Here's the Guardian's take on 1984 at Covent Garden, which has been less than well reviewed today. The gist of this report is that the whole thing is basically a vanity project because Maazel has put his own money into it and that someone (unnamed) within the ROH has described the opera as 'crap'. The cost to the ROH has been about £500,000, the cost of a normal opera like Rigoletto, or half of a normal 'non vanity' premiere.
I can't help reflecting that the vast majority of new operas are actually crap. As they always have been. The immortal strains of La Boheme, Die Meistersinger and even Don Giovanni were always the tip of the iceberg. For every successful and enduring opera, there must be at least 20 that bite the dust the minute they are aired. As they say, you have to kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince, and you have to listen to a lot of contemporary crap before you find something that really is worth the money that its company has devoted to it. Tom Ades's operas do so well that I've never yet been able to get into one, so I can't judge them. But in the meantime, I was less than thrilled by Nicholas Maw's 'Sophie's Choice', a Covent Garden commission which had its moments but which I would be quite happy never to hear again. As for Birtwistle - well, really, the amount of money that must have gone into HIS operas really doesn't bear thinking about. Critics love them, for some reason best known to themselves; but I have never yet met one member of the general public who regarded them as anything but 'crap'. Other works I remember sitting through include 'Golem' by John Casken (at the QEH, admittedly) and Robin Holloway's 'Clarissa', hampered by a fearful production at ENO donkey's years ago; both could usefully have been left in peace in someone's bottom drawer. All of these together must have cost the public purse a lot more than £0.5m and frankly Maazel's work has as good a chance as any of them of making an impact or, more likely, not. Does the Guardian really think that it's better to have Covent Garden fork out the full subsidised whack for officially approved, establishment-accepted crap? Crap is still crap, whoever foots the bill.
Meanwhile Andrew Lovett writes to me from Cambridge about his new opera with digital video, 'Abraham on Trial' , which DOES sound interesting. World premiere is at The Junction, Cambridge, on 20 May. Full details here. As usual, the really creative stuff does not take place within the establishment heartlands.
Wednesday, May 04, 2005
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Slogsville
The days look like this at the moment:
morning: scribble scribble scribble.
afternoon: practise practise practise.
early evening: exercise.
dinnertime: try and eat something healthy.
In just a few weeks life is going to seem easier, once our concerts are out of the way. But preparing for them (1 & 10 June, plus some very scarey runthroughs next week) makes me wonder how on earth people do this all the time? The vast majority of my friends are professional musicians and I'm mystified as to how they can follow the sort of hectic schedules they have, deal with the stresses and strains of public performance (not to mention their own personal standards) and the associated travelling and admin, a certain amount of teaching to help pay the bills, and trying to have a life too? To me the psychological fright is the worst thing: knowing that on x day at y hour you have to stand up in z venue and play something as close to downright perfect as is humanly possible and there is no way round this but straight through the middle.
Meanwhile there are individuals in the world who have nothing better to do all day than log into blogs they're not interested in and waste everybody's time and energy, including mine, by posting daft comments. For this reason I am disabling the comments function for the time being. It's a pity, what more can I say. My apologies to the rest of you. Normal service will be resumed at some point.
morning: scribble scribble scribble.
afternoon: practise practise practise.
early evening: exercise.
dinnertime: try and eat something healthy.
In just a few weeks life is going to seem easier, once our concerts are out of the way. But preparing for them (1 & 10 June, plus some very scarey runthroughs next week) makes me wonder how on earth people do this all the time? The vast majority of my friends are professional musicians and I'm mystified as to how they can follow the sort of hectic schedules they have, deal with the stresses and strains of public performance (not to mention their own personal standards) and the associated travelling and admin, a certain amount of teaching to help pay the bills, and trying to have a life too? To me the psychological fright is the worst thing: knowing that on x day at y hour you have to stand up in z venue and play something as close to downright perfect as is humanly possible and there is no way round this but straight through the middle.
Meanwhile there are individuals in the world who have nothing better to do all day than log into blogs they're not interested in and waste everybody's time and energy, including mine, by posting daft comments. For this reason I am disabling the comments function for the time being. It's a pity, what more can I say. My apologies to the rest of you. Normal service will be resumed at some point.
Wednesday, April 27, 2005
Proms news
Oh, I do like to stroll along the Proms Proms Proms...the launch party is one of the schmoozing highlights of the musical calendar. This year's was held at Tate Britain yesterday evening. I had alarming visions of someone missing a step and a glass of wine zooming rather too vigorously towards a priceless Pre-Raphaelite, but it didn't happen; instead everyone seemed very mellow and unusually up-beat. Proms director Nick Kenyon cracked some jokes that actually made people laugh and declared his optimism for the future of classical music: Proms audience figures were up last year, while this year the harnessing of various technologies will make them even more accessible than they are already. The lunchtime chamber music series got too popular for its own good and has been shifted from the V&A museum to the larger Cadogan Hall. Here's the full website for the 2005 BBC Promenade Concerts!
I came the closest I have ever been to embracing 'Old Nick' when I turned to the very last page of the listings. There, under the heading LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS, I saw a magic word I never expected to see: KORNGOLD. Yes, they are doing Korngold at the Last Night - the suite from The Sea Hawk! And they are starting the second half with it, which means that it will be broadcast live on BBC1 and all over the world to an audience of millions if not billions. It would have been very undignified to turn a cartwheel in the middle of the Proms launch, but I can't say I wasn't tempted.
As if that wasn't enough, Philippe has his Proms debut on 9 August, playing the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, which, if I'm right, is getting its first Proms airing since its British premiere in 1912. About time too - for both of them. Paul Lewis is also in an overdue spot: he'll be playing Lambert's The Rio Grande on the Last Night, something he was scheduled to do in 2001 but was bumped out by the replacement programme that was put on after September 11.
Otherwise, plenty of goodies to tempt us all to Kensington through the summer: 'themes' include Fairy Tales, especially Andersen (why couldn't they have told me this 6 weeks ago?!), The Sea, the End of the War (they'll be playing Gorecki 3 for the first time) and some Big Stuff including a Royal Opera prom of Die Walkure, complete (and oh my, it stars Placido Domingo and Waltraud Maier). The first night features Tippett's A Child of Our Time. New(ish) works by Turnage, Ades, MacMillan and Sørensen, to name but a few, and prime-time soloists include Leif Ove Andsnes, Christian Tetzlaff, Viktoria Mullova, Manny Ax and Anne Sofie von Otter.
No doubt there'll be complaints from everyone else about why there isn't more of this, that or the other, but I reckon the Proms team, generally speaking, is doing a fantastic job against all the odds.
ADDENDUM: 10pm. I knew it: here we go, here's what Norman Lebrecht has to say about English music or lack of it. And it's a darn good read: I for one never knew that Alan Rawsthorne got together with Constant Lambert's widow... Stormin' Norman asks why everyone else has forgotten about these guys' centenaries falling this year and, of course, blames British orchestras for ignoring them. Isn't it more the case, though, that Certain Bigwig Composers, even long-dead ones, now have entourages rooting for them with guns blazing, while others aren't so lucky? Or didn't build the appropriate power-base while alive? Or upset the wrong people in the wrong way (drinking like a fish and getting sacked for it doesn't help). The truth is that composers need someone to fight their corners.
I came the closest I have ever been to embracing 'Old Nick' when I turned to the very last page of the listings. There, under the heading LAST NIGHT OF THE PROMS, I saw a magic word I never expected to see: KORNGOLD. Yes, they are doing Korngold at the Last Night - the suite from The Sea Hawk! And they are starting the second half with it, which means that it will be broadcast live on BBC1 and all over the world to an audience of millions if not billions. It would have been very undignified to turn a cartwheel in the middle of the Proms launch, but I can't say I wasn't tempted.
As if that wasn't enough, Philippe has his Proms debut on 9 August, playing the Coleridge-Taylor Violin Concerto, which, if I'm right, is getting its first Proms airing since its British premiere in 1912. About time too - for both of them. Paul Lewis is also in an overdue spot: he'll be playing Lambert's The Rio Grande on the Last Night, something he was scheduled to do in 2001 but was bumped out by the replacement programme that was put on after September 11.
Otherwise, plenty of goodies to tempt us all to Kensington through the summer: 'themes' include Fairy Tales, especially Andersen (why couldn't they have told me this 6 weeks ago?!), The Sea, the End of the War (they'll be playing Gorecki 3 for the first time) and some Big Stuff including a Royal Opera prom of Die Walkure, complete (and oh my, it stars Placido Domingo and Waltraud Maier). The first night features Tippett's A Child of Our Time. New(ish) works by Turnage, Ades, MacMillan and Sørensen, to name but a few, and prime-time soloists include Leif Ove Andsnes, Christian Tetzlaff, Viktoria Mullova, Manny Ax and Anne Sofie von Otter.
No doubt there'll be complaints from everyone else about why there isn't more of this, that or the other, but I reckon the Proms team, generally speaking, is doing a fantastic job against all the odds.
ADDENDUM: 10pm. I knew it: here we go, here's what Norman Lebrecht has to say about English music or lack of it. And it's a darn good read: I for one never knew that Alan Rawsthorne got together with Constant Lambert's widow... Stormin' Norman asks why everyone else has forgotten about these guys' centenaries falling this year and, of course, blames British orchestras for ignoring them. Isn't it more the case, though, that Certain Bigwig Composers, even long-dead ones, now have entourages rooting for them with guns blazing, while others aren't so lucky? Or didn't build the appropriate power-base while alive? Or upset the wrong people in the wrong way (drinking like a fish and getting sacked for it doesn't help). The truth is that composers need someone to fight their corners.
Monday, April 25, 2005
Monday again
Sorry for lack of updates recently - have been feeling ill for two days. No idea whether it's a virus or a result of overenthusiasm on exercise bike (or, possibly, allergy to practising?). Not much to say at the moment other than that I have been distracting myself from general malaise with total immersion in Dickens's The Pickwick Papers - something I've intended to read for years. What spurred me on was playing the Debussy prelude entitled 'Homage a S Pickwick Esq' - extraordinary that Debussy evokes in five pages an atmosphere that Dickens extends to around 800. Reading the book does make a difference to how I'm playing the piece. Especially since I found a paragraph describing Pickwick gradually falling asleep at the table during/after a very merry dinner that fits the prelude to sheer perfection...
Meanwhile, it's come to my notice that several artists' websites have quoted my reports on the relevant people's performances - a Sokolov site is the latest (though I can't read it on my Mac). If blogging is now so quotably quotable, what does this mean for the future of music critics in newspapers?
Meanwhile, it's come to my notice that several artists' websites have quoted my reports on the relevant people's performances - a Sokolov site is the latest (though I can't read it on my Mac). If blogging is now so quotably quotable, what does this mean for the future of music critics in newspapers?
Friday, April 22, 2005
showing off dreadfully...
...but nevertheless I've got something to shout about today. Opened The Independent this morning to find that my piece on 1984 the opera is the Review section cover feature; and also that my piece about Faure and Turgenev has been turned into a sort of column on Review p18. Was going to put up the links here, but my computer has problems with the Indy website and for now all I can suggest is going to the music section here and scrolling down FEATURES to a) The Original Big Brother and b) Talking Classical. Or, of course, you could buy the paper. :-)
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