Music + Art = Magic?

Spent Wednesday morning at the preview of the new exhibition From Paris: A Taste for Impressionism at the Royal Academy of Arts, talking to the curator MaryAnne Stevens and the French conductor Fabien Gabel about the correlation of music and art in the Impressionist era, and why it was that it took about 20 years for composers to cotton on. Then we had a go at matching some of the paintings with appropriate music...Above, Degas's Dancers in a Studio; an exercise in form and perspective made up of images of preparation. Debussy Etudes?

Results are up now on the new and still developing music portal intriguingly entitled Sinfini, which word seems to suggest an infinite symphony of sins... In reality, though, the site is clean, enthusiastic and friendly, while the most sinful thing about this assignment is probably Duparc's gorgeous setting of Leconte de Lisle. The exibition, at the RAA's Sackler Wing, opens tomorrow.

Musicians against playing for free at the Olympics

A Facebook group, Musicians Against Playing for Free at the Olympics, has been started by Ashley Slater (formerly of Loose Tubes). Ashley says:

Musicians are being asked to play at peripheral Olympic events for free 'for the exposure'.

This is simply unacceptable and I feel we should withdraw our participation.

Sign the petition:

https://www.change.org/petitions/locog-ensure-the-payment-of-arts-practitioners-performing-for-olympic-events

LondonJazz has run the full text of an engagement letter to participating musicians (which he says has appeared elsewhere in the public domain). It has to be read to be believed.

Peter Bacon at The Jazz Breakfast doesn't mince his words on the subject, either. Read him here.

The ISM has a further platform for support: http://www.ism.org/news/article/pay_our_musicians

The short message is that it's vital to make a stance now about the attitude towards musicians of this huge and powerful organisation, because it pushes performers not to the status of liveried servants, 18th-century style (and there's plenty of that elsewhere), but to that of slaves. And if the Olympics get away with it, others will think they have carte blanche to follow suit.

An operatic top ten...

What makes a really good opera production? I saw one the other day. It was Tchaikovsky's The Queen of Spades at the bijou Grange Park, an hour or so down the M3 in the Hampshire woods and fields. World-class quality in a place about the same size, seating-wise, as the Wigmore Hall; an absolute powerhouse of a Herman from the American tenor Carl Tanner and a Lisa to match from the radiant French soprano Anne Sophie Duprels. The roller-coaster score, in the hands of conductor Stephen Barlow - who knows precisely how to pace and shape the drama - swept us all along, Pushkin incarnate in music. This is an opera I've seen a number of times, yet often under slight duress of the "I really prefer Eugene Onegin" type. But this time, I fell for it wholesale and stayed under the spell throughout.

That's thanks, in no small part, to the direction of Antony McDonald. A former co-director and co-designer with Richard Jones, McDonald has become a Grange Park stalwart, and his insights into this work leave me eager to sample more from him. The production does everything that a truly excellent opera production should. It takes a problematic work and convinces you that it's a masterpiece; it takes a problematic tale and makes it almost too real; and it stays with you for days afterwards, teasing out the deeper currents of the story and pointing up the connections that undoubtedly are there, but that could easily be forgotten, neglected or lost.

Here's my Top Ten of what makes a really good opera production - illustrated by this one.

1. It pulls everything together. It makes sense; it's rounded and satisfyingly deep.

2. The majority of operas are familiar to the majority of opera-goers (sad, perhaps, but true). A good production makes you feel you're seeing it for the first time, in the best possible way.

3. Psychology is acute; action matches script, plus some. Prince Yeletsky's aria - beautifully sung by the young Dutch baritone Quirijn de Lang - is delivered to a Lisa who is slipping away from her unfortunate fiance's grasp by the minute. And he - attending the fancy-dress ball - is clad in a Pierrot ruff that makes him seem pitiable, even though the rest of the time he's an arrogant, entitled, sod-off aristo - and doesn't neglect to collect his winnings from the dead Herman's pile at the conclusion.


4. It's alive to semi-visible dramatic truths and draws them out, without thumping everyone over the head. For instance, Herman is totally bonkers. He's known by his friends to be obsessive; but we soon see that he's also a fantasist who has lost touch with reality. If he brandished his revolver at the Countess (a superb Anne Marie Owens), it wasn't noticeable. Instead, she starts to succumb early in that devastating scene to clear symptoms of a heart attack. Herman is so bound up in himself that he doesn't notice. "Do you even have a heart?" he demands, failing to observe that that heart is busy killing her. When he states, later, that he brandished his gun at her and she keeled over, this is his own grandiose fantasy - it's not what actually happened, and that tells us more about him than this moment would have were it the truth. Later, we notice that the final gambling scene takes place without him knowing that his one-time pretext for undertaking it - winning money so he can "deserve" Lisa - is defunct, because Lisa has shot herself and is lying dead at the side of the stage where we can see her but he can't. He never thinks to ask where she is or what will happen to her.

5. The society in which the action takes place is all-important and enhances the action even when it is not the original. McDonald has updated the action to just-pre-Revolution Russia. As the Empress appears (in the auditorium) and the chorus pay her homage, red leaflets flutter down from above, and we don't need to pick one up to know what it's all about. The aristocrats - principally the Countess and Yeletsky - are of another era, stuck in the past; contrast the Countess's crinoline ballgown with Lisa's schoolmarmish outfit. And they behave with considerable vileness towards their underlings; it's clear why they would be hated and rejected, but they are rounded enough for us not to hate them altogether. This is a portrait of a society that has gone to pot and will soon implode: and with that goes the obsession with gambling, the drunkenness, the venality...

6. ...therefore it tells us a lot about our own time too.

7. It draws out darker psychological suggestions in the story, but lets us figure out the rest. Herman has the key to the Countess's room because it's a short cut to Lisa's room and her bed. He, though, is keener to wrest the secret of the Three Cards from the Countess, who long ago gave up her virginity for the sake of that secret. He unveils a giant nude painting of the Countess in her youth, when she was known as The Venus of Moscow. There's some correlation within Herman of the Countess and Lisa, and of the Three Cards and something sexual - and we don't learn exactly what it might be, but it's there, and it nudges our perception towards some deep-seated trigger for his madness.

8. The design (also by McDonald) and lighting (Paul Keogan) mesh together and match the music and the concept. And this is a concept production, but it's so good that you don't realise it at the time.

9. Attention to detail is magnificent. That matters more than ever at Grange Park, because the audience is so close to the stage that everyone can see everything. Tomsky's narrative in act I (sung by the excellent Roman Ialcic) is a case in point: he brings his storytelling to life by casting himself and one of his several pals in its roles, and becomes quite carried away when proferring an illustrative kiss. The pal's astonished exchange of looks with the other pal is priceless.

10. None of this would work were the performers not up to it. The casting is superb. Set-piece moments - like Polina and Lisa's duet (brava to the fulsome Polina of Sara Fulgoni) - are able to shine, with stagecrafted images that match their emotional content.

How Cage sets you free

I'd have loved to be at the Aldeburgh Festival for John Cage's Musicircus the other day. It looks like a heap of fun. Below, my piece from Saturday's Independent, trailing the event, with an extra para or two...

I'm a closet Cage fan. Long story, but it involves mushrooms, meditation and Sonatas and Interludes, not necessarily in that order. He deserves a much, much bigger piece than I can deliver today, but I hope this is better than nothing, at least to start with. Glad that he's getting a whole Prom more or less to himself this summer.

Here goes...

He has been termed music’s greatest iconoclast. But now, in his centenary year, is the composer John Cage going mainstream? 

His Musicircus [was aired on Saturday] at the Aldeburgh Festival; later this summer, a whole evening at the Proms is devoted to his works. Classical music doesn’t get much more mainstream than that. Yet in his lifetime, often struggling for a living, balancing on an idiosyncratic tightrope between classical music, eastern philosophy, visual art, contemporary dance (his partner was the choreographer Merce Cunningham) and ‘chance operations’, Cage (1912-1992) might have regarded this outcome with incredulity. 

Cage’s outlook could scarcely have been more different from Benjamin Britten’s, on whose territory Aldeburgh is founded. It wasn’t just Cage’s prepared pianos, plucked cactuses and so forth that upset the establishment; more than anything, it was the way he incorporated into his music the notion of chance – eliminating the creator’s ego and instead making choices with, for example, the I Ching. This was the opposite of what most composers do; avant-gardists of the mid century like Pierre Boulez and Iannis Xenakis were promptly alienated.

Musicircus is not a concert but a “happening”: as many different performances as possible go on at the same time, piled together in one big-top-like area, while the public wander about. “You won’t hear a thing. You’ll hear everything,” Cage once explained, hoping that attendees would “get the joyousness of the anarchic spirit”. At Aldeburgh, the ensemble Exaudi and sound artist Bill Thompson promise[d] to “throw open the doors and let the sound stream out”. 

Cage’s most famous creation is 4’33 – four minutes and thirty-three seconds of silence. The point isn’t the irony of a musician playing nothing. It is that we listen to whatever we hear, experiencing the world and our consciousness as music. 

Anarchy, joy, chance and fun aren’t precisely traditional elements of classical concerts – but isn’t it time we grew into them? In his quirky way, maybe Cage can set us free.

BRIGITTE ENGERER, 1952-2012

Tributes have been pouring in following the death of the French pianist Brigitte Engerer at the age of 59. She had been suffering from cancer for several years. I've always loved her playing and have long felt she deserved far greater recognition on the international scene than she received during her lifetime.

UPDATE, 26/6/12: Obituary of Engerer from The Telegraph.

Below is a short interview with her from French TV, and further info below. (Alas, I have no interview of my own to run here, so this statement is provided by her record company, harmonia mundi).

PARIS — French virtuoso pianist Brigitte Engerer, known for her brilliant interpretations of French and Russian repertoire, died in Paris on Saturday at the age of 59, her agent said in a statement.

Engerer "played with some of the very best", said Concerts de Valmalete, and "brought all of her talent to what was a continual quest for musical truth".

French President Francois Hollande said in a statement he was "saddened" by the news of her death and said Engerer's "talent... honoured France".

Engerer always "supported young musicians... while pursuing a remarkable international career", he said.

"We will all remember her great personal bravery" in "fighting the illness that took her from us."

Engerer had been battling cancer for several years.

Born on October 27, 1952 in Tunis, Engerer started playing the piano at age four and went to study at the Paris Conservatory at the age of 11.

In 1969 she left Paris for the Moscow Conservatory, which gave her a deep affiliation with the works of Russian composers, including Tchaikovsky's "The Seasons" and Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition". She would later release recordings of both.

"A part of her became Russian," her agent said.

Stanislas Neuhaus, her teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, once described Engerer as "one of the most brilliant pianists of her generation".

"Her playing is characterised by its artistry and romantic spirit, its depth, the perfection of her technique and her innate ability to reach the listener," he said.

Invitations to perform as a soloist with some of the world's top orchestras took Engerer from Berlin, Paris and Vienna to Japan and New York's Carnegie Hall, playing under conductors including Daniel Barenboim and Gary Bertini.

Her life was "an unremitting search for musical truth to which she gave all her talent", the Concerts De Valmalete said.

A fan of chamber music, Engerer also regularly performed with other instrumentalists such as the violinist Olivier Charlier and the cellist Henri Demarquette.

She was well-known for her high-profile four-hand piano performances with Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky.

Engerer gave her last concert on June 12 at the Champs-Elysees Theatre in Paris playing Schumann with the Paris Chamber Orchestra, 50 years after first playing in the prestigious venue.

She received a number of honours, including the French Legion of Honour, and in 2011 was given a lifetime achievement award by the French music industry.