Update on Battle of the Rachs...

Interesting info re the spelling of Serge(i) Rachmaninov/ff has been popping into the in-box since my post the other day, so here's what they're saying.

Alexandra Ivanoff, culture journalist and music editor of Time Out, Istanbul, gives her interpretation:

"As I understand it from my grandparents, -OFF was their generation's anglicization of the Cyrillic letter B (lower case). The 20th century generations chose the -OV, partly because it's one less letter to deal with.

Also, the Cyrillic B can be pronounced like an f or a v, so it's kind of toss-up - that evidently continues."

My doughty editor at The Arts Desk, ace critic and Russophile David Nice, offers further explanation:

"The solution is simple, though the inconsistency is maddening: both Prokofiev and Rachmaninov were known in France as 'Serge' and with two ffs, the French transcription. They were published by Editions France de Musique which was bought up by Boosey and Hawkes, hence the publisher's insistence...The Rachmaninoff Society insists on this, and the foundation is supporting the concerts... I ALWAYS put v (and one s in Musorgsky, no reason for two in transliteration. And always Ye for the Russian E (ie Yevtushenko, Yesenin, Yevgeny, Yelena...)" 

Critic and author Matthew Rye adds: "I had always understood that the 'ff' was R's own self-spelling when he moved to the US (in the same way that Schoenberg chose to lose his umlaut and added the first 'e', and Rubinstein became Arthur rather than Artur)." 

John Riley says: "Academically it should be Rakhmaninov, but that seems the least popular option."

The discussion has put me in mind of my experience aged 18 in what would now be called a gap-year internship, but was then simply a part-time job in a year out between school and university. (It was paid, too, and we even got luncheon vouchers.) I was lucky enough to be taken on as office junior by a famous musical publication with an eminent editor, whose letters I had to type from audio-recorded dictation - and he had spelling issues that I simply could not fathom. They were far indeed from Music A level. Skryabin, for a start; and I think my fuzzy memory must have blanked out his solution to the -off/-ov issue. The most confusing, though, was Chaikovsky, with no T. The terror that this struck into my heart has never quite left me.

Come to think of it, my own name in its eastern-bloc Cyrillic original would have been best transliterated as DUKHEN. I've evidently been missing a trick. By this token you are now reading...

DZESIKA DUKHEN'S CLASSICAL MUSIC BLOG

We know the Mozart Effect - but what about the Korngold Effect?

This fun explanation turned up on Classic FM's Facebook page yesterday. We all know about 'the Mozart Effect', by which listening to Mozart is supposed to make your child awfully clever. But supposing your little ones like other composers too? [warning: irony font applies throughout]

So where do we go from here? Here are a few suggestions for composers who didn't make the shortlist above...

The Korngold Effect:
Child fills room with as many different percussion and keyboard instruments as possible, then eats chocolate while playing them all in F sharp major. Teachers express extreme disapproval, while secretly sympathising.

The Chopin Effect:
Child insists on cladding the living room walls in dove-grey silk to ease piano practice.

The Mendelssohn Effect:
This child seems to speak so easily that he/she is dismissed at school as a brattish know-it-all. Later it turns out that he/she is exhausted because in fact he/she has been putting painstaking hours of revision into every sentence to make it sound effortless.

The Scriabin Effect:
Child starts putting coloured filters over all the lights in the house and reaches a state of desperate over-excitement when they meet and mix. It'll all end in tears.

The Ravel Effect:
This fastidious child is a perfectionist in every way. Writes very little, but comes out top of the class every time. Is nevertheless only acknowledged by classmates for the one occasion when he/she decided to write the same two sentences again and again and again in different-coloured ink, just for a lark.

The Fauré Effect:
Only in evidence after age 16: youngster eyes up opposite sex while supposedly paying attention at respectable school prayers.

The Orff Effect:
Child decides to please teachers in a hardline school by writing exactly what they want. The result is crass and cynical, but everyone loves it.

The Girl of the Golden West End

I wrote this for the Indy's 'Observations' section last weekend, but can't find it online, so here it is in full glory...Puccini's The Girl of the Golden West opens at ENO tonight, with Susan Bullock as Minnie. Enjoy.

Sometimes you can wait two decades for a new production of a particular opera, only to find three turning up within a year. Until recently Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (The Girl of the Golden West) was a relative rarity on these shores. But with stagings this year at Opera North, Opera Holland Park and now English National Opera, where a new one directed by Richard Jones opens on 2 October, it looks as if this entrancing work’s day has arrived.

It is not before time. The composer regarded it as one of his greatest; leading sopranos put its heroine, Minnie, at the top of their role wish-lists. Yet this piece can raise awkward expectations in a movie-drenched public: it’s an operatic western. Puccini gives his all in the service of a story about miners, bandits and a feisty female saloon owner. Maybe opera-goers are more accustomed to tales of consumptive courtesans perishing by inches in 19^th-century Paris.

To Puccini himself, though, the Californian gold rush was wildly romantic; as exotic as those topics he tackled elsewhere, such as the Geisha girls of Japan (Madama Butterfly) or rebellion, torture and passion in 18^th-century Rome (Tosca). Basing the opera on David Belasco’s play of the same title – and, so the story goes, inspired by an illicit female muse a little way from his home at Torre del Lago, Tuscany – he set to work at fever pitch. The world premiere took place at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, in 1910.

In Minnie he created a gigantic leading role, requiring great stamina and strength. It is a dream part for sopranos with the right voice and personality to carry it off; today such stars as Eva-Maria Westbroek and Susan Bullock, who takes the lead at ENO, cite it as a top favourite.

A passionate, complex character, with music to match, the saloon keeper Minnie risks all for love. She falls for the mysterious Dick Johnson, only to discover that he is a bandit in disguise. Despite the deception, she is willing to save him – with her own life, if need be – and the opera offers that rare treat: a happy ending.

The Wild West nevertheless may not be its only problem in reaching the modern public’s hearts. It lacks set-pieces that can be plucked out and popularised. There is no show-stopping aria like ‘Nessun dorma’ from Turandot or ‘Vissi d’arte’ from Tosca that can be played time after time on the radio. Instead, the entire score is magnificent, in a whole different way: it is riveting music-drama, a play set to sophisticated, wonderfully orchestrated, through-composed sonic treats. Take on Fanciulla and you take all or nothing.

Perhaps this gold rush of productions shows that finally we are ready for that. Meanwhile, if operatic westerns are having a moment in the sun, it is maybe time for a British company to present the American composer Charles Wuorinen’s recently premiered opera of Brokeback Mountain.

The Girl of the Golden West, English National Opera, from 2 October. Box office: 020 7845 9300

Day of the Trifonovs...

Thank you, PIANIST MAGAZINE, for this rather to-the-point image! Attention BIRMINGHAM: he is doing the whole thing again tonight, in the Town Hall...

(Update: PIANIST mag tells me this inspired bit of imagery arrived originally from our doughty friend Yehuda Shapiro.)

Trifonov scales the Eiger

Well, the north face of the piano repertoire: Liszt's complete Transcendental Etudes, live in concert. I'm still reeling. Here's my review for The Arts Desk. (Do take out a subscription: it's well worth it, top-notch reviewing for the price of one coffee per month!)