Daniel Hope & the Missing Link

The Missing Link is Joseph Joachim, lynchpin of the split in Romantic music that made everyone go a bit Brahms and Liszt. Daniel Hope has been delving into the influence of this legendary violinist and I recently had a lovely interview with him about it. A somewhat truncated version is in today's Indy, which does make it clear that if Brahms hadn't nodded off at a crucial moment, the whole history of music might have been different... Below please find the Director's Cut - complete with some Youtube of the great Joachim himself, who lived just long enough to make a few short recordings...

He’s the missing link of musical Romanticism: a man of uncompromising ideals, the greatest violinist of his day and an accomplished composer. Yet today Joseph Joachim is barely remembered. Because he was more famous as a performer than as a creator, he has slipped behind his closest friends in terms of repute. And since those friends included Robert and Clara Schumann, Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn and -- for a while -- Franz Liszt, perhaps it’s no wonder.

Now, though, the British violinist Daniel Hope (right) is setting out to restore Joachim to his rightful place as the lynchpin of music-making in the Romantic era, with a new CD entitled The Romantic Violin. And it’s not a moment too soon, for some of the 19^th century’s crucial musical developments revolved around this extraordinary, and extraordinarily cantankerous, artist.

The idea, Hope says, has been bubbling away for years. Joachim (1831-1907) lived long enough to make a few gramophone records towards the end of his life; Hope’s fascination began when he heard those recordings as a child. “By then he wasn’t in his heyday, but there was something very distinct about his sound,” says Hope. “His exceptionally pure tone always intrigued me.”

He found that Joachim’s name “just kept popping up” as dedicatee of countless works, including the Brahms Violin Concerto and pieces by both the Schumanns. As he learned more, Hope was “amazed by the breadth of talent Joachim had, not just in playing the violin but in forging new approaches in musical expression, making new programmes, rediscovering the Beethoven Violin Concerto. He was tremendously interested in poetry, the arts, humanity in general, and he embodied the Romantic spirit more than any other violinist.”

As a child prodigy, the young Joachim was dandled, metaphorically, on the musical lap of Mendelssohn, who was not only his mentor but conducted a performance of the Beethoven Violin Concerto in which Joachim, aged 13, was the soloist. “Without that performance, the concerto might have disappeared,” says Hope. “Until then, violinists had treated it as little more than an exercise. But Joachim played the music as he felt it. It must have been a complete revelation.”

Liszt, then honorary kapellmeister to the court in Weimar, persuaded the still teenaged violinist to become leader of his orchestra in 1848. There Joachim joined Liszt’s group of young disciples for several years. But another friendship soon came about which altered matters considerably: that with Johannes Brahms, two years Joachim’s junior.

It was Joachim who famously provided the 20-year-old Brahms with a letter of introduction to Robert and Clara Schumann, a meeting that profoundly affected the course of Brahms’s life and music. But just before that, Brahms went to see Joachim and Liszt in Weimar. This had a different result, equally lasting. When Liszt played his B minor Sonata to his assembled students, Brahms made a crucial faux pas: he fell asleep. His lack of sympathy with Liszt’s style was a sign of things to come.

What ensued later was the so-called ‘War of the Romantics’, which split the aesthetic of new music in Europe into two separate directions. In one camp were Liszt, Wagner and their followers, determined to create “the music of the future”, shaking up old preconceptions about style, harmony and structure; in the other camp, Brahms, Joachim and Clara Schumann, among others, deplored such iconoclasm and showiness.

But it was largely due to Joachim that the split became unreasonably vitriolic. A letter he wrote to the generous Liszt in 1857, refusing his invitation to perform in a festival in Weimar, simply beggars belief:

“Your music is entirely antagonistic to me,” he wrote. “It contradicts everything with which the spirits of our great ones have nourished my mind from my earliest youth. If it were thinkable that…I should ever have to renounce all that I learnt to love and honour in their creations, all that I feel music to be, your strains would not fill one corner of the vast waste of nothingness…”

Joachim thus ratched up the heat of the ongoing arguments and set the tone for much of what followed from the likes of Wagner himself and (on the side of Joachim and Brahms) the notorious critic Eduard Hanslick. But why was he so bitter?

It could be that the crux was Joachim’s own longing to be a finer composer than he was. Two of his most beautiful works feature on Hope’s CD, but alongside his friends, his music pales by comparison and he would have been the first to admit it. Perhaps because of that inward disappointment, he was a tortured soul.

His letters often reflect the dark side of his nature: he possessed the capacity for hyper-criticism of his nearest and dearest that often goes with great sensitivity and perceptiveness. For instance, despite his closeness to Brahms he would not demur from describing him as ‘egotism itself’ to a friend. His marriage to the singer Amalie Schneeweiss ended in acrimonious divorce (a rare decision in those times); that in turn sparked a serious fallout with Brahms.

But it was the Liszt incident that changed the future of music. “If Joachim had not split with Liszt,” says Hope, “the Liszt Violin Concerto would not have been forgotten; and there might have been one by Wagner. Instead, we have Brahms, Schumann, Dvorák, Bruch…”

Nothing wrong with those, of course; and Joachim’s input requires attention, especially for Bruch’s Concerto No.1, which opens Hope’s CD. “In its first version the concerto wasn’t a success,” Hope says. “Bruch then enlisted Joachim’s help, because with his fame and his ability he could save pieces. Sure enough, he revised it radically.” The concerto partly owes its popularity to Joachim’s rewrites. “And in terms of German Romantic sensibility, it reaches a zone beyond any of the others.”

Joachim’s attitude to Romanticism was quite unlike our general notion of it today, which is closer to that of Liszt and Wagner. “It’s interesting that Joachim was the violinist whose tone was the purest,” says Hope. “It’s like listening pure emotion. Other violinists who recorded around the same time couldn’t sound more different -- perfumed, beautiful, fantastic playing, but showy. That is how Romanticism, as we define it, happened; but it has little to do with what the Romantic movement was really about.”

The CD, Hope says, is the starting point for many of his concert programmes and projects this year. He is never less than snowed under: shortly his third book, Toi Toi Toi, is being released -- “a chronicle of musical superstitions and disasters, including my own,” he says -- and he’s about to assume a new festival directorship in Mecklenburg, Germany. That makes it all the more impressive that he’s spending so much time and effort focusing attention on Joachim. Stand by for some seriously amazing music-making. The CD is out tomorrow.

Here is Joachim himself in the Bach G minor Adagio, recorded in 1904. An ultimate Friday Historical.

On the way to 'Let Me In'

No, not the vampire movie. We came up with the title well before posters for the horror film hit the London Tube. Our Let Me In is a wee bit different from that. It will be premiered by the magnificent choir Chanticleer in California on 26 March and given a number of performances in the environs during the ensuing week. It's an a cappella choral piece by Roxanna Panufnik, one of three new works commissioned from different composers by the American choir for a project based on episodes in the life of Jesus. They'll perform them alongside existing music by Part, Gorecki and Mason Bates. And if you're wondering how a nice Jewish girl who likes Richard Dawkins and scribbles for the JC ends up doing the words, read on...

When Rox (who's Roman Catholic) asked me for a poem to set, I think my first words were "You do know I'm a Jewish atheist, don't you?" Of course she did - we've been great friends for more years than I'd care to state - but the human element of the story was, she felt, more important than the faith. Having selected the childhood of Jesus as her patch, she'd read the Gnostic Gospels (I wanted to know if there were some Agnostic ones too) and settled on a story in which the boy Jesus meets a grieving mother whose child has died. He resurrects the baby. As a mum of three, Rox was deeply drawn to the emotions of this tale. And she was well aware that I know more than I'd have liked to know about bereavement.

The project soon turned into one of those creative onions in which you peel off one layer only to find ten more with ever-stronger flavours underneath. I suggested that we set the narrative in the early Jewish community in which the Gnostic Gospels suggest it could have taken place (eg, in one of the other stories, to which we make passing reference, our lad is told off for making clay birds on the Sabbath).

I filled the first part of the poem with imagery from the traditional rituals of Jewish mourning: the covered mirrors, the torn robes, etc. But the twist is that the mother is nearly losing her mind in her grief and won't allow anyone into the house to sit with her. A boy appears outside, calling: "Let me in!" The crowd are suspicious: they have heard frightening stories of this child's uncanny powers. But so has the mother: she opens the door, recognising he is the one person who could help her. He does. The baby is returned to life. Amid general jubilation, the boy slips away unnoticed.

But how to depict the background in the music? Rox wrote to the marvellous Professor Alex Knapp, expert on Jewish traditional music, who talked us through early settings of the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead. We visited Jackie, a cantor in North London, who offered even more detail on the topic and sang some to us, her voice carrying exactly the focus of spiritual energy that I think Rox was hoping to find in these powerful chants. The earliest version that could be traced was a Yemenite melody infused with a rawness and intensity that grabbed us both by the innards. This Kaddish runs through the first part of the piece.

So far I've heard Let Me In only on Rox's Sibelius computer, but on first listening I was bowled over by the emotional oomph in her harmonies and the way the vocal lines rise up through the keening pulsation of the texture, rather like trying to find one's way through a forest of exotic plants. It's a story to be told - but also to be felt in the gut. Rox has just been appointed as the London Mozart Players' first associate composer. They're in for a treat.

As for the movie...well, I didn't go because I don't get on with that kindathang. But it was nice to see the title of our piece plastered all over the walls at Bond Street Station.

Meanwhile it's turned out there's still another Let Me In! Here it is...

A Farewell to Fodor

The news has just reached me (via Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc) that the violinist Eugene Fodor has died, aged 60. He claimed to be Heifetz's last disciple, though some others say he wasn't. He also had the more dubious accolade of being my weirdest-ever interviewee.

I met Eugene in spring 1994. At that time I was in crisis after the death of my mother that February and to get myself through I'd taken up a yoga and meditation system that involved vegetarianism, ashrams, a guru and so forth. Eugene was in town to play at the Wigmore Hall and The Strad wanted an interview, so I went up to Muswell Hill to talk to him. About ten minutes into the interview, some of his remarks began to ring bells: he practised yoga and meditation, he said, but it wasn't a religious thing, just a spiritual one that enhanced the &c&c&c. It turned out, of course, that we were doing the same method, had the same guru... and along came the Sanskrit passwords and greeting, after which we were supposed to be best buddies. He turned up that week at the Thursday evening central London "satsang" and kindly offered anyone there who wanted to go free tickets for his Wigmore recital (somewhat to the consternation of his concert manager, I think).

During the interview he talked a lot, very movingly, about Heifetz, the Tchaikovsky Competition and why violin playing is a form of mysticism; we discussed technique and he showed me a trick he had of putting resin on the fingertips of his bowing hand to enhance control (this didn't go into the article). He said nevertheless that were I to ask any questions about the allegations of substance abuse or his arrest, he'd stop the interview there and then. So we talked violin. I wrote an article that eventually was entitled "Fodor's Guide to Violin Playing", which you can read on his website.

Six or eight of us from the meditation centre went along to the Wigmore. The Strad, meanwhile, had asked me to review the recital. Fodor's technique was dazzling indeed in the showpieces; with a powerful sound and remarkable security, he inspired much enthusiasm in a very impressed hall. But the Brahms sonata was deeply uncomfortable, not least because he seemed to be at war with his pianist, who looked on the point of collapse. I congratulated him backstage, escaped home and wrote an honest review of what I'd witnessed.

A week or two later I was staying with my father when the phone rings and there's Eugene. The magazine had a new editor who, for reasons that escape me, had agreed to fax my unpublished review to the artist when said artist requested it. Eugene wasn't too happy. So he had written another one. Couldn't we run that instead? Probably not, I said. He faxed it through. To say that the writing was not my style would have been putting it a bit mildly. And for some reason I didn't much like the notion of putting my name to a non-review of a concert written by the performer himself, even if we did both have the same guru and Sanskrit greeting. The contrite editor was on my side and my review appeared as written. Eugene rang again. Dad told him I was out. Not long afterwards I looked at his website. There upon it was his own review of his own London recital. (It isn't there now.)

I didn't go back to the meditation centre. It was revealed, not long afterwards, to be a very dubious organisation indeed, so Mr Fodor had done me a great favour. A strange man, but a wonderful violinist. I shall never forget him.

Butterflitting...

I was at the opening night of Madam Butterfly at the Royal Albert Hall - here's my review from today's Independent. Thoughts about the whys and wherefores of this are butterflitting about. This very popular in-the-round and sung-in-English production has a job to do and it does this very well. The singing was pretty damn good. David Freeman brings out some acute psychological detail that enhances the drama, too. But there was so much that got up my nose: the amplification, the dragging pace, the way that the setting just swallows the silken embroidery of the score's detail, and I have a job to do too, so I have to say so.

And yet... I took along my niece, who'd never heard it before, and she was entranced.  The thing is sold out and they've scheduled extra performances. It's a chance for thousands of people to discover Butterfly in a (supposedly) user-friendly place, sung in the vernacular (even if you can't hear many of the words) and in a production that doesn't muck around with concepts but just tells the story, which is quite enough on its own, thanks. This is all a Very Good Thing. So I feel extremely churlish about grumbling. But I know the score well, I love the opera to pieces and this is the only time I haven't had to get out my hanky at the end. Which means it doesn't deliver enough.

What do you think? Am I being fair?

Aladdin's Cybercave

(FURTHER UPDATE: Norman Lebrecht told me he'd had virus complaints about the recordings, but a distressed message from Brompton's tells me that there's no reason this should be so and that the intention is simply to issue the best historical recordings for free.)

How to win a lot of musical friends very fast: offer free historical recording downloads, just like these ones here. British auction house Brompton's has uploaded a music library which, for historical recording junkies like me, can only be described as an Aladdin's cybercave. Legendary string players all: Huberman in the Beethoven Concerto. Jacques Thibaud in Mozart. Rabin plays Ysaye. Sammons plays the Elgar Concerto. The Budapest String Quartet, Kreisler, Heifetz, Gioconda de Vito, the gang's all there. On your marks - get set - register! (Unless you're in America, which cannot access the collection because of copyright.)

It's amazing how we take the availability of historical recordings for granted, though. When I was a student, back in the 80s, they were rare nuggets of gold-dust to be run to earth on LP in Garon Records (conveniently it was 3 minutes from my bedsit) or dug out, remastered and reissued on those new-fangled CDs from mysterious sources by those in the know, eventually coming to light on labels like Pearl, Biddulph and EMI References. I will never forget the first time I heard a recording of Rachmaninov. I was in Oscar Shumsky's front room outside New York sometime in 1986 and he asked me if I had heard Rachmaninov's playing. When I admitted I hadn't, the great violinist brought out a big, cherished box of LPs and put on some of the preludes and song transcriptions. We all sat there as if hypnotised - partly by reverence at the notion of listening to this beloved composer playing his own works, in person, and partly by the playing itself, rich-toned, multi-nuanced, many-voiced, the phrasing as vocal as Chaliapin. Magic.

While it's fantastic to be surrounded on a regular basis by recordings of the golden greats, it's also good to remember that we have to keep valuing them. On the other hand, if you're a performer today, the downside of all this means that you have to compete for an audience not only with the living, but also with the dead. There are some great musicians around today, too. I hope to be very near one of them this weekend...

And the answer is...

Our mystery opera yesterday was Puccini's Madama Butterfly, which closed after one night. Bravo to "Zerbinetta", who got it in one.

There was monkey-business afoot at that premiere: the owner of the newspaper that published that statement had a vested interest in the theatre and the success of another opera that was scheduled to replace Puccini's, so it was all horribly manipulated.

Back to the present day. Very sad news from Detroit informs us that the management of the beleagured Detroit Symphony Orchestra, which has been on strike for four-and-a-half months, has cancelled the rest of its season. More about this from the New York Times, here.

Today I am off to take part in the jury of a section of the Royal Philharmonic Awards, and am much looking forward to it. The nominees list is as long as both my arms and they are all fantastic. Of course I will not be revealing any names until the night of the awards in May, but looking at the list is a vibrant reminder of just how excellent the music scene in the UK is, and just how much there is to lose were we to allow government cutbacks to remove as much artisitc activity as they can from our lives.

Here is a question for those who think that music should be funded entirely by the private sector: if something gives your life pleasure, meaning and passion, why would you not wish those less financially fortunate than yourself to be able to experience it too?

Guess the Opera

Here is a review that followed the world premiere of an opera (with clue-like words excised). Your challenge: guess which one it is.

"...A second performance would have provoked a scandal among the XlocalsX, who do not relish being made fun of. The opera is not one of those like XanotheroperaX that carry within them the seeds of resurrection. It shows that XthecomposerX was in a hurry. Importuned as he was to bring out the work this season, sick as he was, he failed to find original inspiration and had recourse to melodies from his previous operas and even helped himself to melodies by other composers...The opera is dead."

Turnage, Thomas and a tale for our times

Here's my write-up of ANNA NICOLE from today's Independent.

I want to see it again - and will do in a couple of weeks. It really is a brilliant show, and when you start trying to decide whether that is chiefly thanks to Mark Anthony Turnage's music, Richard Thomas's words, the roller-coaster staging by Richard Jones, the relishful performances from every singer or the verve of Tony Pappano and the orchestra and band, you realise that it's the whole load of them together, forming the perfect team. I'd like to know, though, if Richard Jones has a thing about smiley faces. Smileys grace the back of the drained, "low wages" blues-number WalMart employees; Smileys too, incongruous likewise, back in his Macbeth at Glyndebourne. Signature image?

A few issues to explore at slightly greater length here. The opera moves from life to death in the most visceral way: the first half is all brilliance, colour, images of fairy-tale scale - Anna's big plastic-golden throne from which she narrates the first part of her tale into the willing microphones, and the pole dancers gleam like Rhinemaidens out of a bronzy, hazy tank. The libretto bounces and twirls, not taking itself too seriously, super-ironic and often very funny. Stern the Lawyer - Gerald Finlay in max-evil mode - puts in an appearance in Act 1 and the chorus flings insults at him. Beelzebub! Shiva the Destroyer of Worlds! Worst of all: Not Cool! Then he comes back and they do more of it. He rounds on them: "Anything else?" "Yoko Ono!" they cry. And Anna reminds him: "Honey, you're not in the story yet!"

By the interval I thought I'd got it: hooray! It would have been so easy for this opera to turn out judgmental and salacious; instead it's a celebration of life. They're not saying "she sold her soul for a boob job and then look what happened to her, yah boo sucks", they're saying: "milk life for its joys, because they're gone too fast - be extreme and love it because tomorrow we..."

Oh, but hang on - they aren't. The second half grows increasingly chilly: the thronging, noisy, bright-suited chorus is slowly replaced by black-clad silent dancers with film cameras for heads, slinking around like Harry Potter dementors that suck away the will to live. The fairy-tale lighting becomes bleaker and starker. Anna's beloved son sings only after he's dead. Anna's mother, who is moral but extremely judgmental, has more and more to do. The chorus melts away. All that's left are those camera-dementors and some pretty harsh judgments. "Oh America, you dirty whore, I gave you everything and you wanted more," Anna sings, about to die. Yes, Anna Nicole is a brilliant metaphor for the decline and fall of western excess, maybe capitalism itself. But we can see that. Would it have been better not to bash us over the head with it? I hoped the story would speak, and sing, for itself and allow us to draw our own conclusions.

Thumping blame onto America in an opera for Covent Garden is just...too easy. Yes, Anna Nicole was American, but western culture as a whole has willingly lapped up the world that destroyed her. A theme that sounds derived from Fanfare for the Common Man runs through the score; the curtain that covers the passage of ten years is laden with images of hamburgers. "Supersize me!" the initially reluctant Anna says to the plastic surgeon who's about to give her back pain for life. Come on, we all bought into this. We can't just shift the blame.

I also wonder slightly about the reportage style of the storytelling. This is an opera about the culture of living under constant observation and it is not least the media intrusion, milked so horribly, that helps to destroy Anna. So in that sense, the slant is in keeping with the thrust, so to speak. But if you are telling rather than inhabiting a story, the emotion tends to stay at one remove. The music itself is good enough to induce a lump in the throat when Daniel utters his requiem of drugs and when Anna, taking a few leaves out of Dido and Aeneas's book, mourns him. It certainly doesn't leave you cold. Still, I wanted more set-up to the tragedy - more of the closeness of Anna and her son and why he took to drugs, for instance; some of the second act's drama is a little sketchy, given the horrors it portrays (Anna giving birth on pay-per-view is another step on the downward plunge). And I wanted to reach the very heart of the humanity, to get inside the characters' heads and live the tragedy with them as Verdi, for instance, would have; but this very post-modern take ultimately doesn't permit the identification that would make it possible.

As for Turnage, though - I think this may be the opera he was born to write. His style really crystallises in it: the basis is atonal and full of rough-edged textures and crunchy harmonies that you can really get your teeth into, yet it's also melodic and shot through with jazz, blues and a bit of rock 'n' roll in the party scene (hints here of his alleged flirtation with Beyonce and 'Single Ladies' at last year's Proms). It's a personal voice and a very contemporary one, but it's always listenable, memorable, focused. He's always had a good instinct for zeitgeist-trapping - remember Greek in the 1980s? - and here that instinct comes of age.

It's a tale for our times -- and only future experiences will tell whether it'll become a classic, revivable in ten, 20 or 50 years with more rewards to be gleaned on every hearing. Yesterday was its world premiere, remember. Oh, and yes, it was attended by a lot of so-called celebs -- the place was brimming with people I thought I recognised only wasn't sure whether or not I did. Seems that Boy George was there, and Norman Lamont - and just about every critic on earth.

One last observation. Two major premieres are happening this nearly-spring. The Royal Opera gets Anna Nicole. The Royal Ballet gets... Alice in Wonderland. Same planet, same theatre, different worlds...

Today's newsround...

• It's the world premiere of Turnage's Anna Nicole at the Royal Opera House tonight. After all the hype, will it match expectations? And after 100 years of "epater les bourgeois", can art still shock us? More importantly, will it do more than that? We Shall See...meanwhile the discussion on Twitter has been about what we ought to wear to attend it. Norman Lebrecht, Fiona Maddocks and I are all going in thongs. (At least, I think we are. We agreed on *something*, but that may have been: to cover up. It's very easy to get your tweets in a twist, so I am now completely confused...Anyway, I'll be the one in the sensible shoes.)

• Next, the hills are alive with the sound of hollow laughter as yet again the media portray orchestras as many things they are not. This caused the biggest bellyache: an American site suggesting that being an orchestral musician is a stress-free, well-paid job. Ha bloody ha. [heavy sarcasm] I bet they loved that in Detroit... Oh, and it says similar crap about writing. Where do they get this stuff?! I see around me a world in which many orchestral musicians -- just for starters -- travel for hours each day because they can't afford to live in the city where they work, and have a reputation (sometimes justified) for popping beta-blockers in order to get through a concert without shaking. Stress-free, schmess-free.

• Meanwhile, in The Guardian, the excellent Tom Service doesn't seem to have noticed that seat-of-pants music-making is usually the conductor's responsibility and that the same orchestra can sound completely different, depending on who's waving the stick. In any professional orchestra these days, the standard required to be accepted as a member means that the guys and gals can play anything, technically speaking; but it's the maestro's job to make it more than that. Tip-off: try that Russian bloke beginning with a V. and often found at the helm of the LSO. That other Russian bloke beginning with V. at the helm of the LPO is also not 'alf worth hearing. And the third Russian bloke beginning with V. up in Liverpool is bloody marvellous. But we could usefully surmise from Tom's piece that maybe, apart from Valery, Vladimir and Vassily, there aren't enough really galvanising stickwavers around...until you remember Andris at the CBSO, Mark at the Halle, that extraordinary chap at the Northern Sinfonia, and...

• Sir Colin Davis, one of the finest of them all, apparently tripped and fell over at the Royal Opera House last night and pulled out of conducting The Magic Flute. The ROH promises us that he's had a check-up and is absolutely fine.

• On a more serious note, though, I was absolutely horrified to hear today of the death of our colleague Lynne Walker, who has passed away after a battle with cancer. Lynne was a joy: one of the most positive people in the business, always with an interesting question or a fresh angle at the ready and author of many fascinating, insightful and lucidly written reviews. I did a couple of pre-concert talks with her at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, her home base, and loved her upbeat attitude, plus her fount of information and funny stories. All our thoughts are with her husband, Gerald Larner.

The Green Mountain Strikes Back

In the earliest days of the year I went to something truly glorious in Spitalfields and never got round to running my review (OK, it was intended for somewhere else, and they never got round to it, but it comes to the same thing). So here it is...followed by a video that I hope proves my points better than I can. Please welcome La Venexiana with Roberta Mameli in Lamento della Ninfa, and the freshest, ripest view I've yet heard of that glorious Mr Green Mountain...

LA VENEXIANA

Christ Church, Spitalfields, 5 January 2011

A jewel of a Hawksmoor church, an accolade-showered ensemble and a feast of music from the 16^th century titan, Claudio Monteverdi: fine fodder for a winter festival par excellence, as Spitalfields Music’s current series undoubtedly is.

Monteverdi is best known today for his operas and his Vespers of 1610, but until he was 40 he wrote madrigals almost exclusively; over his long life he produced nine volumes of them. These short pieces for small vocal ensemble with accompaniment on harpsichord, theorbo or both can blaze out unexpectedly as the more subtle forerunners of the modern pop song.

La Venexiana, proud winners of numerous recording prizes, are currently without peers in this music, offering a sense of freedom, theatricality and no-holds-barred emotional engagement that make it leap into being as freshly as it must have done 400 years ago. It still sounds incredibly daring: there is nothing Monteverdi will not risk in the service of the poetry (which includes Petrach and Tasso) and his harmonies are full of scrunches, clashes and innard-churning concatenations of unlikely sounds.

La Venexiana is a flexible-sized group; tonight they were five singers plus theorbo player Gabriele Palomba, with their versatile director Claudio Cavina nipping effortlessly from singing contralto to playing the harpsichord. Each singer is a master of character; and so charismatic a vocal actress is the lead soprano, Roberta Mameli, that I nearly mistook her for Anna Caterina Antonacci doing a spot of moonlighting. Her solo in Lamento della Ninfa was utterly astonishing: as sophisticated, sensual and raw as the finest jazz singer (she’s performed this elsewhere with an accompanying saxophone), while the Lamento itself is powerful enough to make Purcell’s Dido seem downright insipid.

Elsewhere, star spots found the three men -- Cavino with the romantic Raffaele Giordani (tenor) and the deep yet sparkly bass Salvo Vitale -- turning the parallel of love and war in Gera il nemico insidioso into hammy fun with a venomous sting in its tail; and Mameli and soprano Giulia Peri duetted celestially in the birdsong of O come sei gentile.

The only complaints around the church were that the encore was a madrigal we’d already heard; and that the concert -- 75 minutes with no interval -- was too short. We’d have loved hours more of it.

(NB: The following video is from a different occasion & in Spitalfields we didn't have certain elements of this performance. "No sax, please, we're British"?)

Schubert in memoriam

February 12th - the anniversary of my mother's death in 1994. It doesn't feel like 17 years ago; it doesn't fade. Here is her favourite piano piece, Schubert's Impromptu in G flat, Op.90 No.3, played by her favourite pianist, Krystian Zimerman. This doesn't fade either.

This is by Bartok - yes, really

Almost a Friday historical - the Andante, or Albumblatt, by Bartok, written for the then 15-year-old Adila d'Aranyi (elder sister of Jelly) in 1902. Bartok fell for the d'Aranyis in turn (oh, and Stefi Geyer), but it seems that neither of those feisty sisters returned his feelings. Which, to judge from this performance (1978) by Gyorgy Pauk and Peter Frankl, must have been pretty powerful. Enjoy.