It's Fauré's birthday

It is. Amazingly enough, it is also Massenet's birthday. But I heard an awful lot of Massenet yesterday, so here is my main man, the glorious Gabriel: Christian Ferras plays the Berceuse.

Love you, Gabriel Fauré. Love you too, Christian Ferras - dear, doomed, tragic violin genius. How I wonder what you were thinking when you played this.

Once upon a time...

Once upon a time...there was a music journalist who loved beautiful voices. She thought there was something miraculous to the way a great singing voice can exist quite by accident in any part of the world, given the appropriate training and development. So when she found that one especially great tenor voice was shortlisted for a major prize, she thought she must really go to the awards dinner, just in case he won, turned up and sang. But she held out little hope, because he was, after all, a very busy person and was currently on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.


But - imagine her amazement! Another fine tenor suddenly developed a frog in his throat at an opera house nearby, and his understudy was off on a golfing holiday. Someone had to be found who knew that major role, and quickly. It so happened that the great tenor had booked some rest time before a Very Big Show, but he was technically free and beside his Very Big Show the role in London was a stuck der kuche. So he hopped on a plane, and when the awards dinner team realised he was on his way they rushed a fast car over to the airport to kidnap him and bring him to the RealLifePoshPlace for the awards dinner. 


At the dinner the journalist found herself seated [note: SEATED. not: SAT] next to him. He accepted his award with gratitude. They talked all evening, he taught her some vital words in his language and then he invited her for a glass of champagne in his dressing room after the show the next night. And said 'Do bring your husband'...

NO - NO - NO - that's just a fairy-story. Except for the grammar lesson. But last night we all had a cracking good time at the Royal Philharmonic Society Awards at the VeryPoshRealPlace aka The Dorchester. The industry donned its glad rags and gave prizes to some truly wonderful musicians who deserved every inch of them and more. And I'd like to thank whoever the kind person was who decided to put me on Ivan Fischer's table entirely surrounded by Hungarians and next to my good friend from the Hungarian Cultural Centre.

Imogen Cooper presented the prizes, with Katie Dereham and Andrew MacGregor doing the announcements. And playwright Mark Ravenhill, whose translation of L'incoronazione di Poppea is currently on at the King's Head, made a superb speech. In days gone by, the RPS dinner speech was often Whingeville Incorporated, a chance for a leading figure to lambast the government/the BBC/the radio stations/the world for not being all it/they should be. No longer. Mark compared the current approach of arts organisations to 'a luxury airline lounge with an access policy' and pointed out the anomalies of this. 'Let's get out of the airline lounge - and fly!' Now we just have to work out how.

It was also a particularly good night for composers, with honorary membership of the RPS presented to George Benjamin and more honours for Lachenmann, Dillon and Ferneyhough.

You can read the full shortlists and more about the winners on the RPS site, here. Meanwhile...


Here are the prizes.

Conductor: As you'll have guessed, Ivan Fischer. Who is marvellous, magical and glorious. I can't wait to hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra Prom (2 Sept) where he'll be conducting Liszt, Mahler and a bunch of surprises to be chosen at the last moment by the audience itself.

Chamber music and song (this was the jury I was privileged to be on): the Takacs Quartet for their Beethoven cycle in 2009-10. Unfortunately they couldn't join us as they are currently touring down under, but they sent a lovely video message.

Audience Development: ENO for Access all Arias - free membership for students and under-30s, plus Punchdrunk in the warehouse.

Chamber-scale Composition: Brian Ferneyhough for his String Quartet no.6.

Concert Series and Festivals: Southbank Centre for the Helmut Lachenmann weekend.


Education: Sing Up. We were treated to a performance by the children of St Mary's Primary School who sang very, very well and did all the choreography too. Sing Up may not be star-ridden, but it's probably the most important award of the evening because this fabulous initiative has introduced quality singing to millions of children in English primary schools for the first time and has become the envy of Europe and beyond. If the government does not continue to fund it after 2012 then they'd be even stupider than they currently look and would deserve to be [insert execution method of choice].

Ensemble: Aurora Orchestra, who have achieved wonders, joyous music making and a real niche in just five years. Very nice to meet their conductor Nicholas Collon and to see Olly Coates, the excellent young cellist whom I interviewed a few months ago. These bright, articulate, fired-up young men and their generation are the people who are going to bring new ideas and new thinking to the music world in the next couple of decades - watch them!

Creative Communication: BBC4's Opera Italia series, presented to Tony Pappano in person. Is Tony the most human and approachable and communicative conductor Covent Garden has ever had, perhaps?

Singer: Susan Bickley. What an ovation she got, too. 'A consummate artist' said the citation, and we couldn't agree more!

Young Artist: Alina Ibragimova. At 25, she's a shooting star, busily fulfilling the promise that her Sibelius concerto showed when she was 16 - my jaw hit the floor listening to her then. More power to her elbows.

Large-Scale Composition: James Dillon for Nine Rivers, 'for its sheer ambition and the consistency of creative thought sustaining it'. The extract that was played was completely mesmerising and I am itching to hear the rest of it. This man has a phenomenal sonic imagination and my resolution for the evening was to explore much more of his music.

Opera and Music Theatre: The ROH for Tannhauser. Which I flipping well missed. Hopefully they'll do a revival.

Instrumentalist. Leon Fleisher. Hooray! Not just a great pianist with an extraordinary journey through incapacity and back again, but a humane, deep-thinking, fabulous musician from the heart of what it's all about. Wish he could have been there in person.

Egézségedre! And there will be an awards broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on Sunday http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0112czv

AND FROM THE OFFICIAL STUFF:
John Gilhooly, Chairman of the Royal Philharmonic Society commented:
“The Royal Philharmonic Society Music Awards are able to respond to the zeitgeist, but prefer to set the agenda.  They reward serious, imaginative projects which broaden the understanding and enjoyment of music and trumpet the outstanding brilliance of distinguished musicians, composers and young artists at the very top of their game.  There is much to be said for intellectual rigour in a time when serious ideas can often struggle to get a hearing.  The RPS is committed to creating a vibrant future for classical music through a careful, rigorous and artistically bold approach – something which is mirrored in the work of all tonight’s winners.”

Roger Wright, Controller, BBC Radio 3 and Director, BBC Proms commented:“This set of awards is a celebration of the classical music world, not least the value of live music and new work. I am delighted by the recognition given to James Dillon, a composer who has long been supported by both Radio 3 and the Proms. Live music is at the heart of Radio 3 and our recent announcement of the groundbreaking schedule of live music every week night on Radio 3 is just one example of our shared values with the Royal Philharmonic Society and our desire to share live performances with millions of our listener.”


Please join the Royal Philharmonic Society - you can do so HERE.


Last but not least, here's Ivan again, with the BFO, doing a Hungarian Dance in, er, Chinese.

THE DAMNATION OF TERRY GILLIAM

Here you go. My Faust review for the Independent.

THE DAMNATION OF FAUST
English National Opera, 6 May 2011

Review by Jessica Duchen (for The Independent)

Poor old Berlioz. The moment Terry Gilliam was announced as director
of this new ENO staging, it was obvious that the composer would
scarcely get a look in, at least in advance. It’s the first venture
into opera (in a co-production with De Vlaamse Opera, Antwerp) for the
former Monty Python animator and director of such legendary movies as
Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and The Fisher King. The question, of course,
was: could this operatic novice deliver in a field where so many other
film supremos have fallen flat on their faces?

Well, in certain ways Berlioz doesn’t get a look in in the finished
version either, since Gilliam has elected to take us through a journey
through German history, all the way from Romanticism – the red-haired
Faust himself is straight out of that famed Caspar David Friedrich
painting – to…you guessed it, Marguerite rises to heaven from
Auschwitz. It’s not so much Monty Python as The Producers, so full is
the show of camp, dancing, exercising Nazis. Springtime for Terry and
Berlioz, anyone? But Python fans will be glad to know that close to
the start we do get a glimpse of something much resembling the Knights
that say Ni.

Berlioz’s Faust is a challenge at the best of times – it’s not even
opera, strictly speaking, but in the composer’s terminology a ‘légende
dramatique’, part cantata, part opera and possibly as ill-suited to
the stage as Goethe’s ‘closet drama’ (a deliberately unstageable play)
that inspired it. But Berlioz, Gilliam and the character of
Mephistopheles, the devil, have two great things in common: a vast
imagination and a sense of unbounded mischief that means breaking all
the rules, including ‘avoid cliché’; Gilliam seems to have elected to
do the latter so spectacularly that it floors everyone anyway. At
least sometimes.

When it doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work. After all, the Nazis had
nothing whatsoever to do with Berlioz, who wrote this magnificent work
back in 1846, let alone Goethe. Yet the best moments are stunning.
Having spent most of the first half thinking “When are we ever going
to grow up and get past putting the Nazis into  opera?” by the end of
the evening this critic was shaken and profoundly moved.

All credit to ENO for pulling it off. It’s a phenomenally slick,
complex show of many components and brilliant theatrical effects:
Faust and Mephisto’s motorbike ride to the gates of hell, dodging
“birds” that are aircraft dropping bombs, Faust’s entry to – and exit
from – hell itself, and the chilling transformation in Act I of the
songs of the Rat and the Flea into anti-Semitic cabaret horrors. And
there’s a brilliant moment at which Gilliam literally turns back time:
the precision of its execution alone would have been astounding even
if it hadn’t happened to work conceptually.

Gilliam’s not-so-secret weapons are his Mephistopheles, Christopher
Purves at his  most charismatic, infallible and infinitely nuanced;
and, as Marguerite Oppenheim (yes, really), the glorious Christine
Rice, whose rich yet pure mezzo - and aching calls of ‘Alas’ as she is
herded into the cattle truck - suits this music to perfection. Peter
Hoare as Faust performed strongly in the first act, though the start
of Act II found him suffering in the high notes and somewhat losing
his stride for a short while thereafter. The orchestra and chorus were
on fabulous form under Ed Gardner’s baton.

Goethe and Werther

It's been a week here of French Opera Based On Goethe, with Covent Garden's Werther and ENO's The Damnation of Faust opening within 24 hours of each other. I'll post a link as soon as my review of the latter is available on the website. Meanwhile here's the feature-length version of my 'Observations' piece about Werther. Plus a little sample of Massenet at his dusky, sexy best.

I'll be at the performance on Wednesday night. The question everyone's too scared to ask is 'Can Villazon still sing?' Ed Seckerson says he can and does. But the only samples of him in Werther on Youtube date back a few years and are kind of distressing at times, so for now here is, uh, someone else.




Jules Massenet’s opera Werther is opening at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. And, looking at its origins, it seems amazing that this morbid, sugary and really rather French creation should be the chief stage version of Goethe’s searing novella The Sorrows of Young Werther. The book was written when the great German poet was only 24 and it was first published as early as 1774. Mozart was 18 at the time, Beethoven a toddler and Schubert not yet born. Goethe revised the book in 1787. But Massenet’s opera did not appear until over a century later, in 1892.

I’ve been hunting for earlier operatic adaptations of Goethe’s story and so far have drawn a blank. It’s possible that the novella, which was based on Goethe’s own experience of unrequited love and bore an uncanny parallel with the suicide of a friend, may have scared composers away. It was a scandal-ridden bestseller that sparked a fashion craze, revolutionary concerns and a spate of copycat suicides; several authorities banned it. Perhaps it was just too famous, too dangerous, too enticing. It could no more have been turned into an opera in its own time than could Lady Chatterley’s Lover.

Goethe’s tale describes the passion of a young poet for the pragmatic Charlotte. His love seems unrequited; she marries another man; finally Werther shoots himself. The book is terse and spare; its most emotional passages are swathes of translated poetry supposedly by Ossian, mirroring Werther’s turbulent feelings as he reads it aloud to Charlotte. He resolves to die not because Charlotte does not love him, but because it turns out, too late, that she does.

The story looks perfect for adaptation by a German romantic – Schubert, Schumann, Weber or Mendelssohn; and Brahms requested that his Piano Quartet in C minor should be published with an illustration of Werther on its cover. Yet all these composers missed the chance to create an opera that did justice to the author.

Massenet (1842-1912) finally muscled in where his peers feared to tread. Beside Goethe’s original, his version can look desperately sentimental: Werther dies by inches in Charlotte’s arms while the tragedy is offset by anodyne Christmas scenes for kiddiwinks. Nevertheless, parts of Werther remain peculiarly magical. Massenet was famed for his expert orchestration, and the opera owes much to this:  the hero has his own soundworld, darkly translucent, replete with harp and low strings, and his aria ‘Pourquoi me reveiller?’ is a serious showstopper.

Highly successful in his day, Massenet wrote as many as 25 operas; aged 36, he became the youngest member ever elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts. He knew exactly how to pander to the public. Debussy described his situation pithily: “His brethren could not easily forgive Massenet this power of pleasing which, strictly speaking, is a gift. His is a delightful kind of fame, the secret envy of many of those great artists who can only warm their hands at the somewhat pallid flame provided by the approbation of the elect.”

As a professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire, Massenet coached fine youngsters including Ernest Chausson and Charles Koechlin. But eventually, with the rise of more forward-thinking musicians including Debussy himself, Ravel and ultimately Messiaen, the sepia glow of such romanticism faded substantially from view.

Werther, though, has a secret weapon: it is a glorious vehicle for a star tenor. Recently, new high-profile performers have aided its resuscitation, notably Jonas Kaufmann. Now, at the ROH, Rolando Villazón is to take the title role, after a chequered period of vocal problems that has seen him testing an alternative career as TV presenter and talent show judge. The Mexican singer is a passionate performer who pours heart and soul into music and acting alike. All eyes will be on him in the hope he can rise to the challenge of this mysteriously mesmerising work.

Werther opens at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, on 5 May. Box office: 020 7304 4000


[AFTERTHOUGHT, Sunday 11.35: HAS anyone ever made an opera out of Lady Chatterley's Lover? If not, could it work? *sounds of brain-cogs whirring...*]

The thin end of the epiglottis?

Do opera cinecasts bring us the best of both worlds - live opera plus film - or just the thin ends of two wedges? Can they be more than just radio plus epiglottis? A few questions I'm addressing in today's Independent.... http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/nice-aria-shame-about-the-film-2279518.html

Meanwhile, stand by for a French opera fete as Werther opened last night at the ROH and Ed Seckerson has given it five stars; and La damnation de Faust launches at ENO, directed by Terry Gilliam, this evening...the rapid response unit is out for the latter... 

And finally, hugest thanks to everyone who trekked down to sunny Sheen yesterday for the play reading, and to Bernard and Jeremy for putting so much hard work into making it a very lovely occasion. The full house and warm welcome was greatly appreciated!