Bach to basics

Saturday Bach time again, and here's a masterclass with Andras Schiff to show us how.

The Passenger speaks

In the JC this week I have an interview with Zofia Posmysz, author of the semi-autobiographical novel on which Weinberg's The Passenger is based. She is quite remarkable: poised, radiant, eloquent and forgiving. Read the piece here. I'm going to see the opera tomorrow.

The interview contained more interesting material than there was space, so here is one of the out-takes, which was not directly relevant to The Passenger, but will be of great interest to anyone who is preoccupied, as I often have been, by Alma Rose - Mahler's niece - and the Auschwitz women's orchestra that she conducted.

JD: Did you have any contact with the Auschwitz women's orchestra?


ZP (via interpreter): "Yes, I did. It was when Alma Rose started conducting the orchestra that it gained some sort of status and quality. She searched among the prisoners – they were very educated people, professors, artists, all sorts. She looked for prisoners who had a musical education – for instance, there were two excellent, wonderful singers, they were Hungarian Jewish. And since I was working in the kitchen and I had access to some of the products there, I would sometimes go to the orchestra block and take them something. 


"I had a friend who’d helped me along in the past, helped me survive through some of the hard labour outside the camp at first, helped me persevere another 15 minutes and then another 15 minutes; this friend was a violinist and I managed to persuade Alma Rose to consider taking her into the orchestra. She said: "Let her come, but I have to listen to her." And I told my friend: "Listen, I’ve found this fantastic thing for you. You can play in the orchestra and it will give you a chance to survive." She was so thin by then that she was on her last legs. And to my great surprise and regret, she said: "Am I to play here for those people?" To this day I don’t know what she was thinking about. What happened was that there was a ramp that led to the gas chambers and the crematorium, and the orchestra had to stand by the ramp and play these tunes for the transports so that people didn’t know what was happening at all - it was a deceit. I don’t know whether my friend didn't want to play for the people in this situation, or in the concerts for the SS men. Either way, she didn’t agree. A few months later she died."

Kafka at the ballet

Here's my piece from yesterday's Independent about Arthur Pita's new dance theatre work based on The Metamorphosis by Kafka. One day Edward Watson awoke to find that he had been transformed into a giant insect.... It's at ROH2 all this week.

The Metamorphosis is the book of the moment. I've been in Paris for a couple of days to do an interview and while there I also met up for tea and tarte aux framboises on the Place des Vosges with Mikhail Rudy (he of The Pianist and the animated Kandinsky Pictures at an Exhibition). His next collaborative project, due for premiere in Paris in March 2012, is based on...yes, The Metamorphosis, and will involve film projections by the Quay Brothers to a selection of Janacek piano music. Meanwhile he's bringing Pictures to the UK in November - performances in Southampton (17 Nov) and at the Wimbledon Festival (19 Nov). Well worth the train ride, imho.

Meanwhile, my interviewee - an intergalactic opera star - talked to me for two hours, then sent me home with a red nose. That is a first. I hasten to add that it's made of foam. It is now perching on my desk lamp, smiling at me (in a manner of speaking), while I think of his unforgettable performance as Werther earlier this year.

What Bach could do with two oboes

I've just found part of my favourite Bach cantata on Youtube conducted by John Eliot Gardiner, who seems to know exactly what to do with it. I first heard Cantata BWV 8, 'Liebster Gott, wann werd'ich sterben', when I was a student, ploughing through the complete catalogue on LPs in the university music library, and it was love at first toot. There's never been anyone else in the history of music, to the best of my knowledge, who could write for two oboes - oboe d'amores, here - as Bach could.

Finding a recording that really worked, though, wasn't easy: the only ones I ran to earth in the mid-80s were Harnoncourt, which featured some wince-worthy choirboys, and Karl Richter, whom I usually adored, but even I couldn't quite deal with the sluggishness of those tempi. I've clocked one or two others since which seemed relentlessly chirpy and schoolmarmish, hence not exactly reflecting the words...

Gardiner, though, captures the reflective, ineffable quality of this music and its text, wearing his learning lightly, packaging up a heart of compassionate tenderness within a streamlined 18th-century casing.

This cantata apparently was a great favourite of Brahms's too - and if you listen, I think you can hear why. Hope you love it as much as he did. Take it away, oboes...

Hottest ticket in town: Mieczyslaw Weinberg

Here's my piece from today's Independent about Weinberg's opera The Passenger, which opens at ENO on Monday. Interestingly, I've been hearing Weinberg's name for years from my various Russian musician friends who from time to time all let fly with minor rants about what a terrific composer he was and how ridiculous it is that we never hear his works. But if anything can put him on the map, where he should be, it is this: an opera evoking reminiscences of Auschwitz. David Pountney talks to me about why The Passenger can do this when others can't, and we trace the history of Weinberg and ask why he is the composer that time forgot.

Today I am going to meet Zofia Posmysz, author of the largely autobiographical novel on which the opera is based.... 

The trailer proves that we're in for quality music very much a la Shostakovich: