Showbiz without a safety net

You know how to make a critic feel really, seriously bad? Write to her the moment her review is published and tell her you did that entire performance with an infection in your finger that had made it swell up so much that you couldn’t fit it between the notes. A couple of weeks ago I went to review Hershey Felder’s one-man show Our Great Tchaikovsky at the Other Palace Theatre…and about 10 minutes after I published the write-up, there pinged in a message from the man himself... Contrite, I went to see him last Friday to hear about how he creates his composer-focused performances – and about what he was going through on press night.

Silver birch: Felder as Tchaikovsky

We’re in Tchaikovsky’s house in Klin. The stage set that evokes it, anyway. Felder takes the piano stool and talks to me almost the same way that he performs, expressing himself on the piano as much as in words. He is soft-spoken when not acting, but tenacious and determined as anyone must be when creating theatre pieces in which he both acts and plays the piano – in the Tchaikovsky one, almost continuously for an hour and 40 minutes – and performing them eight times a week.

“I arrived on the Sunday, and someone’s luggage got caught on this finger, ripped the nail in half and dug all the way into my finger,” Felder explains. “So I didn’t play for two days, but when I started that week of performances, because I put pressure on it, it got worse and started to swell. Tchaikovsky is awkward as it is, but I was in so much pain – every time I was between two black notes I couldn’t fit.”

Bandages didn’t help much, ice made it worse and Felder tried changing his technique and his fingering in order to accommodate the problem: “The pain was massive and I had to play with flat fingers rather than my usual technique.” Flat fingers worked for Horowitz, he adds, but his own experience was slightly less happy. Then, 15 minutes before the start on press night, “the whole thing broke open and there was blood all over the keys.” It seems nothing short of miraculous that he was able to go ahead with that performance all.

Felder grew up in Canada in a family in which both sides were Holocaust survivors – his background mingles Russian, Polish and Hungarian strands. “My Hungarian grandmother survived because she was standing in line for a train when a little boy came up to her and told her to play dead next time she saw a pile of bodies,” he recounts. Her family, having survived the war, then escaped at the time of the Revolution in 1956.

Felder, fascinated by golden-age pianists such as Busoni and Moritz Rosenthal, studied at Juilliard with Jerome Lowenthal (who had studied with Cortot, among others). He was set on the idea of a career performing and composing, and made his debut in London playing Rhapsody in Blue at the Queen Elizabeth Hall when he was 19. But then, delving into his family history in Poland, he was exploring Chopin heritage too and came across a piano that belonged to the composer. The insights it brought him into how Chopin must have played, he says, set him thinking about how to create a performance to explore the matter. “But everyone said: ‘Chopping? Who’s heard of Chopping? Nobody will come! Do someone everyone’s heard of. Do Cole Porter...’”

He didn’t want to do Cole Porter. “But I saw how the audience responded to the music when I played Rhapsody in Blue. Next thing I know, I’m telling the story of Gershwin. I didn’t think there would be a business in story-telling. But there is. There really is. Today people come to me from all over the world for help in creating similar shows.” Among them was Mona Golabek, whose memoir The Pianist of Willesden Lane was a smash hit here in London and has now been optioned for a film.

Defying the nay-sayers, Felder pressed ahead with more composer productions. His Bernstein show brought him a new friendship with an unexpected new admirer, the great pianist Byron Janis (who is now 89). He did do Chopin – and people did go. Ditto Beethoven, Liszt and Irving Berlin. The Liszt production, devised for the composer's bicentenary a few years back, focused on his support for Wagner, asking the crucial question, according to Felder, "If you know someone is going to turn out bad, do you support him anyway?" - a philosophical argument that set some audiences raging, but pushed the concept behind the show onto a new and vital level. 

We nearly got his Irving Berlin in London this time, but four weeks before opening night, Felder says, he was so disillusioned with developments in Trump’s America that he switched to do his recently premiered Tchaikovsky instead. “I felt I couldn’t come to London and sing ‘God Bless America’ after they pardoned Arpaio,” he declares.

Our Great Tchaikovsky doesn’t shirk difficult politics. “It’s ostensibly about Tchaikovsky,” Felder says, “but actually it’s about propaganda, about erasing who Tchaikovsky was, what Russia is doing now and how this threatens Americans in various communities on a daily basis. It scares the hell out of me.” But in the panorama of Tchaikovsky’s life, the story is relevant without effort, lavishly complemented by digital animations that project across the setting of Klin images of animals grazing in birch forests, images that transform from mountains to dancers to swans, and New York in the snow (for The Nutcracker, dreamed up there when Tchaikovsky visited to open Carnegie Hall). “The show evokes an era,” says Felder, “and that era is Russia in the late 19^th century.”

Rest assured that Felder is one heck of a terrific pianist, with sensitive and colourful touch, and flair to spare. Yet if you’re battling an infected finger plus a difficult acoustic (the Other Palace Theatre is extremely dry), what to do? A true pro presses on, and Felder is as total a pro as you would find anywhere on the globe. There’s no business like showbusiness, as someone once said, and for a one-man show there’s no understudy, no backup, no safety net. Now that he’s better, I might make a return visit.

The mind behind the cough

Diagram from Wikipedia

Last night I went to the London Piano Festival concert and in the middle of the Rachmaninov I felt the first warning signs. Like most other people in London, the PM included, I've had a lurgy. It's gone, but left lingering dregs in the form of a tickly but persistent and "productive" cough. Nothing that Vocalzone pastilles can't sort out, I thought, heading off to Kings Place. And all was well until 2/3 of the way through Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva's splendid performance: in the Rachmaninov Suite No.2's Romance, the bug decided it was time to get me. Just after friends and I had spent half the interval grumbling about people coughing.

It starts with a soft sensation like cat-fur brushing against one tonsil. Perhaps a quiet 'hem-hem' will clear it. No...The cat fur is pressing and now feels more like a brush-bristle. A needle. It's agony, all down the right side of my neck. I put my coat over my mouth and cough as quietly as humanly possible. Did you know that if you stifle a cough in material it helps muffle it, but if you put your hand over your mouth it just amplifies the noise? Take note, dear friends... Yet the cough remains. And I can't cough properly, especially not in this bit. Oh, come on, Jess, it's not like you're the PM...

But...oh help. Oh gawd. What to do? I can scarcely take a breath. My eyes are watering. On stage Charles and Katya are in Rachmaninov Heaven and everybody around me is blissing out. If I get up and run for the door, won't that cause more disturbance than coughing? But I can't cough either. What's more, if I pick up my handbag and start rustling around for my Vocalzone under the tissues, Oystercard, lipstick, Ghost Variations flyers and change that fell out of my purse, that'll cause impossible disturbance too... But I can't cough. What would my friends say? What would my neighbours say? What about the other press?

Won't it be over soon? Won't it pass? Won't this movement, at least, end, and then I can attack the bag for a pastille? I thought the suite was quite short, but it seems not - this movement has turned interminable. Rachmaninov will make sure it goes on forever and forever more. And far from being gentle and romantic, it's eating me alive.

By now something inside my throat is shivering like violin vibrato and my eyes are streaming so much that it must be wrecking my make-up (upside: maybe everyone will think the music moved me to tears...) My whole body is shaking. I try to control it, but slowly the whole of Kings Place seems to be tipping slowly over to the right. Is this real? Is it all psychological? Is this every worst experience of my whole life coming back to destroy me, in the middle of a piano festival? Is this what it's like to have a breakdown? They're going to have to carry me out in a heap of melted hopelessness.

The movement ends. There's a second or two of silence. I can hear the cough sweets screaming at me from the bottom of the bag. In a moment...but Charles and Katya catch one another's eye over their pianos, hands raised, motionless. And they plunge straight into the finale.

Suffice it to say that this morning I'm alive and well. I wonder if every other concert-cougher feels as I do when that happens to them. Rather cruelly, I hope so, because it really does disturb the music. I managed to muffle mine, despite personal suffering. So you can, too. Remember: use material, not your hand, and never leave home without a cough sweet.


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All hands on deck! London Piano Festival opens today

I'm going to be hanging out at Kings Place a lot over the next few days as the London Piano Festival swings into action tonight, led by the dastardly duo of Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva. Turning piano concerts into celebrations of the range, colour and full glory available to pianists, they've programmed a total feast and brought in some amazing artists to deliver it. Here's a piece I wrote originally for Kings Place's magazine to trail the festival. The full programme is online here.

When Kings Place opened the doors to its first London Piano Festival last year, some concertgoers may have been wondering where it had been all their lives. Piano festivals are oddly rare in the capital, despite the perennial popularity of the instrument and its almost limitless repertoire. The piano duo Charles Owen and Katya Apekisheva decided to put that situation right – and sure enough, the 2016 festival went so well that now it is happening again.

Between 5 and 8 October Kings Place will resound with piano music: four solo recitals, a concert for children, an evening with Owen and Apekisheva, a grand two-piano marathon with six star pianists and finally jazz from Jason Rebello.

The range of music extends from a baroque recital performed by Lisa Smirnova to a new commission from the South African composer Kevin Volans, included in Melvyn Tan’s concert alongside Weber and Ravel. The children’s concert includes Poulenc’s L’histoire de Babar, le petit éléphant and an unusual arrangement for piano four-hands of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf - Simon Callow is the narrator. Nelson Goerner from Argentina offers high romanticism (Friday 6th, 7.30pm), and the Russian pianist Ilya Itin presents two sizeable sonatas by Schubert and Rachmaninoff (Saturday 7th, 4pm).

 

Katya & Charles amid some silver birches
Photo: Sim Canetty-Clarke

“We’re trying to focus not only on the biggest names, but on artists who are of the very highest calibre but rarely perform in Britain,” says Owen. “We are very keen to bring several of those musicians to reconnect with British audiences.” Lisa Smirnova and Ilya Itin are prime examples: “Lisa is someone I studied alongside in Moscow, with Anna Kantor, and I always admired her,” says Apekisheva. “She’s a very interesting, individual musician and she has a huge career in America and Europe, but not in the UK. Her Handel recording was wonderful and received fantastic reviews.”

Itin, who won first prize, the audience prize and the contemporary music prize at the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1996, is now based in New York and combines performing with his role as a sought-after teacher. Apekisheva met him at Leeds and was bowled over by his musicianship: “Again he is an absolutely outstanding artist, but hasn’t played here for such a long time. We decided we must have him back.”

The repertoire is a combination of the familiar and unfamiliar. “There’s an underlying theme of Russia, coinciding with the anniversary of the October Revolution in 1917,” says Owen. “Katya and I are playing both the Rachmaninoff Suite No.2 and the Symphonic Dances for two pianos and we’re giving the world premiere of a new commission from Elena Langer, inspired by some Kandinsky paintings from 1917 which we hope to project onto the screen as we play.”

The Russian focus extends to a significant rarity: the Sonata No.2 by Mieczyslaw Weinberg, a close friend of Shostakovich’s whose music is currently enjoying a major revival of interest. Apekisheva learned it for the Brundibár Festival in Newcastle earlier this year: “I completely fell in love with the piece and very much want to play it again,” she says. “It’s very exciting music, but what a challenge to play!”

Ultimately, Owen and Apekisheva say, their aim for the festival is to create something special together that can be enjoyed by piano fans from far and wide. Both regard Kings Place as the perfect venue in which to realise their vision: “With all these wonderful spaces, there’s room for audiences to spread out, meet, talk and chat,” says Owen. “The vibe is informal and there are great places to eat and relax. We’re trying to build an audience who will trust our choices, a core audience of piano lovers. And, very importantly, we want people to have fun!”

Michael Volle: How to keep your head in opera

Even if his characters sometimes lose their heads, the powerhouse German baritone Michael Volle has no intention of imitating them. You'll find he has strong shoulders, feet firmly on the ground and a velvet-lined juggernaut of a voice. I was lucky enough to hear him sing Hans Sachs in Meistersinger at Bayreuth this summer, and this season he is back at the Royal Opera House to sing Guy de Montfort in Verdi's Les vêpres sicilienne and, later, Jokanaan in Strauss's Salome. My interview with him earlier this year originally appeared in the Royal Opera House Magazine and I'm rerunning it below with their kind permission.

Volle as Montfort in Les vêpres siciliennes
Photo: Bill Cooper/ROH

Michael Volle is very proud of his head. The one in the cupboard, that is. “Since 2008 in each Salome performance here, my head is used,” he declares, “because I did the first run with David McVicar.” When Strauss’s searing masterpiece is revived at the Royal Opera House later this season, Volle can reclaim his model cranium: he returns as Jokanaan, aka St John the Baptist, whose decapitation is the febrile princess’s revenge for her failure to seduce him.

For the leonine German baritone, 57, Jokanaan offers a challenge through sheer intensity. “In Strauss’s big, big lines, everything must be perfect. And you must be a prophet,” he says. “I would never have been able in the early years to sing Jokanaan, or the big Wagner roles: you need the experience, you need the breadth, you need to have been on stage playing a very strange character. He is in his madness, he is confronted with this strange young lady and her demands and he loses his security. It’s not a long role, but a very strong: you stay like a rock, but then it takes your energy, the fight with the unknown planet of this young woman.”

Jokanaan, the Flying Dutchman, Hans Sachs, Wotan: the roles that Volle sings are often larger than life, each in its own way, and Volle himself is a gigantic personality, somewhat resembling an imposing yet genial German version of Jack Nicholson. His voice, with its vast capabilities in both quality and magnitude, reflects that strength of presence, yet can also be as meltingly beautiful as it is dramatic. Wagner, Strauss, Verdi and Puccini could eat up all his time. Yet his lasting inspiration is something very different: Bach and Mozart.

BACH TO THE FUTURE

The youngest of eight children of a priest, Volle grew up in Baden-Württemberg, near Stuttgart, steeped in first-rate church music. “In Stuttgart you could visit on one day six or seven church services with six or seven Bach cantatas, because it was part of religious life,” he recalls.

Because of that background, he insists, he cannot do without Mozart and Bach: “But the crazy thing is, nobody offers me Bach any more.” The expectation, he grumbles, is that a Wagner and Strauss voice cannot possibly suit those composers. “It’s ridiculous!” he expostulates. “I’m so fortunate that I did recently with the Akademie für Alte Musik in Berlin the three bass solo cantatas of Bach and we recorded them in concert. I do a lot of Bach because I need it. No Christmas time without a Christmas Oratorio; no Easter without a Passion.”

As for Mozart, he remarks with satisfaction that following a Wagner rescheduling last winter, he found he had the chance to sing one of his favourite roles, Papageno in Die Zauberflöte, in Paris, with his wife, Gabriela Scherer, also in the cast as the First Lady. “What could be better than that?” he beams.

Perhaps having half a million Youtube views could run a close second? Last year Volle was invited by an ear, nose and throat specialist in Stuttgart to be filmed singing inside an MRI scanner, which duly captured astounding images of the physical mechanism of singing. The video went viral (see above). “I don’t do social media, so I knew nothing about it,” he says. “Then my wife told me I’d become an internet sensation.” Wasn’t that a little alarming? “I would not get a job from the way I sang in that video,” he laughs, “but it was fun.”

It’s often said that Volle has had a “slow burn” career, a phrase which also makes him laugh, but is not far off the mark. “Boys always develop more slowly than girls!” he quips. “I only started to study aged 25 and in 1990 I had my first opera contract. I was on fire, wondering why some other people got roles... But 27 years later, I’m very happy it took all that time, because I had the chance to develop and grow up. I believe somehow in a ‘plan’ for your life – fate, if you like. For me it was perfect, because I was never forced to do anything that could have killed my voice. I was able to grow with the right parts at the right time, and I’m very grateful for that.”

As Montfort, with Bryan Hymel as Henri
Photo: Bill Cooper/ROH

Covent Garden audiences might be forgiven for thinking, though, that Volle specialises in characters whose fate is distinctly darker: not least, he is reprising the role of Guy de Montfort in the forthcoming revival of Verdi’s Les Vêpres siciliennes. The opera begins with Montfort as a soldier raping a dancer, who then bears his child – the opera’s hero, Henri. Later, as governor of Sicily, Montfort longs for his grown-up son to accept him, but ultimately he, along with the French occupiers of the island, comes to a sticky end.

"THIS IS AN INCREDIBLE PROFESSION"

As Montfort
Photo: Bill Cooper/ROH

Montfort might not seem the easiest character to identify with, but one vital element of the role was uppermost in Volle’s mind when Stefan Herheim’s production was premiered in 2013. “My fourth child was born in 2012,” he says, “so I was very involved in being a father. This is a central conflict in Vêpres, between Montfort the elder statesman and Montfort the father. He wants to be a good father and he meets his child, who rejects him: this big scene at the end of the first act is very intense.

“I am happy that for the past 20-25 years opera singers have had to be actors too,” Volle adds. It so happens that his brother is an actor: “He says often that if you feel close to a role, it must touch you in some inward way. This is the gift of being an acting singer, or a singing actor: you can try to be somebody else, something quite different from your private life you are paid for it, and you can sing!” Volle gives a giant bellow of laughter: “This is an incredible profession – I love it.”

FIVE AT ONE BLOW

This summer one summit of Volle’s repertoire approached in a special form: he sang Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Barrie Kosky’s new production for Bayreuth [our interview took place before this, in the spring]. “For me Sachs is the one and only role that is above everything,” he says. “The singing is so difficult – but it is so wonderful, because you have not only to sing five characters, but to act them too. Sachs is the wise man, the jealous man, the artist, the shoemaker, the mastersinger, and this is incredible.” He was looking forward to working with Barrie Kosky for the first time, too: “He has incredibly good ideas and I think we will have a great time.” [Author's note: looked good to me.]

And having a good time, he reflects,  is vital. “I am glad to be at a level now at which I can say no to offerings,” Volle reflects. “This can be the least family-friendly job in the world, because if you do an opera you are away for weeks at a time. Family is everything, so I do sometimes say no. Singing so important to me, it is a part of me, but it could be over tomorrow. Then what do you have?”

Les Vêpres siciliennes opens at the Royal Opera House on 12 October. Michael Volle sings Montfort, Bryan Hymel reprises the role of Henri, Malin Byström and later in the run Rachele Stanisci perform Hélène, Erwin Schrott sings Procida and Maurizio Benini conducts. Booking here.

Aida at ENO: a pearl, an intractable oyster and an elephant in the house

Latonia Moore as Aida. Photo: Tristram Kenton

Here's my review of ENO's new production of Aida, for The Arts Desk. I've never particularly liked this opera and the staging really did not help. But Latonia Moore is truly wonderful. As for the elephant, it's the language, this translation especially. When 'shelter' rhymes with 'Delta', isn't it time to go back to Italian? Or at least commission a new and better version?

http://www.theartsdesk.com/opera/aida-english-national-opera-review-heroine-almost-saves-dismal-day