A musical party game for the 21st century

Our new neighbours invited us to dinner the other day and showed us their latest musical toy. It's called Sonos and it is a wireless hi-fi system. It's controlled by a little palmtop remote computer thingy. All you need is a subscription to something like Spotify or Napster and a speaker in the right spot, and bingo: you have, literally at your fingertips, a vast library of music of any and every genre.

So here's the game. You choose a theme along which you'll make your selection - our host decided we should do "Guilty Pleasures" - and you pass the Sonos to the left, each taking a turn to add a piece of music to the queue, without letting anyone see what you've chosen. It's easy to use, though you have to watch out for those guests who like to click "Play next" instead of "Add to queue", hence overriding everything programmed beforehand, and simultaneously manage to set the thing to the whole of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.

But once you've rapped that particular person over the knuckles, you hear Joseph Calleja right beside Tom Jones, Elvis next to a Schubert Impromptu, a selection from The Nutcracker beside a track sung by a pleasant, distinctive voice I didn't recognise, who turned out to be SuBo.

You get chocolate brownie points for choosing something on the evening's theme that nobody expected from you. It's not always easy to predict reactions: my Serge Gainsbourg choice seemed to leave everyone cold (how?), but I earned a round of applause for 'Careless Whisper' (we were all young in 1985...). And a bottle or two of Merlot later, our hostess, who says she listens mostly to rock music, astonished us all by singing along to The Queen of the Night.

The commodification of music? No, that happened decades ago. Instead, here comes something that can totally change the way we listen to and explore music. Take your average suburban dinner party: a CD of Vivaldi or Bocelli goes on in the background and nobody really notices it unless it's a problem. The Sonos, though, became the centre of our evening. We zoomed through the genres, talking about the music we enjoy and why we love it, each of us hearing music we'd never normally listen to, each of us surprising the others by revealing a character trait through our choices - or, indeed, a secret guilty pleasure.

Novelty value? Undoubtedly. But it's a little more as well. Like blogging back in 2004, this is a whole new and revolutionary notion. The old divisions can vanish: a Bach fan can admit fondness for Billy Joel, but also a rock chick can can discover she enjoys a spot of Wagner. Instead of "classical music" being ghettoised beside a soaring quotient of different popular genres, everything becomes fair game in the Sonos game.

Let's get rid of the division of music into popular and classical. Let's just have music as music. Just as Saint-Saens said, there is only good music, bad music...and the music of Ambroise Thomas.

Götterdammerung at Longborough

Wagner in the Cotswolds? Well, whyever not? Can-do attitudes aren't all that widespread at present anywhere else, so I trotted off to Longborough Festival Opera to see their latest Ring Cycle installment - and found myself moved to tears, something that doesn't often happen to me in Götterdammerung. At various other performances in the past I've longed for das Ende... At this one, I could have listened to the whole thing all over again right away. Because Longborough has a conductor whom I suspect may be the best-kept secret in the Wagnerian world, a lead soprano who can hold her own with the world's finest and an expert supporting cast - a cut-down scale doesn't mean compromising on quality. Here's my full review from the Independent.

The power of laughter

One thing I want to do when I have a spare mo is to go and see Sacha Baron Cohen's film The Dictator. As Channel 4's Lindsey Hilsum says in her blog post here, there's nothing that cuts down to size as efficiently as humour. "The plot was bonkers and the jokes variable, but after 18 months immersed in the horrors perpetrated by Gaddafi, it was good to see him diminished by humour," she says.

Maybe that's why comedy is, notoriously, the hardest genre of all at which to succeed - and probably why it doesn't get into music very often, as we noted not long ago when splitting our sides at Rainer Hersch's Victor Borge show in the West End.

Fauré and his one-time flatmate André Messager managed it, though. Perhaps it was with a coating of laughter that they were able to protect themselves against the great "red spectre" of Wagner that constantly haunted and intimidated their friend Chausson and many other musicians whose personalities were positively overwhelmed by that particular juggernaut. Fauré took what he needed, or wanted, from Wagner, and left the rest. You can hear plenty of Wagnerian influence in his opera Pénélope, where perhaps it was expedient for him to employ a leitmotif system, or in the twizzling, sleight-of-hand enharmonic pivoting of the harmonies in such works as the Nocturnes nos. 6 and 7. But Fauré was able to remain very much his own man. So was Messager - who, incidentally, ended up in London running the Royal Opera House.

You want perspective? Laugh. Here's Souvenirs de Bayreuth for piano duet by Fauré and Messager, played by Pierre-Alain Volondat and Patrick de Hooge.

The Flying Duchen

Let's get to the heart of this right away. How can we "do" Romanticism in an age of cynical post-modern irony? I don't pretend to have the answer, but the question is a hefty one. And Jonathan Kent's new production of The Flying Dutchman at ENO asks it full on. That is not the least reason it is so effective. Whether or not the director intended to do so, he's sunk his teeth into one of the big artistic conundrums of today. It deserves to be brought into the open.

We see Senta first as a child in pink pyjamas, watching the waves through a giant skylight; she craves her father's affection, but he is unable to deliver any and pushes off to sea, leaving her with a book of fairy tales for company. The Dutchman manifests as her imagining, her interior living, if you like, of such a fairy tale - as children do, as we all do if only we remember, casting her father one of its characters, and the Steersman too - who sings his quiet song with rapt nostalgia and falls asleep on the floor, where little Senta covers him tenderly with her duvet. The Dutchman and his ship arrive in a terrific coup-de-theatre, he in full Mr Darcy getup, while the ship wouldn't disgrace Errol Flynn's in The Sea Hawk. And Daland's eagerness to marry the stranger off to his daughter without noticing that said stranger is one of the Undead is all too convincing, because Daland is a stranger to love and values nothing but money.

Senta, meanwhile, grows up to be Orla Boylan - except that she doesn't. She's still living that fairy tale, her emotional world twisted into an alternative reality by the lack of emotional substance around her. She works in a factory making ships in bottles - the set (designed by Paul Brown) is magnificent, with a vast window and plenty of wood suggesting past glories for this Norwegian one-ghost suburb. Her refuge is the image of the Dutchman: her own longing, her own clinging to belief in the redemptive power of love and compassion. There's none of that in her real world. Even Erik (sung by Stuart Skelton, who is an absolute knockout of a Heldentenor) is no answer. He's a security guard at the factory and there's a hint of violence, born of frustration, in his treatment of her; this big guy doesn't know his own strength. And the other girls pick on her: she's the mildly deranged fat lump in the pink dress (Primark?) who pooh-poohs their sluttishness.

And then the boys come back from sea, they have a piss-up in the factory and they try to gang-rape her. In the song to the Steersman they're egging him on, as their leader, to do the deed. Remember that nostalgic first song he had in act 1? Everything now is inside-out and upside-down. The ghost ship chorus - beamed in by amplification from somewhere offstage (a bit of a pity soundwise) comes to Senta's aid and scares everyone off, but the event pushes her over the edge and, exhausted and already dead within, she breaks a beer bottle and stabs herself with it. She is destroyed by the society in which she lives. Jonathan Kent shows us the death of a soul.

The performances match the power of the staging. The chorus, for a start, is possibly the best I've ever heard at ENO. Orla Boylan's Senta gives everything in her Ballade; there may be issues about pacing and stamina, as in the scene with Erik she began to sound strained and tired, but she summoned reserves of strength for the final scene that made her Senta seem cousin not so much to Isolde (as Wagner later saw her, rewriting the ending post-Tristan - we got the early version at ENO) but Brunnhilde, facing a test of fire instead of water.

Clive Bayley is a magnificent and all too believable Daland; James Creswell as the Dutchman is strong and even-toned, though could maybe use more variety in vocal colour to put across the emotional content, rather than relying too heavily on diction - it's good to hear all the words, but it sometimes distorted the ends of his phrases. Tenor Robert Murray made much of the Steersman aria, which in the grand scheme of the staging acquired extra dramatic significance. But Skelton just about steals the show, despite his character having too little to do. He tweeted the other day that he was off to New York to sing in Die Walkure at very short notice (jumping in for Kaufmann). Lucky Met.

Still, there's big stuff happening at home, and it is happening most of all down the pit. This is Ed Gardner's first Wagner. And from the moment the lights go off and the orchestra plunges into the deep end, we plunge with them. They grab us by the throat and don't let us go for the full 135 minutes (no interval, thanks). The intensity is fabulous, both at the opera's wildest moments and its stillest; the pacing is excellent, passionate, convincing. This seemed the case after that glorious Rosenkavalier a few months back, but now there's no doubt about it: ENO is busy growing a great conductor.

So, I was wondering how we do romanticism in an anti-romantic age. And then I went to see a preview screening of the 3D film of Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake, which is being released into cinemas worldwide on 15 May starring Richard Winsor (and very good it is). And there's the prelude. The child prince in bed, in his pyjamas. His mother comes in; he reaches out to her, she backs away. He has a fuzzy swan by way of comforter. He has a nightmare vision of the real swan. And the action commences. Remind you of anything?

Now, I'm not suggesting for one moment that this Dutchman production borrows anything from anybody, but the general atmosphere and logic of the concept is quite prevalent enough for different directors to arrive at the same scenario from contrasting positions. The Flying Dutchman story has plenty in common with that of Swan Lake. The lead character's fantasy world becomes his/her reality, encroaches on actual reality, then destroys him/her.

And today, we can't take it on its own terms, the way Wagner or Tchaikovsky intended; we have to interpret and explain it, because it seems nobody will buy into it otherwise. If a twisted mind through lack of a parent's affection is becoming the dramatic cliche of today (taking over from child abuse, which has been used ad nauseam), there may be a good reason for it.

It's one of those odd things about Romanticism, though, that it involved plenty of cynicism. It was the composers, not the writers, whose senses of humour and awareness of irony sometimes fell flat. The Flying Dutchman is based on a story by Heinrich Heine, whose bite is much fiercer than his eloquent bark. In Heine, the ending of the tale - the suicide of "Mrs Flying Dutchman" - is cynical as hell: the only way a woman can be faithful to this man unto death, he suggests, is if she dies right away. Wagner makes a virtue out of this, but that's not how Heine wrote it. Just as Schumann, setting Heine's songs, avoids the razor edge of this poet's fearsome blade and refuses to laugh or sneer with him, so Wagner goes a stage further and creates his own philosophy out of it - perfumed, feverish and egotistical it may be, but it's alive and well and blazes out of the music. Heine, one suspects, would have been livid.

And Romanticism? Its music still has the strongest appeal to audiences for classical music - not all, of course, but a distinct majority. You want "popular classics"? You get Tchaikovsky. So it is not dead. Twisted, certainly, but defunct, not at all. Most of us still, somewhere, believe in the redemptive power of love - don't we? - and the current craze for vampire movies suggests that maybe we even want to believe, at some level, in the supernatural. But the destruction of a soul through lack of love, and that lack of love, and tenderness, and compassion, and kindness, and idealism, as a comment on our society, is taking hold. Maybe we should take notice.

Wagner was here...

I've just been to paradise, aka Lucerne. This Swiss lakeside city has got to be one of the most beautiful spots in Europe (and its KKL concert hall matches that point for point).

Wagner must have thought so too, because he lived here, at Tribschen (above) - a beautiful, good but gentle walk along the lakeside from the hall, the house is in a location second to no other. And it was here, on the stairs, that he assembled an ensemble of musicians to play the Siegfried Idyll to Cosima - who was upstairs in bed - on her Christmas Eve birthday. The view from the house is really not bad.

The only thing in Lucerne to convince you that you're still in the real world is...cost. With the Swiss franc among the world's strongest currencies at present, and the dear old pound plummeting, you pay, for example, more than six quid for a frappuccino and about seven for a reasonably decent sandwich. When I have written my 25th bestseller and all the other 24 have been filmed starring Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz, I shall consider moving there. More about the concert I attended soon, but for now, suffice it to say that it was the Lucerne Festival Orchestra with Abbado...

Meanwhile, I wrote a piece about the agony and ecstasy of film music, for The Independent - it came out on Friday in time for the film music Prom and pays special attention to that desperately underrated centenary boy of 2011, Bernard Herrmann. Couldn't post earlier as was on the move, but here it is.

Yes, Korngold is in it too, but he would be - and I'm also delighted to say that next year I'll be doing a Radio 3 Building A Library broadcast to choose the finest available CD of the Violin Concerto, which is good news because it's a sure indication that now there are plenty available.

FRANZ LISZT: SINS OF THE FATHER

Very happy to announce that TOMORROW, in AUSTRALIA, my latest 'stage work' will take the platform for the first time at the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, Far North Queensland. Entitled Franz Liszt: Sins of the Father, it's a grand-scale piece bringing together as many of the resident musicians as humanly possible, and commissioned for the Liszt Bicentenary Year by the doughty Piers Lane, pianist and artistic director of the festival. The show kicks off at the Townsville Civic Theatre at 4pm.

The popular Australian radio presenter Damien Beaumont is Franz Liszt, narrating the strange history of how his sometime friend Wagner stole his limelight, his music and his daughter Cosima - and how, perhaps, the scandal of the latter was his own fault. There is humour, pathos, poetry (from Obermann), love and some reflection on the bonds that bind families so close, however bizarre that family may be.


It's very exciting that Lisa Gasteen, the great Australian Wagnerian soprano, is making a rare return to the concert platform to perform Wagner's Wesendonck Lieder and Liszt's 'O lieb', accompanied by Piers (pictured right) himself. The performance opens with Wagner's Siegfried Idyll, and along the way there are solo spots for violinists Jack Liebeck in Paganini's Variations on God Save the King and Philippe Graffin in Liszt's Romance Oubliee and Bartok's Romanian Dances; pianist Danny Driver, who'll play Liszt's transcription of Wagner's Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde; and cellist Louise Hopkins, who plays the cello version of La lugubre gondola and joins Philippe and Danny in the trio version of Vallee d'Obermann. And finally there's the Hungarian Rhapsody No.2...played by the Contiguglia Brothers piano duo, the American pianists who were among the last pupils of Dame Myra Hess.

I just wish I was there. But the performance will be broadcast the next day on ABC Radio and I'm informed that it should be possible to access it by internet, though I haven't quite worked out the time difference issues... UPDATE: An Australian tweet-friend has sent me this link which should hopefully do the trick: http://www.abc.net.au/classic/audio/#again

Do please feel free to drop me or Piers's agent a line if you are a venue that would like to book the show for Wagner Year, 2013.


UPDATE: Limelight Magazine has an interview with Damien today in which he (pictured left) talks quite extensively about Sins of the Father and what he loves about Liszt.
Taster:

Beaumont says a complicated triangle of musical passions, love and betrayal lies at the heart of the show, which takes as its subject not only Liszt but also that other Romantic titan, Richard Wagner. “We explore the story of Liszt, his daughter Cosima and her eventual marriage to Wagner. It’s an extraordinary tale of these two men connected by women, and connected by music."

The suave Hungarian and the imperious German were longtime friends, the wealthy concert pianist often helping Wagner financially. But the relationship turned sour. “The whole story is predicated on what Wagner stole from Liszt, right from his daughter to a musical phrase that Wagner turned into a five-hour opera.”

The ultimate Eurovision: Richard Wagner

Around 11pm yesterday, Richmond-upon-Thames was the scene of some strange nocturnal activity, besides the usual gaggles of drunken, semi-naked, apparently cloned teenagers. Along George Street towards the bus stops wandered small groups of dazed and bedazzled pensioners, many of them humming quietly, all of them wearing an expression that suggested they'd been at an ashram retreat and emerged with an altered sense of consciousness. The source? The Met Opera cinecast of Die Walkure.

I was lucky to be there at all, as our local Curzon sold out months ago - some friends had a spare ticket and called in the morning, so I dropped everything and ran. (I was one of just three or four under-60s in the place.) Of all the Wagner operas, this one is my favourite: its passions are the most convincing, its dilemmas the most interesting and its level of inspiration the most consistent. As you know, I have my doubts about opera in the cinema - too many tonsils - but with the prospect of Kaufmann, Westbroek, Terfel and Voigt in the Robert LePage new production...

It wasn't the tonsils that caused the problem - or even the occasional droplets of drool that came across too clearly on the big screen - but the volume. This was cinema volume, flattening out the dynamics at the uppermost level. Across a very big evening of Wagner this can leave you feeling assaulted. Just a notch down would have spared our heads and done the singers more favours - it is hard to get any idea of subtlety or variety of tone. Perhaps in future cinecasts this can be somehow addressed. But apart from that...

It's total surrender. How does one person, one bumptious little 19th-century man, create a work of art like this? How is it possible? Witness Die Walkure - especially in a performance like this - and you're left in no doubt that the potential of a human being is many thousands of times greater than we're usually allowed to believe, let alone aim towards ourselves. He creates a state of enhanced reality, a true raising of consciousness, a natural high that I'd defy any drug to match (not that I've tried any, but with Wagner around, who needs to?). Beside it everything else sounds...so small, so silly, such a waste of time.

Eurovision? You want Eurovision singing? Then see Wagner on screens in every country. Hear Eva-Maria Westbroek singing for The Netherlands as Sieglinde. Hear Bryn Terfel, fresh out of Wales, as the ultimate Wotan - the most powerful operatic performance I've ever seen, bar none. Hear Jonas Kaufmann compete for Germany in an oak-strong, desperate, tender Siegmund. And Deborah Voigt with her shining scimitar of a light-catching voice, flying through the high notes... And there is no need for anybody to win or lose.

Every argument is pallid beside this. All those fine words dissecting every word Wagner ever wrote, all those trendy debates about whether classical music is 'relevant', all the politically correct stuff, social engineering, box-ticking and dumbing-down - forget the lot. Just hear Die Walkure.

This is why we need music. This is the real thing. This is what it's all about. Showing us what a human being can truly achieve and share with others. Talk about Nietzsche if you like, talk about man and superman and Also sprach Zarathustra, but Wagner proves that something superhuman can come from humanity. And if it can, then it should. Don't tell me that anyone who can't hear it or doesn't 'get' it isn't missing out. Yes, they are. Wagner wanted this music to be for everyone. He wanted to reach the widest possible audience because he knew he had something vital to give them. He's still giving.

Down from the cloud, it's possible to dissect things a little more. Robert LePage's production hits many nails fair and square. Keeping a 'traditional' approach to the drama - naturalistic and rather prehistoric, complete with armour for Wotan and the Valkyries - does make the whole thing more engaging and believable than most tricksy updatings can. The set is extraordinary: a string of vast, tall panels, apparently weighing about 45 tons, according to the interval info, on pivots that shift, rotate and transform: they are a forest, a roof, a mountain and even the Valkyries' horses, dipping and plunging in the Ride: the girls dismount by sliding.

But the coup de grace is the final image of the sleeping Brunnhilde on her rock, watched from afar by Wotan: everything swings around until she is upside down, high up, a perspective evoking the sense that we're directly above her, looking down into the flames while rising into the sky with Wotan. My companions thought it might be a trick with a doll rather than the real Deborah Voigt, but if it was, it worked - the possibility never occurred to me. And if it was Voigt - she's brave. Have a look at the slide show of images from the New York Times.

We can pick holes, if you like. Voigt isn't the ideal Brunnhilde - at least not yet - though she may become one. Her middle voice isn't as strong as her high register, as she admitted herself in the interval interviews, with Placido Domingo and Joyce DiDonato as reporters, no less (they'll have Alan Titchmarsh out of a job if they're not careful). But it's her first run in the role - rare to be perfect first go - and in terms of personality and a strongly characterised tone, she more than carried it off. There were occasional things that we saw that we wouldn't have noticed on stage: moments when things get stuck, fail to cooperate or drip spectacularly. And the show started about 40 minutes late due, apparently, to 'machine malfunction'. We were glad to hear in the interval that this was stage machinery, not something inside James Levine, who looked unable to stand without support and didn't go up on stage for a bow. He has now pulled out of pretty much everything but this performance. A few raggedy bits in the orchestral playing, but only a few, in an opera in which scary amounts of stuff can go wrong, given half a chance.

Holes aside, this was the show of a lifetime. People speak of an aeons-gone 'golden age' of operatic singing, but I can only feel grateful to be alive to hear these guys. Terfel's Wotan is utterly superhuman, consumed with self-loathing and conflicting loyalties and with a voice that is a force of much more than mere nature. The way he kills Hunding took the wind out of everyone's sails. One word - "Geeeeeeeeh!" - and the character falls back as if struck in the stomach by a twelve-ton demolition ball. It will be a long, long time before anyone else can match the impact of Terfel's performance.

Westbroek is having one incredible year - first Anna Nicole, now this - and Sieglinde's ecstatic final blessing of Brunnhilde, wild and transported with joy, left us wondering whether it is she, in due course, who will become the next great Brunnhilde. Kaufmann, for all his assertions in his interval interview that he doesn't want to be a Wagner singer and nothing else, is going to be hard-pressed to escape more Wagner roles, so magnificent is his Siegmund. He has a German textual advantage, along with the fact that he was literally born into this music: in the interview, he recalled the days when as a small boy he sat at the piano beside his grandfather who was happily bashing through the piano scores of The Ring. Stephanie Blythe's Fricka was another huge success (in every respect) - every inch a match for Terfel's Wotan, she's a mezzo of glory.

Back to earth now. Let's slide down the Valkyrie horses...and get out to the shops before they sell out of rhubarb. Our fridge is mysteriously working again. Perhaps the energy generated in the cinema last night was enough to power everything up for miles around.

And the sequel is...

... this. Go here and click on 'Listen' for Track No.9, entitled ISOLDINA. Marc-Andre Hamelin performs and the music is by Clement Doucet after, er, Big Richard.

Note from Technotwit: ambitious attempts to plant the music directly into this post have failed.

Grande Cornish

Certain members of the orchestra not a million miles from here are blaming our freak storms on the fact that they're about to launch into Tristan und Isolde at Glyndebourne, the emotional power of which is inducing the weather to imitate the opera's setting, Cornwall. I couldn't possibly comment... but here's a sneak preview of Nina Stemme singing the Liebestod. Tristan opens next week - with La Nina a climatically appropriate choice for the lead. A further taster to get everyone in the mood will follow tomorrow.