Monday, July 30, 2018

AFCM#4: Barefoot in the Festival?


I’ve spent a happy morning today at Kathy Stott’s Concert Conversations. These events take place every day during the festival, in the Casino of the plushly gorgeous Ville Resort overlooking the sea and Magnetic Island - and they’re jam-packed solid with music-lovers. First Kathy interviews a group of festival artists for about 45 mins. Then they each perform something.

I’m always intrigued to hear musicians interview other musicians because you can bet your bottom dollar it won’t resemble an interview by a journalist. Sure enough, Kathy and today’s group covered a startling range of topics. We had piano chat with Daniel de Borah and Timothy Young, some touching honesty about pressures and schedules from Tine Thing Helseth, who didn’t have a holiday for 10 years; tales from the orchestral front-line with flautist Prudence Davis (first flute of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 1980); and the price of top violins today from Alexander Sitkovetsky, who is trying to raise $5m to buy the heavenly Strad he is playing at present. But above all, we had...footwear?

Or lack of it. Tine is one of an increasing number of young women musicians who prefer to play bare-footed. Seeing some of the heights of heels others wear on stage has often left me fearing for their ankles, feet, instruments and general security and if a rebellion is taking place, it’s not before time. I mean, come on, men don’t wear them, so why should we have to? (I gave up attempting high heels about 10 years ago and nowadays if I ever do wear them, I can hardly walk, and I like to be able to walk...) Pianist Alice Sara Ott has played barefoot for years, so has violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Tine explained she simply feels more comfortable that way. But today we learned that the phenonemon is spreading to men, and it’s the digital shift that’s driving it.


Timothy Young appeared on stage not barefoot, but in some unusual shoes - unusual for a musician, that is. You’d be more likely to see them in a yoga studio. They’re the soft-soled, wrap-around, close-with-velcro (I think) type, and he explained that he wears them because he now performs from an iPad instead of paper sheet music and finds it easier to treat the necessary bluetooth pedal sensitively if he can feel it underfoot, which normal concert shoes don’t always allow. 

When it was time for Kathy and Daniel to offer their morning performance - Fauré’s Dolly Suite for duet - Kathy admitted she would today be making her iPad debut. And Daniel, as the ‘secondo’ player in charge of page-turning, walked on stage...barefoot. 

My jury is still out regarding Mrs Bach’s footwear for Wednesday. Whatever she has will be hidden by her long skirts in any case... hmm...

In the meantime, I’ve reviewed the two opening nights’ concerts for Limelight Magazine, which you can read here: https://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/features/australian-festival-of-chamber-music-opening-weekend-round-up

And we had Moreton Bay Bugs in garlic butter for lunch...

Sunday, July 29, 2018

AFCM#3: Working. Seriously: working....



The pic above is from our first rehearsal today for Being Mrs Bach here in Townsville. I’m wielding my script at the side, offscreen, while some of our siezable team of musicians rehearse in the studio - pictured, baritone Roderick Williams, pianist Daniel de Borah, the young Stanley Street Quartet, who are studying at the festival Winterschool, and bassist Kees Boersma, getting to grips together with ‘Mache dich’ from the St Matthew Passion and ‘Hat man nicht mit seinen Kinder...’ from the Coffee Cantata.

The wonderful soprano Siobhan Stagg - who does actually look like Anna Magdalena - will be channelling our heroine’s spirit into ‘Bist du bei mir’, Daniel is playing the Minuet in G and the E flat Prelude and Fugue from Book 2, and somewhere in the room the Goldner Quartet were preparing to play the unfinished contrapunctus from The Art of Fugue. Completing the line-up, Guy Johnston will offer a movement from one of the cello suites.

I can hardly believe I’m working with this team of musicians. They’re simply the best in the world...and somehow I have to match up. Gulp.

The first two evening concerts have brought us some astounding performances - last night’s included Roddy and Daniel in the Vaughan Williams Songs of Travel and a roof-raising Tchaikovsky Souvenir de Florence with an all-star international line-up, to say nothing of a supremely talented young Australian violinist, Grace Clifford (she’s 20), playing Julian Yu’s Passacaglia after Biber so splendidly that I suspect a magnificent future for her.



Relaxed festival-goers who don’t need to rehearse, practise or write about things can enjoy musical events from morning til night most days at AFCM. In the mornings, Kathy Stott presents Concert Conversations, interviewing her artists, with  performances by them to follow, a Winterschool lunchtime masterclass, a 5pm Sunset Series (in which Being Mrs Bach is included) and then more events in the evening. Tonight people are off to a Supper Club where they will be entertained with jazz, tango and Gershwin while munching. Some of us, though, are grabbing the opportunity to conquer the jet-lag, or try to, and cook ourselves some local fish.

The jet-lag is quite something. Jokes are zipping around the festival about how everyone is ‘drugged’ - on melatonin. I don’t know how we’d manage without it...but I made the mistake of taking a second one at about 3.30am and then slept through to 9.30am, when I had to write and file some copy by 10am. Tom kindly made the coffee while I jumped to it...

To be fair, it wasn’t only jet-lag. We’re having too much fun. After the concerts you go out, bump into people, eat gluten-free linguine with seafood or veggie burgers, sample the local produce (I have a none-too-secret passion for Ozzie wines) and before you know what’s happened, it’s midnight. Music festivals were ever thus, but this one is more than usually friendly - and exceptionally well set up by its devoted teams of volunteers, patrons and management, so everyone seems free to be in a singularly good mood. Long may that continue.

More pics at my Instagram account (jessica.duchen) and another update will follow tomorrow. For the time being, the Chadonnay beckons and the pan is waiting for me to pop in the barramundi...

Saturday, July 28, 2018

AFCM #2: Home from home...

There’s that moment when after a 24-hour journey you peer out of the plane window at the country you’re about to visit and you see...Australian sunlight. I haven’t been here for 15 years and had managed to forget its unique nature. The quality of it is like opals, brilliant and translucent and full of gold, ochre and purple. You have to screw up your eyes against it, or rush for sunglasses. Strong, pure and irresistible, as if shot in technicolour, it makes you wonder if the Land of Oz was so named for a good reason. Toto, we’re not in Kansas any more...

We’ve made it to Townsville, in the dry tropics of Queensland, and now it’s the morning after the night before...and that was the night after the day after the journey before. We left London with two big suitcases on Tuesday night, spent a pleasant few hours in Hong Kong airport and arrived in Sydney on Thursday morning...with one big suitcase. Sole free day in Sydney was supposed to be spent happily reuniting at leisure with my aunt, whom I hadn’t seen for 15 years, but this turned into a hasty and frazzled coffee in between frantic calls to the airport where we’d shunted from office to office for about three hours upon arrival. The case arrived 24 hours after we did and has joined us here. At least it wasn’t the one that contained my Anna Magdalena costume.


A post shared by Jessica Duchen (@jessica.duchen) on

All in all, I can think of worse places to hold a chamber music festival. We’re staying - along with all the festival artists - in an apartment hotel near the marina; the sun is pouring into our new home-from-home across the cluster of lilttle boats  this morning, the Strand beside the sea awaits exploration, as do its gelatarias, there’s a massive seafood bar across the road and yesterday’s opening concert was a heap of musical joys.

It was full of fresh, startling ideas, juxtapositions and collaborations, with Tine Thing Helseth and Katya Apekisheva shining amid an all-star line-up for the Saint-Saens Septet, eight cellists plus wonderful Siobhan Stagg in the Villa Lobossome amazing new timbres from marimba, sheng and bandoneon in world premieres by JP Jofre and Paul Stanhope, and a completely barnstorming performance of the Chausson Concert by Kathy Stott, Alexander Sitkovetsky and the Goldner String Quartet. The big concerts take place in the Townsville Civic Theatre, a sizeable modern hall from which last night’s concert went out live on the radio - splendidly hosted by Mairi Nicolson, whose interviews with the musicians while the stage set-up changed were fun, interesting and sympathetic.

Backstage, of course, it’s hard not to think “YIKES, I have to do the Bach show HERE?”, given the impressive scale of the whole thing - but with a chance to catch up with old friends like Kathy, Katya and Guy Johnston and to meet new ones over artist drinks-and-eats post-concert, the nerves quickly dispel. For performers in festivals like this, the treat is exactly that: to work with colleagues you’re meeting for the first time, forge new connections, spark ideas into being, and while away the post-concert wind-down over Australian beer or wine in which jet-lag becomes but a memory and lost suitcases all part of life’s rich pattern. I’ve now met many of my Bach show colleagues, Roddy Williams, Siobhan Stagg, Pavel Fischer, Kees Boersma and the Goldner String Quartet, among others. And out front in the audience, one can’t help noticing the way that people are running into one another as festival regulars over years and years, catching up in (where else) the queue for the ladies’ loos (“How are you? We met four years ago right here!”) and, better still, over ice-cream in front of the theatre, under the full moon.

A last thought for the morning: this is winter. It’s 28 degrees and there is simply no sunlight in the world quite like this. It’s going to be one amazing week.

Update: I think I’ve worked out how to bring the photos in from Instagram, but please visit my instagram account to see some more.

Monday, July 23, 2018

#AFCM1: All set, sort of...

It's tomorrow! We are off to Australia for a week in Townsville as part of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music. And in the meantime I can report that you get some very interesting looks when trogging up to Vauxhall station in the heat of the sun, carrying a huge plastic bag emblazoned with NATIONAL THEATRE COSTUME AND PROPS HIRE.

Tucked away in a south London warehouse/college/arts pad a few minutes from the Oval cricket ground, there's a facility that, if you like dressing up or giving theatrical performances of any type, is better than Aladdin and his Genie ever dreamed of. London's Royal National Theatre here keeps row upon tempting row of costumes - covering all eras from echt-Shakespeare to 1920s flapperville to 1980s glam rock - and they hire them out for a suitable fee. Silken gowns, embroidered waistcoats, feathered and bejewelled headdresses, era-appropriate strings of pearls, underskirts of any colour, petticoats galore, and the sort of under-contraptions you're very lucky not to need to wear under your dress in this day and age. Walk in and you might even see an ass's head lurking on a shelf, ready for the next Midsummer Night request.

You phone them up, book in and have a good browse, with a chance to try on your most suitable targets, complete with accessories of any type from royal crown to bum pads. I can't say I ever expected to need bum pads, but bum pads I've now got, because they go under 18th-century dresses to create that sumptuous shape... A happy afternoon a few weeks ago led me to the perfect outfit for Anna Magdalena Bach to take to Australia: a dark overdress with a subtle pattern and a black underskirt. Nothing fancy, I promise. Just...18th century.

I did try to research what Anna Magdalena looked like. There aren't many pictures of her. There is, however, this:


Ouch. Owowowowowch.

As you may remember, Kathryn Stott, the new AFCM artistic director, has commissioned me to write and perform a new show with words and music about Anna Magdalena Bach. Being Mrs Bach will receive its world premiere on 1 August, 5pm, with musicians including Roderick Williams (baritone), Siobhan Stagg (soprano), Guy Johnston (cello), Daniel de Borah (piano), the Goldner String Quartet, Pavel Fischer (violin), Kees Boersma (double bass) and Winterschool Strings. Anna Magdalena, when she appears, is an impoverished widow, looking back over her life with Johann Sebastian, with all the associated agonies and ecstasies... And I've never worn a costume before. I hope I can still get into it on Wednesday week. In case you were wondering: Lucy Worsley I'm not. (Nor am I the blonde bombshell pictured above.)

The next day I'm giving a lecture about women composers for the festival's Winterschool and then joining Kathy and some of the musicians for the morning Meet the Artists chat on 3 August before heading, no doubt with reluctance, back to the airport. In the meantime I will be writing about the festival a fair bit, and have promised to do a daily blogpost while there, so please check back after Friday for my festival diary and PICS.



You wouldn't believe what it takes to get ready for a thing like this, unless you're especially prone to taking part in festivals on the other side of the world. First there's the preparation of the show. In October, I went to Leipzig to see the Bach family's own territory at first hand - it made all the difference, too. Then the writing and whittling down, choosing the music, fitting it all together, making sure it's the right length. That's the easy bit. Then the paperwork: visas, documents, passports, emails and more emails. (Can you believe we're going to have to do all this for Europe as well soon, when currently we don't? Those Brexiters are out of their tiny minds.) There's booking the travel, deciding where and when to stop (straight to Sydney on the way out, to see my aunt, then to Townsville the next morning; and Hong Kong on the way home...). The costume. The house-and-cat-sitter. Finishing everything that needs finishing before going. Remembering everything that needs to go in the suitcase. Panicking.

And above all, panicking about the jet-lag. Most of the festival artists - to judge from Kathy's Facebook pics - are already in Townsville and acclimatising. I'm still in sweltering in London and won't arrive until Friday. I'm not sure this was the greatest plan, but it's too late now...

Anyway, if all goes smoothly we shall be there in time for the big opening night on Friday evening, in which  no fewer than 24 festival artists will perform works by Saint-Saëns, Villa-Lobos, Paul Stanhope (world premiere of a new piece for marimba), Wu Tong performing another world premiere on the sheng, Leopoldo Federico, JP Jofre (world premiere of new piece for marimba, sheng and bandoneon), and one of my great all-time favourite pieces, the Chausson Concert, with Kathy on the piano, Alexander Sitkovetsky (violin) and the Goldner String Quartet. That would be enough to turn me upside-down on its own.

For the rest of the programme, please see here.

Sunday, July 15, 2018

'Silver Birch' is in the SWAP'ra Gala!



I've done an interview for SWAP'ra, the new charity which aims to change the opera world to make it more user-friendly, all round, for women and parents.

Support for Women And Parents in Opera will be holding an inaugural gala concert at Opera Holland Park on 31 July consisting of extracts from operas famous and less so, in which all the performers and directors are female (though some of the composers, like Mozart and Strauss, were blokes...). Much to our delight, they're also including a scene from Roxanna Panufnik's and my Silver Birch - Anna's aria, in which she tells her son Jack that she will never let him risk his life. Helen Sherman plays our heroine and our original director, Karen Gillingham, will stage it. To my intense frustration, I won't be there. I have no objection to visiting Australia this summer, but I'm sorry to miss Silver Birch's first extract to be performed in London.

The full gala line-up is here. Do go along - there's treat upon treat upon treat, culminating with the Trio from Der Rosenkavalier starring Janis Kelly, Diana Montague and Mary Bevan, conducted by Jessica Cottis. Booking here.


Taster of my interview is below, and there are lots of other hard-hitting, tell-it-like-it-is interviews with the stars of the gala on the SWAP'ra website.

So many of the staple operas and repertoire are stories and music written by men. Why do you think this is, and do you think that a composer’s/librettist’s gender has any bearing on the kind of music she/he writes?

Much of this is historic. Let’s not forget that at present we are celebrating only 100 years of any British women having had the right to vote! Most of the world’s staple diet of opera is older than that; inevitably, women were not often able to be part of the creative teams as their fathers had to have accorded them a suitable musical education and their husbands had to permit their continuation of career (yuck) (but some did, and hooray for them). Plenty of works by women are crying out for rediscovery and they are now starting to be noticed. If more women composers are to be explored and resuscitated, it will also take the involvement of opera’s administrative framework to find, champion and stage them. It’s easier to get audiences into well-known pieces (though Silver Birch was totally sold out ☺ ) and it’s easy for operatic organisations to be…well, maybe a little bit lazy in this regard.

Does a composer/librettist’s gender have any bearing on the music? No. To prove it, try listening blind. I heard some songs recently by a composer named Poldowski and was impressed by their invention, their tremendous energy, their vivid colours and their beauty, and wondered why I’d never heard of him before. Then I looked him up. Turns out he was a she. ‘Poldowski’ was the pseudonym of Irène Wieniawska, later Lady Dean Paul, daughter of Henryk Wieniawski. She’s amazing.


SWAP’ra Supporting Women and Parents in Opera – was established in response to a collective frustration with the unconscious gender bias in the industry. The ultimate aim is to foster an environment in which a female CEO, Music Director, Artistic Director, Conductor, Composer or Librettist is no longer noteworthy.
The founders – Sophie Gilpin, Ella Marchment, Anna Patalong, Madeleine Pierard, and Kitty Whately – will address the gender imbalance in opera by encouraging best practice strategies for diversity and inclusivity, and effect industry-wide positive change by working to dismantle barriers for women and parents in leadership positions and senior artistic roles. Acting in an advisory capacity, SWAP’ra will work alongside a range of organisations to develop projects and schemes to further support or nurture female artistic talent.
Funds raised by this inaugural SWAP’ra gala will enable the organisation to make significant change in the industry. For more information, please visit the website: www.swap-ra.org

Friday, July 13, 2018

Slippery storytelling

Lauren Zolezzi as Nuria, Grant Doyle as Enric
Photo: Julian Guidera

I've been twice to see The Skating Rink at Garsington, the new opera they have commissioned from composer David Sawer and librettist Rory Mullarkey. Reviewing it is not my plan, as I'm a bit close to the place since Silver Birch last year and have some more projects in the pipeline, including a new piece for the Youth Company with composer Paul Fincham for 2019. I can say, though, that I found it enormously impressive, often very beautiful - the skating music and the snowy conclusion in particular - and, on balance, touching and engaging, more so than certain other highly-lauded recent operas I could mention. I hope it will have a long and happy life in the opera houses of many companies and countries hereafter.

If there's a problem, though, it's the narrative style and I suspect that might account for some of the reviews that found it a bit, er, icy. The opera is based on a novel by Roberto Bolano, set on the Costa Brava, in which the same story - the murder of an unfortunate down-and-out singer, Carmen - is told through the different eyes of several implicitly unreliable narrators. As it unfolds, we build up a picture of the hierarchies involved and the way that love, supposedly a private matter, can impact upon the fates of others. "Love is a rebel bird," says Carmen - well, she would, wouldn't she? The clinching image at the conclusion shows us what the ice rink really is: a better world, away from all that squalor and distress, where perhaps we could all be our happiest and best selves.

Yet preserving the novel's approach creates a special set of problems. First of all, each narrator tells his story in the past tense, while it is being acted in front of us. So, when the body of Susan Bickley as Carmen is lying on stage in a "thick black sea" of blood, our narrator tells us: "It was the singer". He could have run to her, tried to wake her, described how he feels - the shock, the pity, the terror - but no. He just tells us who it was, but we already know because we can see her. You get my drift.

Meanwhile, characters with whom we've engaged early on - Gaspar, the drifting would-be poet (Sam Furness, on splendiferous form) and his passion for the unfortunate addict Caridad (equally splendid Claire Wild), begin at the centre of our world and fade to the edges; Remo Moran (excellent Ben Edquist) gives his viewpoint, yet is never quite sympathetic or rounded out; and our real hero, Enric, does not emerge until the second half.

I'm concerned about this first of all because I'm not sure how you'd get around any of this when fashioning a piece out of a story told in that structure, but also because my Bach show for Townsville (on 1 August) is basically narrated as a flashback so that I don't have to convince anyone that I'm 20 at the beginning. On the other hand, nobody gets murdered (even though I have my doubts about Bach's quackish eye surgeon, John Taylor of London...). One wants it to be convincing, but how much does the past tense interfere when your audience is living the drama in the present? We'll see.

The opera's finest moments are when the narration has stopped and the action enters both real time and inner worlds. Enric's dream of skating, with an ungainly double in the same brown suit and pink shirt sliding about on the rink to the manner born, is sweet and touching; the party scene in which the mayor, Pilar (an imperious Louise Winter) rumbles Enric's embezzlement of funds for the rink while they dance raises the temperature in a valuable way.

The performance is absolutely top-notch, with wonderful contributions from the whole cast: Susan Bickley is outstanding as singer-turned-down-and-out Carmen, Alan Oke (come on, chaps, this guy should have national treasure status!) as her whispering, drawling, howling lover, Rookie, and Grant Doyle as Enric, the plump official whose life - and occasionally figure - is turned upside-down by his love for the Olympic skater Nuria Mari (a convincing joint performance by Alice Poggio as the skating Nuria and Lauren Zolezzi as the singing one). Garry Walker conducts an orchestra stuffed with interesting sounds including a Chilean charango, soprano saxophone and euphonium, plus an off-stage marching band.

But for me, the most touching thing of all was to see, among the onstage silent extras - a chorus that never sings - several very familiar faces from Silver Birch. David, who was the Warden at the beginning and walked the dog in the army desert scene (hey, Skating Rink company, didn't you find a role for Sam's Labrador, Poppy?); Bev, who came into our production among our hard-won military recruits; and Sheila, who had fallen on hard times, had never imagined she'd set foot on a stage and found that being part of the adult community chorus helped her turn her life around. How wonderful that they are back for more!

Some tickets remain for the final two performances - do go if you can. It's beautiful and haunting.

Thursday, July 12, 2018

Hysteria: a guest post

Delighted to give the floor today to the BAFTA-award winning composer Jocelyn Pook, who tells us about Hysteria: A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist which premieres this Saturday 14 July at 7.30pm at Hoxton Hall (tickets here). Fasten your seatbelt: this is strong stuff.


Jocelyn Pook
Photo: Zoran S Pejic

I am fascinated by the power of the mind, the power of thought and the power of emotion to trigger a chemical reaction in the body. It is a point where the unconscious takes over and the body reacts of its own volition with a physical symptom.

So when the Wellcome Trust asked 10 artists including me to respond to the subject of Hysteria and psychosomatic disorders, it sparked 2 years of research resulting in the premiere this Saturday of my new work Hysteria:  A Song Cycle for Singer and Psychiatrist. Our brief from the Wellcome Trust was to pair up with a medical professional and I was lucky to work with the French psychiatrist Dr Stephanie Courtade. Stephanie has an unusually open, compassionate, humorous and perhaps at times unorthodox approach. As a result it was a fascinating process for me, resulting in the work occasionally veering off into quite unexpected directions.

I am constantly surprised by how many people around me have been afflicted by these conversion disorders.  Hysteria is an irksome and outdated term previously a preserve of female disorders in the 19th century, yet now it is no longer considered a medical condition. Many of these ailments, if not necessarily critical, can however be debilitating. I wanted to find out whether hair turning white overnight was apocryphal or based on evidence.  

I came across cases of outbreaks of severe eczema during an unhappy love affair, something which had never affected that person before or subsequently. A friend’s grandfather’s hair fell out overnight during a a breakdown as a young man, which in those days was never talked about and became a family secret. A woman suffered from panic attacks to the point that she lost the ability to swallow liquid. There was a violinist I had known since youth orchestra, who became plagued by a  psychosomatic pain in her solar plexis whenever she performed in an orchestra and resulted in her changing career entirely. Every time she picked up the violin, the pain returned though it never does when she sings. And I did discover a case of a 12-year old girl whose hair turned white overnight when her mother died. At times, I have feel like a fly on a wall at a therapist’s studio.
  
The body speaks in so many different ways. As Stephanie says, “the body is like the stage for the drama and theatre play of the mind.” These examples are from men too, though the balance in this work is weighted unconsciously to more female voices.   

Hysteria’s long gestation was preceded by two earlier works linked to mental illness, making latest installment Part 3 of a Trilogy. It started with Hearing Voices inspired by protest literature from patients incarcerated in psychiatric hospitals and in particular my great aunt’s notes during more than 25 years lost in an “asylum” as they were then known. Part 2 was Anxiety Fanfare, a choral work which also explores the sometimes funny side of anxiety and the use of humour as a kind of survival mechanism. 

Like Hearing VoicesHysteria will also be a multi-media project. So many of my works start with the primary sources - the witnesses from the front line.  It’s their testimonies, which form the kernel of all three works. Often the cadence and rhythm of a patient’s own recorded voice morphs into the voice of vocalist Melanie Pappenheim. The performance is not a load of crazy grimacing and shrieking, but deals with the more private moments of pain. I wanted this idea to be reflected in the music and performance, in a way that feels true to our experiences and observations. It was important for me to show people in a state where they aren’t completely broken.  

I have also incorporated many of Dr Stephanie Courtade’s insights about the medical profession, including her own experiences as a patient on the couch with a particularly unsympathetic psychiatrist. The common use now within the medical of profession of referring to patients as “service users”, seems particularly impersonal even if liberating them from illness. 

I feel immensely privileged that so many people have shared such intimate experiences with me – feel a responsibility to them. I still have so much material that I would still like to use, so I don’t know whether this is the finished piece.   


The UK film premiere of The Wife for which Jocelyn Pook wrote the filmscore, will be premiered at Somerset House on 9 August before going on general release on 28 September. Memorial, based on the poem by Alice Oswald with music by Jocelyn Pook comes to Barbican Theatre 27-30 September.  


Monday, July 09, 2018

Problems with Pélléas

It's always interesting to read bad reviews, even if one cringes while so doing. But those that have attended the new Pélléas et Mélisande at Glyndebourne have come with such a dose of vinegar that it makes one super-curious to see whether they're justified, and it's always hard to believe that they could be.

Oh dear.

Das Wunder der Heliane meets the ghost of Pélléas?
Photo: Glyndebourne Productions Ltd, by Richard Hubert Smith

Perhaps Stefan Herheim's concept would play better in central Europe or Scandinavia, where productions are often more heavily dramaturged [yes, I know, no such word] than is usually the case here, and where audiences have arguably grown to expect controversy on stage plus abstruse references laid on with the trowel. And perhaps the setting of Glyndebourne's Organ Room - recreated with useful additions such as concertina-folding organ pipes and sliding walls - would have played better if habitual Glyndebourne patrons had not seen umpteen other productions of other operas also set within Glyndebourne itself, to the point that this jumps aboard the most massive of local clichés.

It is nevertheless a valid starting point: the action takes place in a grand, dark, oppressive old house/castle and, as my companion for the evening remarked, how many of us have not wandered through such a place and wondered what secrets it is hiding in its past? (Or is Herheim trying to tell us something about the age-old secrets of Glyndebourne? I sincerely hope not.) Perhaps part of the idea is about the Christies staging dramatics in their organ room. But what is inexcusable is to have Debussy's final bars obscured by audience laughter as actors clad as present-day Glyndebourne punters wander onto the stage, looking around. No. Just no.

Everyone seems to be blinding each other. Yes, the text makes ample reference to blindness, but nothing in this text is literal: must it be spelled out to that degree? If there is a benefit to the storytelling, it's eluded me thus far. And Golaud, Pélléas and Yniold all frantically mime painting on empty easels. Yes, Debussy was a contemporary of the great Impressionist painters, but that doesn't make this appropriate, insightful or comprehensible, even if perhaps excusable.

What's with the Christ-like figure that appears in the middle of the organ, just as Arkel tells Mélisande she must issue in a new era...with a sheep draped over its shoulders? Sacramental imagery, says a Twitter contact. Yes, we get that (and Herheim changes Yniold's shepherd into a priest), even if we don't necessarily get its point - but the bottom line is that it looks completely ridiculous and everyone laughed, and you don't want that to happen in the middle of Pélléas.

Or maybe you do...and that would be worse, because it means you are not taking the work on its own terms or presenting your audience with something conceived in its true spirit, in which case why should we go? Moreover, having Golaud rape his own son/daughter Yniold is a major misjudgment in a scene that is upsetting enough as Debussy and Maeterlinck created it - and leaves Pélléas novices seriously confused ("But why does he do that?" "Well, actually, he doesn't...").

Nevertheless, there's a sprinkling of wonderful ideas too. Mélisande is portrayed (by the excellent Christina Gansch) as a complete pre-Raphaelite beauty, overwhelming in her seductive presence, and she seems to have healing powers; also, she recoils when Golaud faces her with his sword presented as a cross. There's always a mystery about her; no reason she shouldn't be at least partly supernatural. Golaud (a tour de force from Christopher Purves) is a violent psychopath, as destroyed by his own malady as any Otello. Pelléas is under-characterised, though mostly well sung by John Chest. The division of body and soul for Mélisande at the start of the final scene works nicely, as does having the ghost of Pélléas lurking around, waiting for her to join him – though I'm not sure why he has to run her through with a sword when she's about to snuff it in any case. Some of these images come over more as Das Wunder der Heliane than Pélléas, and I can't really think of two more different operas.

As you'll have gathered, a lot of visual ideas are crammed in here, layer upon layer upon layer. Yet Debussy's music is so subtle, so delicate, so hinted-at, that it's completely overpowered by the on-stage shenanigans. By the end one feels exhausted by all the "WTF now?" moments, and might be longing for the privilege of hearing a concert performance instead – preferably with Robin Ticciati conducting it every bit as beautifully, intelligently and ineffably as he does here.

In the past few years Ticciati has had to take some time off for a back operation, which has somewhat disrupted his tenure as Glyndebourne's music director. But in that time, he has been reinventing his whole approach to conducting (as he told me in an interview last year) - and now the results are becoming more and more interesting. Something in him has deepened and darkened and opened out. I'm getting the impression that we may have here a very significant musician indeed, someone who has further to go interpretatively than some of the supposedly glitzier, more superficially exciting podium presences. I hope I'm still around to see where he is in 25 years' time.

Nina Stemme as Kundry, with ex-equine friend
Photo: Ruth Walz

Concert performances, meanwhile, have a lot going for them. I spent yesterday afternoon and evening holed up with the webcast of Parsifal from the Bavarian State Opera, this being the first summer in a number of years that I'm not going physically to Munich. (Hallelujah, medals and science prizes galore, please, to whoever created the technology that makes webcasts possible and quality sound available on the computer.) What a musical treat: Kirill Petrenko on fire with spiritual joy in the pit, the orchestra playing the living daylights out of the piece, Nina Stemme the most astounding Kundry - and Kundry the most astounding Nina Stemme - that I've yet had the joy of hearing, Christian Gerhaher a dream of an Amfortas, Rene Pape channelling Gurnemanz in person, and Jonas Kaufmann tracing Parsifal's growth and strength incrementally, with That Voice. The production, by Pierre Audi, is strong, straightforward and clear, never confused or confusing. The Grail is meat in act I and music itself at the end of act 3: we are saved by art alone. Bravi. But the visual art is by the great Georg Baselitz and though many images are effective, at other times one just has to look the other way. A concert performance would solve that in one fell swoop. This probably sounds uncharacteristically philistine, so blame the heat if you like.

Friday, July 06, 2018

Have some Rachmaninov? Don't mind if I do...

Boris Giltburg had a free evening in London. So he called Stewart French and asked him to film him playing Rachmaninov's Op.39 Etudes-Tableaux overnight. Well, whyever not? Here's the result, which he's just sent me, and there's a blogpost at Gramophone that tells the story.

Thank you, Boris! Sitting down for a good wallow...

Thursday, July 05, 2018

Fit for purpose

What is fit for purpose in the UK at the moment? Not a lot, but I've found one thing that is. It's a national treasure of a concert hall - in an Essex village state school.

Saffron Hall
Photo: Graham Turner
I'm talking about Saffron Hall, of course, named after its location, not the donor who put up the money to build it - that person, with rare grace, preferred to stay anonymous. And if you go through Saffron Walden, you wouldn't expect to find this venue there. An almost too-adorable antique town in not-too-flat-yet East Anglian countryside, beyond the great house of Audley End, it's a setting in which you'd be less surprised to find a haunted hotel (at the Cross-Keys Inn the ghost of a Civil War soldier is said to walk the corridors, while Cromwell's mistress supposedly lurks in a bedroom) than a shiny four-year-old concert venue haunted by the likes of Maxim Vengerov and Mats Lidström. The good news is that the two notions aren't incompatible.

The hall, in case you haven't seen it yet, seats around 800 and has a wide, shiny, wooden interior with a narrow balcony section that runs all the way round the sides and behind the stage. The acoustic ('tunable') is warm and blooming, ample and resonant. The audience seems still to be in a honeymoon with it - a community blessed with a big asset and the chance to hear Vengerov and friends play right on their doorstep - and it was great to see lots of children in the ranks. The school setting helps. I learned during the course of the evening that the place used not even to offer Music A Level (a tragically increasing situation nowadays), but that music for its pupils and beyond is now thriving thanks to the exemplar of the hall and the world-class events it hosts.

This should be a model for anyone to follow if and when they want to build a new hall: for goodness' sake, embed it in its community. Put it where children will feed it with their energy and enthusiasm and be fed its art in turn. Put it where its audience will be happy, where they will be there to support it, prioritise it and take pride in it. This is high art for everyone and that's exactly what we need, right here and right now. For too long we've fetishised concert halls as a tool of regeneration - sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, and if it does it takes decades - or decided they must multitask as conference venues. It's the kiss of death. You end up with soulless creations in places nobody really wants to go. Try multitasking them within community schools instead. You might be surprised.

Maximum violinist: Maxim Vengerov
And we got a wonderful surprise last night. Maxim Vengerov and friends from the Soloists of the Oxford Philharmonic joined forces for a delicious programme of varied chamber line-ups. First, Brahms violin and piano music with Marios Papadopoulos - more often found on the orchestra's podium - becoming an empathetic duo partner to Vengerov in the D minor Sonata, following an up-tempo, soaring account of the 'FAE' Scherzo. In these days of exaggeration and over-interpretation, Vengerov is a breath of fresh air: he eschews such intrusive trends. He plays that violin with a perfect tone that one can drink up like honeyed mead. He polishes it to the nth degree and displays it without a hint of fuss. He makes all of this look phenomenally easy and natural, which heaven knows it's not.

The second part was a rarely-heard two-movement String Sextet by Borodin and then the Mendelssohn Octet, and here we had a chance to hear some of the Oxford Philharmonic's lead string players. My, oh, my, look who's here: only a line-up to match any top-notch international chamber ensemble and probably beat them on their own turf. Violinists Natalia Lomeiko, Anna-Liisa Bezrodny and Yury Zhislin. Violists Garfield Jackson and Jonathan Barritt. Cellists Mats Lidström and Peter Adams. They're all among the best on the scene, whether established soloists or long-standing members of great string quartets, and with Vengerov as first violin they produced an Octet to remember, almost symphonic in scale (it's amazing how much noise can come out of just eight instruments) and wonderfully conversational. We don't need reminding that it's a masterpiece, but it's a perennial joy to be reunited with Mendelssohn's extraordinary fount of high energy, bowling along as if he simply can't get the ideas down on paper fast enough, so richly do they flow. This was a Maserati of a Mendelssohn rather than a wispy, elfin job, and I had the impression the performers were enjoying every note as much as we were.

I'm quite embarrassed to admit I had no idea any of them were with the Oxford Phil, although in some cases I've known and followed their careers for decades. Perhaps the problem with the word 'Oxford' is that you are conditioned to hearing it alongside another word: 'University'. This is, emphatically, not necessary.

You can hear the same concert tonight at Cheltenham Town Hall if you are lucky enough to be in the area.

Fit for purpose: music, musicians, hall and everything about them. Not fit for purpose: the UK's infrastructure.

I was offered a ticket and a lift to/from Saffron Walden by a friend in the music business who lives near me and has a car. We set off from Hammersmith at 3.30pm. An hour and a quarter later we'd reached...Kilburn. Because if you're sitting in Wood Lane you can't get across the A40 because the traffic blocks the junction and you're basically stuffed. Somehow we found the A1M via somewhere near my old school up in Stanmore, and then there was a smash, with ambulances rushing up the hard shoulder, so we sat there for a while too, and eventually we turned off, pootled across some golden cornfields and adorable countryside near Cambridge, along twisty little lanes, past calendar-worthy old houses, and arrived for supper at the 15th-century Cross-Keys Inn (no ghosts on display) a cool almost-three-hours after setting out. Made the concert in the nick of time.

The thing about going anywhere in the UK to review a concert is that you have to go, and in my unfortunate experience neither roads nor trains can be relied upon to get you anywhere at the time you need to be there. This has always been bad, but it's getting worse and heaven alone knows how things are going to function after the B word happens, in a country seemingly hell-bent on national suicide.

When the revolution comes, and it may, I'll head for Essex and hide under the piano in Saffron Hall. Because this place gives me hope in what remains of our humanity.


Tuesday, July 03, 2018

Concerto rising: Errollyn Wallen's new piece for Kosmos

Today violinist Harriet Mackenzie takes the floor to tell us about the new concerto for violin, viola and accordion [yes, really] that the fabulous Errollyn Wallen has composed for her Kosmos Ensemble. It's about to have its UK premiere at the Festival of Chichester.

If you can't get there, you can still hear the concerto: here's a video of its world premiere performance at the Jersey Liberation Festival in May, with Harriet on violin, Meg Hamilton on viola and Milos Milojevic on accordion. The Jersey Chamber Orchestra is conducted by Eamonn Dougan.
JD

Kosmos performing in Brunel's Thames Tunnel Shaft in London


NEW WORLDS: A guest post by Harriet Mackenzie



It’s not every day you get a concerto written for violin, viola and accordion - in fact, this may well be the first ever - and when you throw in the fact that we asked Errollyn to include spaces for improvisation and to include vastly different styles, both hallmarks of Kosmos, it probably is an adventure worth writing about!

Not every new concerto starts with a Zen Buddhist saying, and I can’t grandly say that this one did. Not exactly. But there is a Zen Buddhist phrase that I have been trying to get to grips with lately - “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!”. A superficial understanding of this seems to be: "If you believe you are on the road to enlightenment and you meet the Buddha then you must kill him, as once you think you have reached or understood enlightenment, you are no longer in the path of attaining it".

Somehow, I am also reminded of one of my dear violin teachers saying: "Once you are satisfied, then you are dead."  The nirvana is in the process, not necessarily a final destination. The urge to strive, to try, to improve, to be in the moment (the ubiquitous 'mindfulness' which has infiltrated newspapers and dinner-party conversations of late), to constantly be moving the goalposts,  seems to be a necessary aspect of being an artist, or even perhaps, a human.

Harriet Mackenzie in Jersey
Certainly, I feel as if I am constantly shifting the comfortable ground beneath my feet and Kosmos has been part of that. It was created as a madcap, personal moving of goalposts for myself and my fellow members - Meg Hamilton (viola player extraordinaire, winner of the prestigious Millennium Award and a renowned specialist in Jewish music) and Milos Milivojevic (one of the finest accordionists working today, winner of the Derek Butler prize contested by all the Music Academies in London, who couples his classical training with the Balkan music that flows in his veins). We all had our areas of expertise - for me, of course, that is classical - and we all wanted to stretch our creative muscles, to bring our ‘own’ areas together and see what would emerge from the collision. Personally, as a classical musician I had never improvised. Suddenly I found myself on stage, without any sheet music, regularly playing our own works, arrangements and improvisations where classical meets composition meets roots music meets world music. I was deliriously happy and terrified in equal measure. When the lights dim and the audience is waiting expectantly, there is nothing quite like the frisson of composing in real time in front of a discerning crowd. And the more we performed together, the more music we discovered and explored, the more a rich landscape opened before my eyes and ears.

When we came up with the idea of a 'Kosmos concerto', the first composer that sprang to mind was Errollyn Wallen. I have admired many of Errollyn's works - her cello concerto (written for Matt Sharpe), the percussion concerto (written for Colin Currie), her song cycle. Errollyn has a diverse musical palette. She has written acclaimed operas, concertos, chamber music and is fascinated by world music styles and jazz. She is also a great singer herself and in lots of ways she breaks boundaries (not least as the first black woman to be commissioned by the BBC Proms). So we approached her, asking - as if the job of writing a concerto for these particular forces was not unusual enough! - that she include the ethos of the group, so some form of world music influence and some form of improvisation.

Errollyn Wallen
This of course is a concerto, so we have the additional element of an orchestra. Adding those elements with all the orchestral players alongside, who necessarily have to know what they are doing at all times and be in perfect synchronisation, is complex and not a little daunting. But in a good way.

Errollyn took this all upon herself and has written us a truly unique work. There are jazz influences, a Venezuelan 'Joropo' rubs shoulders with a Byzantine Chant. There is not only improvisation, but at some point the orchestra, soloists and conductor all have to sing. That is something I have certainly never had to do in any of the other concertos I have performed!

So, and in no small part thanks to Errollyn, the Buddha yet lives! We are still on a path, with horizons uncertain. This piece had its world premiere in Jersey in May, but every performance of this concerto will be different and we hope that the UK premiere at Chichester Cathedral goes well. More than ‘goes well’, in fact - there are times when everything seems to hum and sing with the energy of the world, and when all the elements of Kosmos come together and we have great material such as that Errollyn has written for us it can be a kind of musical nirvana. And you feel - I believe athletes call it ‘in the zone’.

As well as my own journey in search of that elusive musical Buddha whom I must hope never to find (and kill), I hope that audiences are also on their own journeys, opening their hearts and ears to new sounds and experiences without prejudice. And should any of us find that Buddha, let’s not kill him. Let’s embrace him, and then change direction and carry on travelling, striving, looking, exploring, searching for new experiences, as I will too.  


Kosmos perform Errollyn Wallen's Triple Concerto at the Festival of Chichester, Chichester Cathedral, 5th July, 7.30pm, with the Worthing Symphony Orchestra and John Gibbons conducting. www.kosmosensemble.com

Harriet Mackenzie’s most recent recording was “21st Century Violin Concertos” (five world premiere recordings), with the English Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kenneth Woods (Avie).

By way of encore, here's The Lark Ascending as you've never heard it before...