NYLUND It’s actually very dangerous to drive a car and listen. You always drive much too fast. [She's not wrong - JD]
NELSONS A few conductors have died during “Tristan.” The reason is Act II. It might seem relaxing, but actually the heartbeat and the intensity and level of excitement — it’s so high that you can’t stand it for a long time. So I don’t want yet to die, but I might.
KAUFMANN Do it on Saturday, so at least we’ve done one concert.
Farewell? Renée Fleming as the Marschallin.
Photo: ROH Catherine Ashmore
When Der Rosenkavalier turns into a piece for our own times, you know two things: first, the director has a classic production in the making; secondly, we ourselves are in a lot of trouble.
Robert Carsen's staging at the Royal Opera House sets the action in the year Strauss composed the work, 1911. The empire is imploding in slow motion. Arms dealers are the moneyed arrivistes. Violence simmers under the surface, sometimes explodes. The Field Marshall's palace boasts crimson walls and giant, imperial-era paintings. Outwardly, all is elegance, beauty and shiny show, the Marschallin choosing Klimtesque gowns from a fashion parade and a troupe of "house-trained dogs" drawing oohs and ahhs (especially the bulldog and the borzois); and the silver rose is massive, not only a ton of silver but full of crystal sparkles. It's an artificial rose of the future, set against the living, delicate but doomed red ones the Marschallin cradles and sniffs. For underneath there lurks "degeneracy": a brothel-load of prostitutes in Schiele-like revelations, an Octavian who knows a lot more than he lets on, and sexual danger looming around Sophie from Ochs's troops (Sophie nevertheless startles her father and the importunate Ochs with new-found defiance). The palace reveals doors within doors within doors; every level conceals another.
Matthew Rose as Baron Ochs and Sophie Bevan as Sophie
Photo: ROH Catherine Ashmore
But this is a world on the brink. As the Marschallin delivers her reflections on the passage of time, a shudder of recognition goes through us. She is talking not only about ageing, but about the world itself, about everything that surrounds her. Yes, this is Renée Fleming's likely farewell to London's operatic stage, and yes, the Marschallin is no spring chicken, however fabulous she looks and sounds. The implications are much wider, though. At the end the place disintegrates, showing us the battlefield horrors of World War I - and soldiers aim a gun at a drunken child named Mohammed. The veracity of this imagery hits home so hard that one becomes fearful in earnest for where we are all going now. Remember, historical fiction isn't only about the past; its task is to be about today.
Big plaudits, then, to Carsen and his designers Paul Steinberg (sets) and Brigitte Reiffenstuel (costumes). The lighting is by Carsen and Peter von Praet. Musically, too, this performance couldn't be much more memorable if it tried; even if not every singer precisely matches every listener's ideal, the quality of insight, the excellence of the singers and the chemistry between them could scarcely be bettered.
Fleming's Marschallin is the incarnation of olde-worlde glamour. Her voice still has its amber-mellow beauty, if perhaps scaled down from its full glory, and her singing communicates with profundity accentuated by its directness and poise. As Octavian, Alice Coote brings oodles of character to her tone as well as her acting; this lad is awkward and stiff in army uniform, yet abrupt liberation follows in Act III when, dazzling in drag in a brothel, he/she displays a startling understanding of how to tantalise and torment the justifiably muddled Ochs - and whether Octavian has learned all this from the Marschallin or acquired it elsewhere is perhaps a moot point. Sophie Bevan as her namesake sounds warm and golden rather than cool and silver, yet her high notes at the presentation of the rose seem to reach heaven itself.
Matthew Rose's Ochs is no mere bumpkiny boor, but a powerful man out for a good time that doesn't please those around him and tramples - Trumples? - over societal norms with disruptive relish. It's almost impossible not to feel vaguely sorry for him as "Mariandel" delivers him her nasty dose of over-worldly Viennoiserie. Luxury casting for Annina and Valzacchi in the shape of Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke and Helene Schneiderman, as well as Faninal - the many-dimensional voice of Jochen Schmeckenbecher.
The greatest magic of all: Andris Nelsons, red-shirted, open-armed and open-hearted, unleashing the music and letting it fly out of the orchestra's players, hushing the levels for Fleming and allowing the visual marvels to be cradled in a sensual richesse of sound.
It's hard to believe that this could be Fleming's farewell - but then, there's a lot that's hard to comprehend right now. She may be departing together with our golden age of opera. That's a topic for another time, but reinforces an important message: let's never forget we were lucky enough to have and hear this.
On a lighter note, a special little plaudit for a startling appearance in the onstage band of two characters that apparently reference "Geraldine" and "Josephine" from Some Like It Hot. A very endearing anachronism.
Meanwhile I may get up in the night and stop the clocks.
I am running a new occasional series of exclusive star interviews on JDCMB. Here is the first... Matthew Rose takes centre stage, appropriately enough, in the Royal Opera's new production of Der Rosenkavalier - and it's not going to be a pink, fluffy one. The British bass talks to me about Baron Ochs, Bottom and Brexit...
Matthew Rose rehearsing for Der Rosenkavalier, with Helene Schneiderman as Annina. Photo: Catherine Ashmore
If I’ve arrived at the Royal Opera House
stage door expecting the kindly, bearded presence of a King Marke, I’m in for a
surprise. The new version of Matthew Rose instead boasts sideburns, a hefty moustache
and a military demeanour. The British bass may be as imposing as the Wagnerian monarch he sang last summer at ENO, but today he is still virtually in character from ongoing intense
rehearsals for Covent Garden's new Der Rosenkavalier. Singing
Baron Ochs, he remarks, settling into the tallest chair we can find, is “like
doing seven operas at once”.
“Robert
Carsen, our director, said just now that Baron Ochs is probably the most
brilliant character ever invented in opera, with such bravado and such belief
in himself,” Rose declares. People often see Ochs as a bit of a buffoon, he adds, but it’s not
necessarily so: “He speaks French and Italian, he knows about the world, he’s
very educated – but he happens to act in a way that is very different from
everyone else in Vienna. He’s from a house in the middle of nowhere where he
can behave as he wants, so that’s what he does and he comes to Vienna thinking
he can get away with it there too: meeting his bride-to-be, with the
Marschallin, who’s his cousin, he just says exactly what he wants to say. This
staging has him as a soldier as well, though, so there must be some kind of
discipline there. And he’s very entertained by himself. He’s a very entertaining
character.”
Matthew Rose, with the former look
Entertaining the opera may be, and Ochs
with it, but this time we can expect something a little edgier on stage. “I’ve
done the role just once before, in Chicago, so I was trying to get all the
words into my head,” Rose says. “That was a very traditional Rosenkavalier, very fluffy. Many of the
productions you see are fluffy, very pink and lovely. This isn’t like that.
This is definitely not fluffy.”
Carsen has set the production in 1911, the
year of the opera’s composition, rather than the Mozartian era envisaged by
Richard Strauss and his librettist Hugo von Hofmannsthal. “It’s pre World War
I, pre change of everything, Austria before everything went tits-up there: a
very important time both historically and artistically,” says Rose. “It fits in
very well with how things are here.”
Indeed, the primary purpose of historical
fiction is arguably not only to explore a bygone era, but to reflect back
crucial elements of our own through its prism – and this opera is no exception.
Rose has little doubt that “things here” are about to go very tits-up indeed.
On the morning the Brexit decision was announced, he made for Westminster with
a takeaway coffee, expecting a demonstration in protest to materialise. He was
astonished when it didn’t. “Why are we allowing this to happen?” he growls. “Brexit
is going to ruin this country in a way I think people don’t understand. I don’t
see how anybody could think any good could come out of it.”
Rose as Sparafucile in the ROH's Rigoletto
Photo: Johan Persson/ROH
At a recent press event Alex Beard,
chief executive of the Royal Opera House, explained that Brexit has already hit
the organisation hard because of the fall in value of the pound: the cost of
paying many people in other currencies has risen 20 per cent. “It’s obvious how
it’s going to affect us in the arts – it puts everything in peril that we do,”
says Rose. “Our industry is in a terrible situation. This opera house thrives
on people coming in and out internationally, very freely and easily, and doing
things often on a very ad-hoc basis. Who knows what’s going to happen to that,
and who knows what the pound is going to do? All these knock-on effects… In the
US Trump can be voted out after four years, but I think the UK is in worse
shape, as we’re stuck with the referendum result forever.”
Rose has a foot in both countries: he has been living more or less in
mid-Atlantic, between New York and Blackheath, south-east London, for some
years. Though he grew up in Seaford, five miles down the road from
Glyndebourne, he came to the idea of professional singing relatively late.
“Singing has always been part of my life,
though I didn’t take it seriously at first,” he says. “In my last year at
school I was singing in the choir, but there were lots of other people doing
things seriously and I wasn’t one of them. A new music teacher arrived at the
school and he was the first person who suggested to me that I might consider
becoming a professional opera singer. I’d never even thought about it before.
Then I went to university at Canterbury and Benjamin Luxon and his wife were
there and they took me to the next step.”
As Bottom in Glyndebourne's production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. Photo: Robert Workman
Attending a summer course in Italy, he met
Mikael Eliasen, artistic director of the Curtis Opera Theatre at the Curtis
Institute, who invited him to Philadelphia to audition. He spent five years
there, though at first, he remarks, “it was quite embarrassing. I think I went
in the same year as Lang Lang. He went in being already this world-class star
and I was starting from scratch, so it was quite an intimidating situation.”
The department was relatively small, with
around 25 singers, yet put on five operas a year, Rose recounts – a preparation
for stage life more hands-on and intensive than most. His teacher was Marlena
Malas, who was based at the Juilliard School in New York, and whom he still
consults. “I had my lessons every Monday at five o’clock, looking straight
across to the Met,” he remembers, “and whenever I did something wrong, she’d
say: ‘Do you wanna sing thereor not?’”
He certainly did, especially after he
started attending performances every week after his lesson. “The Met has always
been a shrine to me,” he remarks. “Now I do two or three operas there a season
and it’s a wonderful family to be part of. There are lots of friends around,
people in the orchestra with whom I went to college, and I feel very at home there.”
His most recent Met stint was as Leporello
in Don Giovanni: “Leporello is my favourite role in the world,” he declares.
“He’s an amazing character. Da Ponte wrote some of the greatest librettos in
history – as did Hofmannsthal – and Leporello’s journey through the opera,
especially the second half, is just miraculous.”
After five years at Curtis, Rose felt “ready
to go out and have a career”. Back in London he auditioned, and was accepted,
for the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme at the Royal Opera House. Next
thing he knew, he was on stage with Angela Gheorghiu, Roberto Alagna and Bryn
Terfel in David McVicar’s production of Faust. “At that point you have to up
your game,” he considers, “and there’s no better way to do it than standing on
stage with these people.”
Rehearsing the ROH's La Bohème. Photo: Yuri Vorobiev
Coming back to Covent Garden some 14 years
later, he notes, it is hard to shake off the association – “up to a point I’m
still ‘Matthew Rose who was on the Young Artists’ Programme…’” But now he has
travelled full circle and himself coaches the young singers on the scheme:
“It’s a nice role reversal. I feel so grateful for things that have been passed
to me. We all absorb these things that we distill within ourselves and
hopefully can pass them on again. I’ve done lots of teaching these past few
years and I really enjoy that.”
To various teaching activities, Rose adds a
strong commitment to the Blackheath Concert Halls near his London home: “I’ve
been heavily involved in activities there for ten years – we’ve done wonderful
community projects, started a children’s choir and have a new children’s opera
commissioned for next year from Kate Whitley. I’d love to be part of making it
into a really wonderful centre for the arts in south-east London, though of
course it’s easier said than done…”
Another favourite London location is the
Wigmore Hall: here he sings Schubert’s Winterreise
in February 2017. And then there’s Schwanengesang
a few months later at Carnegie Hall, New York. “How lucky am I to do that!” he
remarks. “Schubert was my first great passion that really got me into singing,
when I went to a Schubert Day at the Royal College of Music in his bicentenary
year, 1997.
“I love Lieder, making music with one
pianist, being in control of what one wants to do – whereas in opera one is
told by many people what to do. And I love orchestral concerts. Of course I also
love being on stage, but you’re compromising so much when you sing opera:
you’re trying to do 17 different things at once and you’re rarely going to be satisfied.
But I love standing there with an orchestra, making music. At the end of the
day, I’m a musician and I love to make music. And if there’s a bit of acting or
being a bit silly involved,” he adds, “that’s OK.”
Rose certainly has risen to fame with in
roles that are comic, yet with an undertow of complexity: “I’m quite a silly
person, so being on stage being silly comes quite naturally,” he suggests. Besides
Leporello, he has been particularly lauded as Bottom in Britten’s A Midsummer
Night’s Dream, at Glyndebourne and beyond; he will be singing the role at a new
Aldeburgh Festival staging by Netia Jones in summer 2017. He is a long-standing
devotee of Aldeburgh, having attended many courses there as a student and
nursing a passion for the musicality and dramatic excellence of Britten’s
operas. “Bottom in particular has been very good to me,” he notes.
One does sense, though, that underneath
there is little about this perceptive and down-to-earth artist that is remotely
silly. Even golf is a serious matter for him: “It’s not for unwinding,”
he says. “It’s something I love to do well and in many ways it is like singing:
concentrating hard, switching that concentration on and off.”
As for his dream roles that remain, those
aren’t so silly either. “I’d love to have a crack at Philip II,” he says.
“Gurnemanz in Parsifal will hopefully happen next year, and certain other
Wagnery things would be nice… But I’m having the most incredible year at the
moment, doing Leporello, Bottom and Baron Ochs, and the song recitals. I
probably ought to retire after it! What I’ve done so far has far surpassed
everything I ever dreamed of and I’m so lucky to have done what I’ve done. If I
stop now, I’ve had a very nice time and a very nice career and maybe it’s time
to go and have a very nice sleep.”
Now he really is being silly, or so one
hopes. There is the whole of Der Rosenkavalier
to look forward to, with a dream cast and Andris Nelsons in the pit: “There’s
no one classier in the world than Renée Fleming,” Rose enthuses. “Alice Coote
and Sophie Bevan I know very well, and it’s nice to be reunited with Jochen
Schmeckenbecher [singing Faninal], who was in the first opera I ever did as a
student in Philadelphia – it was The
Magic Flute, I was a priest and he was Papageno.” As for Nelsons, “The
orchestra sounds unbelievable with him. He’s got it all. This is the hardest
role I’ll ever do,” he adds, “and everyone’s being so nice to me. It’s a huge
honour and I’m very grateful for this situation.”
Curtain up is this Saturday at 6pm: and the
appropriately-named Rose is set to be a cavalier of a whole new kind. Beg,
borrow, or ninja a ticket.
Der
Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera House, from 17 December. Book
here.
Bryn on...Andris Nelsons (who conducts the Wagner tonight): "The first time I met him was in Birmingham - and then I heard the Boston Symphony Orchestra had snapped him up. He’s
married to Kristine Opolais,of course, which will only make him an even better
conductor of singers – but he can sing! Goodness gracious, you should hear his
voice. He's a stunning bass-baritone and he loves to sing from
the pit- and he laughs and winks at you. From what I hear, the orchestra
loves him as well. Isn’t that a great formula already? Who knows where he’ll
go?" Bryn on...his foundation to help student musicians:
"Whatever I do concertwise now, the money I
get for that goes to the foundation. I need to work a little bit harder, maybe, on getting people to invest some of their money into the youth of my
chosen career, so I’ve given some nmoney to young Welsh singers, I’ve given
some mopney to a young accordionist who's doing really well at the moment,
Ksenija Sidorova, I gave her a little foundation money – I’m sure that any
student coming out of college would like some help. So that’s something for the
future. In the next 10 years I’m going to home in on my foundation. I started it because I heard from students that they were coming out of
university with debts and that made me think that maybe they need the money
now, while they’re still in college. So the money I’ve given to students, they’re in
college now, spending it. And there’s no stipulation about what they can spend
it on – they can buy shoes, a car, a dress – and these are things you need as a
performer. I’ll never forget Sir Geraint Evans telling me: 'Buy a new suit.' And
he was right. Because that generation, thety’d come to rehearsal in a
three-piece suit! I’ll never forget who I got money from. Capital Radio gave me
£500 once. The Kathleen Ferrier Scholarship I won was £5000 and that was really important for extra coaching and extra language coaching."
Bryn on...the great pianists:
"I’ll never forget going to hear Martha Argerich
play with the young Verbier Symphony, full of kids under 25 years old. I
sat there with Peter Gelb and he said 'It’ll be brilliant tonight.' I can guess a pianist will be brilliant by the names, but to hear
piano music being played I need to study a little more, I think, on the
difference between brilliant and mediocre, because I think they’re all fantastic.
And Peter said that at the end of Horowitz’s career he was his agent and filmed
him playing in Moscow for the last time. He said they didn’t want to film him from the front of the audience, so he had
the camera on Horowitz from behind - and looking through into the audience, all
these Russian people were sobbing. But he said Horowitz had said to him: 'Only one
pianist will take over what I’ve started, and it’s Argerich'. So I was about
to listen to this woman – I listen to a lot of Horowitz anyway on Youtube - his
White House soirées with presidents are recorded on video. So that
was one of the most exciting evenings I’d ever had, having heard that story."
1. Combine exploring opera with your passion for the piano. If you're heading to the Institut Francais's big three-day keyboardfest, It's All About Piano - starting today and running through Sunday - catch the screening of Poulenc's one-woman opera La Voix Humaine, filmed with the one and only Felicity Lott - with piano accompaniment, in which version it's been recorded for the first time, delivered by the brilliant Graham Johnson. Sneak preview above. The screening is tonight at 8pm - and if you turn up at 6pm you can hear Nick van Bloss play the Goldberg Variations and a four-hands programme from Lidija and Sanja Bizjak at 7pm.
2. Pop over to CultureKicks for my latest post, which is called "How to get into opera in under six minutes". You'll find a quick guide to Rigoletto, a film of its astonishing quartet 'Bella figlia d'amore' and a short explanation of why it shows to perfection what opera can do that just cannot be done nearly so well in any other art form... (Lovely editor there then said "What about Wagner?" to which the response can only be: "Well, what about Wagner...?" Watch that space.)
3. Listen to Andris Nelsons conducting. I've just been in Birmingham doing some pre-concert talks for the CBSO's Beethoven Cycle, which he, their music director, is doing for the first time. Honest to goodness, guv, this guy is amazing. Not sure I've seen anything so purely energetic and with so much warmth since...well, who? Jansons? Solti? The atmosphere in Symphony Hall - which was sold out - really had to be experienced. Nelsons, who hails from Latvia, cut his musical teeth as an orchestral trumpeter and started off, as so many great maestri do, in the opera house, and he's married to the soprano Kristine Opolais, who's currently wowing ROH crowds in Tosca.
He conducted his first Ring Cycle at the age of 26 and is now a favourite at Bayreuth. Hear his Beethoven and you can tell why. The structures are clear, but the emotion is allowed to blaze: there's enough rhythmic strength to build a castle, but enough flexibility to let in the sunshine. The characters and personalities that shine out of each of Beethoven's symphonies are as distinct as those of any opera. Perhaps, in this conductor's hands, music is inherently operatic?
It was an absolute privilege to have introduced this extraordinary concert. Great turnout for the talks, too, especially for yesterday's matinee, where a door-count estimate suggested we had nearly 500. Thanks for your warm reception, dear friends, and I hope you all enjoyed hearing about the slow movement of Beethoven 7 through the narrative of Rosa Parks and the American civil rights movement.
Last but not least, it was a special treat to run into our old friend Norman Perryman, the musical "kinetic artist", whose beautiful paintings and portraits are part of the Symphony Hall visual brand. Here he is beside his magnificent picture suggested by Elgar, Gerontius, which hangs in the foyer at level 4. Glad to say he was in town to start work on a portrait of Nelsons.
I've been talking to some interesting people recently...
The unbelievable Edward Watson, who is dancing the lead role in Mayerling at Covent Garden next month. The crazed Crown Prince Rudolf is, weirdly enough, the only ballet prince he's played, other than Albrecht in Giselle, who's not really that princely. A dancer with his levels of drama, flexibility and power would probably be wasted chasing after a swan. Catch him first in the equally incredible The Metamorphosis.
A composer called Nimrod - who, as it turned out, lived next door to me in West Hampstead 20 years ago, except that we never met. The Philharmonia played a work of Nimrod Borenstein's the other week with Ashkenazy conducting, and has commissioned a new piece from him for June at the RFH. He's also writing a violin concerto for Dimitry Sitkovetsky. He's a live wire who thinks big, and talked to me (for the JC) about finding his voice and what he's doing with it now that he has.
It's All About Piano! Francoise Clerc, the one-woman dynamo at the heart of the Institut Francais's classical music programming, has put together an absolute bonanza of a piano festival, which will take place over three days next weekend, 22-24 March. Star performers include Imogen Cooper, Nick van Bloss, Charles Owen, Katya Apekisheva, Cyprien Katsaris and Anne Queffelec; there's a chance to hear some rising stars including a raft of the most gifted budding virtuosi from the Paris Conservatoire, a modern American programme from Ivan Ilic, jazz from Laurent de Wilde, talks by Steinway technicians, children's events and plenty more. When did London last have a piano festival like this? Um. Pass. This is for Classical Music Magazine and you'll need to be logged in to read the whole article.
Meanwhile, if you're in Birmingham on Wednesday evening or Thursday lunchtime, I'm doing pre-concert talks for the CBSO to introduce Beethoven's Symphonies Nos.6 and 7. Andris Nelsons conducts them both. Very privileged to be allowed to hold forth about my two favourite Beethovens, let alone to complement such an event: there's a major buzz about Nelsons' Beethoven cycle and Symphony Hall is apparently packed solid.
And next Sunday at 12.30pm I'm at The Rest is Noise to introduce a talk about Korngold in America and discuss the issues around him with the Open University's Ben Winters. In the Purcell Room, and part of the ongoing festival's American Weekend. (We're not in the current listings PDF as far as I can tell, so this may be a late addition!)
My Internet is back, so very quickly, before it vanishes again, here's a little newsround.
BATONFLIPPER'S BIG BREAK
Don't miss this blog by conductor Michael Seal, who tweets as @batonflipper, about how Andris Nelsons dropped out of the CBSO tour and he had to step in at an astounding 20 minutes' notice. There followed a massive programme with Jonas Kaufmann singing the Kindertotenlieder. By all accounts Michael did magnificently. Is this his big break? Let's hope so. Interesting, too, to hear about how Der Jonas responded when a member of the audience shouted at him after his first song to step forward because they couldn't see him...
THE RETURN OF MAXIM VENGEROV
He's been around, but not playing the violin: an injury has kept him away from the fiddle on a sort of enforced sabbatical. But now he's back at last. Maxim Vengerov is on In Tune on BBC Radio 3 today, playing and talking, sometime after 4.30pm. Tomorrow he'll be giving his first Wigmore Hall recital for around 20 years, with Itamar Golan at the piano. I was at that last one, and I will never, ever forget it. He was 14 and there, on stage, was a spotty schoolboy playing for all the world like Jascha Heifetz. I am sure everything will be different now - have the intervening decades mellowed him, or will he be that same virtuoso daredevil? It's a comparatively restrained programme: Handel, Bach and Beethoven - but of course music doesn't get any greater than the Bach D minor Partita and the Beethoven 'Kreutzer'. Go, Maxim, go!
WHERE'S TOMCAT?
He's here:
That, in case you wondered, is a view from the pit at the Bavarian State Opera, Munich, where our Tomcat is currently working, having taken extra time away from London. His own enforced sabbatical (rather different from Vengerov's) has done him the power of good - and the particular ironic trajectory by which this Buxton-raised son of German-Jewish refugees from Berlin fetches up in Munich, playing Wagner's Parsifal at Easter, is something that you couldn't make up. The orchestra is fabulous, he says, with no weak links; it functions with plenty of space, great facilities, grown-up attitudes and, not least, crack football teams for both sexes. Right now he's being shown the town by Wilhelm Furtwangler's great-grandson, who happened to be sitting next to him on the plane.
