Happy Holidays!

Conrad's blog is on holiday until 10th July, when it will resume with a review of the streaming of the ENO Carmen.

Fathers' Day

Orkney Days and Nights

From 1977, when it was founded, until 1990, when I stopped going to it, the St Magnus Festival in Orkney was my annual midsummer escape. Presided over by Peter Maxwell Davies and his music, it was my favourite festival of them all, set in two small towns, Kirkwall and Stromness, where one event led straight into the next, and the last of them each night led into the next day’s dawn.

It was the Scottish equivalent of Aldeburgh, Benjamin Britten’s fine little festival in Suffolk.  In both of them you encountered music evoking the landscapes and seascapes amid which you were listening  to it.  Britten’s spoke of the fens, Davies’s of luminous turquoise skies (not every year admittedly, but always hoped for) above Kirkwall harbour, filled with fishing boats each of them  identified, like Mozart masterpieces, with a “K” number.

One day, sauntering with Malcolm Rayment, music critic of The Herald, along the waterfront, we named the boats we were passing. “Look.” I exclaimed, “there’s the early opera Mitridate.”   “And there,” replied Malcolm, “is one of the best of the Salzburg divertimentos for wind and strings.”

On Sundays, prior to to an afternoon recital in the old Stromness hall, we might spot the likes of Gennadi Rozhtdestvensky walking the length of the long narrow High Street before playing piano duets with his wife, Viktoria Postnikova.  Stromness Books and Prints, formerly Broom’s Bookshop, was an essential pedestrian pit-stop, a tiny, cluttered Aladdin’s cave of a place, filled with literary treasure  trove, run by Tam MacPhail, a resident American who had once worked in Jim Haines’s and John Calder’s Paperback Bookshop in Edinburgh, and who was married to Gunnie Moberg, an adventurous, poetic Swedish photographer armed with an Olympus camera, who scoured the islands for the most sensationally picturesque views, which she sometimes captured from the windows of small aircraft  that transported her around.

Near the bookshop, in his council house, lived the Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. Davies, who set many of Brown’s words, composed some of his best music in his isolated cottage near the Old Man of Hoy. Stone Litany, written for the Scottish National Orchestra and conducted by Alexander Gibson down south in Glasgow, set Davies’s inspiration flowing.

The Blind Fiddler, written for  the Fires of London, Davies’s own chamber group, was unveiled in St Magnus Cathedral. A long work, sung by Mary Thomas,  it ended just at the point where, outside, sunset was soon to become sunrise. On a solitary walk afterwards, I brooded about what I had just heard, then returned to my hotel to write about it.

The place, and its atmosphere, were magic. Each year there was a new Davies work to hear, often more than one - sometimes an opera, performed by local people, or a piano piece, portraying the voyage to Hoy, where the festival invariably ended with a merry party entailing a five-mile walk to Davies’s cottage.

Gradually things expanded. Big works replaced little ones. Isaac Stern arrived with Andre Previn to give the premiere of Davies’s Violin Concerto - not, it seemed to me, one of his greatest works.  A new music arena opened. Davies composed a frolicsome tone poem, Orkney Wedding with Sunrise, now popular around the world.  It ended with a sonorous skirl of bagpipes, even though it is fiddles, rather than pipes, which are the Orcadian instruments that matter.

The old visions began to fade.The rough-hewn voice of Ted Hughes, declaiming his poetry in the Pier Art Gallery, hangs ever more distantly in the air.  Recently Davies has been  ailing. George Mackay Brown is dead, and so are Gunnie Moberg, who died before her time, whose pictures were so redolent of Mackay Brown,  and Archie Bevan, teacher and co-founder of the festival.

Before these things befell, I had stopped attending. I had had my fill.  The festival was recognisably changing. The event as it originally was was wonderful. To venture back might be too daunting but the memory - of stormy organ music in the cathedral, of lobster and scallop suppers with Highland Park whisky after concerts, of sharing  a duck with George Mackay Brown in the Stromness Hotel (“dicey thing, duck,” he remarked as he poked at it with his knife and fork) - lingers on. This year’s St Magnus International Festival, as it is now rather grandly called, opened last Friday.
20 June 2015


www.stmagnusfestival.com

The Full Seraglio

Though it will be a year before the new Glyndebourne production of Mozart’s Turkish comedy, conducted by Robin Ticciati, is released on DVD, the argument has already begun, with The Guardian praising its revelatory aspects and The Times and the Daily Telegraph dismissing it for its prolixity.

For The Guardian, the production’s  completeness is what counts, along with the quality of the performance. Every spoken word, every aria, every possible note of music appears to have been included, to compelling effect,  in the irresistible version presented.

The critic, Tim Ashley, observantly claims that the restoration of so much material, usually omitted, is a rare treat.  For his rivals, however, the whole thing  is merely a drag, which made them  feel like administering the kick in the pants Mozart famously received from his employer  on departing from Salzburg.

But the fact is that Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail is a sublimely copious opera, not necessarily improved by established cuts - the Glyndebourne version evidently has twenty scene changes.  Though the work’s  sheer richness originally disturbed the Austrian emperor - who reputedly responded to it with the words, “Too beautiful for our ears, my dear Mozart, and monstrous many notes”  - the truth is that the composer toiled long and  hard to get it the way he wanted, and that he succeeded brilliantly in his efforts.

The gifted director, David McVicar, has clearly appreciated this aspect of the piece and Robin Ticciati - who, in his concert  performances with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra has proved himself a Mozartian of exceptional promise - has gone as far as to insert a fragment of the great B flat major Wind Serenade, written around the same time, at an appropriate moment in Die Enfuhrung. Too many notes, dear Ticciati? In the context of this production, maybe  not.

More than any other Mozart opera, perhaps, Die Enfuhrung is a work that people like to tamper with. Sir Thomas Beecham, another outstanding Mozartian, used to separate Contanze’s two great arias in Act Two so that they were not heard one after the other. He was wrong to do so, as we now recognise.

Today, as ever, Belmonte’s aria at the start of Act Three is considered gratuitous. But is it really?  Everything, it seems to me, depends on the beauty of the performance. How good or bad  this comprehensive Glyndebourne production is is something we shall not know in Scotland until we see it on DVD. But I look forward to being reassured by it.
17 June 2015

A Revelatory Rosenkavalier

The live DVD recording  of last season’s controversial - though I would prefer to say revelatory - new  production of Der Rosenkavalier at  Glyndebourne has been joyfully released.

Whatever its faults, and I have had difficulty finding any that seriously trouble me, they do not lie with Tara  Erraught, the fine young Irish mezzo-soprano who sang the central role of Octavian and was chided by the London critics for being “dumpy,” “stocky,” and - worst of all -  “fat,” a word which, so far as I know, was employed by only one reviewer, and by him (they were all male)  admittedly obliquely. But the damage was done and, after such a tizz, it seems quite brave of Glyndebourne to have issued its two-disc DVD, showing the entire cast in revealing close-up.

And what do we see? No previous Octavian, in my experience, has been attacked so needlessly  for visual  reasons, though occasionally the word “priggish”  or “arrogant” has been used about exponents of the role in Act Two  - I seem to recall that Janet Baker was thus described  when she sang it for Scottish Opera many years ago.

I thought that Baker, on the whole, was an admirable  Octavian, and I believe that, for different reasons, Tara Erraught is even better.  The difficulty about Octavian is that, as conceived by Strauss and Hofmannsthal, the composer and librettist,  he is a seventeen-year-old boy who is played by a girl - one of the opera world’s most famous “trouser” roles - and has to dress up, in Act One and Act Three, as a chamber maid, just like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro.

Again like Cherubino he is an aristocrat, and at the start of the opera he is amorously involved with another of the work’s aristocrats, the Marschallin (or field marshal’s wife)  who is attracted to boys when her husband is away. The story grows farcical when the Marschallin’s country cousin, the raucous Baron Ochs, arrives to marry Sophie, daughter of a nouveau riche Viennese family. It’s an arranged marriage - they have never met before - and Octavian gets inextricably involved in the proceedings when he meets Sophie and falls for her, thus bringing his relationship with the Marschallin to an end.

As operatic tradition goes, most exponents of Der Rosenkavalier are more, sometimes much more, mature than they are meant to be. But, usually  being possessors of fine voices, they get away with it. With an uncommonly youthful cast at his disposal, however, Richard Jones, Glyndebourne’s resourceful director, made a virtue out of the the cast available to him and created portrayals of striking truthfulness, without losing the advantage of expressive voices. When not even the Marschallin is shown to be an older woman  - the whole point of the character is that she is actually quite young - their relationships became all the more sharply defined.  Kate Royal, tall, slim, elegant, and silvery-voiced - was an ideal Marschallin. Tara Erraught’s Octavian was a bright-eyed boy, and the fact that she was smaller than the Marschallin seemed perfectly in keeping. Indeed the latter’s interest in adolescent boys (her black pageboy is clearly going to be her next young lover) is vividly put.

Nor is  Lars Woldt’s active young  Baron in any way the clumsy old lecher of tradition. Rude and irritating, yes; maladroit, no. Teodora Gheorghiu’s Sophie, who so quickly sees her future in Octavian and not the Baron, is spot-on. With young Robin Ticciati of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra making his debut as Glyndebourne’s latest music director, the performance is in the right hands. Richard Jones’s production, apart from placing its big brush-strokes correctly, is alert to all the tiny visual details a good Rosenkavalier requires, including a gratuitous but gloriously apt appearance by Sigmund Freud. Though Act Three, with its Verdian bating of the Baron, so akin to that of Falstaff, as usual has its longueurs, I loved the whole thing and am delighted to recommend it.
14 June 2015


 

Musical Times

John Duffus, whose responses to my blog are among the pleasures of writing it, has been back home in Scotland this week en route  to a busy spell on the Continent, where he is attending the Leipzig Bach Festival among other things.

Lunching with him on Monday - Contini’s ristorante  in George Street was our chosen spot  - we inevitably talked about music and about Scottish Opera, for which John once worked before heading for a new life in what we used to call the Far East. There, in Hong Kong and now in Bangkok, along with the odd moment in Bali and detours to North and South America -  even Fitzcarraldo’s Peruvian opera house has been on his itinerary -  he has spent the rest of his career as a high-flying musical events manager, arranging concert appearances for the likes of Pavarotti (ten times), Jessye Norman, Renee Fleming,  Yo Yo Ma, Isaac Stern and many other star names.

While sipping Contini’s house Pinot Grigio, the only Pinot Grigio in Edinburgh to taste (along with Valvona and Crolla’s) as it should, he had much to tell us, including the fact that, at the age of 67, he is writing his memoirs and would like me to read them privately while he is at work on them.  Since they already amount to some 200,000 words, he will clearly need to trim them to a marketable length.

Meanwhile I am looking forward to seeing them and giving him my thoughts. That they will be full of good things - some of which he has already touched upon in his responses to my blog - I have no doubt whatsoever. Vivid musical memoirs are always worth reading, and the fact that John has spent so much time in Asia, while touring the rest of the world, should make his ones very special.

Rudolf Bing’s memoirs of the New York Metropolitan, 5000 Nights at the Opera, which he wrote after leaving the Edinburgh Festival, of which he was the founder, is a classic of its kind, which I find myself returning to periodically. But Scotland was not their particular subject whereas it is in Aberdeen, his hometown, that John’s will begin.

This, at least for  me, should give them an added attraction. What he says about Scottish Opera in the old days, and of its more recent misadventures, is sure to carry a sense of regret - only a few of us now remember what the company was like when its hopes were high - but if John sets it down as prelude to his foreign experiences he will have performed a fascinating service.
9 June 2015

This Week’s Wine: White Rioja

White Rioja, not the most prevalent of wines, could be called an alternative to red Rioja for people who distrust supermarket versions of  the latter.

Whether it is an acceptable substitute is another matter, but Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Rioja Bianco  is perfectly serviceable, if not exactly sensational, correctly priced around the £7 level. It is dry and Spanish, neither much better (taste the difference?)  nor much worse than other Spanish whites of its sort which can be found in supermarkets at this price.

Well, perhaps it is slightly above average, and we recently  thought it perfectly drinkable when sipped fully chilled on one of Edinburgh’s rare warm days. But somehow we never finished the bottle, though we admit we would not be  averse to encountering it in a Barcelona bar.

Much more impressive, however, is Waitrose's latest Gruner Veltliner from Austria, selling at £10.79 but currently available with a 25 per cent discount, which brings it closer to the price of the Rioja.

Produced by Markus Huber, it possesses a lot of Viennese charm and goes nicely with the Glyndebourne performance of Der Rosenkavalier which I have been watching on a newly issued DVD.
5 June 2015

Theodora from the Salzburg Festival

And what’s this? At the start of a two-disc DVD, it could be anyone’s guess. A crowd of people are enthusiastically  assembling for what looks like a lively business conference, with a cocktail party in the offing. The men are in dinner jackets, the women in black dresses. Behind them, a vast array of organ pipes stretches across the breadth of the Salzburg Festspielhaus’s huge cinemascopic stage, where Herbert von Karajan once conducted The Ring.

The crowd of people are, in fact, mostly members of the admirable young Salzburg Bach Choir, laced with some top-quality stars, under the stylish conductorship of Ivor Bolton, who for a time was in charge of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.  Here, with the substantial Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, he continues to prove his worth.

Representing what in Handel’s time would be the forces of evil, the randy, predatory chief executive officer of the business organisation - if that is what it is -  is making a boorish nuisance of himself to the only woman dressed in white, who is today’s personification, we can assume, of the heroine of Handel’s tragic oratorio about Christian martyrdom a long time ago. She brushes him off but he will be back.

Christof Loy’s recent theatrical reinvention of Handel’s great, late masterpiece as a modern opera seria grows gradually underway. Clearly it is Salzburg’s answer to Peter Sellars’s famous Glyndebourne production of the same work, and is a fascinating response not only to Handel but to Sellars at Glyndebourne. Even if you already possess the Glyndebourne DVD, do not resist the temptation to buy the newer one. Each in its own way makes an impressive case for updating the story from Roman antiquity to the present time, while remaining true to the musical eloquence of the original.

Theodora is sung with touching purity, even when her dress is colour-coded from white to scarlet,  by Christine Schaefer, who once sang Berg’s Lulu, a role much less pure, at Glyndebourne - another DVD well worth acquiring -  and who is a famed exponent of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.  The counter tenor Bejun Mehta is ardent as her lover, the secret Christian who faces death with her at the end, and Joseph Kaiser is the fine tenor who sympathises with their plight.

Another tenor, Ryland Davies, the star of some early Scottish Opera productions, plays the small Handelian role of the Messenger.  The sublime Bernarda Fink is Theodora’s devoted supporter (at Glyndebourne it was the lovingly remembered Lorraine Hunt Lieberson)  and Johannes Martin Kranzle portrays  the brutally convivial CEO with ample verve.

Such intelligent updating  brings a gripping new look to the plot, just as it did at Glyndebourne. Thus staged, Handelian drama breathes  afresh.
2 June 2015