Opera season: the might-have beens.

Having recently experienced from the inside just what it is like to create an opera (it's rather like building the world's largest cruise-ship), I've been thinking about The Ones That Got Away. The operas that were never written. The operas that composers longed to write, but were never able to because they couldn't get the copyright or couldn't get the commissions or died before they could even begin. Here are a few of the works that might have graced our stages, but don't.

Goethe, painting by Tischbein

1. FAUST, by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Goethe loved Mozart's music and stated that he would be the ideal composer to transform his Faust into an opera. Other composers were a bit too modern for his taste. The first inklings of Faust were published as Faust - A Fragment, in 1790. Mozart died before any prospect of it could become even a bit viable. Don Giovanni is probably the closest approximation...

2. WAITING FOR GODOT, by Pierre Boulez. The late French composer and conductor was widely rumoured to be planning an opera on Beckett's masterpiece, and I asked him about it in 2012. Indeed, the frail 87-year-old confirmed, he would love to write it if he were granted long enough on earth. Sadly, he wasn't.

3. Unnamed (I think) opera on a story by Ivan TURGENEV, by Johannes Brahms. In Baden-Baden,
Brahms was introduced to the Russian author by Pauline Viardot, the singer with whom Turgenev was obsessed for most of his life. Much socialising took place in the beautiful German spa town, Viardot's home, where she had a little theatre in the back garden, and Turgenev drafted a libretto for the composer. Unfortunately Brahms never set it. It told the story of a 40-something man who fell in love with a young 20-something woman, and it's possible Brahms took it a bit personally, since he had been pursuing his beloved Clara Schumann's daughter Julie about that time. Julie married a young man of her own vintage, but died tragically of tuberculosis soon afterwards; in her memory, Brahms wrote the Alto Rhapsody for Viardot to sing.

4. THE VICTORS, by Richard Wagner. It was going to be an opera on the life of the Buddha and Wagner sketched some ideas for it. But then he realised he had already written his Buddhist opera and it was Parsifal...

Fauré's sketch of Verlaine

5. THE BUDDHA. Again. This time, words by Paul Verlaine, music by Gabriel Fauré. The Princesse de Polignac, one of Fauré's most important patrons, wanted to bring the poet and composer together to create an opera and Fauré set about tracking Verlaine down. He found him in hospital, succumbing to alcoholism. They talked about making an opera on the life of the Buddha. Fauré sketched him. But Verlaine's commitment to his drink proved stronger than his drive to write a libretto. In the end Fauré played the organ at his funeral. Nevertheless, he set Verlaine's poetry in some of his finest songs, including the Cinq Mélodies de Venise and La bonne chanson.

6. HIAWATHA, by Antonín Dvorák. When Dvorák went to America to run the New York Conservatory of Music, he was charged (by its sponsor, Jeannette Thurber) with the task of inventing a national style of music for the nation. Researching possibilities, he became fascinated by Negro Spirituals and likewise by the story of Hiawatha, in the poem by Henry W. Longfellow. He aimed to turn the poem into an opera and sketched some material for it. For some reason the board of the conservatory had to approve his libretto. And they didn't approve it. And this stopped him from writing the thing. Some of the music ended up in his Symphony No.9, in which form it is now ubiquitously famous.

7. REBECCA, by Roxanna Panufnik, libretto by muggins, based on Daphne du Maurier. A few years ago we tried for but couldn't get the stage rights, which had been recently awarded to a musical. It was a little bit heartbreaking. Never mind... we ended up creating Silver Birch instead. We have plenty more ideas, and you know where to find us.

'Poldowski'

8. SILENCE, by Poldowski. Unlike the others on this list, this 'symphonic opera' was both written and published (in New York sometime around 1920). So where is it? 'Poldowski' was the pseudonym of Irène Régine Wieniawska, daughter of the violinist and composer Henryk Wieniawski; after her marriage she was Lady Dean Paul. Her music is simply fabulous. Its non-existence today has nothing to do with its lack of creation.

9. DEIRDRE, by Arnold Bax, on an Irish story by WB Yeats. Fascinating stuff, this, sketched in part yet never fully realised. Read all about it here.

10. OSSIANE, by Marie Jaëll. A disciple of Liszt and a devoted pianist and composer, Jaëll was a 19th-century French musician unlucky enough to be born in an era when living for your art wasn't an accepted life approach for a young woman. She managed to do so anyway, though she seems to have suffered psychologically, and her music can be, to judge from what I've heard, a bit patchy. Still, this opera would be fascinating. It was written - but only extracts survive. The amazing Palazzetto Bru Zane has devoted a recording and accompanying book to some of her other works. More about her from the brilliant Song of the Lark blog here.

And last, but by no means least, the excellent Anne Midgette of the Washington Post, faced with new opera seasons in the US that look chiefly like Same Old with Some Stars, has tweeted her own ideal opera season: all of them splendid operas that happen to have been composed by women. Here it is, and hear hear to it all!

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In full sail: Hamburg's Elbphilharmonie is a demanding marvel

This is it: the Elbphilharmonie, Hamburg's already renowned new hall, which opened in January after a long, long wait involving years of delay and hundreds of millions of Euros. I popped over for a couple of days to hear and interview the young American pianist George Li - more about him when the article is out, but suffice it to say that he is the real deal. He performed the Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and it was a privilege to be there.

Sunset by the sea. Elbphilharmonie on the right

The Elbphilharmonie rises out of the shoreline like a great ship: that was, indeed, the idea of the design, complete with sail-dips and prow. It reminds me of John Adams's story of the inspiration behind his Harmonielehre: a dream in which he saw a giant tanker lift up from the sea and fly. The place has perhaps the finest setting of any concert hall since the Sydney Opera House, looking across the waters into the sunset. Hamburg has acquired a landmark to be proud of, and a venue to compete with the best in the world.

There's just one problem. The design priority certainly involves impressiveness, memorability, magnificence - and a fabulous acoustic. Yet it does not appear to have the wellbeing of its audience quite as much at heart.

It is vast. Not all of what you see in the picture above is hall, though: there are other bits and bobs inside the brick section, not least a luxury hotel, while the venue itself is up at the top. Perhaps it is not until you reach the entrance that you realise what a big deal this is. Because you have to get to your seat in time for the concert and it can take a while.

Walk through the electronic gates (your ticket serves as boarding pass) and you are faced with the most inventive format of escalator I've encountered since Charles de Gaulle airport, involving several shifts of gradient and a long, high ride. Once you've done two escalators, there are stairs, stairs and more stairs. They are sleek and modern, involving interesting angles and twists. They smell wonderfully of new wood. A few lifts exist as well, which is lucky because the clientele for the Hamburg Philharmonic's Monday concert were not all sprightly on their feet. Benefitting from a health app on my phone that counts my steps every day and awards points if I do enough, I wondered if a partnership arrangement might be feasible for those who choose to climb.

Inside, the design is in the round, with stalls plus four tiers of seating above. The nautical theme continues: the balconies undulate like waves or a shoreline and the wall around the orchestra is studded as if with stones from a beach. The place is enormous, yet feels intimate as the division of the tiers makes you feel that you are not surrounded by thousands of people, everyone has enough space and wherever you sit you are relatively close to the performers. A giant acoustic mushroom hangs from the ceiling (in the photo you can just see the curve of it at the top, studded with lights). 

The sound is clear as a mountain river and as fulsome as the sea itself: an excellent balance of colour and timbre levels and a substantial bloom to blend them. At times it erred on the boomy, certainly in the Tchaikovsky Symphony No.5 which ended the programme, but George's wonderful, singing piano tone was flattered and enhanced, with a chance to appreciate the nuancing of phrases and the depth of legato in a way that is often not possible in certain other venues one could mention. 

Unfortunately our conductor for the night seemed to think the Tchaikovsky Fifth was a sacred space requiring dubious extremes of exaggerated tempi, and he waited on the podium, motionless while his orchestra tried not to twiddle their thumbs, for absolute pin-drop silence from the audience before beginning the first, second and third movements. Quite a challenge in an acoustic so clear you can hear someone burp on the other side of the auditorium.

But...oh dear...you would think, would you not, that after spending hundreds of millions of Euros on this building, they could put in enough ladies' loos? Could they hell. On level 15 I and most of my fellow audience members spent the whole interval queuing up, to discover upon entry that there were only two (2) stalls inside that door. What the heck were they thinking?!? 

Verdict. Architecture: inspirational magnificence reinvented. Acoustic: mostly splendid. Creature comforts: inside auditorium, yes; in entrance, foyers and facilities: nnnooooo... 

Hamburg itself has much to offer the musical traveller. I spent a wonderful morning in the so-called Composers' Quarter (above). Brahms's birthplace having been destroyed in WW2, along with much of the city, a charitable foundation has created a block in traditional Hamburgian style in the area where Brahms's family once lived; it houses a Brahms museum (the stone portal on the right of the photo) and a Baroque museum for Telemann, CPE Bach and Hasse. It will soon be home to a Mendelssohn museum as well - the staff told me it should be opening next year. 

The Baroque centre is full of fascinating bits and pieces, notably the delightful information that Handel and Telemann were great friends and shared an enthusiasm for horticulture; it seems they used to post one another rare flower bulbs across the Channel. There's a model of a baroque opera house, complete with deus ex machina, a modern clavichord and a beautiful spinet of c1730 akin to one that Telemann might have used. Best of all, if you're a musician you will be encouraged to play the instruments. At the Brahms museum (one of the wardens of which is named Frau Joachim, though she says she is no relation) historical displays with facsimiles and photos aplenty trace the outline of his life, his relationships with the Schumanns and Joachim, and there's a "table piano" that belonged to him, on which he used to give lessons. They let you play that, too... It's not easy to control the evenness of tone, but the sound is almost surprisingly rich and responsive and as you make awkward progress through Op.117 No.1 you might try to absorb the notion that Brahms's fingers touched these keys, and that the pupil who sat at this keyboard striving to make music would look up at his/her teacher for response and see that thoughtful broad forehead, those frank blue eyes...

For another startling spiritual hit, go to St Michael's Church (the Hauptkirche Sankt Michaelis, or "Michel"). The interior, recently painted, is bright and white, filled with clear Nordic light from tall windows and spaces that billow around you like those oft-referred ship sails. If you're lucky (and I was) someone might be playing Bach on the organ. On one side of the entrance is a plaque to Mendelssohn, on the other side one to Mahler, who held a music director post in Hamburg and wrote his Symphony No.2 here. In the crypt is the grave of CPE Bach. At the font, Brahms was baptised. The place has an intense charge, an atmosphere of peace and meditation that pulls you in and demands that you stay there a while to breathe in its peace and breathe out your stress before retackling the outside world. That is true sacred space. No pulled-around tempi needed.

The trouble with sparkles

T'other day I was out shopping when the girl behind the counter, returning my credit card, handed me a gift of a Christmas cracker covered in sparkles. I think our neighbours must have got one too, because they put through our door a cracker joke that runs: "Which players can't you trust in an orchestra? The fiddlers."

The trouble with the sparkles is that they're fairy dust and they fall off. Next thing you know, they're on the kitchen floor, in the cat food, under the piano, on the train and, by now, probably all over the Royal Festival Hall.

And they've got into JDCMB. We all sometimes need to get our sparkle back, so here are five favourite bits of musical glitter and winter snow to light the long evenings, aided and abetted by some great dancing. And they're not all Russian. Don't forget that this Friday it's the Winter Solstice and time for the JDCMB Ginger Stripe Awards!

Prokofiev: The Winter Fairy, from Cinderella - Frederick Ashton's choreography, with Zenaida Yanowsky



Schubert: Der Winterabend, sung by Werner Gura with pianist Christoph Berner. The gentler sparkle of moonlight on snowy stillness...




Tchaikovsky: The Silver Fairy variation from Act III of The Sleeping Beauty (look! No Nutcracker!). Danced by the Royal Ballet's Laura Morera.



Brahms: Es tönt ein voller Harfenklang. (Yes, there are sparkles in Brahms. Just listen to this...) Abbado conducts members of the Berlin Phil and the Swedish Radio Choir.



Rachmaninov: Suite No.2 for two pianos, second movement - Waltz. Alexander Goldenweiser and Grigory Ginzburg don't play it as fast as Argerich and Freire, but there's time to wallow in the glitter.

Lost Brahms surfaces in...Ashburton

What a scoop for the Two Moors Festival. This plucky, determined organisation way out west between Exmoor and Dartmoor has had its share of rather impactful incidents. Back in 2007 they bought a Bosendorfer, for which they'd bust many guts to raise funds, and someone dropped it during delivery (no, it wasn't OK). Now, though, they've found something altogether more resilient, and it's by Brahms.

It is, to be precise, an arrangement for piano duet from 1864 by the great Johannes of his own Piano Concerto No.1. It's been sitting undiscovered in a California library since World War II. Here's what happened, according to the festival:

Brahms sends the score to his publisher, Rieter-Biedermann, and it somehow moves thence to the hands of Heinrich Schenker, the legendary musical analyst. After his death in 1935, his wife has the manuscript. But then Mrs Schenker tragically falls prey to the Nazis and is deported to a concentration camp, which she does not survive. Beforehand, she manages to give her husband's substantial collection to one of his pupils, Oswald Jonas, who spirits its contents out of Germany in a trunk. In America, Jonas bequeaths the Schenker collection to the University of California, Riverside. And finally, someone finds the duet there...

Ashley Wass and Christoph Berner are the two lucky pianists who will give the UK premiere in St Andrew's Church, Ashburton, on 13 October, with a script telling its tale written by Sarah Adie and narrated by Ian Price. The pianists will be playing on the festival's replacement Bosendorfer. The festival has 30 concerts this year and its theme, appropriately enough, is Arrangements and Transcriptions.