional stage: operas staged by Pinchgut Opera in the City Recital Hall in Sydney have been excellent overall and musically outstanding.

However, on my previous visit to the Melbourne hall at the time it was opened in 2009, I heard chamber music, (Schubert's Trout Quintet played by the Goldner Quartet with Piers Lane and Alex Henery and a late night concert which introduced me to Morton Feldman's haunting Rothko Chapel), for which the acoustics of the hall were perfect, and a performance of some opera excepts and Vaughan Williams Serenade to Music, with Orchestra Victoria conducted by Richard Mills and singers, which I thought was not as well suited to the space.

The Elizabeth Murdoch Hall is lined with timber, and I could smell the wood as I came in: I hope this natural aroma therapy will last.

For Julius Caesar, the orchestra was placed in front of the stage. The simple all purpose set included an obelisk, Cleopatra's Needle perhaps, reaching almost to the ceiling and some thin drapes hanging from a rail attached to the roof, which were opened and closed during the performance.

As soon as the orchestra played, my doubts about the quality of the music were extinguished. The ensemble from Orchestra Victoria conducted by Richard Gill, the artistic director of Victorian Opera, played beautifully. The orchestral sound was balanced and well articulated. If I wanted to find fault I would say that the hall was not quite as kind to the singers, as I thought I noticed a little too much reverberation at times. But overall I was enchanted. I should have allowed myself enough time in Melbourne to hear it more than once. So much for scepticism.

I don't think I had heard David Hansen the countertenor who sang Caesar before. He has a remarkably agile voice, his high notes in particular had great clarity of tone. Tiffany Speight was a fine Cleopatra, and it was interesting to hear Tobias Cole ( Oberon in OA's Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this year ) as Tolmeo. He sang Caesar in the most recent revival of OA's famous production. The other singers were excellent as well.

It may not be a universal rule, but I think there is much to be said for staging 17th and 18th century opera in small theatres and halls. I know that when Handel's opera's were first performed the rather static nature of the opera seria was mitigated by the use of elaborate scenic effects; but I'm not certain about how large the theatres were. I have seen the OA Julius Caesar, first performed by Yvonne Kenny and Graham Pushee in 1994, in both Sydney and Melbourne. Those theatres were fine for the music and the space allowed for elaborate and effective staging. I was, however, disappointed by David McVicar's production, originally for Glyndebourne, which I saw at Chicago Lyric Opera in 2007. I will mention some aspects of the production later, but my overriding impression was that the theatre was too large for the work which lacked impact for that reason. It's seen from a distance, and though there are singers who are powerful enough for a large auditorium many fine artists are not. In Chicago, French countertenor Christophe Dumaux, who sang Tolemeo, seemed much more suited to the space than David Daniels, who sang Caesar.

The VO production was directed by Steven Heathcote who recently retired after an outstanding career as a principal dancer with the Australian Ballet. His background in dance was reflected in some aspects of the production, which I thought was well suited to the hall and enhanced the excellent music. I disagree with the critic for the Melbourne Age, who wrote: "All too often, what we were seeing on stage seemed superficial to what was being played and sung."

The static nature of opera seria creates problems for the modern director, but those problems were elegantly solved here. Two examples:

Towards the end of Act 1, Caesar sings the remarkable aria with horn obligato "The skilful hunter treads silently when stalking his prey". In Francisco Negrin's OA production this was done with Caesar and Tolemeo confronting one another around a large table covered with a green baize cloth. It was a thrilling piece of theatre. David McVicar's production picked up a dance rhythm in the music and had Caesar and Tolemeo performing a kind of gavotte which seemed to drain the dramatic tension from the scene. The VO production, with less elaborate resources, depicted the scene as a confrontation in a way which did enhanced the music.

Another highlight of the OA production was the aria -

" If in the pleasant, flowery meadows, the bird among flowers and leaves, conceals itself, it only makes its song more delightful.."

in which Caesar steps out of character and conducts a kind of duel with the accompanying violinist as they compete to find the highest note. This was also very effective in the theatre. (The applause and foot stamping can be heard on the live recording ).

Chicago also had the violinist on stage without the same theatrical effect, but Steven Heathcote's solution was to have a dancer depict the bird of the lyric sometimes eluding Caesar's reach but when caught allowing the singer to try a few lifts from the ballet. It created a nice effect.

Apart from the obelisk, the Melbourne production was not intended to accurately represent Caesar and Cleopatra in their historical context, but it was straightforward and effective. The much more elaborate Chicago production was a sly representation of British Imperialism, which despite the comic effects had a Serious Purpose. Mr. McVicar says in the program: " On some level this is an opera about what happens when you walk into other people's countries under false pretenses". So there.

I find that it is now 40 years since I first heard Julius Caesar. I mention this because over that time there has been a change in the performance practice for opera seria, most of which included parts for the then prevalent castrati. I saw the first stage performance of Julius Caesar in Australia presented by Young Opera at the Science Theatre, University of New South Wales. Ceasar was sung by one of the great Australian singers, contralto Lauris Elms and Cleopatra by the equally celebrated Marilyn Richardson. Here is the cast list:

As with many programs there is no indication of the year, but looking in Lauris Elms' memoir The Singing Elms I find it was 1970. She says (at the time of her writing): "Twenty-five years later people still remember those performances." And Forty years later as well.

Alfred Deller's career as a countertenor was well established by then, but the voice did not have the prominence it does today. I bought a LP record of highlights of the opera as performed by New York City Opera after hearing it in 1970. Beverly Sills is Cleopatra, but Caesar is sung by a bass baritone, Norman Treigle.

As late as 1999, we have a female Caesar at the Met, in a performance I found on the Met Player:

Jennifer Larmore and Sylvia McNair as the ill-fated couple, abounds with dazzling vocal pyrotechnics as well as heart-rending drama. Stephanie Blythe (Cornelia) and David Daniels (her son Sesto) give memorable performances as the grieving family of the murdered Pompey. Brian Asawa sings Cleopatra’s conniving brother Tolomeo.

I was surprised to see David Daniels, Caesar in Chicago, was Sesto. In 1970 David Parker, a tenor, sang this role, but in the other productions I have mentioned Sesto has been sung by a contralto.

* Julius Caesar, Victorian Opera at Melbourne Recital Centre; 22 July 2010.

Forgotten Operas

2010-08-08T16:35:00.000+10:00

In the Members room at the Art Gallery of NSW I came across a display of French opera posters from around 1900. It seems there was a more formal exhibition of the gallery's collection of the posters about ten years ago with an illustrated catalogue I haven't seen yet.

The posters are the work of various artists, none of whom I know; but the fascinating thing was how many of the operas depicted are now unfamiliar. I have made the mistake before of thinking of the history of music, (and the same applies to other things), as an orderly linear progression of famous works, in the case of music, beginning with Bach, or Monteverdi perhaps, and on through Mozart, Beethoven and so on. But in fact as a quick look at the Naxos catalogue proves, at any time there were thousands of composers of countless works which we will never hear. Leaving aside works that were never performed, this small exhibition is a reminder that many operas reached the stage but soon vanished.

I have not heard any of the operas advertised by the posters, but at least know of Massenet's Esclarmonde, (in a poster by Auguste-Francois Gorguet 1862-1927); and was reminded by an interview with Richard Bonynge in the August 2010 edition of Opera News that it was famously revived by him and Joan Sutherland and performed in San Francisco and at the Met in New York 1976. I hadn't heard of Le Mage (poster by Alfredo Edel 1856-1912) but then as the Opera News article points out that Massenet left 28 complete operas as well as incidental music ballet and songs.

Charles-Marie Widor is famous for his organ symphonies particularly the toccata from the symphony for organ no.5 op. 42 no. 1, but I had never thought to ask if he had composed any operas. There were four, represented in the exhibition by Les pêcheurs de Saint-Jean (poster by Fernand-Louis Gottlob 1873 - 1935).

The operettas are even more deeply lost. I hope time permits me to search for and find Shakespeare! by Gaston Serpette (poster by René Péan, b.1875 'opéra bouffe' at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiennes) or the saucy Mam'zelle Boy-Scout by Gustave Goublier (Poster by Boulanger 1858 -1924 for the operetta at the Théâtre des Renaissance).

But, because of its curious name, the opera which most caught my imagination was La Glu by Gabriel Dupont (Poster by Robert Dupont 1874 - 1949, the composer's brother, for the opera at the Théâtre National de l'Opéra de Nice). My student's French dictionary has no entry for "La glu" but it's meaning is clear from this review found in the New York Times archive -

PARIS Feb. 12- The new dramatic opera "La Glu" produced recently in Nice has been received with the greatest enthusiasm by all who have heard it. The libretto is drawn by Henry Cain from Jean Richepin's powerful book bearing the same title, and presents the following story:

An elegant Parisienne is known by the significant nickname of "La Glu" or birdlime. To gratify a whim she begins and intrigue with a young Breton fisherman, who, however, takes the affair so seriously and loves her with such mad jealousy that he tries to kill himself on learning that she has betrayed him. His mother saves his life and to rescue him from the charmer who endeavors to get him again into her power, murders her.

The music , which has been written to this simple theme by Gabriel Dupont, is extremely melodious and full of poetic beauty. The orchestration is declared by musicians to be admirable.

Paris desires to hear this opera, which in a general way, seems likely to awaken the same emotions that "Carmen" does, but Berlin will almost certainly enjoy that good fortune first. The Princess of Saxe-Meiningen, a sister of the Kaiser, has sent a copy of it to him from the Riviera, at the same time writing him about it with superlative praise. "La Glu" will be produced at the Imperial Opera House in Berlin early next season."

February 13, 1910

By that point Carmen had emerged as a classic: it was not as well received when first performed. The NY Times itself joined the general opinion of the day:

"...Carmen must stand on its own merits - and those are very slender. It is little more than a collocation of couplets and chansons with a strong flavor of the opera comique ( which may be "spicy" but is not very pure -- art-wise, we mean) and musically, is really not much above the works of Offenbach. It is new, and it has chic, but as a work of art, it is naught. "

October 24, 1878

Australian Shakespeare Company COMEDY OF ERRORS

2010-08-08T16:15:00.000+10:00

First stop on my recent Melbourne excursion was the Atheneum in Collins Street for the Australian Theatre Company's production of The Comedy of Errors. Since, by chance, I have happened upon two of the more obscure Shakespeare plays, King John and Henry VIII this year, I thought, why not see them all; so when I found that the Comedy of Errors was being performed in Melbourne during my visit I decided to add another to my list.

The play dates from about 1592. It concerns the confusion arising from the presence of two sets of identical twins, each set unaware of the other, in Ephesus. Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse, were separated in a shipwreck when they were very young. Their servants, both named Dromio, were separated with them.

The introduction to the Penguin edition of the play says:

Modern productions and scholars, as if taking their cue from the play’s good-natured laughter at erroneous perceptions, have re-examined the play through theatrically innovative and historically revisionist perspectives to overturn older prejudices against it as a mechanical farce of mistaken identities representing a one-off piece of Shakespeare juvenilia.

The Melbourne production, I think correctly, presented the play as a mechanical farce of mistaken identities. The problem of presenting the identical twins was overcome by having the characters in masks which owed something to the comedia del arte, and something to cartoons and the muppets. As dressed and masked the sets of twins were pretty much indistinguishable .

The twins named Antipholus, are the children of Egeon, a merchant of Syracuse and Emilia (who has become Lady Abess at Ephesus. At the begining, we learn that Egeon has been sentenced to death by the Duke of Ephesus, as he has entered Syracuse contrary to restrictions imposed because of a trade dispute between the two cities. As written, Egeon has a very lengthy speech in which he sets out the misfortunes of his family and his search for his son as an explanation of his presence in defiance of the ban. The duke relents and gives Egeon time to find the money for a fine in lieu of excecution

The penguin editor says:

And in the hands of an actor who can tune the rhetorical peaks and valleys of Shakespeare’s masterly piece of verse-narrative to Egeon’s turmoiled recollection, the story can grip theatre spectators completely, as modern productions have often shown.

This production passed over this possibility by breaking the speech into sections and interpolated between later scenes. This became a running joke, as Egeon was dragged across the stage to execution, time and again, reciting his apparently never ending story. The joke worked well; so I will need to await another production to see if the speech can be completely gripping. At the moment I am sceptical about this.

The only trouble with presenting the play as knockabout farce and slapstick, is that, although it is Shakespeare's shortest play it makes for quite a long real life cartoon. I don't say this as a criticism of the production, more of the play, or at least way Tom and Jerry and the like have changed our expectations of the content and pace of slapstick.

It is wonderful that Melbourne has retained so many of its traditional theatres, and although the Atheneum looks somewhat run down it was a pleasure to see the play there.

There was one set, having the appearance of a roughly sketched building. Names were attached to it indicating that it, or its various doors, represented different locations. It was well designed to accommodate those scenes in which the participants can hear, but not see, each other in a convincing way.

The costumes and masks, while elaborate and well made, complemented this style giving the whole production a rough hewn appearance and feel.

The play was well acted throughout. Notwithstanding all the knockabout action, the words were spoken with clarity by everyone. It's probably not a play for great performances; and no one member of the cast seemed to stand out.

The Residents at the Sydney Theatre company are now performing the play at The Wharf; it will be fun to see what they make of it.

Seen at Atheneum Melbourne
21 July 2010

KING JOHN - THE ELEVENTH HOUR AT THE ADELAIDE FESTIVAL

2010-03-11T13:36:00.000+11:00

Queen's Theatre Adelaide

While visiting Adelaide, I was fortunate to see a production of Shakespeare's The Life and Death of King John by The Eleventh Hour. The Eleventh Hour is a theatre company from Fitzroy in Melbourne.

I suppose I had heard of King John, but when I found that it was on in Adelaide during my visit, I couldn't bring anything about it to mind. The King John of history and myth was lost to my memory as well, and I had to remind myself of Magna Carta, Runnymede and the adventures of Robin Hood (none of which are in Shakespeare).

It's said that performances of King John are rare these days, although the play was popular in the nineteenth century when pageantry, and elaborate scenery and costume were more in evidence. It gave scope for all of these. It may also be that King John loomed larger in the imagination of people at that time; historians of the period treated him as the personification of evil. William Stubbs, professor of modern history at Oxford, described the him as not only as " the very worst of our kings" but also "polluted with every crime" and "false to every obligation". Still under this influence, A.A. Milne taught us that " King John was not a good man-..." I suspect that for the 19th century actor John was what Richard III became in the hands of Laurence Olivier. If you look at the old silent film of Beerbohm Tree performing the death of King John, which was shown in the foyer in Adelaide, you get some sense of this I think.

For those interested, there is a debate about the source of Shakespeare's play and whether it followed in time, and drew upon, the anonymous play The Troublesome Reign of King John or whether Shakespeare came first. Whatever the answer to this, the play is not very coherent, it conflates some incidents from history and jumps forward in time without explaining that it is doing so. King John reigned from 1199 to 1216. The first four acts of the play are chiefly concerned with John's dispute about the inheritance of the Crown with Arthur, Duke of Brittany; or more accurately since Arthur (born 1187) was a youth at the time, with his supporters. This dispute ended when Arthur vanished mysteriously in April 1203 ( in the play he falls, or jumps, from a wall after John's unsuccessful attempt to murder or blind him.) Then the last act depicts the events leading up to John's death in 1216. There is no sub-plot or elaboration, just the rather tortured narrative and countless battles. But a reading of the play does give a feeling of Shakespeare, the working dramatist of great linguistic facility, working against time to get the thing ready and onto the stage.

Stories about the inheritance of royal power were relevant to the politics and events of Shakespeare's time, but are not of pressing concern now.

The Eleventh Hour has tackled the plays difficulties by setting its production in France on the last day of the First World War. It's not simply a production in modern dress. The company, ( I assume its dramaturge William Henderson ) has written a play set on that day in the course of which Shakespeare's King John is performed.

The performance took place in Queen's Theatre in Playhouse Lane, Adelaide. The name suggests a delightful old traditional theatre, but that's not what I found. Although there has been a theatre on the site since 1841, the building, or what remains of it has had a variety of uses over time. The word BAZAAR in faded paint is the only name on the facade. At some stage it was "horse bazaar", I assume a kind of market. All that lies behind the facade is a large space. This is currently used for functions or as a performance space, each user adapting it to their own needs.

A large room to the side was used as a foyer and Shakespeare Tavern; and when it was time for the play to begin the audience was led from there to a side door of the theatre proper, offered paper Chinese fans against the heat, and shown to a steeply raked temporary grandstand structure which held just over a hundred seats. The bank of seats faced back towards the building's facade.

The space between the seats and the front of the theatre was converted to an elaborate set, depicting a barn near the trenches of 1918. To imagine the set, you must forget the usual kind of stage design. The old building was converted into the barn: spaces in the existing wall had been built up and accurately matched with existing structure to show shell damaged walls. Old carts, wheels, barrels and boxes were placed realistically around the "barn" and straw littered the floor. There is a sound design which reproduces the sound of nearby artillery, aircraft and exploding shells and bombs.

The play begins with the entry of a group of soldiers blinded by gas wearing eye bandages, together with three women, two ambulance drivers and an army nurse. The group has sought shelter in the barn, and are soon joined by a badly wounded officer and a chaplain.

This sets the scene for a theatrical device which if simply described sounds contrived and wholly incredible, but which, surprisingly, led to a fascinating and absorbing performance. The nurse, Matron White, suggests to the group that to keep the Captain's spirits up, they should perform the play they have been rehearsing - King John, of course. The Captain is King John. It could be that soldiers at the front in the First World War did some playacting to pass the time, I don't know; but did a group of walking wounded ever learn King John? However, once we take this jump, the strengths of the idea begin to work.

I am totally sick of the convention of placing historical plays and operas in modern times, and the variation of equipping ancient warriors with sub machine guns, with the purpose of teaching those of us lacking the insight and virtue of the Director that war is and was evil and destructive. The improbable device used here managed to skirt a didactic onslaught and instead provided some real insights and emotional force.

The idea drew on some parallels with the plot of King John. As a map in the foyer reminded us, the trenches in France were close to where the action of Shakespeare's play took place. And the futility of that war seems close when Lewis, the dauphin says of a battle:

And now 'tis far too huge to be blown out
with that same weak wind which kindled it.

The gas blinded soldiers give an edge to Shakespeare's very effective scene in which Hubert, acting as the king's henchman, prepares to blind the youthful Arthur with hot irons. In a performance in which all the actors were excellent, Michaela Cantwell (alias Lieutenant Violet O'Faolain, Ambulance Driver) gave a most affecting performance as the troubled and vacillating Hubert. The idea of Hubert being performed by a woman was another bit of the mysterious alchemy which gave this show such emotional force.

Shakespeare's play was interrupted from time to time by episodes in the story of soldiers who were performing it. This did two things. First, it provided another parallel with the old play by showing the stresses which work on wounded and war weary soldiers to produce tension and acrimonious exchanges. But more importantly it gave an impetus to the production which would be difficult to achieve from the text of King John itself. The performance of King John became the driving force of the soldiers' existence: when things got too hard to bear there was always THE PLAY. It became more important to them than issues of life and death, injury, pain and distress.

My only reservation about the performances was that the soldiers developed more identifiable personalities than some of Shakespeare's characters. This might be a fault in King John itself, though I imagine it might be overcome if various of the disputing nobles were given very distinctive costumes. Here they were all in regulation army issue.

One of the ambulance drivers had set up a field telephone which relayed messages from Marshall Foch and General Haig about the armistice to take place at the eleventh hour that day. This also provided some drive to the proceedings; and it was no surprise when the church bells celebrating the end of hostilities accompanied Richard's concluding speech:

This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror,
...Nought shall make us rue
If England to itself do rest but true.

King John has died, one line of the play explaining that he was poisoned by a monk. This has some point, as during the play John has anticipated Henry VIII by seizing the wealth of the monasteries to finance his battles. No one knows why John died, but I prefer Holinshed's story that his death followed "increased feeding on rawe peaches, and drinking of new sider". No sooner has the Captain delivered John's final lines than he himself falls off the cart on which he rested, dead. I don't want to quibble with such a fascinating production, but this was not difficult to predict.

Charles Bell Birch in Adelaide

2010-03-10T10:29:00.003+11:00

This statue of Queen Victoria is in Victoria Square Adelaide. I have now added particulars of the statue to my page on Charles Bell Birch, the sculptor.

Robert Burns in Adelaide

2010-03-09T10:27:00.001+11:00

I never intended to make a catologue of memorials to Robert Burns, but since I was visiting Adelaide and since the statue there is found in The World's Memorials of Robert Burns by Edward Goodwillie late of Michigan, I decided to take a look. ( The italicised passages below are taken from Goodwillie's book. )
The second statue of Robert Burns to be erected
in Australia was unveiled on May 5th., 1894, at
Adelaide, the Queen City and Capital of the federated
State of South Australia.
The location of this statue is one of the finest
which any statue of Burns adorns. The site is the
eastern end of the Reserve, opposite Government
House Domain, on Adelaide's glorious North Terrace.
In close proximity are the Public Library,
Art Gallery, Museum, University and School of
Mines.
Since that was written the statue has been moved twice to different locations North Terrace. First to the Art Gallery* and more recently, after restoration, to the State Library.
At the unveiling ceremony, which was presided
over by His Excellency the Lieutenant Governor,
who was received by a guard of honor of the Permanent
Artillery, there were present two direct
descendants of Burns, namely, Mrs. McLellan, a
grand-daughter, who still resides in South Australia,
and Mrs. Burns Scott, a great-grand-daughter.
Thousands of people thronged North Terrace at its
intersection with Kintore Avenue when Hon. John
Darling, M. L. C., pulled the cord and exposed the
figure of the Immortal Bard to their admiring gaze.
As mentioned, this was the second statue of Burns in Australia; the first was at Ballarat, where, according to Goodwillie, a crowd of 40,000 people was present for its dedication. It's not unlikely that a similar crowd was present in Adelaide. I have previously mentioned the elaborate ceremony held in 1905 in Sydney. In an audio file found on the Artlab Australia website, Joanna Barr, who worked on the restoration of Adelaide's Burns, discusses the change in the response of the public to memorials since the late 19th and early 20th century. Although elaborate ceremonies and huge crowds are not longer seen, she tells of the considerable interest in the statue which its restoration attracted.

The Adelaide statue of Burns is of Angaston
marble, and is erected on a pedestal of Monarto
granite. On the die is engraved:
"ROBERT BURNS
1759 -1796."
The inscription on the base is:
"Presented to the City of Adelaide by the Caledonian
Society, and unveiled by the Chief, The
Hon. John Darling, M. L. C., 5th May, 1894."
The statue is full life-size and stands, with the
pedestal, thirteen and a half feet high. The poet is
represented in the garb worn during his first winter
in Edinburgh when he wore the livery of Charles
Fox, blue coat with brass buttons, yellow buckskin,
and top boots. He is supposed to be reciting the
poem of a "Winter's Night" to a company assembled
at the Duchess of Gordon's house in the Scottish
Capital. The attitude is taken from Hardy's
centennial picture, now in the possession of Mrs.
Barr Smith, of Adelaide.

I have noted that the statue by Frederick Pomeroy in the Sydney Domain shows the poet with rather dainty shoes even though he is standing at the plough. The Adelaide statue correctly shows the boots he favoured, even when mixing with the cognoscenti of Edinburgh.
The Angaston marble used for the statue is found in South Australia.*
The sculptor, Mr. W. J. Maxwell, was born in
Scotland, and took his degree in the School of Arts,
London. One of the last works he was engaged
upon in England was the restoration of the enrichments
of Westminster Abbey. Going to Australia
in search of health, he executed the architectural
adornments of all the public buildings in Adelaide,
besides many in Sydney and Melbourne. The Adelaide
"Burns" was the first public statue which he
chiselled, but before leaving Scotland, he prepared
a model of the poet which gained the silver medal
at Kilmarnock. The Adelaide statue impresses the
spectator with a sense of both strength and grace.

Mr. W.J. Maxwell was an interesting figure: he did other work in Adelaide and also worked on St. Mary's Cathedral in Sydney but has no entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography. He is, however still remembered in Scotland. A short biography appears at Glasgow - City of Sculpture, from which it appears that he also designed and built a "mock castle" named Woodlands Park at Edwardstown SA. It's not everyone who lives in a castle of their own construction, and it's a pity that Maxwell's has gone, and that we don't know more about his life and personality.
The restoration I mentioned began in 2002 when it was reported that:
The Adelaide City Council says the 107-year-old statue needs substantial repairs including work to reassemble its left arm and to stabilise cracks.
A missing finger also needs to be remodelled.
Pictures of the work on the left arm are at Artlab.
I don't know if the finger was remodelled - but it isn't there now.

( * information from audio by Joanna Barr at ArtLab.)

A MIDSUMMER NIGHTS DREAM Opera Australia 2010

2010-02-26T16:39:00.002+11:00

Opera Australia has revived Baz Luhrmann's 1993 production of Britten's AMidsummer Night's Dream. Tempus fugit. It's hard to imagine that I first saw this show almost 20 years ago.
It was absolutely magical. Magic has a lot to do with first impressions as Shakespeare's play itself shows, so it's not surprising that the sense of wonder created by the first performance fades a little the more you see it, but it remains an excellent production. I am interested to explore why this is so: the removal of the action from ancient Athens to a bandstand in an India ruled by George V, is a substantial change, but it hardly seems to matter at all.

When W.H.Auden came to The Merry Wives of Windsor in his lecture series on Shakespeare's plays given in New York in 1947 he said:

"The Merry Wives of Windsor is a very dull play indeed. We can be grateful for it having been written, because it provided the occasion for Verdi's Falstaff, a very great operatic masterpiece. Mr. Page, Shallow, Slender, and The Host disappear. I have nothing to say about Shakespeare's play, so let's hear Verdi."

Britten's Dream is also a very great operatic masterpiece, but we can't dismiss its source so abruptly. Britten and Peter Pears collaborated on the libretto. They edited the text of the play so as to reduce it by about half but they made very few alterations to the words.

However, their excisions alter the balance of the play. Act I Scene 1 set in the Palace of Theseus almost entirely deleted and Scene 2 is deferred, so that the opera begins with the chords which are so evocative of the deepening night, and the entrance of the fairies. The fairies are a new character: they replace a single fairy who doesn't have much to say and appropriate many of Puck's lines as well. Britten had a precedent. Verdi did the same thing when he transformed the witches in Macbeth into a chorus.

I haven't counted the lines but I suspect that most of what Oberon, Titania, Puck and now the fairies have to say is retained from the play. But it's not only this, and their placement at the beginning of the opera which gives them much more prominence; Britten has given much of the most memorable music to Oberon from
"I know a bank where the wild thyme blows... ", and
"Be it on lion or bear or wolf or bull ..." to the wonderful concluding music which sets
"Now, until the break of day...".
It was a masterstroke to give this music to a countertenor.
In his lectures, Auden says that in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Shakespeare: "..mythalogically anthropomorphises nature, making nature like man.." so that "..mythological characters are used to describe certain universal experiences which we cannot control." In other words, the fairy characters animate nature and personify the psychological forces which influence the behaviour of the lovers. By giving this aspect of the play greater prominence, Britten has shifted our focus from the human drama to the mysterious forces at work in the wood.

I don't know anything about Hindu religion, but it seems to me that by giving the fairy characters an Indian persona Baz Luhrmann has found in a polytheist, or perhaps animist, religion a good analogy with Britten's version of the play. It fits the music perfectly even if we don't take into account the way in which much of the movement has been carefully choreographed to fit the score. The whole concept enhances the work and does not, as happens too often, attempt to substitute some half thought out idea of the director for the genius of the piece being performed.

There are a couple of references to India in Shakespeare's text which were probably the jumping off point for the Indian setting, but in themselves these would have been insufficient basis for it. References to Athens are retained and are superficially inappropriate, but because the idea as a whole is in harmony with the way the opera works, although they intrude a little, they don't grate.

The set, which places the orchestra in the bandstand on the stage and extends the acting area at the front is also helpful. It replicates the thrust stage, copying the theatres of Shakespeare's time, which has returned to use in the modern theatre.

One reason the production works so well for us is that it is modern in this sense. It's modernity also reflects Britten. His mysterious and sensual score is very different from Mendelssohn's familiar incidental music which sounds trivial by comparison. Mendelssohn's music was, it seems to me, perfectly in accord with the way in which the nineteenth century saw A Midsummer Night's Dream. Arthur Rackham and W. Heath Robinson both produced illustrated editions of the play. They retain classical antiquity as the setting, but the characters are pure fantasy.

W. Heath Robinson

Arthur Rackham

The artists might have seen the play as a delicate and finely worked out farce, amusing but lacking substance. Similarly, in the nineteenth century theatre, Shakespeare's plays were produced with emphasis on costume and pageantry, with, I suspect, a loss of some human interaction and urgency, even in comedy. Although Britten has altered Shakespeare's emphasis, the dark and mysterious forces of nature were always there.

As the opening scene in the palace of Theseus is excised, the relationships between Demetrius and Helena and Lysander and Hermia and their position in relation to Theseus are not as clear as they might be, and the production makes an attempt to overcome this problem by staging some mime between these characters before the music begins. As the scene is brief and without words, it cannot reproduce pages of missing text, but it is another example of the way in the production is faithful to both the opera and the play.

There is usually much more in a production than can be taken in, unless you see the performance a number of times and pay close attention. And when a show is revived more than once, the director may well make changes, which can play with memories of earlier times. For example, I don't remember seeing the removal of Oberon's finger nails ( or are they fingers), before. When Oberon first appears his hands are more like claws, with long spiky nails. Later on, when his mood has improved, and he is about to be re united with Titania these are removed leaving him with hands of normal proportions. This represents the substantial change which occurs once Oberon has his own way and takes possession of the changeling boy from Titania.

What are we to think of Oberon when we first see him in vengeful mood ? I would have thought he was more scheming and mischievous than malicious, but I found another opinion in Kobbe's opera book. The article by Lord Harewood on the opera quotes David Drew, writing of the first performance in the New Statesman:

"Whether intended or not Britten's Oberon is a more grimly effective horror than the Peter Quint who called from the Tower and had no Puck to help him." Peter Quint, who appears in Britten's Turn of the Screw is a wholly malevolent character who hardly needs a Puck to help ( though he has help of a different order from Miss Jessel.) Apart from Britten's use of the celesta in the accompaniment of both characters, I find nothing in common between them. The music creates an atmosphere of mystery, even unease, but it is hard to find evil personified in the remarkable settings of the verse which I have mentioned.

Even assuming Oberon's falling out with Titania is malicious, his intervention in the lovers' affairs is at worst mischievous, even though it goes wrong at first. Then, as the fingernail removal shows, he becomes quite a benign figure, and his singing of "Now until the break of day", is a dramatic and musical resolution of the whole piece.
In the current OA production Oberon is effectively portrayed by Tobias Cole, who I was lucky enough to hear a couple of years ago singing Orpheus on Orpheus Island as part of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music.

Tobias Cole and Marshall McGuire on Orpheus Island (July 2006)

He also sang the title role in Handel's Julius Caesar to great effect.

The role of Titiania suited Rachelle Durkin's voice perfectly. The cast was uniformly excellent. The overall quality of the singing at Opera Australia seems to get better year by year.

When I first saw this production long ago in 1993, it seemed that the appearance of the rustics in military uniform was an affectionate tribute to the television comedy It Ain't Half Hot Mum. That show is so lost in the past that it took me a while to remember the probable reference to it; and when I checked I found that its production run ended about ten years before this Dream was first seen. I think most people still remembered it then however.

There is an excellent summary of the musical techniques used in the opera in Michael Kennedy's book on Britten in the Master Musicians series. He describes the music for the play performed by the rustics as:" (an) extended, affectionate and musically very witty commentary on the conventions of the Donizetti type of Italian opera.." and suggests that:

"Provided the singers do not overplay it, it is a scene that yields fresh delights at each renewal." Those delights are denied us here, as the play is performed as broad farce. It's amusing, but it would be interesting to see a performance in which the music did more of the work.

After the play, the lovers gather for a group photograph taken by a bellows camera with a magnesium flash. This is a fairly early example of this cliché in recent opera productions around the world.

Charles Bell Birch

2010-02-12T16:46:00.009+11:00

from The London Illustrated News, 21 October 1893

This all began in Townsville in August. I was there for the Australian Festival of Chamber Music and after hearing a concert which included various pieces by Argentinean composer Astor Piazzolla it was only to be expected that I would find a message from Argentina on my laptop, and there it was:

Hi !

I was wondering if you have more pictures of this:

"Art Nouveau fountain by C.B. Birch surmounted with a bronze statue of a young girl with a heron and reeds and frogs at the base"

That´s an awesome fountain and it would be great if you could upload more images.

Thank you!

Esteban

Esteban was referring to this photo which I had taken in the Sydney Botanical Gardens the year before:

The description attached to the photo came from The Royal Botanical Gardens website.

I found that Esteban was from Córdoba, Argentina; and provoked by his interest decided to re visit the statue on my return to Sydney.

The fountain, said to be one of the last remaining drinking fountains in Sydney, was erected as a memorial to the businessman and politician Lewis Wolfe Levy, who was born in London in 1815 and came to Australia in 1840. He had an active and successful business career, was twice elected to the Legislative Assembly and was later appointed to the Legislative Council. He died in 1885: according to the Australian Dictionary of Biography, "Although self-made, plain spoken and occasionally short tempered, he was widely respected and sincerely mourned".

There is a more detailed description of the fountain in the excellent Poetry of Place by Edwin Wilson, which catalogues and describes all of the statues in the gardens and the Domain. The bronze statue of a water nymph with a heron and surrounding reeds and frogs is the work of Charles Bell Birch, the English sculptor who is discussed here. The statue was erected in 1889 having been cast at a foundry at Thames Ditton in England.

I don't think "Art Nouveau" is a misdescription of the style: it looks that way to me, but it would make Birch a very early exponent of Nouveau. The Maison de l'Art Nouveau in Paris opened in 1895, and the movement itself is given the dates 1890 - 1905. The Arts and Crafts movement in England is often cited as a source of Art Nouveau and Birch would surely have been exposed to the movement, but his other work and the little I have discovered about him do not suggest a relationship.

I have found that Birch is a neglected artist in the neglected genre of Victorian sculpture. From one point of view the lack of interest in this field is hard to understand. The cities of Britain, and the old Empire, including Australia, are decorated with statues and sculptures from the nineteenth century made by artists in whom little interest remains. The works are seen by millions of people every day but the artists are unknown.

There are a few references to Charles Birch in more general books and on the web, but no biography I can locate and no article in wikipedia as yet. There is, however, an article in the Dictionary of National Biography.

He was born in Brixton in 1832, the son of Jonathan Birch, an author with the unrealised ambition of becoming a sculptor himself. While still a youth, Charles Birch travelled to Germany where he studied at Kurfürstliche Akademie der Künste and with the German sculptors Ludwig Wichmann and Christian Rauch. It is suggested that: " his style was more or less set by his training in Berlin, with what has been described as 'a naturalistic veneer upon a classical foundation'." I would need to know much more about the German style of the period to assess this view, but the works which I have seen don't seem to embody any one particular style.

Birch returned to Britain in 1852, and entered the Royal Academy Schools. Then in 1859 he became principal assistant to John Henry Foley and remained in that position until Foley's death in 1874.

He had his first great success in 1864 when the Art Union of London awarded him a premium (meaning, I think, a prize for acquisition) of 600 pounds for "A Wood Nymph", which was shown in Vienna, Philadelphia and Paris. There is an image of this work here: although a nymph, this one seems quite different from the water nymph seen in the Levy fountain.

Birch sculpted " realistic and vigorous " or Boy's Own - depending on your approach- military sculptures. He made The Last Call in 1879:

from The London Illustrated News, 21 October 1893

and Walter Hamilton VC "striding over an Afghan threatening him with a knife " in bronze-painted plaster in 1880.

These works have a recognisable style of their own, which looks to me quite different from either nymph.

The success of Hamilton VC resulted in Birch being elected an associate of the Royal Academy in April of 1880.

Birch was at the height of his fame in that year, in which, what must be his most often seen work, the griffin on the Temple Bar Memorial in London was erected.

from The London Illustrated News, 21 October 1893

The Temple Bar Memorial which replaced the old Temple Bar was a controversial project at the time. The Temple Bar itself was removed because it had become an obstruction to traffic, but the new memorial was seen as another, if lesser, obstruction in itself. The DNB calls Birch's sculpture " the unfortunate bronze griffin", but I would like to think that at least some of the criticism of it which is reported confuses opposition to the structure itself with a dislike of the griffin.

Phillip Ward Jackson in Public Sculpture of The City of London notes that when the memorial was opened by Prince Leopold in September 1880, with Birch in attendance, The Times reported that "...a crowd stationed within the new Law Courts groaned throughout the brief ceremony".

Ward Jackson also records that a critic in the Builder commended the "vigour and power" of the griffin while the Architect said that " the artistic courage and strength of will manifested in this magnificently ungainly object are prodigious ". There was no unanimity however: Building News stated:

"...Let the First Commissioner of Works seize the opportunity and draw (Queen Victoria's) attention to that wretched object the Griffin. If Her Majesty does not counsel its immediate removal, she has lost the unerring perception of truth and beauty which have distinguished her reign".

And Darke's The Monument Guide to England reports that the griffin has been likened to " an animated corkscrew ".

But it has guarded the entrance to the city for almost 130 years.

Charles Birch is often said to be an exponent of The New Sculpture, understood to be a movement towards greater naturalism in later Victorian sculpture. The critic Edmond Gosse used the term in articles written in the 1890's. Frederick Leighton's Athlete Wrestling with a Python of 1877 is seen as the key work in the movement.

Two copies of this work are presently displayed in the Art Gallery of New South Wales.

Not far from them is Charles Birch's Retaliation made in 1888 and exhibited at the Sydney International Exhibition in 1879 where it won the award of "First Degree of Merit Special".

It can be seen in this photograph from the Art Galley archives taken in 1881:

And again in 1885 in the new gallery:

It didn't remain in fashion however and in 1958, it was sold to the Botanical Gardens, where it was placed in the pathway through the Palm Grove. It was not undisturbed: in 1961 a truck collided with the statue requiring repairs to its marble base. Then in about 1977, the Art Gallery had second thoughts and arranged to take it back as a swap for The Satyr by Frank Lynch now in the Gardens near the Opera House gates.

It is quite likely that Retaliation was influenced by the Athlete Wrestling but as it was completed only a year later, it would not be possible to say this with certainty without more information. It is a work of high drama, the naked shepherd, (note the crook), appears to have wrung the neck of the bird of prey responsible for the death of the lamb lying at his feet.

Perhaps it was the success of this work which led to Birch's commission to make the Levy fountain. But if he drew the inspiration for Retribution from Leighton, what was the source of the bronze statue of a young girl with a heron and reeds and frogs at the base on the Levy Memorial Fountain ?

Birch died in 1893. A full page tribute was published in The London Illustrated News including the images reproduced above. The article was as follows:

THE LATE MR. C. B. BIRCH, A.R.A.

The death of Mr. Charles Bell Birch, the well-known sculptor, removes an interesting and prominent figure from the world of art. Mr. Birch died on Monday Oct. 1, at the age of sixty-one, having been born in Brixton in 1832. For many years he was a student of the Berlin Royal Academy.

It was in Berlin, in 1852, that he produced his first important work, a bust of the late Earl of Westmorland, at that time Ambassador to Prussia. On his return to England Mr. Birch entered the studio of the late Mr. Foley R.A., where for ten years he acted as principal assistant ; in 1864 he was the successful competitor at an Art Union competition, where his subject, " The Wood Nymph," carried -off the prize of £600. For many years Mr. Birch was acting as a wood-engraver, and much of his work may be seen in the pages of this Journal, as well as in other publications. His equestrian group, " The Last Call," exhibited at the Royal Academy, which is here reproduced, was the proximate cause of his election to the Associateship of the Royal Academy in 1880. It is, perhaps, by the work which we reproduce here, the famous Griffin, which looks down upon us from the site of Temple Bar, that Mr. Birch is most widely known to the public, although a mere list of his statues -would make a formidable catalogue. At a later period he devoted himself to producing statues for public buildings in this country and the colonies, and many of these were marked by considerable vigour and massiveness. In his more imaginative work amongst which must be included the silver statuettes and race cups for which he received frequent commissions, he allowed his fancy fuller play, but as a rule his work suffered from the constant pressure under which it was produced.

Towards the end of his life, Birch made a statue of Queen Victoria, of which a number of casts were made. The first was made for Udaipur in India and was erected there in 1889. After Birch's death a cast of it was erected on the northern approach to Blackfriars Bridge in London. It was unveiled by the Queen's cousin, the Duke of Cambridge, on 21 July 1896. The duke regretted the sculptor had not survived to see his work erected there.
I looked for it in November 2009, but did not see it. I assumed it had been moved to a place of safety during the renovation works being done in and around Blackfriars Station.

Another example was given to the City of Adelaide by Sir Edwin Smith MLC and erected there in 1894. It stands in Victoria Square where I saw it in March 2010.

*************
Posted 12 February 2010

Amended 23 February 2010 to add illustrations and quotation from The London Illustrated News

Amended 10 March 2010 to add Queen Victoria in Adelaide

TOSCA 2010

2010-01-11T14:52:00.001+11:00

Opera Australia has opened its 2010 season with a new production of Puccini's Tosca. There was some fine singing from a wholly committed cast, but it's a production I hope never to see again. American soprano Tekesha Meske Kizart gave strong performance as Tosca; specially, as in her visse d'arte, when unimpeded by the director's concept.

I first saw Tosca in 1953, and thought I might qualify for some kind of record until, while listening to the opening night of the Met's 2009 Tosca online, I learned that Licia Albanese who sang the role at the Met in 1950 was in the audience. In any event, I have known Tosca for more than half the life of the work, and heard it many times.

It's true that Puccini wrote memorable tunes, but there is a lot more to his music. He often creates not only atmosphere and mood, but also a sense of place. For example, in Il Trittico: contrast the music opening Il Tabarro depicting the barges on the Seine complete with fog horns, and the entirely different music for the convent garden in Soeur Angelica. The music of Tosca is very much tied to the historical settings: the Te Deum in Sant'Andrea della Valle and the sound of the church bells at the opening of Act 3. I discovered from an article in the OA program that Puccini went to the top of the Castel St. Angelo to hear the bells and ensure he had their pitch right.

In April last year I stood at the ramparts of the Castel St. Angelo, looking out over Rome when church bells began to ring. It wasn't dawn, but it was extraordinarily moving to be reminded of the music of Tosca in the place where Act 3 is set.

The new production by Christopher Alden for Opera Australia places the story in a single room, and moves the story to present day Italy. The intention is to heighten the immediacy of the drama, but it is a bold step to excise so completely the locations movingly represented in the music. Nothing a particular production does can destroy a work, which remains intact to be performed again in another style; classic plays are cut and altered often to excellent effect, throwing new light on the familiar. Notwithstanding the advent of directors' opera, the continuity provided by the music makes it impossible to cut and amend the text in the way which has become commonplace for Shakespeare and other classic plays. Some works appear in different versions of course and some can be and are cut, but the music is a constraint. I think that in Tosca, the music is more than a constraint on adaption; its suggestions of place, character and atmosphere are the reason the opera continues to be performed over 100 years since it was composed. The play by Sardou, on which Tosca is based, is not in demand.

Christopher Alden's production, though new to Australia, was first performed by Opera North in 2002, and has been revived there since. English critics liked it; which makes an interesting comparison with the reception given by both critics and the opening night audience to the much less radical new production by Luc Bondy for the Met in New York.

Writing in The Independent in 2002, Anthony Arblaster, who admits he thinks Tosca is a "nasty melodrama", said:

Alden sets the opera in contemporary Italy, and treats it as a lesson in the habitual ruthlessness and casual brutality of modern state power. This involves taking a few liberties with the narrative (sic), but the gain is that the story is dragged out of the comfortable never-never land of Late Romanticism and placed in our time, when torture and murder are the stock- in-trade of many states. The results are suitably shocking.

And Richard Morrison, writing about the 2008 revival in The Times enjoyed a compelling night in the theatre.

while recognising that:

...the American takes brazen liberties with the time, place and plot of Puccini’s 1900 thriller. And sometimes he seems perversely determined to subvert the music’s power as well.

Writing in The Guardian, Mr. Alden himself says:

The posters for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party that line the walls of the dingy church basement in which this Tosca is set rob the audience of the comforting thought that Scarpia's repressive despotism has vanished from our world.

These days many opera directors are anxious to rob us of these kinds of comforting thoughts: but who thinks them? I have never met anybody under the delusion that repressive despotism has vanished; anyone suffering from it would need to live in comfortable isolation from all the media, even Berlusconi's media. At the risk of turning moraliser myself, it is not accurate or sensible to equate the Berlusconi government and Scarpia's despotism.

The single purpose set is a large room, apparently attached to a church though with some very large klieg lights hanging from the ceiling. Though not a usual ecclesiastical fitting, they are useful if the room is wanted for an interrogation. There is a confessional box in the back and glassed in alcove with a television set, probably tuned to a Berlusconi channel, in the front.

Though I was puzzled about how the Te Deum would be performed in such a utilitarian space, things were promising to start with. The sacristan's conversion into a surly janitor was a nice change from the familiar comic turn, and Tosca's display of jealousy and suspicion was particularly effective. Then a strange thing happened, the escaped prisoner, Angelloti, emerged from the confessional which served as the private chapel where he hides, and sat in a chair to the side of the stage. Strange because the score includes music to show his stress and anxiety as he leaves the chapel, but this music comes after Tosca has left.

Tosca does not see him as she leaves ( understandably in one sense, as in the opera as written he is not there ) which makes no dramatic sense. Later, in Act 2, Scarpia's henchmen Spoletta and Sciarrone are left in the back of the room oblivious to the seduction and murder taking place a few feet away. This kind of thing is a distraction from the drama, unless you are intrigued by working on something akin to a cryptic crossword puzzle while watching the performance. It must be a STATEMENT of some kind, but what ? It could just be the usual post modernist device of leaving actors sitting about the stage so that we don't forget we are in a theatre; but my best guess about this one is that it somehow stands for a proposition resembling evil is everywhere but we do not see it even when it's before our very eyes. Bravo.

Scarpia's entrance in Act I of Tosca is, I think, the most spine chilling moment in all of opera. Puccini breaks into the games of the choir boys and sacristan with an ominous statement of Scarpia's theme. Here, the possibilities of this moment are lost, as Scarpia has already wandered into the room by the time this music is reached.

I think that the portrayal of Scarpia in this production is wrong. It is true that Scarpia, as written, is a sterotypical villain out of melodrama; but this has not prevented great performances of the role which provide alarming insights into the nature of lust and despotic power. This Scarpia escapes one set of stereotypes and enters another: he is seen as a pathological figure whose lust is accompanied by a frenzied religious guilt.

This cannot be the Scarpia who sings:

I lust, and what I lust for I pursue,
I take my fill and throw it away
Then turn to a new attraction.
God created an abundance of beauties and wines
I want to savour all that I can of God's creation !

This passage and its music do not stand with the characterisation imposed on Scarpia, and as John Wegner performed it with great force and effect, he seemed to step out of himself and into the shoes of the real Scarpia.

The enactment of the Te Deum which ends Act 1, is associated with the distribution of lotto tickets from the sacristan's alcove. Why, I cannot imagine.

Act 2 and 3 are run together. The introduction to Act 3 is sung by the Marchesse Attavanti, rather than the shepherd boy as specified. The Marchesse had taken up a position on top of the confessional box where she reacts to the action with various gestures, assumes a foetal position and so on. The only consolation for this was the opportunity to hear Sian Pendry, who has a lovely voice, even when singing music which only emphasised the limits of what was going on.

Act 3 would have been wholly inexplicable, as almost all of the narrative is replaced by one which has no relation to the libretto or the music, had I not found Mr. Alden's Guardian article, in which he explains:

And when it comes to the last act, the production rejects the naturalistic verismo ethic as the best way to capture its bleak horror; instead, it is played out as a fantasy unfolding in the broken Tosca's demented mind. By the final curtain, the basement is littered with the corpses and the atmosphere hovers somewhere between Beckett and Tarantino.

Consistently with this approach, Tosca spends the whole of the Act cowering at the side of the confessional box. This is not a performance of Tosca at all. It is an invention riding on the coat tails of Puccini's magnificent score.

The AO production replaces one by John Copley which has had many revivals. It was a production which owed a great deal to Franco Zeffirelli's Tosca at the Met which was replaced by the new Luc Bondy production I have mentioned. Unlike the Zeffirelli and Copely productions, the new Met Tosca doesn't attempt to reproduce the historical locations of each act, but it does retain them. The church, palace and ramparts are replaced by nondescript sets and the costumes do not reproduce the dress of the historical period - or any particular period. The new Tosca was met by uproar on opening night and great objection from traditionalists - and Mr. Zeffirelli.

When I saw it in October, I was unable to understand the commotion. It was true that visually the historical locales were lost; but what was seen did not depart in any radical way from the story or the music. There was a gripping performance of the title role by the wonderful Katia Matilla. It is now available for everyone to see on the excellent Met Player - though the video production seems overly dark, and a lot of the movement in Act 3 is much harder to see than it was in the theatre.

It seemed to me that, although something was lost by making the locations anonymous, the production did gain a feeling of contemporary relevance of the kind Mr. Alden was attempting to achieve. I wondered if a few subtle changes to the libretto could place the work in, say, Franco's Spain to good effect.

But it was not only the first night crowd wrenched from their familiar pretty scenery that objected.

Alex Ross wrote in the New Yorker that Bondy:

...delivered an uneven, muddled, weirdly dull production that interferes fatally with the working of Puccini’s perfect contraption.

And in The New York Times, Anthony Tommasini:

Mr. Bondy probably wanted to rid his “Tosca” of stock clichés, yet his heavy-handed ideas are just as hackneyed.

When sensitive and experienced critics express views like these, it's worth pausing to consider the intricate relationship between words, music and dramatic narrative that give opera its place in our imagination. There cannot be innovation without mistakes, but the OA Tosca, for all its superficial excitement and excellent singing, goes too far in the wrong direction.

Burj Dubai

2010-01-04T07:52:00.001+11:00

Today is the official opening of Burj Dubai, the world's tallest building. There seems no doubt that it is the tallest; and its actual height will be revealed at the opening. The Times says it is the first time the Arab world has claimed the title of the world’s tallest building since 1311, when Lincoln Cathedral exceeded the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza. It also reports that it cost a billion pounds, somewhat less than the ABC news claim that the tower and surrounding development has cost about $22 billion to build.

In March 2009, when I spent a day in Dubai, the building was, I think, structurally complete and dominated the city skyline.

The architecture of Dubai is entirely modern; but the evocative sound of the call to prayer from any number of mosques as the night fell told that we were in a different world.

The thistle under the plaid

2010-01-02T19:33:00.001+11:00

I have written here previously about the statue of Robert Burns by Frederick Pomeroy in the Sydney Domain. Now, thanks to the wonders of the Internet I have discovered some more of its history. A short time after the statue was erected, Edward Goodwillie published his book The World's Memorials of Robert Burns in Detroit, Michigan. Lacking the Internet he gathered information about the statues and memorials from correspondents all over the world. His information about the statue in Sydney came from Mr. James Muir, a much-traveled, well-read Scot, one of the greatest students of Burns in Australia, if not in the world.

The text of his book and a pdf file version are available.

SYDNEY, NEW SOUTH WALES. Sydney, the oldest city in Australia and the Capital of what is now the State of New South Wales, has an elaborate memorial to Burns in its picturesque "Domain." The desire amongst the leal-hearted Scots of this beautiful city of hills and harbors to erect a memorial of some kind to the Bard of Scotia, existed for many years as an aspiration, and slowly but surely gathered strength towards practical realization. A few enthusiastic spirits banded themselves together in the early nineties, pledging each other to eat haggis on the 25th of January and to collect funds for a Burns statue during the remainder of the year. They designated themselves the "Burns Monument Committee," and for some years went joyously on their way. Finally, however, they determined to take more aggressive steps, and in 1898 they appealed to the Highland Society of New South Wales to take up the work. The latter cordially assented and accepted the collected funds, amounting to some fifty-five pounds, as a nucleus, at the same time shouldering the responsibility to erect a Burns statue.

...

In furtherance of the cause, Mr. Muir published an excellently written brochure, entitled "An Australian Appreciation of Robert Burns' which did much to forward the movement for the statue. This committee was backed up financially by the Caledonian Societies in New South Wales and also by thousands of private subscribers of varying amounts ; and as a result of their incessant labors they were able to unveil, on the 30th January, 1905, to the gaze of an admiring multitude, the beautiful statue in the "Domain."

And here is the origin of the statue:

The Sydney "Domain" memorial of Burns certainly takes first rank amongst those of its class. In general lines the figure follows the Paisley statue, but in some minor details the sculptor, Mr. F. W. Pomeroy, of London, agreeably adopted some suggested alterations made by the Sydney committee.

Mr. Goodwillie's book discusses the Paisley statue as well:

It is the work of a London sculptor, Mr. F. W. Pomeroy, whose design was chosen on the recommendation of Sir Thomas Brock, the Royal Academician, sculptor of the National Memorial to Queen Victoria in London, and knighted by King George on the occasion of its dedication, May, 1911. The poet is represented clad in the costume of the period tail coat, knee breeches and broad Kilmarnock bonnet leaning on an old Scottish plough. In his right hand, which rests on the plough, is a pencil, and in his left a note book. The attitude is contemplative. The statue proper is of bronze, ten feet high, and with the pedestal twenty-two feet. The pedestal is of gray granite, and has one panel of aluminum in front, representing "Tam o' Shanter" crossing the Brig o' Doon chased by the witches.

Elsewhere, we learn that Frederick Pomeroy, who had already contributed some sculpted panels to a building in Paisley, won a competition with his design of the Burns sculpture. This is the Paisley version:

Apart from the chain attached to the plough, which does not appear in the Sydney version, I have not yet found the minor details in which the sculptor agreeably adopted some suggested alterations made by the Sydney committee; although the pedestal, (the design of Mr. J. W. Manson of Sydney, who acted as honorary architect, is of granite and is somewhat different from the commonplace style so widely adopted for similar statues, and surely harmonizes with the strong, rough, natural genius of the poet ) lacks the Tam o' Shanter aluminium panel attached to the Paisley statue.

Edward Pinnington, a contemporary art critic said of the Paisley statue:

"F. W. Pomeroy wisely abandoned precedent and convention without roughly defying prevailing views of physical likeness. Burns looks every inch a man; somewhat ponderous, perhaps, across the loins for agility, but muscular, broad and strong. An ample plaid lends the burly peasant all the grace he needs, and, falling over the plough at the back, partly hides a thistle. The emblem is not obtruded, because the sculptor wishes the poet to be seen as the Poet of Humanity first, and as that of Scotland afterwards. Mr. Pomeroy tried for something original and he succeeded. In his Burns he has portrayed the thinker and poet of boundless potentiality, without neglecting the toil-bent worker or the athlete. Capable as a work of art, the statue is endowed with a life-like vigor and picturesque grace which ensure its acceptance."

I hadn't thought to look at the back of the Domain statue before reading this, but if you doubted plaid could be represented in bronze - there it is:

And the thistle too :

New Zealand has one as well - in 1921, a replica of the Paisley statue was unveiled in Auckland.

THE CASTLE

2009-11-08T06:15:00.001+11:00

Bluebeard’s Castle is a one-act opera by Bela Bartok to a libretto by Béla Balázs . It is a version of an old story which has appeared in many forms. Judith abandons her family and fiancé and accompanies Bluebeard to his castle, although she is aware of many rumours about Bluebeard, his castle, and the fate of his former wives. The hall of the castle is dark and has seven locked doors. With varying degrees of reluctance, Bluebeard agrees to Judith’s requests to open the doors and let in the light. Behind the doors are found: Bluebeard’s torture chamber; his armory; his treasure house; his garden; his vast kingdom; a pool of tears; and behind the seventh door his three wives. Although, much blood has been found behind the doors, the wives, notwithstanding rumour, are alive and at the conclusion, Judith is obliged to join them as the fourth wife. There is a review of the work in Wikipedia.

The story can be read as a creepy gothic romance, or a metaphor for Judith’s desire to open the doors to Bluebeard’s mind; it can be interpreted in Freudian terms (if you like that kind of thing) and so on.

I first saw Bluebeard’s Castle at the Washington National Opera in 2006, in a production by the film director, William Friedkin (who made The Exorcist ) which was first seen in Los Angeles. Samuel Ramey was Bluebeard and Denyce Graves, Judith. It was an elegant, abstract production in which Bluebeard and Judith approached the castle in a gondola with birds swooping over their heads. The seven doors were seen to open at the rear of the stage letting in light of various colours. The production was very effective and allowed the imagination to roam over the possible readings or meanings of the work. I was left with the feeling that it was an opera which emaphasised the wonderful orchestral score over the singers, and this may have been influenced by the production itself to some extent. The orchestral score is a great piece in itself – (there are echoes of it in Bartok’s later Concerto for Orchestra).

I have mentioned this production because, while I enjoyed the new production of Bluebeard by the English National Opera at the London Coliseum, I was very glad that it was not my introduction to the work.

The new production was directed by Daniel Kramer with ENO musical director Edward Gardner conducting. Clive Bayley is Bluebeard and Michaela Martens, Judith.

The ENO production confines the story to particular reading, some parts of which were obscure to me. The castle is reduced to a room, which appears at times to be below street level. Bluebeard is depicted as a psychotic with a tendency to revert to childhood fantasy; for example, his armoury contains a castle made of toy blocks and a ride-on canon on wheels. He sometimes moves in an odd jerky way, which I suppose is intended to represent his appalling mental condition. Clive Bayley has a fine voice and sung the role very well. He may have been even better if allowed to sing unimpeded by some of the strange bodily contortions the characterisation required.

The greatest departure from a traditional account of the work was that Bluebeard’s kingdom revealed at the opening of the fifth door was not a vast estate, but children who emerged from bunk beds at the back of the stage, stood from time to time in order of height, and were united with their mothers when the wives emerged from behind the final door. While this did some violence to the original conception, it is an interesting approach as it seems possible, even likely, that Bluebeard’s household included children. Like the location of the “castle” in a cellar, the children may also be a reference to recent cases of the abduction or imprisonment of women, which are mentioned in a program note.

There is a violent conclusion in which it appears the wives including Judith are subjected to genital mutilation by a sword wielding Bluebeard. Apart from theatrical shock value, I did not understand this and am unable to see how it fits with the overall concept of the production. Both the music and the impetus of the story seem to lie better with the realisation that Judith’s fate is to join the other wives in their joyless imprisonment.

Michaela Martens Judith was well acted and marvelously sung. Her character seemed to develop with the story as the intensity of her demands for the doors to open increased with the bloodstains which eventually covered her dress.

The orchestra too was excellent. There was a specially exciting moment at the opening of the fifth door when it was augmented by an additional brass section in a upper box and the luminous sound of Bartok’s music for Bluebeard’s kingdom filled the theatre.

Unlike some “director’s opera” this production does not impose anything foreign to the work itself. It is one of many possible readings of the story, but a very limited one. By approaching the work in this way, the director closes out other readings and to some extent at least extinguishes the ambiguities which make it such a fascinating opera.

In Washington, Bluebeard’s Castle was followed by Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. This combination is faulted by Edward Gardner in an ENO program note, but I thought it worked very well. The change of tone is welcome, and it gives the baritone the opportunity to sing two entirely different roles on the one night. The Washington production carried some scenic elements (stylised birds for example) from Bluebeard to Schicchi with amusing effect.

At ENO it was a night of serious modernism: Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring was performed by Fabulous Beast Dance Theatre as the second half of the program. I know nothing about ballet or dance, I can only say I enjoyed it.

Duke Bluebeard's Castle and The Rite of Spring. English National Opera at the London Coliseum,
6 November 2009

Amazing

2009-11-01T01:52:00.001+11:00

I became interested in Nicolas Hawksmoor and his London churches in April this year when I saw the Lion and Unicorn gamboling around the tower of St. George’s Bloomsbury and looked into their history. I visited each of the six churches in May; but I only saw St. Mary Woolnoth from the outside as it was closed on the Bank Holiday of my visit. I had only known of the church from its appearance in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land:

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,
And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.
Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,
To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours
With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.

And I wanted to hear if it indeed kept the hours. It was approaching 2 p.m. and I waited near the clock for the hour, but no sound was heard. I wondered if Eliot’s line was an obscure joke of some kind, or if the clock struck, but only some of the time.

I returned to the church in late October and found it open. The clock was set at 12, indicating that it was not in working order. But inside the church I was surprised to find a clock mechanism and pendulum in a glass case inscribed with the passage from The Waste Land. Perhaps this was the clock that kept the hours but I couldn’t find anything about its history.

A young man was arranging a display of Christmas Cards for sale in the porch and I asked him what he knew.

“Sorry, I only started here yesterday.”

And “The Reverend’s away until Monday”.

The Waste Land is not the only verse associated with the church. There is a memorial on the wall for John Newton, author of the words to Amazing Grace.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

According to the Wikipedia article on this hymn, it only began to be sung to the tune associated with its modern popularity in the twentieth century, the tune first appearing in 1829; and if this is correct Newton was blessed by never having to endure it himself.

It’s an unusual combination of associations: an eighteenth century evangelical hymn and probably the best known modernist poem in English.

When I find out more about the final stroke of nine I will add it here.

COSI FAN TUTTE

2009-09-18T11:25:00.001+10:00

Opera Australia has opened a new production of Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte directed by Jim Sharman. "It's not in an airport lounge this time" a I heard someone explain to her companion " though that is a good setting as they are soldiers going to war". I fear this was a confusion with the recent production of Abduction from the Seraglio; but it shows the risk a company runs locating shows where they don't belong.

This production is located in a Japanese wedding: "I don't understand why the bride is there", someone else remarked. The program notes don't explain it either, but I will try.

It's not a Shinto wedding with the bride and groom staring at the camera from their ancient costumes, but one of those weddings that happen on Guam or at the glass walled Crystal Wedding Chapel in Port Douglas. The popularity of these ceremonies is one of the mysteries Japan presents to outsiders. The tradition behind the elaborate dressing up, chauffer driven limousines and wedding formalities seems completely detached from the participants but they find great enjoyment in it nevertheless.

The plot of Cosi, is famously absurd. The much adored fiancés of two sisters are shipped off to fight a war at short notice, but return immediately so convincingly disguised as Albanians that each is able to seduce the other's girlfriend. It's best seen as a fantasy, and this production successfully creates one by staging the opera as an entertainment performed at the Japanese wedding. ( If Mozart had known of this scheme he would have allowed a little more time for setting the scene, I think.)

So we have a comedy wrapped in a fantasy inside a daydream, or something like that. Anyway, this device works as a way of overcoming the inherent improbability of the plot and oddly enough makes many of the incidents and interactions more believable and intense than might be possible in a production which attempts realism. Admittedly, the OA production which this replaces did involve the idea of a performance, but it didn't realise it nearly as well.

There is also an irony involved in a story of deception and romantic betrayal told in the framework of an idealised, if fanciful, wedding ritual.

There is a deep, mainly white, single purpose set, which seemed a little too big at times for a work which has only a small chorus and many scenes with only one or two participants. It does, however allow for a lot of movement, and this enlivens a piece which is potentially too static. The liveliness is reflected in the marvellous, frequently changed, brightly coloured costumes. The exuberantly coloured camouflaged greatcoats would maybe provide some cover in sideshow alley, but nowhere else.

It goes without saying that without the music, this story would be of little interest. But too much can be, and is made of it. I don't think we enjoy it because it demonstrates "profound human truths"; or as an embodiment of Enlightenment thought. The story gives Mozart many opportunities, and the score incorporates a remarkable range of moods, situations and colour. It's magic because it can't be conveyed in words, but the best description I have found is the Cosi chapter of David Cairns' Mozart and His Operas.

In some recordings, the youthful exuberance and emotion of Cosi is lost because the singers, however excellent, sound too old. In this production, Opera Australia has found a cast of young but sufficiently experienced artists who sing well individually and blend together so well in the ensemble pieces.

I enjoyed all the performances: Jose Carbo is an active Don Alfonso, more cynic than philosopher. Tiffany Speight as Despina takes advantage of the scope offered in this production to give a more interesting performance than was possible in the 2006 production by Victorian Opera which only just became airborne.

Henry Choo has sung major roles with OA for some years, beginning as a light tenor in productions of Elixir of Love and Lakme. I had some concerns that as he moved to more dramatic roles he could be progressing too fast for the development of his voice, but he was perfect here; more convincing than his Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni only a year ago.

Rachelle Durkin is a wonderful artist and her portrayal of Fiordiligi ranged from girlish delight to intense emotion. This combination was most convincing. Older singers can bring dramatic intensity but can't be very convincing in the lighter moments.

Sian Pendry, Dorabella , and Shane Lowrencev, Guglielmo, are both singers who have emerged in stages from the OA chorus. Last year I mentioned Sian Pendry's fine performance in the MSO Flying Dutchman concert and this performance confirmed my opinion. It is difficult to judge the quality of singers in minor roles. Their ability and potential must be clear to the music staff and management when they are first selected, but the audience must wait for the opportunity for their talent to fully emerge in performance.

I was surprised how suited Shane Lowrencev was to a lyric role as he has been cast more as traditional bass, most recently as Polyphemus in Acis and Galatea, a part more suited to an older and more resonant bass baritone. It was a pleasure to hear him in full flight for the first time.

Saved from Oblivion

2009-09-10T07:15:00.002+10:00

I visited the church or St Bartholomew the Great on bank holiday in May for no particular reason. The church has a long history going back to twelfth century. What remains is only part of the original structure. Large parts of the building were demolished on the dissolution of the monasteries in the sixteenth century and other parts were substantially altered and given over to secular use. The original Lady Chapel was bricked off, altered and became an ordinary house, before being further subdivided. Part of it became the printing works where Benjamin Franklin worked in 1725, and then a lace fringe factory. It was restored as a chapel in 1896.

The current state of the building recalls what could be its original appearance with thick Norman columns and walls of stone blocks.

I took some photographs of monuments on the walls there and gave them no further thought. The pictures were not particularly interesting images and I was about to discard them when I discovered British History Online, and excellent site containing digitised versions of historical documents, records and books including The records of St. Bartholomew's priory [and] St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield: volume 2 Year (1921) by E.A Webb. This appears to be a very thorough review of historical records relating to the church; and it includes material about the monuments I photographed in May.

As far as I can tell from internet searching, none of the people for whom the memorials were erected was of any significance in history. We know of them by the pure chance that someone decided to erect a substantial memorial, and that the memorial has remained in a church whose fabric has been changed in the intervening years. Webb records that some of them have been moved from different locations in the church. I imagine there have been others lacking their decorative interest which have been removed and lost.

Monument to Percival and Agnes Smallpace

The Latin portion of the above inscription may be thus translated:

All welfare is vain.

Remember that death will not be long in coming and that the covenant of the grave hath been showed unto thee for the covenant of this world is 'He shall die the death'. All things come forth at their due season and pass away.

Judge none blessed before his death since it is in his sons that the man is known.

Percival Smalpace Esquire died the 2nd day of February A. D. 1558 in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. His body lies buried near this monument.

Agnes his wife and daughter of John Tebowld Esquire died the 3rd day of September A. D. 1588 in the reign of Elizabeth. Her body lies buried near this monument.

Their children Michael and Thomas are still living and in affectionate memory of their most excellent parents have erected this monument.

To the dying man all things become peaceful;

blessed are they who die in the Lord.

Posterity will award to each his due distinction. Be wise and adopt with reverence this precept: Thy life is of no account for thee, enrol thyself in the full service of the true God: proffer to Him prayers from thy heart, and express thy praise and thanksgiving. To this end was a man born. And, O! very far more steadfast is a faith which repentance renews. There are no parochial records of Percival Smalpace. From his will (fn. 8) we learn that he was one of the clerks of the Board of Green Cloth. The monument was restored by Mr. Gilbert J. Smallpiece in 1897.
The Board of Green Cloth, named for the covering of the board table, audited Royal accounts and made travel arrangements; athough its functions changed it continued until 2004.

Sir Robert Chamberlayne's Monument

In English: To Robert Chamberlayne, son of Robert by the institution of the pious happy and ever August James, of Great Britain France and Ireland, made a knight of the most noble order of the Bath; lord of the castle of Sherburn in the county of Oxford, descended by a long line of ancestors from the most ancient Earls of Tankerville in Normandy. Fit for any fortune, however great, born with an intellect and an equally great character, whilst cherishing these for himself and his own people, he also travelled many foreign countries, skilled in their habits and languages. Eventually he reverently approached the Holy Land and the Sepulchre of our Lord, and found also (alas) his own (sepulchre) of what kind or on what shore is unknown, dying in the year of the Virgin Birth 1615. A bachelor, far from his own people he perished by the inclemency of the weather or of man between (as far as can be guessed) Tripoli and Cyprus. A sorrowing friend, mindful of so sweet and old a companionship and unequal to support so great a grief and loss erected this (monument) (to a well deserving friend). He lived about 30 years.

He is covered by heaven though he has no tomb.

I wonder if he travelled for his own amusement; or whether he was a government agent of some kind; he was knighted by James I. And I don't know if pilgrimages to the Holy Land were common in the seventeenth century. I seems as if he went missing at sea between Tripoli and Cyprus; the "inclemency...of man" could refer to piracy which was common particularly off the African Coast. From 1609 to 1616, England lost 466 merchant ships to Barbary pirates.

And who was the sorrowing friend?

James Rivers

Within this hollow vault here rests the frame
Of that high soul wch. late inform'd the same
Torne from the service of the state in 's prime
By a disease malignant as the time
Who's life and death design'd no other end
Than to serve God his country and his friend;
Who when ambition rytanny and pride
Conquer'd the age, conquer'd himself and dy'd.
Here lyeth the Body of James Rivers Esq. (Sonne
and Heir of John Rivers of Chafford (fn. 59) in the County of Kent (Baront) who married Charity Dautr and Cohers of Sr. John Shurly, of Isfield in the Couy of Suss'x, Who died June the 8th 1641.

We learn from the parish registers that he was buried on the 9th June, the day after his death, 'out of the house of W. Freake Esq. the close side' from which, and from the fact that we find no other record of him in connexion with the parish, we assume that he was staying in the Close with a friend at the time and was not resident here. He probably died of the plague as did Sir George Hastings three weeks later. His great-grandfather, Sir John Rivers, Knight, of Chafford, was Lord Mayor of London in 1573. His father, Sir George Rivers, was made a Baronet in 1621 and was still living when his son died.

The monument was formerly on the south side of the quire on the spandrel over a circular pillar, from whence it was moved during the restoration of 1864 because it cut into the arch mouldings. It was at some period covered with black pitch, which was removed in the year 1912 when the inscription was re-written at the request and charge of a descendant, Mrs. Rivers-Moore.

At the moment, I have no idea why this and the next monument were, at some stage, covered in black pitch.

Edward Cooke, 1652.

A marble monument (covered with black pitch) in the south ambulatory on the west side of the entrance to the south chapel.

It can be seen that the black pitch has now been removed from this monument also.

Unsluce yor briny floods, what! can yee keepe
Yor eyes from teares and see the marble weepe,
Burst out for shame: or if yee find noe vent
For teares, yet stay, and see the stones relent.

The tablet is made of a stone which readily condenses the water from the air in damp weather; before the hot-water pipes were placed below drops would often be seen condensed upon it.

In English: Here lies interred all that is mortal of a truly reverend man, Edward Cooke, an exceedingly learned Philosopher as well as a very notable man of medicine, who, on the third of the ides (the 11th) of August A. D. 1652, and in the 39th year of his age, yielded perforce to nature in the sure hope of a resurrection.

Edward Cooke is described in the Parish Register in the record of his burial on the 14th of August 1652 as 'Doctor of Physick'. Otherwise his name does not occur in the parish records. His father, also Edward Cooke, occurs in the charter of the Society of Apothecaries, of which he was a Fellow in 1617.

Formerly this monument was on the opposite side of the south ambulatory, where it filled one of the stilted arches at the south-east corner of 'Purgatory'. The restoration of the apse necessitated its removal in 1864.

All of the italicised passages above come from 'Monuments, memorials and heraldry', The records of St. Bartholomew's priory [and] St. Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield: volume 2 (1921), pp. 449-487.

Kusama Addition

2009-09-06T20:26:00.001+10:00

I have added to last year's entry on Yayoi Kusama and the revised page is here:
http://wandering-ninox.blogspot.com/2008/05/narcissus-garden.html

Fellows at St. James

2009-09-05T11:29:00.002+10:00

The Sydney Symphony fellowship program provides opportunities for aspiring orchestral players to be part of the orchestra, and take part in performances and further education designed to assist them in their careers. It's part of what I recently heard described as the "academisation" of the beginnings of a career in music. There have been great changes.

Charles Mackerras was appointed second oboe of then ABC Sydney Orchestra at the age of 17, and by 19 was principal. Earlier, Neville Amadio joined the 2FC Broadcasting Orchestra at 15, and was principal flute of the ABC Orchestra by the time he was 21.

More recently, it was not uncommon for conservatorium graduates to obtain orchestral positions on graduation. Now it is much more competitive.

This year, David Papp, who was a member of the fellowship program in 2008, became the orchestra's youngest member, at the age of 24, when he was appointed second oboe.

Each year the fellows give chamber music concerts at St. James King Street; and I heard one of the best so far on 2 September.

There are all kinds of pitfalls in writing about concerts. The Daily Telegraph reports that the pianist and musical critic David Money, who died on July 17 aged 97, " liked to include positive remarks, but occasionally he was reduced to referring to 'a well-balanced program'."

When I read this, I was about to write enthusiastically about the program at this concert, which was very well balanced, and very well performed at well.

The first item was Mozart's Horn Quintet K407, scored for two violas, violin, cello and horn. As the excellent program note says, the scoring for two violas lends a warmer sound which complements the sound of the horn. The horn part, which is really like the solo in a concerto, was beautifully played by Alex Love. The fellowship string players were joined by Roger Benedict, SSO principal viola and artistic director of the fellowship program.

Next came Debussy's Sonata for flute, viola and harp. There is not, as yet, a harp player among the fellows, so the ensemble was joined by the fine player Owen Torr, for the this and the next item. As part declaration of interest and part excuse to wander, I should mention that a few years ago Mr. Torr, was my daughter's harp teacher.

This all began in the tropical warmth of the Sunday market at Port Douglas where we heard the delightful playing of a young man with a small harp. We asked where the harp had been made.

In due course I travelled to the Atherton tableland where I found the maker, surrounded by harps of various sizes in the course of manufacture. He was from the United States and had, I think, found American society uncongenial and exiled himself to the wilderness outside Mareeba. As well as the harps, he had a large aviary full of cockatiels. For those with the skills to do it, working with wood must be a very satisfying occupation, particularly when making something as attractive as the harp.

We soon learned that, attractive as they were, these harps were not concert harps, but ours was still fine for a beginner to use for practice.

Although I hadn't played it recently, I have a old vinyl LP including Debussy's Sonata played by William Schegler, Flute, Fritz Ruff, Viola and Helga Storck, Harp. I found that the piece, or parts of it at least, were recorded in my mind as a result.

I thought fellowship flautist, Lina Andonovska, played with great subtlety and variation. The first movement, Pastorale, seems to echo some of the cadences of Debussy's preludes while evoking the atmosphere of the jungle as depicted by his contemporary Heni Rousseu. Did Debussy have the tropical warmth of the Snake Charmer in mind, I wonder. Ms. Androvska played this with a marvellous smoky, lugubrious tone which was exactly right.

The mood changes in the second movement, Interlude, which does in fact provide an interlude between the more distinctive outer movements, giving Ms. Andononvska the opportunity to play with a brighter timbre.

The Finale is a reminder that we are in the musical world of the early twentieth century, with an edgy dialogue between the flute and viola, well played by Charlotte Burbrook de Vere.

Next we heard the Elegiac Trio of Arnold Bax, written for the same instruments at about the same time. Bax was about 20 years younger than Debussy, but his Trio lacks the modernist feeling of Debussy's Sonata. It was most interesting to be able to hear the two works together in the same program.

I heard the Trio as recently as 6 August at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, in the distinctly less elegiac setting of Jupiters Casino Ballroom. It wouldn't often have been played by finer musicians: Lorna McGhee (flute), David Harding (viola) and Sebastien Lipmann (harp), but I found, hearing it again, that the piece itself had made little impression, unlike the Debussy I recalled from a recording heard years ago.

The concert ended with a performance of the sextet from Capriccio by Richard Strauss. The sextet is so full of associations for those who have heard and loved the opera that it's difficult to talk about in isolation. It is similar to Debussy's Sonata, having contrasting passages of calm and agitation; the agitation in this case reflecting the anxious mood of the competing artists of the opera. The excellent acoustic of the church suited the string playing very well.

Perfectly balanced.

*****
For my notes on an earlier Fellowship concert:

http://wandering-ninox.blogspot.com/2007/09/st-james-church-sydney-symphony.html

Ethics in Edinburgh

2009-08-31T18:08:00.004+10:00

The ABC has a program called The Philosopher's Zone which is often worth hearing. A couple of weeks ago there was a discussion on the morality of ethicists. Apparently, they steal library books.

I learned about ethics from Professor Alan Stout (whose childhood was spent in St. Andrews and who taught at Edinburgh before moving to Sydney). He talked quite a lot about honesty as an important factor in personal relations and social cohesion. I can't begin to imagine that he had any library book that was as long as a day overdue.

One of the speakers on the Philosophers' Zone was Eric Scwitzgabel from the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, who said:

I'd had a number of philosophers tell me anecdotally when I first started thinking about moral behaviour of ethics professors that they'd noticed that ethics books were more likely to be missing from academic libraries. So I decided to test that empirically. So what I did was, I looked at the library holdings in philosophy at I think it was about 31 leading academic libraries in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and compared the rates at which ethics books were missing, compared to non-ethics books in philosophy that were comparable in age and popularity.

So what it turned out was across the spectrum, ethics books were more likely to be missing.

There was no reason to suspect that this was a hoax of some kind; but there must be some limits to empirical testing. So just in case it's just a fiction, I note here that I have entertained the possibility.

The project had a theoretical element as well:

Yes, I guess there are two versions of that hypothesis. One would be a lot of professors go into ethics because they maybe don't have the same intuitive gut moral sense that other people have, and so they have to compensate for that by thinking rationally about things, than a lot of people would respond to much more naturally. Now I don't know if that's true or not. If it is true it would be nice if we could think of a way to measure that.

It was a coincidence that, shortly after hearing this, I came across Isabel Dalhousie. She is fictional. She edits the Review of Applied Ethics and is the protagonist of the Sunday Philosophy Club novels by Alexander McCall Smith. I had been looking for something set in Edinburgh to read. I knew about Ian Rankin, but after looking at a few pages of an Inspector Rebus novel in a shop decided it was not what I was after. Isabel sounded promising so I looked for her in the bookshop at Cammeray which had only the second book of the series, Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, which I bought and took to read while eating lunch in the adjoining Simmone Logue cafe. The only table available was in the window looking out onto Miller Street and the expressway entrance.

I mention this because there is an interesting tic or repetition in the story telling, it is that Isabel and her friends are seated by the window of any cafe or restaurant they enter.

While it is true that I bought the book to reminisce about Edinburgh, it was a shock to find that it opens with a character making his annual visit to the grave of the poet Robert Fergusson in the Canongate kirkyard. A grave I had visited as recently as 13 May last.

When Robert Burns visited Edinburgh in 1787, he found that Fergusson had been buried in an unmarked grave. He commissioned the gravestone which we can now see there. The architect engaged to make it, named Robert Burn, took two years to erect it . Burns, accordingly, took a further two years to pay for it. He said:

"Considering that the money was due by one Poet for putting a tombstone over another, he may, with grateful surprise, thank Heaven that he ever saw a farthing of it."

Robert Louis Stevenson was concerned about the condition of the grave as he found it, and intended to restore it, but I don't think he did. I tried to find out more by chatting to the gentleman on duty in the front porch of the church.

" Ah, Jamie Fergusson" he said.

Not a promising start. He did have a copy of a guidebook to the graves of Edinburgh but this said nothing of Stevenson's plan.

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate was probably written before the statue of Fergusson by David Annand was placed outside the Canongate Kirk in October, 2004, as one guide books puts it, striding away from his grave. It is a very moving tribute to an energetic poet who died at the age of only 24 in 1774 .

Auld Reikie, wale o' ilka toun
That Scotland kens beneath the Moon;
Where couthy chiels at e'ening meet
Their bizzing craigs and mous to weet;
And blythly gar auld Care gae bye
Wi' blinkit and wi' bleering eye:
Owr lang frae thee the Muse has been
Sae frisky on the simmer's green...

Isabel Dalhousie is not only an ethicist. She is a music lover and makes large anonymous donations to Scottish Opera. She has an adverse opinion of the lists of donors which appear in theatre and concert programs.

Almost as soon as she is introduced to the narrative she is off to a concert at Queens Hall. It is explained that it was once a kirk, hence the high straight backs on the seats to ensure that members of the congregation assumed a correct posture. She avoids these seats and seeks out the more modern chairs placed in the centre.

I didn't know the history of the hall or the nature of the seats when I arranged to hear a concert there last December. I had heard the violinist Jack Liebeck at the Townsville chamber music festival and thought it something of a coincidence that he was playing in Edinburgh at the time of my visit. I was accompanied by a group of impecunious students; and not being aware of Isabel's views, we found ourselves in a neat row in the same posture improving seats which had earned Isabel's disapproval.

The concert was given by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, (also mentioned in the novel) and included Points of View a new work by Scottish composer Thea Musgrave, who was interviewed before the performance.

She mentioned a dream she had in the 1960's in which orchestral players stood in their places and challenged the conductor. This gave her the idea of requiring players with a solo passage to stand while playing.

The orchestra also played a concerto grosso by Handel and Mozart's Haffner symphony. Jack Liebeck was the soloist in the recent violin concerto of Magnus Lindberg. This is an exciting piece which I have heard again on CD with Lisa Batiashvili accompanied by the Finish Radio Symphony. There are some reminders of the Sibelius concerto in the work I think: maybe just a feeling of the vast icy wastes of Scandinavia. Looking for some confirmation of this, I found the program note mentions "a momentary echo of Sibelius, perhaps," towards the end of the concerto.

Jack Liebeck is a violinist whose playing of more romantic pieces has an intense emotional edge which only a few can achieve; and though I was disappointed not to hear a work which might have allowed this to emerge, I was grateful for the introduction to Magnus Lindberg's concerto.

I'm pleased Isabel Dalhousie wasn't there. She is an ethicist, as I mentioned, and takes ethics very seriously. From time to time she is motivated by a sense of ethical duty to take action. It seems to me that this motivation arises somewhat at random, but when it does, analysis and duty force Isabel to intrude. Never mind that the objects of interest are bereaved families - there are two of these in the book - her duty must be done.

I am reminded of Mrs Jellyby, though in her case chaos at home resulted from her preoccupation with distant good works. Noel Coward wrote a story called The Kindness of Mrs. Radcliffe, concerning a woman whose smothering helpfulness led to disaster in every case, and I am sure there are others.

Isabel is also inclined to make remarks which would have better been left unsaid, leading to complications in her private life. She is not an attractive figure.

So I wonder if Alexander McCall Smith had heard of the missing library books. Isabel seems to lack " the same intuitive gut moral sense that other people have " and could have become an ethicist for this reason. Where others act out of empathy, she constructs a moral rule and proceeds without regard to the consequences for her victims.

If you can stomach this kind of thing, Lovers, Friends, Chocolate is an enjoyable book to read, particularly if you want to reminisce about Edinburgh.

My other reservation is that the plot turns on coincidences.

Postscript
16 February 2010

Last week Alexander McCall Smith himself appeared on The Philosophers Zone and talked about Isabel.

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/stories/2010/2814063.htm

Quite contrary to what I have said about her, he seemed to agree that she was "nice":

Alan Saunders: This is an interesting aspect of her character. You're very good I think as a writer at creating nice people like Isabel and Precious who are still interesting, which is quite a difficult task for a writer I think. And part of what makes Isabel a nice person is something that you've already alluded to, the fact that she gets drawn into other people's lives, because she thinks that they have a moral claim on her.

Alexander McCall Smith: Yes, that is something which I find very interesting, and I suspect that most of us think about that problem from time to time. We think about it if we're walking along the street, and let's say we see a beggar, or somebody asks us for something. ...

Dear Isabel - I have no moral claim on you.

***

Jack Liebeck's CD on Sony, which is also on iTunes.
http://www.amazon.com/Violin-Concerto-Sonata-Sonatina-Liebeck/dp/B0024RA2LO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1251705825&sr=8-1

Magnus Lindberg and Sibelius

http://www.amazon.com/Sibelius-Lindberg-Violin-Concertos-Magnus/dp/B000SNUMFC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=music&qid=1251706054&sr=1-1

Burns Pomeroy Lawson MacDairmid

2009-08-15T15:17:00.010+10:00

There are statues of Robert Burns all over the world, and we have one in The Domain. The sculpture is by Frederick Pomeroy (1856 - 1924), who also contributed four of the eight statues on Vauxhall Bridge in London.

Agriculture

Architecture
The Burns statue dates from 1905; and adopts the legend of the heaven taught ploughman, who leans on a large plough holding a small pen, or perhaps the stylus he used to inscribe verse on window panes.

He seems over dressed for ploughing and wears a Tam o' Shanter (rather than his farmer's hat) in tribute to his eponymous hero.
When Burns went to Edinburgh for the first time in 1786 , he adopted the persona of a rustic bard, attracting comment by wearing his farmer's boots everywhere. Pomeroy missed an opportunity by giving this statue less robust footware.

Australia's own bard, Henry Lawson, saw the statue unveiled and published this in The Bulletin:

Grown tired of mourning for my sins—
And brooding over merits—
The other night with aching heart
I went amongst the spirits;
And I met one that I knew well:
“O Scotty’s Ghost! is that you?
And did you see the fearsome crowd
At Bobbie Burns’s statue?
“They hurried up in hansom cabs,
Tall-hatted and frock-coated;
They trained it in from all the towns,
The weird and hairy-throated;
They spoke in some outlandish tongue,
They cut some comic capers,
And ilka man was wild to get
His name in all the papers.

“They showed no sign of intellect,
Those frauds who rushed before us;
They knew one verse of ‘Auld Lang Syne’—
The first one and the chorus.
They clacked the clack o’ Scotlan’’s Bard,
They glibly talked of ‘Rabby’;
But what if he had come to them
Without a groat and shabby?

“They drank and wept for Rabbie’s sake,
They stood and brayed like asses
(The living bard’s a drunken rake—
The dead one loved the lasses);
If Bobbie Burns were here, they’d sit
As still as any mouse is;
If Bobbie Bums should come their way,
They’d turn him out their houses.

“O weep for bonny Scotland’s Bard!
And praise the Scottish nation,
Who made him spy and let him die
Heart-broken in privation:
Exciseman, so that he might live
Through northern winters’ rigours—
Just as in southern lands they give
The hard-up rhymer figures.

“We need some songs of stinging fun
To wake the States and light ’em;
I wish a man like Robert Burns
Were here to-day to write ’em!
But still the mockery shall survive
Till Day o’ Judgement crashes—
The men we scorn when we’re alive
With praise insult our ashes.”

And Scotty’s Ghost said: “Never mind
The fleas that you inherit;
The living bard can flick ’em off—
They cannot hurt his spirit.
The crawlers round the poet’s name
Shall crawl through all the ages;
His work’s the living thing, and they
Are fly-dirt on the pages.”

If, like Lawson, you identify with the writer and the poetry, it's easy to dismiss the statues and the myth out of hand. But these emerged from the poetry, or some of it, as well and are interesting in themselves.

Lawson anticipated the thoughts of Scotland's 20th century bard Hugh MacDairmid (Christopher Murray Grieve 1892-1978) who wrote of:

"The world wide attention devoted today ( at least once a year) to the mere man and his uninteresting love affairs and the ramifications of the genealogies of his acquaintances and the poor bric-a-brac of his lars and penates and the witless lucubrations of the hordes of bourgeois "orators" who annually befoul his memory by the expression of sentiments utterly antipathetic to that stupendous element in him which ensures his immortality."
"The Burns Cult" reprinted in At the sign of the Thistle at 168
Compare Lawson (above):

We need some songs of stinging fun
To wake the States and light ’em;
I wish a man like Robert Burns
Were here to-day to write ’em!
But still the mockery shall survive
Till Day o’ Judgement crashes—
The men we scorn when we’re alive
With praise insult our ashes.”

And MacDairmid (A Drunk Man Looks at The Thistle):

Rabbie, wad'st thou wert here - the warld hath need,
And Scotland mair sae, o' the likes o' thee!
The whisky that aince moved your lyre's become
A laxative for a' loquacity.
I found the details of the statue and the poem by Lawson in an excellent guide book to the Royal Botanic Gardens, The Domain, and Centennial Park Sydney: Poetry of Place by Edwin Wilson.

For a further page on the Burns statue click here

Ethical Culture

2008-12-05T02:40:00.004+11:00

J. Robert Oppenheimer the subject of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, which I saw at the Met earlier in November, attended school at the Society for Ethical Culture, so it was appropriate that the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center was performing there during the renovations of Alice Tully Hall. I heard one of a program of four concerts given under the title “Night Fantasies”. It was lucky I didn’t chose the first concert on November 20 as this was cancelled following a small fire in the basement. I walked past that night and saw the fire trucks and concert goers milling about, but didn’t learn the concert had been cancelled and rescheduled until an announcement at the beginning of the concert on November 21. They had to extend the hire of some percussion which was on the stage on Friday but not used.

The seating in the hall is in two levels in a semi circular formation around a low stage.
Above the stage is an inscription:

"The Place Where People Meet to Seek the Highest is Holy Ground"

The acoustics were good as well. The program ingeniously included three fairly short works with a numerous short movements. The principal artists were the Pacifica String Quartet, which I was interested to hear as I recently purchased their CD of two of the string quartets of Eliot Carter, which I plan to use, if time permits, to see if listening to Carter as a stream of consciousness, (an idea discussed by David Robertson in his recent Stuart Challenger lecture) helps at all with this difficult music.

The performance I heard on 21 November demonstrated the quartet’s great commitment to and understanding of contemporary music.

The program opened with a performance of Gyorgy Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 “Metamorphoses nocturnes”. My interest in Ligeti’s music was enlivened this year by a performance of his horn trio at the AFCM Townsville, but a CD I bought of this trio disappointed.

The String Quartet No.1 is about 20 minutes long and divided into 12 movements which are very short accordingly. They are fragments really. Each is different; and some of them had the same intense rhythmic drive I admired in the horn trio.

Next was another work of 20 minutes duration: Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) for Electric String Quartet by George Crumb.

My only previous encounter with Crumb’s music was a performance of Vox Balaenae (Voice of the Whale) (1971), for electric flute, electric cello, and amplified piano at the AFCM a couple of years ago. The musicians wore masks for that (I don’t know if the masks are required by the score). It was notable for the excellent whale song imitations of the amplified cello which were quite moving (suggesting that Alan Hovhaness went to unnecessary trouble in incorporating recordings of real whale song in And God Created Great Whales).

If I count correctly there are 13 movements in this work. I have seen the Kronos Quartet play with electronics attached to their instruments but in this concert the amplification seemed to be done by individual microphones on stands. There was more to it than amplification however. The members of the quartet also played tuned drinking glasses set up on stands behind them, struck gongs and sang or vocalised. There was also an intriguing passage in which the players bowed the neck of their instruments, yielding an early music viol effect.

13 movements in 20 minutes with such a variety of effects was certainly interesting if hectic, and I haven’t mentioned the references to “Death and the Maiden” and other works which I was unable to hear. I would describe the piece as interesting and fun but the composer had much deeper thoughts. “The numerous quasi – programmatic allusions in the work are therefore symbolic, although the essential polarity – God versus Devil – implies more than a purely metaphysical reality” is just part of a long note by the composer. Fortunately the music is not as ponderous.

After intermission the quartet was joined by soprano Claron Mc Fadden in a performance of Lyric Suite for String Quartet with Soprano by Alban Berg, which was also full of interest but which I will need to hear again before being able to comment.

The programmer recognised that there can be too much of a good thing, I think, and abandoned stark modernism to conclude the concert with the charming Chanson perpetuelle for Soprano and Piano ( Gilbert Kalish) Quartet by Ernest Chausson.

Bach Penderecki Beethoven

2008-12-02T00:31:00.002+11:00

I haven’t heard much of the music of Krzysztof Penderecki. In 1973 I was greatly impressed by his opera The Devils of Loudun at the ENO in which Geoffrey Chard gave a memorable performance as Urbain Grandier. But that is a long time ago now. So to the New York Phiharmonic which performed his Concerto No. 2 for cello and orchestra directed by Lorin Maazel with Alisa Weilerstein as soloist.
The concerto begins with a long orchestral introduction which is loud and of ominous intent. It would be disrespectful to suggest that the work should be named 50 ways to feel really anxious. The strings make sounds like air raid sirens; there are bursts of staccato playing from trumpets and eerie bells and gongs.
The cello part which weaves in and out of this background was marvelously played by Ms. Weilerstein. It left me with the impression that it was a fascinating cello sonata trying to escape from the orchestra.

It would not be unfair to say that the program for this concert was strange. Prior to the Cello Concerto we heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 6, performed by two violas, two violas de gamba, cello, bass and harpsichord: the ensemble for which it was written. The unusual feature of the performance was that Mr. Maazel appeared to conduct it. I wasn’t the only person to think this was odd - the Times music critic mentioned it. I have enjoyed the performances of Brandenburg concertos which have ended Bach night at the AFCM Townsville in which ensembles of similar size have played the works with a vigour which makes the pieces sound as if improvised. There was no chance of that here under the conductor’s steady beat; but there was a lovely sound from the unusual combination of low strings.

After intermission there was an excellent performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The people next to me said they had heard it before and left at intermission. I may lack their sophistication but I stayed to the end.

New York Philharmonic, Avery Fisher Hall, 20 November 2008.

MADAM BUTTERFLY

2008-11-25T02:33:00.003+11:00

I am now familiar with the Met’s production of Madam Butterfly having seen it in the two previous seasons and I wrote about it here last year. The performance was overshadowed by the death of its director, Anthony Minghella, in March this year. Like Baz Luhrmann, he was able to create an opera production which was both undeniably modern and true to the spirit of the work at the same time.
This Madam Butterfly is well paced, visually exciting and was again beautifully sung. The first time I saw it I was entranced by the Chilean soprano Christina Gallarda-Domas in the title role, and she returns in 2009, but on this occasion Patricia Racette was a fine Butterfly. Pinkerton was Italian tenor Marcello Giordani, in for Robert Aronica, who was ill. Mr. Giordani is here to sing Faust in The Damnation of Faust. He not only added Pinkerton but also sang both roles in the one day on Saturday when I saw his Faust at the matinee. The New York Times which, in happy contrast to papers I can think of, provides an interesting coverage of what goes on here, reported this and added:

In a statement, Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, said, “Marcello Giordani is a wonderful artist but also the iron man of tenors.”

The Act 1 duet was excellent, but I would have liked more real remorse from him at the end; but iron men probably don’t cry.

Sharpless, the consul was Dwayne Croft. I think there is more in the character than he was able to find. Suzuki was sung, as last year, and the year before by Maria Zifchak. It comes as no surprise that she is asked to return as she is perfect in the role.

Patrick Summers, a regular visitor to Opera Australia, conducted the Met orchestra. It was a very lyrical performance, downplaying the melodrama, but complementing the design and flow of the production perfectly.

The 826th Metropolitan Opera Performance of Madama Butterfly, Wednesday 19 November 2008 at 8pm.

Love for Three Oranges

2008-11-23T04:03:00.003+11:00

I’m sure if you stay in New York long enough everything in the world will come to you. Last week the Kirov Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre St. Petersburg was here playing a series of concerts devoted to the works of Prokofiev, and on Sunday I saw their concert performance of The Love for Three Oranges, a favorite of mine, which I saw a number of times in Opera Australia’s recent production of the English translation by Tom Stoppard.

I was excited to find that my seat purchased over the internet months ago in row D was in the front row. And more so when I discovered that the row of chairs set up in front of the orchestra would not be used by the singers sitting in a row. Although a concert performance with no scenery or props – apart from a clip on bow tie which became the beautiful ribbon which entrances the ferocious cook who keeps the three oranges in her kitchen – the singers performed without music and acted their parts using the whole width of the stage. Having an uninterrupted and close view I could see that all of them were completely absorbed in their performances, and they all sang marvelously as well. The orchestra was conducted by its director the amazingly disheveled Valery Gergiev who occasionally stepped back from his music stand to direct groups of the singers from their midst.

I don’t think I have ever seen a program or artist’s biography which reveals the age of a singer, but it was clear from appearances and the years in which all the members of this cast had graduated or won prizes that they were all young and would be surprised if any of them was older than say 35.

Alexei Tanovitski caused a little confusion at the outset as he sang both the King of Clubs and the Herald, but the Herald was soon gone and it was clear who he was. Though he is young his bass was reminiscent of the deep Russian bass singers familiar from Orthodox liturgical music. Bass baritones are usually solidly built, so Pavel Shimanovich who sang Celio came as a surprise. His voice did not have the liturgical growl of the King of Spades, but he was a fine bass baritone though short and slight.

There are too many characters in Love for Three Oranges for me to list them all: they all sang well. Though the Tom Stoppard translation used by OA was very witty in itself and a highlight of that production, there is nothing like hearing it sung in Russian by Russians. The unique sounds of the language belong with the music and the whole effect, together with the excellent orchestra and chorus was overwhelming.

Love for Three Oranges is both a fairy tale and an ironic commentary on theatrical traditions. It shows that you can have great Opera about nothing of importance, at least which can be described in words. As a composition, it is perfect. There is not a note too many, and the music is a perfect compliment to the story and the text, especially with the sound of Russian voices.

Prokofiev, Love for Three Oranges, Kirov Orchestra and Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre, Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, Sunday 16 November 2008, 3pm.

La Traviata

2008-11-23T02:59:00.004+11:00

Last year I wrote here about the Franco Zeffirelli production of La Traviata at the Met, and I saw it again, with a different cast, this year. There are so many variables in any performance, including the mood and state of mind of the listener (me) that it’s not easy to judge after an interval of a year why I found the production so much more engaging this time. Last year I seemed irritated by the ballroom scene, Act II scene 2, in a way which surprised me when I re read my comments. This time the whole production seemed to flow seamlessly maybe on account of the lack of surprise in some of the scenic effects.

Violetta was sung by German soprano Anja Harteros, who was very strong and whose performance I enjoyed more that that of Renee Fleming last year. Alfredo Germont was Massimo Giordano, from Italy, who looked youthful and sang well. Last year I wrote about my reevaluation of Giorgo Germont who for many years I wrongly characterized as the most boring person in all of opera. In fact, his dialogue with Violetta in Act II Scene 1 can be fascinating, and the performance of Zeljko Lucic (seen last year as Macbeth at the Met) confirmed this. He began with an outburst, but soon abandoned bluster as he moved through the scene with Violetta. It was a subtle and thoughtful performance. I think it should remain an open question whether his impression of Violetta really affects him emotionally or whether he is a crafty old man determined to get what he wants come what may. If the latter, it adds an interesting twist to his remorse at the end of the opera: a realization that he has been too clever for everyone’s good.

The 951 st production of Verdi's La Traviata at the Metropolitan Opera Saturday 15 November 2008 at 1 pm.

JOHN ADAMS IS BEHIND THAT HEDGE

2008-11-19T04:37:00.001+11:00

I had dinner with some Met supporters and staff before seeing the last performance for the season of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic. Our tables were separated from the restaurant proper by some bushes in tubs. The Met person told us “John Adams is behind that hedge!” You can’t get any closer to a contemporary opera than that.

There should be a strict rule against recording conversations overheard in theatres and buses and I will follow that rule forever more. But what I overheard prior to Doctor Atomic was very odd and was related to the opera as well.

The main curtain used for Doctor Atomic has a large reproduction of the classic periodic table of elements printed on it. A young couple was seated immediately behind me.

Him: “That’s really interesting: it’s the periodic table….hey … there’s palladium…it’s a very interesting metal.
Her: “What about mercury?”
Him: “I’m not a big fan of mercury.”

“Do you see gold – it’s so malleable and such a great conductor of electricity.”

“I see Chlorine, and Fluorine there - I’m not a big fan of those pharmaceutical elements……”

I am a big fan of Doctor Atomic. I was going to write a lot about it, and may still do so, as it has attracted quite a bit of negative criticism much of it wrongheaded.

I was lucky enough to see the first production of the opera in San Francisco in 2005, and was impressed by it then. Many works need more than one hearing before you can assimilate and begin to understand them. However, I left Doctor Atomic in 2005 with a strong overall impression of the work and distinct memories of two arias: Kitty Oppenheimer’s “Am I in Your Light” and the setting of the Donne sonnet “Batter my Heart” for Oppenheimer himself which ends the first act.

The libretto by Peter Sellars has been criticized as an unwieldy kind of amalgam of miscellaneous poetry and contemporary accounts of the bomb test. I think this overlooks the fact that J. Robert Oppenheimer was himself an exuberant polymath who saw himself in terms of the literature he read. Oppenheimer was recorded as quoting the Donne sonnet for example, and it had some particular biographical associations for him. The references to the Trinity and their relation to the naming of the test site are obvious.

Since its first performance in San Francisco the opera has been seen, in versions of the original production in a number of places, and John Adams has revised it as it has moved from one place to the next, but it’s still very much the same piece. It’s a great tribute to the work that the principal singers who appeared in San Francisco are still in it. Gerald Finley has made the role of Dr. Oppenheimer his own and I agree with Met director Peter Gelb that his is one of the great virtuoso performances of the 21st. century. Eric Owens (General Groves ) and Richard Paul Fink ( Edward Teller ) remain in their original roles.

Peter Sellars was producer in San Francisco and beyond but the Met has commissioned a new production from Penny Woolcock, which is not that different from the original. The last act is still dominated by a hovering reproduction of “the gadget” as the bomb built for testing was known. This production uses what seems to be the new operatic cliché: singers in stacked boxes – but notwithstanding this, I think it achieves greater coherence and intensity. As the opera itself has been changed, it wasn’t clear to me how much of the improvement was to the work itself and how much to the production. For example, a much criticized part of the original was the music, dance and mime performed by Kitty Oppenheimer’s maid Pasqualita and other Native Americans. Pretty clearly, this was intended to contrast the relationship between the New Mexico desert and its longtime inhabitants with the terrible explosion to take place at Los Alamos. This was not incongruous and did not involve wallowing in political correctness either. In the original production however this aspect did seem detached from the main thread and included some less than inspiring dance. Now it is a lot more coherent. Pasqualita was beautifully sung by Meredith Arwady, whom I would describe as a contralto and a deep voice at that; I must investigate why the Met doesn’t recognize “contralto”, it only hears “mezzo sopranos”.

Not everything was better, Kitty Oppenheimer’s movements around the bed during “Am I in Your Light”, caused the action to lose touch with the text.

The Met Orchestra was conducted by Alan Gilbert who will take over the New York Philharmonic next season. There can be no better opera orchestra anywhere, and while the San Francisco orchestra was fine, the playing here was extraordinarily good. Apart from the arias and set pieces, the orchestral score is alive with movement, urgency and anticipation and all of this was perfectly realized.

The Act I finale, the setting of “Batter my heart”, was an intensely moving experience. .Gerald Finley is probably more restrained in his movements than when I first saw him sing it, but this was an amazing and even more powerful performance. John Adams’s setting of the poem has been criticized as insufficiently true to the verse, particularly because of the repetition of some lines. First, this is an opera not a song cycle and the original poem cannot be damaged by the way it is used here. Secondly, any critic should hear Britten’s setting of the poem in his “Holy Sonnets of John Donne” which to me sounds frenetic and superficial by comparison. I think the music here would stand in any context.

The score also includes some electronic music and some poignant spoken Japanese text at the end. This means that there is some amplification. I think the singing or some of it is amplified, but I did not find this troubling. I just don’t like amplified sound in opera. Particularly towards the end there was a repeated motif on a tuba or euphonium, a foreboding of doom I suspect, which was just too loud. Perhaps one day there will be a minimalist version of Atomic without electronics or amplification.

Some Russians

2008-11-16T12:45:00.003+11:00

Just like in the movies the traffic on Broadway was at a standstill with horns blasting as I headed out the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday. I then saw the hold up was caused by a demonstration several thousand strong proceeding south on the other side of the street. At first, it was hard to work out what it was about. I saw various banners and signs

LOVE NOT H8

SEPERATE IS NOT EQUAL

I LOVE MY MORMON FAMILY

JESUS LOVES ME AND MY BOYFRIEND

As I walked along, it became clear the procession was a protest about the adoption of Proposition 8 in the referendum which California held on November 4. Others were as mystified as I was about why the demonstration was happening on the upper west side of New York City.

“Proposition 8 is California isn’t it – why are they here?”
“Sympathy I guess”
“Do you think so?”

And one older lady clambering into Avery Fisher Hall, clearly not into IM:

“I don’t get this aitch eight”

Unexpectedly, the clue to the thing was the Mormon sign. There is a large Mormon church opposite Avery Fisher Hall, and it has now become apparent that the Mormons poured millions of dollars into support of Proposition 8. An article in the New York Times today suggests it would not have passed without this support.

The concert was the New York Philharmonic conducted by Andrey Boreyko with Gil Shaham playing the Khachaturian violin concerto.

The concert began with a short tone poem, Kikimora, by the Russian composer Anatoly Lyadov (1855 – 1914). Hello Mr. Melody Man!: the only work of Lyadov I could think of was his A musical snuffbox used as a theme by Lindley Evans on the ABC Childrens Hour so long ago. Kikmora was a pleasant if not very memorable piece which brought Rimsky – Korsakov’s music to mind. (And Lyadov was Rimsky Korsakov’s pupil.) It was interesting to hear it in this program which ended with the 1919 version of Stravisnky’s Firebird Suite, as I realised listening to Kikmora that works like Firebird and Petrushka which struck me as unique inventions when I first heard them had very strong roots in works of this kind. In fact, the program note explains that Diaghilev was a pupil of Lyadov, and wanted him to compose the Firebird score and only turned to Stravinsky when Lyadov failed to “fish or cut bait”. Though I doubt Diaghilev put it that way.

I learn from the Wikipeida that Liadov’s pupils included Prokofiev and Nicolai Malko, another link with the distant past as Dr. Malko was chief conductor of the SSO, and I remember sitting in the organ gallery of the Sydney Town Hall watching him, deathly pale, conducting the orchestra. His appearance was not deceptive as he lived for only a short time after that concert.

Next came the violin concerto. I saw Gil Shaham play here a couple of years ago but was unprepared for this exuberant performance. He smiled broadly at the conductor and then at no one in particular. He crouched, he move around the platform between the conductor and the first violins, often approaching the conductor so closely that he appeared to be playing for him rather than the audience. From where I was seated at the left front he entirely disappeared behind the conductor at times. In the slow movement his facial expression changed to one of ecstatic reverie, .but the gawky broad smile was back for the finale.

None of this was inappropriate for the concerto, a lively work with great melodies which becomes very exciting at times, especially when the violinist is a crouching tiger.

After intermission the orchestra played Abii ne viderem for String Orchestra, Alto Flute, Piano Harpsichord and Bass Guitar by the contemporary composer Giya Kancheli who was born in Georgia but now lives in Belgium. I did not know of Kancheli, and for me this was the most interesting work in the concert. The list of solo instruments gives a false impression as the flute is the only on with a significant solo part, and that consists at times of the repetition of a single note. The program says that Kancheli is numbered amongst Eastern European composers who have explored the “new mysticism”. I remain skeptical about program music mystical or otherwise, but the piece contain a range of sounds which demonstrated that a traditional orchestra still has a great deal of life left in it. Many fascinating sounds and contrasts and a lot of silence ( maybe the mystical part ).

The concert ended with a fine performance of the 1919 version of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. This version was scored for a smaller string section than the ballet itself and the Philharmonic followed the score. I have found that the acoustics of Avery Fisher Hall vary from place to place, but where I was sitting the grinding deep bass from the basses which opens the work was marvelous to hear. The woodwind parts were also crystal clear and subjectively at least somewhat louder than they usually seem. This was odd, because the Philharmonic is arranged on a flat platform and from where I was in front of any raking in the seats I was unable to see the woodwind section at all.

Flight Log

2008-11-13T23:32:00.003+11:00

This was a flight to LA with an almost silent crew. There was no announcement from the flight deck apart from a reading of the US non congregation rule and thankfully an advice that what we could see from the left hand side of the aircraft was the Isle of Pines, New Caledonia. As this indicates, the flight path was a northerly one. This had the advantage that the modern equivalent of the dark night of the soul was broken by a crossing of the big island of Hawaii. I think the band of lights on the horizon must have been Honolulu. The bright lights of the Kona coast were clearly visible and then a few other lights. The flight path seemed to be direct overhead Hilo, so only a few lights were visible on the east coast of the island. I had hoped to see the red glow of volcanic eruptions or the shadows of the mountains against the moon, but if the lava can be seen, I was too far north and looking in the wrong direction. The mountains were invisible.

Perhaps because of the northerly course the arrival into Los Angeles was to the north of the airport. We flew over the CBD area past the famous Hollywood sign before making some sharp right hand turns for the final approach.

Flight 107 has now moved to the Tom Bradley International Terminal at Los Angeles and as we were the only aircraft around it meant fast immigration and customs and instant security on the way back in. Everyone was ready to leave on time but we waited almost an hour for 19 passengers from Melbourne who arrived on the new airbus, which I saw for the first time in Qantas livery.

The Los Angeles – New York leg of the trip, as usual, seemed to pass in no time at all. Although a flight attendant told me the track was over Las Vegas, we were well south of it and just to the north of Flagstaff. I think I saw the Grand Canyon again but unlike last year there was no announcement about it.

Then long periods of cloud cover from before the Rockies to near St. Louis. Some views of rural America including the distinctive patterns of the world financial crisis as seen from outer space. Mile after mile of new housing development, this time to the north of Indianapolis.

At last, arrival into New York, flying down the Hudson River to what was said to be an approach from the south to JFK. There were so many twists and turns and corkscrew maneuvers that in the end I had no idea what direction we were headed but we eventually landed about ten minutes later than the time estimated at the beginning of the descent.

My driver from the airport was an American story in himself. He talked New York but told me he had emigrated from Afghanistan at the age of eight.
“There is fear in the city”, he told me “people aren’t coming to New York to see their bankers anymore – our business is down 20 -25% year on year”

The Flying Dutchman

2008-09-10T12:18:00.008+10:00

Thursday 28 August 2008.

A trip to Melbourne to see (or hear) Wagner's The Flying Dutchman in a concert performance with the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra conducted by Oleg Caetani.

The Opera
Daland is captain of a Norwegian ship which has just weathered a fierce storm. He leaves the steersman on watch while he and the crew rest. The steersman falls asleep at his watch; and while he sleeps a mysterious ship appears alongside. The Dutchman alights from it and sings of his fate to sail the seas forever unless redeemed by the love of a woman faithful until death. Every seven years he may return to land to seek the woman.
Daland returns to the deck to find the Dutchman, and, in return for the treasure on the Dutchman's ship offers him shelter at his nearby home and the hand of his daughter in marriage.

DALAND
joyfully taken aback

What? Do I hear aright? My daughter his wife?
He seems to mean what he says ...
I'm half afraid, if I remain wavering,
he will change his mind.
If I only knew if I were awake or dreaming!
Could there be a more welcome son in law?
I'd be a fool to let this fortune slip!
With delight I agree.

Meanwhile, on land, the womenfolk are busy spinning, with the exception of Daland's daughter Senta, who is found in dreamy contemplation of a portrait and who sings about the legend of the Dutchman whose portrait it is, and with whom she is obsessed.
Her nurse Mary asks:

Will you dream away your whole youth
in front of that likeness?

Senta's boyfriend Erik announces Daland's return and seeks reassurance of Senta's love. Erik tells of a dream which foretells what happens next: the return of Darland with the Dutchman.

Senta! Let me confide in you:
it is a dream! Listen to its warning!
But unfortunately for Erik:
SENTA
awaking suddenly, in the utmost rapture

He asks for me! I must see him!
With him I must perish!
ERIK
Oh horror! This all becomes clear!
She is lost to me! My dream told the truth!
He rushes off in horror.

When the Dutchman enters with Darland, he and Senta recognise each other and agree to marry.

SENTA
Am I now deep in. some wondrous dream?

The Norwegian sailors celebrate their homecoming, and taunt the crew of the mysterious ship to join them. Eventually the ghost sailors commence a dramatic and eerie account of the Dutchman's story and the Norwegian sailors flee. The Dutchman overhears Erik reminding Senta of her promise to him and, believing himself deceived, renounces Senta and returns to sea. Senta declares her love for the Dutchman and leaps off a cliff. The mysterious ship sinks and Senta and the Dutchman are transfigured.

I found a libretto on the internet and this let me find and note where dreams are mentioned. The last Opera Australia production of The Flying Dutchman in 1997, in its original form as directed by Barrie Kosky, emphasised Senta's dream to the extent of an opening tableaux in which she was terrorised by an upright piano and which presented the shipboard scene of Act 1 as taking place in Senta's room. The story is more complex than that: it's about mutual dreams or at least dreams that intersect so that all the dreamers are participating in one mystical experience. This is a commentary on the nature of myth, made all the more engrossing by the music of the opera.

A short Talk about the Opera
An hour before the concert Maestro Caetani gave a wonderful short talk on the opera illustrated by musical examples which he played on the piano. I find talks by musicians themselves most usually very interesting and instructive. This talk certainly was.
Since I had come to hear the opera performed with a large orchestra in full view, I was pleased to hear him say: " The music won't be disturbed by anything else."
The orchestra would include 16 first violins which would not fit into any orchestra pit apart from The Met and Bayreuth. And the singers would be in front of the orchestra, which overcomes the problem of the pit orchestra being in front of the singers and therefore too loud: "We conductors have to reduce the dynamics."
Mr Caetani saw the opera as essentially German: Wagner found his German identity in Paris, where The Flying Dutchman was composed, just as Gogol and Tchaikovsky found a Russian identity in Rome where Tchaikovsky composed the very Russian Queen of Spades.
Wagner had just heard a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony by a very good orchestra in Paris and the impact of that performance far from Germany was an influence.
He said that the opening chords of The Flying Dutchman were like the opening of Beethoven's Ninth a "quint" his word I believe for a fifth. This intrigued me enough to listen to recordings of both and find the notes on the piano. I have been familiar with the opening chords of the opera and the Dutchman's motif for a very long time, but know nothing of harmony, musical notation or vocabulary. I enjoyed doing this - I hope I got the notes right - but I'm not sure if, and how, it helps in the overall experience of listening to music.
Mr. Caetani next explained that The Dutchman feels stable in the sea, unlike most of us; but when he puts his foot on the land - instability: " Where is the key. Where are we?" Something else to listen for; I didn't in the concert.
The next subject was the duet when Senta and the Dutchman finally meet. It's not a love duet in the usual sense: each sings of him or herself and of recognition. The bourgeoisie world is a reflection of Europe before 1848. Dutchman and Senta just see ideas.
But for Mr Caetani " the sea is the main character" . Every Wagner opera begins in water.
I haven't included everything mentioned in this short talk, but it gave valuable insights into The Flying Dutchman and the knowledge and involvement of the conductor in his work.

Performance
The performance itself lived up to the promise of the talk and my expectations. The overture and all that followed from the orchestra was thrilling. The presence of the large orchestra was enhanced by the placement of some instruments, horns in particular, off the stage so that the sound came from all directions.
The overall standard of the singing was high, but a feature of a concert performance is that the singers are very exposed and I noticed things which I may not have heard among the distractions of a stage performance. To begin positively, Senta's nurse Mary was sung by Sian Pendry who has appeared quite often in recent Opera Australia productions. She has a beautiful rich voice which I had not fully appreciated until now.
Senta was to have been sung by Lisa Gasteen who withdrew due to injury and we heard the German soprano Gabrielle Maria Ronge in a fine dramatic performance. She may not have the smoothest transition from mid to upper register but once there achieved excellent volume and one memorably piercing scream.
The Dutchman himself was sung by John Wegner, who sang the role the last time I saw the OA production (in a modified version) and who conveys the dark and mysterious character of the Dutchman perfectly. I thought I detected some head congestion, which may be why Mr. Wegner conserved his voice to allow a gripping finale at full volume.
Stuart Skelton was excellent as Erik. I heard him last year as Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire and was keen to hear his voice in Wagnerian mode. He obviously enjoyed the performance as well, and while it was delightful to see him groove along with the dramatic orchestral music, it did take away a little from the, albeit minimal, acting and movement of the other performers.
Another singer new to me was the Icelandic bass Bjarni Thor Kristiansen who sang well and created a perfect gruff but naive persona for Darland.
The young Melbourne tenor Adrian Dwyer sang well as the steersman, although his voice was little smaller.
The choruses were seated round the organ galleries. They were impressive overall but seemed to lack some dramatic intensity, particularly in the brilliant passage in the third act where Wagner opposes the sailors and the Dutchman's crew each singing their own distinctive chorus. It could be because it was the first time I had heard it, but I still remember the spine chilling presentation of this moment in the OA production of 1967 (with the Dutchman's crew in skeleton suits), as the best I have heard, so far.
The MSO plans to issue a CD of the concert.

TSUGARU

2008-08-15T18:39:00.003+10:00

One way to revive this Wandering is to post a note from Saturday, August 19, 2006

On 18 August, C and I went to the City Recital Hall to see TSUGARU Soul and Beat of Japan. Tsugaru is the northern part of Honshu and the Tsugaru straight lies between Honshu and Shikoku. The Tsugaru shamisen is a kind of shamisen or style of playing which started there. I first read of Tsugaru shamisen music and its origin in the playing of blind itinerant musicians in Alan Booths Looking for the Lost. He tells of a short lived boom in Tsugaru shamisen music in the 1970s.

The leading artist at the concert was Tsugaru shamisen virtuoso Michihiro Sato. His son Michiyosi, who graduated from High School in 2005, also plays the shamisen. Sachiko Kaiho, a Koto player is Mr. Satos wife and Michiyosis mother. Shozan Tanabe played shakuhachi; he had only one large instrument. (My introduction to the shakuhachi was Riley Lee's playing at the Townsville Festival of Chamber Music in July and he had many instruments of various lengths.)

Masaki Yoshimi played tabla, which he studied in India. Im uncertain at the moment how the tabla came into a Japanese group, or whether its use in ensembles of this kind is common. He was the only player who did not wear Traditional Japanese dress. Sachiko Kaiho wore a bright green kimono, and the colour of Mr. Satos jacket marked his seniority in the group.

Mr. Sato spoke in English from notes from time to time. An endearing feature of his speech was the pronunciation of works like shakuhachi which became shak-hashhhhh; Michyoshi michiyoshhhhhhh and so on, just as in the days before recorded announcements words like Nihonbashi became Nihonbashhhhh for train guards.

The family group was larger. The father and son were listed as playing Tsugaru Shamisen Kyokuawase together, but when we reached it Mr. Sato announced Tonight we have a special surprise for you my youngest son will play with his older brother! He looked about 4 years younger than Michiyoshi.

The program notes say that the sounds of the Tsugaru shamisen are notably different from more traditional Japanese music. They are played with a large plectrum held in the closed hand. It is used make drumming sounds on the body of the shamisen as well as to pluck the strings. The younger Sato seemed to make more drumming sounds than his father. When they played together there was great empathy between them.

The music has been compared to jazz and there are obvious parallels, but I was unable to tell what improvisation was and what was not. I am unfamiliar with the music. There was a lot of fast complex fingering in the left hand in some parts but although the sound was distinctive some of the tunes were a little elusive. The most prominent feature on hearing it for the first time was the rhythms. Some were very fast and exciting to hear. There were some vocalizations but no singing mostly shouts and crys at a climax. In the last item, the tabla player accompanied his solo with very fast wordless vocals which resembled scat singing in jazz.

I would like to investigate further but I havent found any available CDs of this or similar music as yet. Still there are places in Japan where it is played and I can search for these on my next trip.

There is some information on wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsugaru-jamisen

The web page for the concert itself is http://www.jpf.org.au/02_events/tsugaru/tsugaru.htm

Please let me know of anything more you know: specially cds.