The ultimate Eurovision: Richard Wagner

Around 11pm yesterday, Richmond-upon-Thames was the scene of some strange nocturnal activity, besides the usual gaggles of drunken, semi-naked, apparently cloned teenagers. Along George Street towards the bus stops wandered small groups of dazed and bedazzled pensioners, many of them humming quietly, all of them wearing an expression that suggested they'd been at an ashram retreat and emerged with an altered sense of consciousness. The source? The Met Opera cinecast of Die Walkure.

I was lucky to be there at all, as our local Curzon sold out months ago - some friends had a spare ticket and called in the morning, so I dropped everything and ran. (I was one of just three or four under-60s in the place.) Of all the Wagner operas, this one is my favourite: its passions are the most convincing, its dilemmas the most interesting and its level of inspiration the most consistent. As you know, I have my doubts about opera in the cinema - too many tonsils - but with the prospect of Kaufmann, Westbroek, Terfel and Voigt in the Robert LePage new production...

It wasn't the tonsils that caused the problem - or even the occasional droplets of drool that came across too clearly on the big screen - but the volume. This was cinema volume, flattening out the dynamics at the uppermost level. Across a very big evening of Wagner this can leave you feeling assaulted. Just a notch down would have spared our heads and done the singers more favours - it is hard to get any idea of subtlety or variety of tone. Perhaps in future cinecasts this can be somehow addressed. But apart from that...

It's total surrender. How does one person, one bumptious little 19th-century man, create a work of art like this? How is it possible? Witness Die Walkure - especially in a performance like this - and you're left in no doubt that the potential of a human being is many thousands of times greater than we're usually allowed to believe, let alone aim towards ourselves. He creates a state of enhanced reality, a true raising of consciousness, a natural high that I'd defy any drug to match (not that I've tried any, but with Wagner around, who needs to?). Beside it everything else sounds...so small, so silly, such a waste of time.

Eurovision? You want Eurovision singing? Then see Wagner on screens in every country. Hear Eva-Maria Westbroek singing for The Netherlands as Sieglinde. Hear Bryn Terfel, fresh out of Wales, as the ultimate Wotan - the most powerful operatic performance I've ever seen, bar none. Hear Jonas Kaufmann compete for Germany in an oak-strong, desperate, tender Siegmund. And Deborah Voigt with her shining scimitar of a light-catching voice, flying through the high notes... And there is no need for anybody to win or lose.

Every argument is pallid beside this. All those fine words dissecting every word Wagner ever wrote, all those trendy debates about whether classical music is 'relevant', all the politically correct stuff, social engineering, box-ticking and dumbing-down - forget the lot. Just hear Die Walkure.

This is why we need music. This is the real thing. This is what it's all about. Showing us what a human being can truly achieve and share with others. Talk about Nietzsche if you like, talk about man and superman and Also sprach Zarathustra, but Wagner proves that something superhuman can come from humanity. And if it can, then it should. Don't tell me that anyone who can't hear it or doesn't 'get' it isn't missing out. Yes, they are. Wagner wanted this music to be for everyone. He wanted to reach the widest possible audience because he knew he had something vital to give them. He's still giving.

Down from the cloud, it's possible to dissect things a little more. Robert LePage's production hits many nails fair and square. Keeping a 'traditional' approach to the drama - naturalistic and rather prehistoric, complete with armour for Wotan and the Valkyries - does make the whole thing more engaging and believable than most tricksy updatings can. The set is extraordinary: a string of vast, tall panels, apparently weighing about 45 tons, according to the interval info, on pivots that shift, rotate and transform: they are a forest, a roof, a mountain and even the Valkyries' horses, dipping and plunging in the Ride: the girls dismount by sliding.

But the coup de grace is the final image of the sleeping Brunnhilde on her rock, watched from afar by Wotan: everything swings around until she is upside down, high up, a perspective evoking the sense that we're directly above her, looking down into the flames while rising into the sky with Wotan. My companions thought it might be a trick with a doll rather than the real Deborah Voigt, but if it was, it worked - the possibility never occurred to me. And if it was Voigt - she's brave. Have a look at the slide show of images from the New York Times.

We can pick holes, if you like. Voigt isn't the ideal Brunnhilde - at least not yet - though she may become one. Her middle voice isn't as strong as her high register, as she admitted herself in the interval interviews, with Placido Domingo and Joyce DiDonato as reporters, no less (they'll have Alan Titchmarsh out of a job if they're not careful). But it's her first run in the role - rare to be perfect first go - and in terms of personality and a strongly characterised tone, she more than carried it off. There were occasional things that we saw that we wouldn't have noticed on stage: moments when things get stuck, fail to cooperate or drip spectacularly. And the show started about 40 minutes late due, apparently, to 'machine malfunction'. We were glad to hear in the interval that this was stage machinery, not something inside James Levine, who looked unable to stand without support and didn't go up on stage for a bow. He has now pulled out of pretty much everything but this performance. A few raggedy bits in the orchestral playing, but only a few, in an opera in which scary amounts of stuff can go wrong, given half a chance.

Holes aside, this was the show of a lifetime. People speak of an aeons-gone 'golden age' of operatic singing, but I can only feel grateful to be alive to hear these guys. Terfel's Wotan is utterly superhuman, consumed with self-loathing and conflicting loyalties and with a voice that is a force of much more than mere nature. The way he kills Hunding took the wind out of everyone's sails. One word - "Geeeeeeeeh!" - and the character falls back as if struck in the stomach by a twelve-ton demolition ball. It will be a long, long time before anyone else can match the impact of Terfel's performance.

Westbroek is having one incredible year - first Anna Nicole, now this - and Sieglinde's ecstatic final blessing of Brunnhilde, wild and transported with joy, left us wondering whether it is she, in due course, who will become the next great Brunnhilde. Kaufmann, for all his assertions in his interval interview that he doesn't want to be a Wagner singer and nothing else, is going to be hard-pressed to escape more Wagner roles, so magnificent is his Siegmund. He has a German textual advantage, along with the fact that he was literally born into this music: in the interview, he recalled the days when as a small boy he sat at the piano beside his grandfather who was happily bashing through the piano scores of The Ring. Stephanie Blythe's Fricka was another huge success (in every respect) - every inch a match for Terfel's Wotan, she's a mezzo of glory.

Back to earth now. Let's slide down the Valkyrie horses...and get out to the shops before they sell out of rhubarb. Our fridge is mysteriously working again. Perhaps the energy generated in the cinema last night was enough to power everything up for miles around.

After the outage...

Our host site was down all yesterday and there's a lot to catch up on now. (Is the John Lewis warranty system also powered by Blogger? Today their system is down...as I know because our fridge is bust...)

First, the 'Classic Brits'. Whatever you think about their abandonment of those two little letters '-al', they had a handful of really good winners the other night. Best of all, Tasmin Little won the Critic's Award for her CD of the Elgar Violin Concerto (on Chandos). As you will know, dear readers, she also got a JDCMB Ginger Stripe Award for it last winter solstice. The disc is seriously, highly recommended. And since other awards went to Tony Pappano and Alison Balsom, things can't be quite so dreadful and doom-laden without those two little letters as many would have us think.

Next, James MacMillan's new chamber opera, Clemency. Fascinating to hear this so soon after the Berlioz Damnation of Faust, since it proves that less really can be more. A co-commission between the ROH, the Britten Sinfonia and Scottish Opera, it's spare, concentrated, highly characterised, and packs an extraordinary number of difficult questions into just 45 minutes of music. My review is in The Independent.

Over in Hungary, JDCMB favourite conductor Iván Fischer has given a warm endorsement to JDCMB other favourite conductor, Gábor Takács-Nagy, who has just been appointed principal guest conductor of the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The news comes via the lucky old Manchester Camerata, where Gabor takes over as principal conductor in the season ahead. Iván says: "There will be a very important change in the life of the BFO from next season onwards. Gábor Takács-Nagy, who was our former concert master, has been nominated Principal Guest Conductor of the orchestra. There are many conductors in the world who can get orchestras to play together but there are very few who can profoundly inspire. Gábor Takács-Nagy is one of them."

TODAY there's a live cinecast from The Met of Die Walkure starring Jonas Kaufmann as Siegmund. Coming soon to a cinema near you, but if you can't get in there are a few 'encore' showings tomorrow and even Monday. Oh, and it also stars Deborah Voigt as Brunnhilde, Bryn Terfel as Wotan and Eva-Maria Westbroek (aka Anna Nicole) as Sieglinde. Playbill Arts has 20 Questions with Jonas Kaufmann, in which our tenor says rather charmingly that "every composer has weak und strong points". Intermezzo disapproves of his admission that he likes Dire Straits.

Faure fans who play the piano will be very glad to see Roy Howat's spanking new Urtext edition of Glorious Gabriel's Beautiful Barcarolles, all 13 of them, clearly and readably presented by Peters Edition and correcting all manner of mistakes, misreadings and misapprehensions that apparently crept into earlier publications. Roy's Faure editions have been arriving thick and fast over the past - well, probably a decade, come to think of it - and they're evidently a labour of love. This one may well tempt me back to the piano for a long-overdue wallow. Read more about it here.

And last but absolutely not least, my interview with the lovely South African soprano Pumeza Matshikiza was in The Independent yesterday. Pumeza grew up in the townships of the Cape Town area in the last decade of apartheid. Next week she'll be singing at the Wigmore Hall in a showcase concert of the Classical Opera Company, and will be doing a duet with white South African soprano Sarah-Jane Brandon. That wouldn't have been possible in South Africa a couple of decades ago. Go hear them.

Now, about that fridge...

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.