Blown away by Chopin in Istanbul

Here's one of my talks from Istanbul. They're now all on Youtube. This one was dedicated to the topic of the young Chopin and preceded a mesmerising account of the E minor Piano Concerto by Daniil Trifonov, no less. If any of us hadn't been blown away by the weather, he blew away anything that remained. Enjoy.

My visit to Istanbul this week...

Here's where I'm going tomorrow...

...and here's what I'm doing, for the Istanbul Music Festival, in a series of pre-concert talks in the gardens of the Hagia Eirene Museum, Topkapi Palace.

22 June The Young Chopin. This evening Daniil Trifonov performs Chopin's Piano Concerto No.1 as part of a programme of varied concertos with different soloists, with the Moscow Soloists. In the talk, I'll be looking at the influences that fed into the formation of the young Chopin's distinctive style.

23 June The Fantastical World of the French Baroque. Preceding a concert featuring Magdalena Kožena (mezzo) and Emmanuelle Haïm (conductor). An introduction to the extraordinary relationship between Louis XIV and his composer in chief, Lully; the enduring influence of French Baroque music; and the splendour of the world into which it emerged.

24 June Brahms, Schumann, Clara Schumann and Joseph Joachim: The Indivisibles. Brahms galore: Christian Tetzlaff performs the Violin Concerto and the concert also includes the Symphony No.1. What a wonderful chance to explore the way these vital relationships are preserved in Brahms's music. 

26 June Mozart and the Violin. Arabella Steinbacher (violin) and Maxim Rysanov (viola) feature with the Lausanne Chamber Orchestra in two of Mozart’s violin concertos and the Sinfonia Concertante. A perfect opportunity to explore Mozart's somewhat chequered relationship with the violin, and with his violinist father. 

It's a great festival. Explore the website for the complete programme, here.

Please join us if you're there, and come and say hello.

Pianist soldiers on with broken shoulder...

Last Friday I was up in Ulverston for the music festival. I did a pre-concert talk with Tasmin Little and Martin Roscoe. The atmosphere is warm and friendly, the town and its countryside almost too pretty to be true and there's gluten-free food galore. And on the train on the way up you go through Carnforth, where Brief Encounter was filmed. This is a good trip for old-film buffs, especially with Stan Laurel being Ulverston's biggest local celeb.

Anthony Hewitt (left) and me with local celeb Stan Laurel
& his pal outside Ulverston's Coronation Hall

Other than Anthony Hewitt, that is. He's the director of the Ulverston Festival and a very fine pianist indeed. But about six weeks ago disaster struck. He had a cycling accident in which he suffered a broken collar-bone and dislocated right shoulder.

You may remember that back in 2012 he was The Olympianist, cycling from Land's End to John O'Groats and giving a recital wherever he stopped each night, to raise money for musical and sports charities.

Still, it took a shoulder injury for the TV news to go and film him...playing music for left hand alone, written for Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War.

Better late than never: here he is on ITV.
http://www.itv.com/news/border/story/2015-06-16/the-show-must-go-on/

Excuse me, but why isn't this man conducting Wagner at Covent Garden and Bayreuth?

Here's my review for The Independent of Tristan und Isolde at Longborough Festival Opera the other day. GO. NOW. Only two more performances, one of which is today.

I'm seeing Tristan again at Bayreuth in August, incidentally, and I challenge their very, very, very celebrated Wagner conductor to do anything with it that is even slightly more powerful, devastating, thrilling, detailed, loving, intelligent, wise and glorious - more downright Wagnery in the very best sense - than Anthony Negus (left)  did the other night. So there. Why isn't this man conducting there, and at the ROH and at ENO and all the rest? Their loss is Longborough's gain - but they are missing out.

Here is his article about his life with Wagner, from Longborough.

****

Tristan und Isolde, Longborough Festival Opera, Gloucestershire

16 June 2015

Tristan und Isolde, Wagner’s vast paen to love and loss, has reached the intimate setting of Longborough Festival Opera in a thoughtful new staging. But its ultimate marvel is on the podium.

One weird conundrum in the world of classical music is that some conductors who wield enormous power are not especially inspiring musicians, while a few masters of their art, equipped with peerless understanding, remain tucked away working in unlikely corners such as the Cotswolds. Longborough’s music director, Anthony Negus – a disciple of the now legendary Wagner conductor Reginald Goodall – is a Wagnerian maestro of a calibre that should rightfully be heard and lauded at the likes of Covent Garden and Bayreuth. Meanwhile, it is Longborough’s wisdom and good fortune to have him.

Presiding over a reduced-scale orchestra, Negus offers exceptional, profound knowledge of and empathy for this music, letting it fly by building the aerodynamics of its structure – whether streamlining to perfection the lengthy build-ups of tension in Act I, sustaining the hushed ecstasy of the love scene or bringing to life the raw agony of the wounded Tristan in Act III. His placement of details – for instance, homing in on a light-shaft of harp here or a deep-set heartbeat rhythm there – bring continual insights. And he inspires everybody, from Isolde to the bass clarinet, to excel themselves. The musical results are deeply human and emotionally shattering.

Carmen Jakobi directs a staging based in suitable strength and simplicity, set within clean-edged designs by Kimie Nakano and pleasing, rich-coloured lighting by Ben Ormerod. Two dancers – Katie Lusby and Mbulelo Ndabeni – portray Tristan and Isolde’s inner emotions at key moments. This device is overused in opera productions today, yet here they contribute just enough, without interfering – and they are superb dancers. Isolde’s hapless husband, King Marke, is shadowed on stage by the bass clarinet in his monologue. The opera would not suffer without such tricks, but they are judiciously managed.

Rachel Nicholls, singing her first run as Isolde following her triumph as Brünnhilde in the Ring, offers a calm, centred, imperious interpretation; vocally she embraces all of the role’s challenges, from volume and precision through tonal colour to unflagging stamina. With time her performance is bound to deepen, but she sets her own bar high from the start.

As her Tristan, the dark, steely-centred and extrovert tenor tone of Peter Wedd proves an ideal match – indeed, he offers far more convincing acting and more beautiful singing than some one encounters in higher-profile venues. Presenting the anguish of Act III with such devastating intensity is no small feat.

The Norwegian bass Frode Olsen as King Marke is a further highlight; his artistry (including perhaps the evening’s finest diction) as Tristan’s betrayal cuts him deep makes this scene just as heart-breaking as Tristan and Isolde’s own.

Catherine Carby as Brangäne is a warm-toned foil to Nicholls’ bright Isolde; Stuart Pendred is a sympathetic Kurwenal; and the chorus of sailors pulls its weight. Some ragged edges around the actual playing of the orchestra and its off-stage horns are audible, but forgivable.

Two performances remain. Go.

The Who?

The other day, into my in-box popped one of those press releases emblazoned with the portentous word EMBARGOED. This indicates something Very Important Is Happening, only we're not allowed to say - or such is the implication.

Turns out that the reason is that the recently released orchestral recording of The Who's Quadrophenia has been denied its rightful spot in the classical chart (at the very top) because it isn't actually classical music. The press release quotes composer Pete Townshend's fury at the snobbism of the classical world, as expressed on Twitter: “So musical snobbery in the “classical” elite is still alive & kicking then? F**k ’em. There’s a huge team behind this album, entirely rooted in the practical world of recorded classical music, who deserve better than this petty slap-down. I know I'm a rock dinosaur and I'm happy to be one, but the team on Classic Quadrophenia are all young, creative and brilliant.” – Pete Townshend  

So is a 'rock opera' a 'classical' opera or not? I once had a look at this issue for The Independent. It was ten years ago and the website has been revamped since then, unfortunately making it impossible to open the article. Therefore I'm re-running it below. My feelings about the negative impact of insisting on putting things in boxes haven't changed.

Incidentally, in the Olden Days, "music" in a newspaper review section meant what we now call "classical music", while other stuff was called "pop music". At some point - in the eighties? the nineties? not sure - the situation was reversed. This was the doing of the media, not of the art form. Recently Julian Lloyd Webber suggested that we should get rid of these labels once and for all, and I think he's right. As Korngold once said, music is music.

Meanwhile, the implications of not classifying orchestral Quadrophenia as classical music are potentially quite positive - depending on who has suggested this and why.

Let me explain. The Musicians Union pays different rates to orchestral players for classical recordings and for non-classical recordings.

If you are a rank-and-file member of an orchestra, the MU rate for a classical session of three hours' duration is £71.76.

For a non-classical recording of the same length, the same player would be paid £120.

It would therefore be a lot more expensive to record a big orchestra playing something that is not classified as classical music. And no doubt this contributes to certain classifications of certain stuff as classical when it is actually...something else.

The reverse might potentially apply in this case - which would be an admirable contrast.

Among my biggest regrets is having missed the 1960s. Not the fashions or the drugs, I hasten to add, but the music. Creative things were happening then that just didn’t apply during my teens in the unfortunate Eighties. When The Who released its double album Tommy in 1969, it coined a new concept of ‘rock opera’, following it up with Quadrophenia in 1973. Both were later made into feature films, but by then I was busy practising piano, violin, oboe and ballet, so I missed the lot. Therefore a new DVD set of The Who performing live – Tommy from 1989 and Quadrophenia from a 1996 tour of a specially adapted revival – is my first taste of Peter Townshend’s ‘rock operas’. They’re original, stirring, peculiarly irresistible. They’re certainly ‘rock’. But are they remotely ‘operatic’?

The New Grove Dictionary, musical academia’s Bible, gives the following definition of opera: “The generic term for musical dramatic works in which the actors sing some or all of their parts. Opera is a union of music, drama and spectacle …” Its most extreme manifestation is Wagner’s ideal, the gesamtkunstwerk – ‘complete art work’, combining music, drama and spectacle to the highest degree. More generally, when you go to an opera, you expect to see a good story and believable characters in, hopefully, a halfway decent production, with music that is appropriate, inspired, sophisticated and well performed. You hope to come out moved and uplifted.

A ‘purist’, of course, would have plenty of objections to calling Tommy and Quadrophenia ‘operas’. For a start, in most operas worth their salt, you find a variety of musical structures: dramatic scenas, choruses, love duets, reflective solo arias and ensembles where characters simultaneously express different viewpoints. The singers have to act, staying in their roles for the duration. But the majority of the songs in Tommy and Quadrophenia are simply songs. They progress, in Tommy, one after the other without speech; telling a story, but without the wide variety you’d expect in a ‘real’ opera.  In these staged versions, unlike the feature films, the members of the band aren’t in costume (given Roger Daltrey’s muscular good looks in 1996, that’s fine with me) and they convey a variety of different viewpoints as the stories unfold. The guest artists do adopt characters and costumes: in Tommy, Patti Labelle sings The Acid Queen, Billy Idol the bullying Cousin Kevin, and there are guest spots for Phil Collins and Elton John; Quadrophenia features Billy Idol as the Ace Face.

On the other hand, Townshend – who’d penned operas and studied orchestration, but didn’t expect The Who to perform such things – lets rip when opportunity allows. Tommy’s recurring plaint, “See me, feel me, touch me, heal me”, is as raw and vulnerable as anything you’ll hear in Covent Garden, though probably not every singer could bring it off as convincingly as Daltrey. And Tommy’s overture is as fizzy and galvanising as any Rossini.

Opera traditionally deals with emotion on a grand scale – from Monteverdi’s chilling 16^th-century vision of a Roman emperor and his mistress murdering their enemies in L’Incoronazione di Poppea, through Wagner’s depiction of the end of the world in Götterdammerung, and Verdi’s musical transformations of stories by Shakespeare and Victor Hugo. More operas flounder because of lousy libretti than for any other reason – huge chunks of Italian bel canto, French Romanticism and German Expressionism, not to mention works from the later 20^th century, are rendered third-rate because of their hopeless stories. Timelessness, humanity and a well-constructed plot can count for much in an opera’s longevity.

Tommy and Quadrophenia both involve powerful emotions, springing from a shared underlying theme: the legacy of a generation’s wartime traumas upon its children. Unlike many operas other than Wagner’s, words and music originate (mainly) with the same creator. Tommy’s plot lets it down a bit, requiring major suspension of disbelief: a child witnesses the murder of his father by his mother’s lover, turns blind, deaf and dumb in consequence, becomes a pinball champion, then is cured by a smashed mirror and turns into a pseudo-Messiah who nonetheless remains alienated by the severity of his experience. Hmm.

Quadrophenia is more internalised: most of it takes place inside Jimmy’s muddled head. Yet this adolescent anti-hero’s spiritual journey involves emotions that run so high, with imagery so strong and archetypal, that Townshend borrows directly from Wagner’s Das Rheingold to depict a boat journey. Wagner writes about gods building Valhalla, Townshend about an alienated teenager running away to Brighton; yet their protagonists are tormented to the limits of their experience, whether through godhood or through drink and drugs. Wagner’s monumental power matches the myths behind his stories; Townshend’s rock soundworld fits Jimmy’s angry internal agony to perfection.

It’s in Quadrophenia that Townshend really crosses the great divide. The four different aspects of Jimmy’s mind are each represented by a leitmotif, a Wagnerian association of idea with musical theme, which join together at the climax when Jimmy is stranded alone on a rock in the sea and experiences his spiritual epiphany (“It’s difficult to make four leitmotifs work together,” comments Townshend on the DVD. “It’s easy if you’re Bach, or that bloke from Coldplay…”). In the original album, each member of the band represented a different part of the four-fold personality. Meanwhile, there’s a gesamtkunstwerk idea too: in this version, Jimmy’s narration is portrayed on film, images of the sea return constantly, and near the start a lengthy instrumental interlude accompanies a montage of newsreel footage, tracing the evolution of teenagers against a background of the Blitz, Churchill, Hiroshima, rationing and the Beatles. What’s more, Quadrophenia’s subject matter – growing up – is timeless.

In some ways, Quadrophenia is more successfully operatic than many ‘official’ operas of the same time, not least because it’s a sophisticated fusion of artforms, primarily well-wrought music, with something powerful to communicate. Townshend reached his audience by writing about alienation; but in the Seventies his classical contemporaries, experiencing alienation themselves, frequently forgot their audience altogether. Stockhausen’s operas (like Donnerstag aus Licht, 1978) are too naval-gazingly bizarre to expect much uptake. Michael Tippett, who wrote his own libretti, sometimes created psychological stories so convoluted that they can remain baffling even if you like the music. As for Harrison Birtwistle, there can be few figures in contemporary culture so showered with critical awards yet so unwelcomed by the general public. One could argue that opera is opera whether or not anyone goes to see it, and that the mere presence of an audience is certainly no assurance of artistic quality. But if the audience is alienated by both story and sounds, no opera, rock or otherwise, is likely to live for long.

The Who’s rock operas connect with a public wide enough to include classical music journalists. We were all teenagers once. We’ve been there too, even if we were practising three instruments at the time. And we love good music, well performed, whatever its genre. Tommy and Quadrophenia are as characteristic of their era as any opera by Mozart or Wagner; now, with our feet planted firmly in a new century, it seems they can also stand the test of time.

Labels can be deceptive; at worst, they stifle creative thought. Quadrophenia may not be a traditional opera, but it’s a bloody marvellous band performing terrific music that tells a strong story, blending song, drama and spectacle in a manner of its own. Moved? Exhilarated? Uplifted? You bet. Rock opera? Yeah. Why not?