Writing a piece about the Golden Age of Pianists for Primephonic, I couldn't resist including one of the most startling, inspiring and terrifying musicians I have yet encountered on record: the Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi. You may not have heard of him, but maybe it's time you did. All you can expect of him is the unexpected.
Kevin Bazzana's biography reveals the life of a man who lurched between genius and mental breakdown, from wild success to sleeping rough in the subway, from wife to wife - ten of them (eat your heart out, Henry VIII) - yet who was never anything less than his own true self.
The cover to be. Photo: Yoshimasa Hating
Tomoyuki Sawado of Sonnetto Classics is having a Kickstarter to raise funds to release Nyiregyházi's comeback recital of 1972 on CD. Please have a listen and consider contributing. He has 9 days left to raise the remaining 49 per cent. More details at the Kickstarter page here.
My Primephonic article explores what exactly the magic of those so-called Golden Age artists was about. It's not a comprehensive survey or a Top 300 list or similar, and is designed for general music lovers as well as serious pianophiles. I chose a selection of pianists from different places, with contrasting personalities and life stories, and wondered what brings them together under the same umbrella. It's a personal choice and assessment. There are probably 50 more who could have been included, yet the article is already double its intended length.
Listening to Christoph Prégardien singing Lieder by Mahler, Schubert and Schumann the other night at the Wimbledon International Music Festival, I couldn't help wondering if that's where Leonard Cohen got it from. The journey to the darkest regions of the human heart dates not from today's finest singer-songwriters, perhaps not even from Mahler, but from the 1820s. Schubert's settings of Heinrich Heine in his last song cycle, Schwanengesang, are a strong contender for the title of bleakest, most nihilistic music in history, should we ever need to present such an accolade. Their intense pain is only increased by their beauty - and by the craftsmanship by which Schubert is able to kick our guts out with the upward step of one semitone in 'Der Doppelgänger'.
Christoph Prégardien. Photo: Medici.tv
There's something almost masochistic about a really good Lieder recital. We're put through the crushing emotions of lost love, of longing for death, of self-imposed suicidal isolation, and the more it hurts, the better the singer is presenting it. We're put through an emotional mangle and sometimes we weep. And the more of that there is, the more likely we are to offer him/her a standing ovation at the end. Because actually we come out feeling better.
Is that because it's over? Nope. It's good, old-fashioned, Greek catharsis. We have the chance, listening to these songs, to go into the secret, suppressed chambers of our own hearts and concentrate on feeling, unimpeded, the emotions we might not want to let out otherwise. It hurts, but it's an experience, a meditation and a release.
The fact that Christoph Prégardien was singing in Wimbledon at all is quite a triumph for the WIMF, whose programming these days wouldn't disgrace a festival three times its weight in the centre of some gorgeous European capital, rather than suburban south-west London, where we all go wombling free (even Alfred Brendel, who lives north of the river, was in the audience for this one). Prégardien's artistry is streamlined, focused, essential: with beauty of tenor tone absolutely intact - he is 60 - diction impeccable, emotions of text and tone fused and explored to the last degree, he is the consummate Lieder singer. His partnership with the excellent pianist Sholto Kynoch matched all of that. He brought splendour, agony and ecstasy to Mahler's Lieder eines Fahrenden Gesellen first; bitterness, irony and a heady intelligence to Schumann's Dichterliebe in the second half; and those Schubert Heine settings in between are still alive and reverberating with wonder and horror somewhere in my subconscious several days on. You want it darker? Try Schubert.
Incidentally, the artistic director of the WIMF, Anthony Wilkinson, has for some years been spearheading an effort to get a world-class concert hall built in Wimbledon; and at the moment, he tells me, things are progressing quite well. More power to his elbow.
The festival continues with a feast of great music-making until 27 November: Christian Tetzlaff in solo Bach and Bartók, Tabea Zimmermann and Dénes Várjon, Michael Collins, Raphael Wallfisch, a Klezmer night with Balkan Voices, the Tetzlaff Quartet, the Bach Christmas Oratorio and more. Wimbledon is a short train ride from Waterloo, or take the southbound District Line to the end.
British pianist Kathryn Stott has just been announced as the new artistic director of the Australian Festival of Chamber Music in Townsville, taking over from Piers Lane.
The town in Far North Queensland has its fair share of palm trees, sunshine and proximity to what remains of the Great Barrier Reef; for decades the festival has welcomed the great and good of the music world to its delights. Piers has been in situ 11 years and Kathy will be only the third director to hold office.
Born in Lancashire, Kathy studied at the Yehudi Menuhin School and at the Royal College of Music with Kendall Taylor. Aged 19 she was a finalist in the Leeds International Piano Competition and shot to fame; now she has long enjoyed a busy career juggling solo work, chamber music including a duo partnership with Yo-Yo Ma, teaching at the Oslo Conservatory of Music, and the occasional curating of festivals and concert series. She tells me she had been keeping an eye out for something longer term in that department, but is more than thrilled to have been recommended to the AFCM, where she has been a frequent visitor, by Piers himself.
I'm not sure for whom I'm happier: the festival having her, or her having the festival. Congratulations all round!
The Paris Philharmonie. We want one too! Photo: Charles Platiau
It's dead - supposedly. Theresa May's government recently decided Rattle Hall, or The Centre for Music to use its official title, wasn't "value for money" for the taxpayer (though this, one presumes, depends which taxpayers you ask). In today's Times, Richard Morrison points out that that doesn't mean it's not going to happen: it's just that it will have to be funded entirely by private money, and possibly by someone who might roll up loving Sir Simon Rattle enough to stump up a few hundred million. Well, we can dream...
The news has been greeted with a peculiar mixture of anger, relief and cynicism, and while the prevailing anxieties are Brexit and Trump, nobody seems able to get excessively worked up about it. Yes, we need a new orchestral concert venue in London because the acoustics in the Barbican and the Royal Festival Hall really are several hundred light years away from today's state of the art possibilities, which are exemplified by the work of Mr Toyota. There's only a limited amount of good that their expensive refits could do them; the RFH is now over-clinical, with funny bass-treble balance in some parts of the hall, and the Barbican is louder without being warmer. But the Museum of London site is far from ideal. If we're to have a truly world-class new hall, please can we get it right this time?
What concerned me the most about the plans, as far as they went, was in fact not the location, nor the argument that the money would be better spent on music education - it never would have been in any case (different budgets). Arguably the hall would have been a major incentive to improve music education locally, if not nationally, since it would have provided top-notch facilities to be used by schools and young people and - crucially - sent out a positive and encouraging message about the value of the arts to society, the exact opposite of what pulling the plug does. Parties of children could have flocked there daily on "enrichment" projects.
No, the worrying thing was the implication for the rest of London - indeed, the rest of the country. A new hall has to be built. After that, it has to be run. And where does the money come from to do that? Yes, government. What is the government doing to the arts? It is cutting their budget. Is there any prospect of that changing? Not while this lot is in power. So where would that money come from? Other organisations, run from the same budget, being slashed, obvs.
Musicians and audiences in London want, need and deserve a hall to match the finest in Tokyo, Berlin and Paris. What we don't want is an organisation that comes to life by snuffing out the competition. Whatever their limitations, we wouldn't be happy to see the Royal Festival Hall stripped of its orchestral programmes, which are already somewhat reduced, or the Barbican put entirely out to pasture, or ENO killed off; if that were the price for the Centre for Music, it would indeed be too high. Arts in the "regions" are to be a greater priority now - and quite right, too - but London is a massive city, and growing fast (unless we lose a six-figure number of bankers as they shift to Paris and Frankfurt post-Brexit, which could happen), and can easily support as many arts organisations as it has, and more. Especially since we expect a steady influx of tourists who can now come over more easily because of our tanking currency, and are definitely not heading here to bask on a beach.
If the new hall were to be built, with private money, in an ideal world it would be an "as well as" rather than an "instead of". As long as that is the case, it would be much better that it happened than that it didn't.
But we can't predict anything now, things being as they are, so the whole idea may yet remain one more vape dream: an empty gesture, stripped of substance.
Politicians right now are not distinguishing themselves with high-level eloquence, though goodness knows we need some. Instead, here is one musician who's not willing to stand by and watch everything go to pot: the pianist Igor Levit, who is 29, has just released a speech he made before a Beethoven concert in Brussels the other night. Bravo, Igor.
A spot of musical escapism after a very dark night.
Tonight I'm chairing a panel discussion with five American composers who happen to be women, before the concert in Lontano's Festival of American Music at the Warehouse, Waterloo. The composers are Hannah Lash, Julia Howell, Elena Ruehr, Barbara Jazwinski and Laura Kaminsky, so it should be a fascinating chat. But it's going to be an even more interesting evening than I'd anticipated. We'd hoped to be celebrating the accession of the US's first-ever female president, but...no.
Tonight, too, the LPO pertinently plays Dvorák's "New World" Symphony at the RFH. Robin Ticciati conducts. (But listen out for the dark side of that piece. It's there.) In the first half, Anne-Sophie Mutter is playing the Beethoven Violin Concerto - on her Strad, which used to belong to Jelly d'Arányi and was probably the instrument on which the latter gave the UK premiere of the Schumann Violin Concerto.
Tomorrow at the Barbican, the LSO is playing the Schumann itself, with Renaud Capuçon the soloist. An insane piece for an insane world? Or Schumann's last stand before the crash, unfairly suppressed for 80 years until its bizarre rediscovery? It's not for nothing that that story became Ghost Variations, though I didn't anticipate that its 1930s setting would ring quite as many bells as it does. I'm looking forward to hearing Renaud play it.
At some point I'll try and produce some cogent thinking about the scuppering of the new London concert hall, but today is not the day.
Actually I am lost for words and I don't want to depress anyone further, but I have no verbal slivers of hope, inspiration or humour to offer, so here's some Schumann instead.
Zoltan Kocsis. Photo: Zsolt Szigetvary/MTI via AP,
Tragic news came yesterday that the Hungarian pianist and conductor Zoltan Kocsis has died at the age of 64. He was chief conductor of the Hungarian National Philharmonic and had also been active as a composer. In tribute, his fellow conductor Iván Fischer said: "Kocsis was a giant of music...his influence on his generation is immeasurable."
Many regrets that I never managed to meet him, and heard him play infrequently - he was not a regular visitor to the UK, and the loss was ours. I first heard him, in fact, while on holiday in Switzerland when I was 14, which must have been 1980. He gave a recital in the cinema, Pontresina, and nobody around had actually heard of him before, but he played his own transcription of the Prelude & Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and the roof nearly flew off. I remember we were all left speechless.
Kocsis had heart surgery in 2012 and more recently had cancelled a number of concerts on medical advice.
Agence France Press says:
Kocsis had served as musical director of the National Philharmonic Orchestra since 1997 and became a household name among music fans from the United States to Japan as he took the ensemble on tour.
He underwent heart surgery in 2012, and last month cancelled upcoming concerts on the advice of doctors, according to the orchestra.
Born in Budapest in 1952, Kocsis began playing the piano around the age of three.
He first played abroad after winning the prestigious Hungarian Radio Beethoven Competition at the age of 18 in 1970, and made his first concert tour of the United States a year later.
He also performed extensively with the Berlin Philharmonic, and played with leading orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic, the Vienna Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra.
In 1978, aged 25, he was awarded the Kossuth prize, Hungary’s highest state honour for artists, an award he won again in 2005.
Often taking the conductor’s baton with the BFO, Kocsis also began composing from 1987.
His pieces, along with his transcriptions of works of Hungarian composer Bela Bartok and the recordings he made from them, also won him wide acclaim.
“His death is an irreplaceable loss for Hungarian culture,” said a statement from Hungary’s ministry of human resources.
Delighted today to bring you a Q&A with Steve Reich, an interview conducted by Justin Lee, the director of the Cambridge Music Festival and generously offered to JDCMB, for which many thanks. Next week the legendary (though very real) American composer is on the UK leg of his 80th birthday tour, which takes him to just three events - the Barbican, the Royal Opera House and, on 8 November, the Cambridge Music Festival. Justin asked him about his influences, Clapping Music, Bob Dylan and the American election...
JD
Justin Lee: My
14-year-old daughter came home on Friday and explained what she had been
doing at school that day – a version of ‘Clapping Music’ – and she was so
excited to hear that you’re coming to Cambridge next week. Did you know that
you’re on the music curriculum in British schools, and that 'Electric
Counterpoint' is on the GCSE music syllabus – our public exams at 16?
Steve Reich: First of all, I’m delighted to
hear what you’re telling me because if younger people don’t like my music, my
goose is cooked. They’re the next generation; they’re the future. So tell your
daughter I’m delighted and I hope she’ll enjoy ‘Clapping Music’ live and that
she’ll forgive me because I am 80 years old and don’t have the energy and verve
that I did 30 years ago. And I’m delighted to hear that 'Electric Counterpoint' –
which is certainly one of the best pieces I’ve written – is incorporated onto
the syllabus for study in the UK. That’s wonderful.
JL: Can
you tell me a bit about your musical background and influences? How do you
account for your appeal to people who love Bach AND people who love Bowie?
SR: I started with piano, then, at
the age of fourteen, I heard Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for the first time,
which of course changed my life and made me a writer and composer. Just a few
weeks later, I heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos, then I started listening to
jazz, and began studying percussion and going to Birdland, to hear Miles Davis
and Bud Powell. Later on, I got interested in Ghanaian drumming, then Balinese
music, then John Coltrane while I was studying with Luciano Berio. I was also
very attracted to Perotin and the whole Notre Dame School of the twelfth
century.
If you put all that together,
it’s a very wide spread of things. So there are people who are attracted to the
early music, people who are attracted to jazz and pop music, people who are
attracted to all of the twentieth century, and some of all these people will
naturally be attracted to what I do.
Steve Reich. Photo: Wonge Bergmann
JL: When
you’re composing are you thinking about whom you’re writing for, about your
audience? For example, did you write ‘Electric Counterpoint’ with a festival
audience like Glastonbury in mind and ‘Music for 18 musicians’ thinking of a
huge concert hall?
SR: I am completely and 100% a
writer – I am completely 100% selfish and I don’t think of anyone in the world
but myself. I write what I believe I really must write at the time I am doing
it, and it has been my good fortune, and it has been a blessing that other
people have – not everyone of course – shown some appreciation of my work.
JL: What
advice would you give to young composers and musicians today?
SR: The advice I have for composers
is simply this: get involved yourself. If you are a performer, play your
instruments with your friends, play your own music with them when you start
out, when you’re young. Start out while you’re young. If you are a conductor,
then conduct them, if you programme a drum machine, then programme a drum. So,
get involved, do it with your friends, and if you do a recording of a piece of
music you wrote, be proud of it, no apologies, and people will get to know what
you really have in mind.
JL: You’re
a musician, and Bob Dylan’s a musician. Do you think it’s right that he has
been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature?
SR: He’s
a very good songwriter. I admired early Bob Dylan, particularly ‘Bringing it
all back home’, but with 'Subterranean Homesick Blues', I couldn’t even understand
the words! The interesting thing about Bob Dylan is that the magnetic
attraction of his music, for me in the early days, was based entirely on the
songs themselves – on the music and his tone of voice.
JL: In
1970, you wrote an essay entitled ‘The future of music’, and practically
everything you predicted has come to pass. What’s the future of music today?
SR: I’m no longer young and
sometimes foolish, so I’ll quit while I’m ahead. But, I can tell you this, in
the English-speaking world, there’s a huge group of wonderful young composers,
so many good ones – like Nico Muhly and Bryce Dressner here, and Jonny
Greenwood (of Radiohead, who performed Electric Counterpoint at Glastonbury in
2014) in your country.
JL: November
8, the night you perform at the Cambridge Music Festival, is a big night for
Americans. What has been your reaction to the presidential campaign?
SR: I’m a human being, so of course
I get involved, just like everybody else, but I really don’t think composers’
views on politics are worth any more than yours or mine or the postman’s, but
it certainly isn’t the greatest choice of candidates that we’ve ever had,
that’s for sure.
Final Ghost Variations Concert klaxon of the year: tomorrow, 3 November, at the Barnes Music Society, my ace and beloved duo colleagues - the dastardly David Le Page (violin) and the vivacious Viv McLean (piano) - and I are proud to be presenting our show for its final performance of 2016. It's the last one for a little while, so if you want to hear it I recommend showing up at the Old Sorting Office, Station Road, Barnes, London SW13 tomorrow evening for a 7.30pm start.
The programme includes music by Bartók, Brahms, Ravel, Mendelssohn, Hubay, FS Kelly and Schumann, all of it chosen for its relevance to the story and most of it intimately connected with Jelly d'Arányi.
HUNGARIAN DANCES is back! This autumn has marked the 60th anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution and we are commemorating this with two performances in the north of England, one at the Helmsley Arts Centre in North Yorkshire on 12 November and the other at The Sage, Gateshead, on 22 November. The magical Bradley Creswick is the violinist, with the equally magical Margaret Fingerhut at the piano, and the story of Mimi Rácz's journey across the 20th century - from Roma child to celebrated soloist to exiled great-grandmother - is brought to life in music including Dohnányi, Dinicu, Debussy and much more. The venues are special delights, as Helmsley was host to my play back in July with the Ryedale Festival, and The Sage was where the whole phenomenon of the novel-concerts really took off: they commissioned the Hungarian Dances project for the Fiddles on Fire Festival back in 2009, so really this is going home.
On a totally different tack, next week, on 9 November, I'm delighted to be chairing a pre-concert women composers' panel discussion at the London Festival of American Music, under the auspices of Odaline de la Martinez.
Horses for courses? No, it's Listenpony! A group of young composers and their friends who are taking the reins: putting on concerts, commissioning new works and shuffling the genres to the manner born. They've just started a record label, so I asked them to tell us about it.Listenpony is run by three composers: Freya Waley-Cohen, Josephine Stephenson and William Marsey. Here's Josephine's guest blog on why they do what they do, how and why they've jumped into the record label water and what's in their next concert, coming up next week. JD
Listenpony: our new record label: a guest post by Josephine Stephenson
We, Listenpony, launched a new record label last month with the release of an EP of live performances by the violin duo Mainly Two. This recording was made at our last event in March and includes a movement from Prokofiev’s Sonata for two violins, a selection of Bela Bartók’s violin duets, and most importantly, the premieres of two pieces by young British composers, Dani Howard and Lawrence Dunn, which we commissioned. It is the first of a series of digital EPs designed to offer an alternative experience of our concerts, each focusing on a single performer or ensemble, to be enjoyed post hoc on the move or from the comfort of one’s own home, anywhere in the world!
The mix of music on the record is typical of our programming. Ever since we started putting on concerts in London over four years ago, we have always aimed to showcase the wide variety of music we enjoy alongside that which we make - a bit like if someone was pressing ‘shuffle’ in one of our music libraries. For the most part, this is classical music that goes from the Renaissance to today, with a particular focus on the new music that we commission from contemporary young composers or write ourselves. But we also invite artists from other musical traditions to perform acoustic sets, and this has ranged from pop to folk via jazz and rap. We never choose music according to its style but only simply because we like it and think it’s good, and we hope that in there there is something for everyone. We often get all the performers to play something together at the end, and this always feels very special!
Tir Eolas, Abstruckt and the Vickers-Bovey guitar duo, performing at Listenpony in May 2015
The artists we collaborate with, performers and composers alike, tend to be young, unsigned artists of our generation whom we admire. It’s always fantastic working with them, and it’s also great that we can help make them known through the gigs and now the label too, just as they help us by making our music exist. Our recordings - which are done live by a brilliant young company called Sonus Audio - are distributed by The Orchard, thanks to whom they are available worldwide through Apple Music, Spotify and other services. As for the artwork, the covers are all unique lino prints which are handmade by the artist Daniel Strange, usually inspired by photographs of the actual event and subsequently digitalised. Dan made our brand new chicken logo too!
Here's Mainly Two performing a new piece by Dani Howard, which is on our first digital EP:
Setting up as a record label is something which we wouldn’t have imagined just 18 months ago. We didn’t even really know that it was something we could do - and yet we had all these recordings which we had been making ever since the beginning for the composers and performers’ benefit, to a higher and higher quality. It wasn’t until someone from the record industry attended one of our events last Autumn and told us that we had something they hadn’t quite seen before, and should consider putting out our live recordings, that we realised the potential of making them available to the public. This was a way for us to reach a wider audience, outside the limits of London and beyond the evening of the concert. We had everything we needed already, apart from artwork and a deal with a distributing company. We met up with a few different advisers and before we knew were a record label signed to one of the biggest distribution companies around.
Our next two EPs, to be released in the coming months, will feature the vocal consort Eo Nomine and the Vickers-Bovey guitar duo, with music ranging from the 16th century to today. Our next event is taking place on the 15th of November at Crypt on the Green, with the viola da gamba player Liam Byrne, the Laefer Saxophone quartet and the singer-songwriter Mara Carlyle. It should be another brilliant night - come along!
I'm off to see Shostakovich's The Nose at the Royal Opera House tonight. It's directed by Barrie Kosky, the wonder-worker behind (among much else) Glyndebourne's award-winning Saul, an internationally sought-after Magic Flute and, imminently, Bayreuth's new Meistersinger, for next summer. All this added up to a perfect excuse to interview him, and the context of the JC adds certain extra fascinations, especially where Bayreuth is concerned. The piece appeared there in last week's issue, which you can read here.
Incidentally, he also has some interesting words re opera in translation, what's happened at his Komische Oper in Berlin, and why ENO could take a leaf out of its book.
Here's a trailer and the article is below.
Looking out at Covent Garden Piazza from the Royal Opera House, it’s easy to forget that this site, teeming with tourists, was once home to London’s most famous fruit and vegetable market. By marvellous coincidence, the opera director Barrie Kosky’s grandfather from the East End used to have a stall there. Now Kosky, 49, is inside the Royal Opera House’s rehearsal studios for the first time, staging his ROH debut production: Shostakovich's youthful masterpiece The Nose.
The Australian opera director, recently named Director of the Year by the International Opera Awards, has come a long way, and not only geographically. Having termed himself a “gay, Jewish kangaroo”, he is bounding through the world’s great lyric theatres, his fresh and original productions trailing accolades galore.
His staging of Handel’s oratorio Saul for Glyndebourne in 2015 won a Royal Philharmonic Award and was nominated for a South Bank Show Award; Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which he directed in historic-cartoon style, has been snapped up by opera houses and festivals around the globe. Next summer he heads for Bayreuth to tackle that ultimate paean to German art, Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.
The Nose. Photo: Bill Cooper
If his maternal grandfather in Covent Garden would be happy to see him ensconced in the Royal Opera House, so would his paternal grandmother, who came from Hungary; it was she who introduced him to opera as a child. “I was bombarded in a wonderful way from the age of seven onwards,” he says, “and by the time I left school I’d seen around 200 operas, not only the popular ones.” When he was 15 a teacher encouraged him to try directing a play at his school; browsing for one in the library he chose no smaller challenge than Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck.
His family was a melting pot of different Jewish traditions. “My paternal grandfather and his siblings left their shtetl just outside Vitebsk, in what’s now Belarus, after a terrible pogrom around 1903,” he says. “They came to London, via Hamburg, but weren’t allowed to stay in Britain and had to go to Canada or Australia. They chose Australia, where they started a fur business.” This grew eventually to be the country’s largest fur retailer. On a business trip to central Europe his grandfather met his grandmother, “who was from a typical, assimilated, upper middle-class Budapest Jewish family.” On his mother’s side, his English-born grandparents had family members who were involved with the Yiddish Theatre in the East End; Kosky’s father, sent to Britain on business as a young man, married their daughter and took her home to Australia.
Kosky, having come to terms with the “cities of my grandmothers”, Vienna and Budapest, has settled in Berlin, “which I love”. Yet he also remarks, “I felt I didn’t belong in Australia and would be more at home in Europe, but I still feel an outsider here. I don’t quite know where I fit. But,” he adds, “it doesn’t worry me any more!” Jewish history and culture remain a fervent passion for him, although he describes himself as a “spiritual atheist” who dislikes organised religion.
His fascination with the inter-influence of Yiddish literature and culture, Russian avant-garde theatre and German Expressionism is feeding his work on Shostakovich’s The Nose. The choice of piece is unusual, deliberately so: “I wanted to do an opera that had not been staged here before,” he says. “It’s difficult to make your debut here, and in Mozart, Verdi and Wagner there’s too much tradition, history and opinion! I’ve wanted to do The Nose ever since I first heard the score while I was at university, but you rarely get to see a production because it’s huge and expensive to put on.”
The Nose. Photo: Bill Cooper
It is based on a surreal short story by Gogol: a man awakens to find that his nose has gone missing and is at large in St Petersburg, living a life of its own. “Gogol combines Russian folklore, superstition, the grotesque, dreams, symbolism, humour and this incredible fantasy,” says Kosky. “I also feel there’s a connection in it with my favourite Yiddish writers like Sholem Aleichem and I.L. Peretz, who I think were heavily influenced by Gogol.
“I find the story so weird and wonderful. It has almost the logic of a dream; you never quite know what’s happening, and he never explains. But I think it’s dangerous to say that The Nose is a metaphor for this or that. I think it is a delicious piece of nonsense, much more connected with Dada and Surrealism, and with the logic of dreams, like Alice in Wonderland. It’s part parable, part Kafka, part Marx Brothers.
“We wanted to create this weird and wonderful world of St Petersburg without being literal and without saying what the nose is or represents. That’s for the audience to decide, as in any great fairy story or myth. I think a director’s work has to leave room for those associations and interpretations from the public. That’s not to say that I don’t have a strong interpretation, but I hope that the production allows another set of them to take place.”
It sounds almost as much fun as his Magic Flute production, created originally for the Komische Oper in Berlin, where he became intendant and chief director in 2012. Since he took over, the theatre’s audience figures have shot up — in his first two years they jumped by some 20 per cent — and, intriguingly, he has now ditched the company’s policy of performing in the vernacular translation, favouring the original language whenever possible.
“There was a time for translated opera, but with surtitles that has passed. It can sound provincial,” he declares. “Nobody wants to hear Italian opera in anything but Italian — and it sounds even worse in English than it does in German, which is pretty bad!” Wasn’t there an outcry? “Not one letter of complaint — but much celebration,” he says proudly, adding that English National Opera could profitably consider following suit.
He is meanwhile preparing his first staging for the Wagner Festival in the composer’s own theatre at Bayreuth. Wagner’s famous anti-Semitism still makes the operas a difficult prospect for many Jewish music-lovers and Kosky admits he is no exception. He recounts that Katharina Wagner, the festival’s current director and Wagner’s great-granddaughter, persuaded him to stage Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which he had previously refused to approach.
“Meistersinger is a piece of German ideology and German music about German ideas about music, community and nationhood and culture, written by someone who was obsessed with ideas about what being German meant. It’s the only one of his operas that is not a universal story,” he says.
“I told Katharina I didn’t think I’d have much to say about it, being an Australian Jew. She said she thought I’d have a great deal to say about it, being an Australian Jew!”
As what he terms a “cleansing” exercise after the Wagner, he plans to tackle Debussy’s Pélléas et Mélisande and, by way of extreme contrast, Fiddler on the Roof back at the Komische Oper.
“Fiddler on the Roof is the Jewish Meistersinger,” he declares. “I think there’s a very interesting link between Tevye and Wagner’s Hans Sachs and I’m making a point of it. Though I’m probably the first director in the history of opera to say ‘Tevye’ and ‘Hans Sachs’ in the same sentence…”
The Nose, Royal Opera House, from 20 October. Booking: 020 7304 4000
