Expressions of love

Autobiographical chamber music is a conspicuously Czech accomplishment, pioneered by Smetana in the nineteenth century and sustained by Dvorak before reaching its apogee in Janacek’s two string quartets, the second of them an expression of romantic love unrivalled among other works of its kind.


Though modern research has suggested that the object of his adoration - a young married woman who inspired his operas Jenufa and Katya Kabanova as well as the  quartets - did not return his love, the music of Intimate Letters, the second of his quartets, written just before his death at the age of 74, certainly speaks for itself.

With the voice of a viola d’amore sensuously replacing that of an established viola, it is a quartet like no other, though it will share Monday’s New Town Concert at the Queen’s Hall in Edinburgh with something that equals its intensity,  Berg’s Lyric Suite, written just across the border in Austria two years earlier  in 1926.

As Berg’s first venture into all-out Schoenbergian atonality, it makes perhaps tougher listening than the Janacek, but the passion it expresses for a married woman other than his wife is direct and unmistakable, and, as its six movements progress, increasingly desolate.  Since the two works, written almost simultaneously, complement each other, it is surprising how rarely they are placed  side by side in the same programme.

But on Monday, thanks to Berlin’s sensational young Armida Quartet, this will happen, and the opportunity is something to seize. Whatever difficulties it may contain, Berg’s Lyric Suite was adored by George Gershwin, who discussed it with its composer at their famous meeting in Vienna, when Gershwin played Berg some samples of his own form of lyricism and Berg responded with  the words, “Mr Gershwin, music is music.”

The composer of An American in Paris took the score of the suite with him to France, studying it on the train before persuading the Kolisch Quartet, who had just given the work its premiere, to play it from memory at various Parisian parties given in his honour, though what the listeners thought of it is not hard to guess.

Yet although Berg’s was a different sort of lyricism from Gershwin’s, his influence on the American composer ran deep, and his first opera, Wozzeck, was clearly responsible for the composition of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess. His second opera was Lulu, which he died - of an insect bite, tended by his wife -  too soon to complete. Like the Lyric Suite it commemorated his doomed love affair, and though its completion was quite easily achieved from his detailed notes, its publication in completed form was blocked by his widow as long as she lived. Its eventual premiere, conducted by Pierre Boulez, revealed it to be a masterpiece as great as - perhaps even greater than -  Wozzeck.

So do not miss Monday’s performance of the string quartet, and do not fail to spot the touching reference to the prelude to Act One of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde amid the desolation of the last movement, a moment similar to the quoting of Bach’s Es ist Genug by the soloist near the end of his late, great Violin Concerto.

At present, in preparation for the performance, I am re-reading Bird in the Apple Tree, Raymond Monelle’s novel about Berg in its Kindle edition. Employing the mature violin concerto as its framework it is an enthralling study of the composer’s early life, though the author - a dear friend of mine who taught at Edinburgh University - died too soon to savour any fruits of its success.
30 January 2016

A big night at the MacBeth's

Though traditionally regarded as conspicuously cruder than Verdi’s two mature Shakespeare operas, which benefit from Boito’s presence as librettist, Macbeth has had a good track record in Scotland -   and not merely because of its Scottish setting.

A famous old Glyndebourne production, with Margherita Grandi as Lady Macbeth, opened the inaugural Edinburgh Festival in 1947, marking the start of those halcyon years when Glyndebourne was responsible for all opera at the Festival.  David Pountney’s Scottish Opera production in the 1970s was memorable for its gleeful witches, for its buckets of biliously green blood, and for Galina Vishnevskaya’s poshly Chekhovian Lady Macbeth, as well as David Ward’s big, noble Banquo.

A later Scottish Opera production, just before the turn of the century, gave the company the opportunity to work at the Festival with Luc Bondy, one of the greatest European directors of the day, whose production, with Katherine Broderick’s Lady Macbeth, was ensemble drama at its best. Though it reputedly cost a fortune, it was worth the millions of bawbees that had to be spent on it.

If Verdi’s Macbeth has a flaw, it lies not so much in its supposed crudity, which does it very little damage, as in the fact that Lady Macbeth is almost invariably the star of the show.  And in a Deutsche Grammophon DVD I received as a Christmas present, she is played by Anna Netrebko, a portrayal that is as good as they come.

To the New York Metropolitan, the source of this performance, she has in recent years brought a new allure.  In Il Trovatore, recently screened publicly  in the Met’s international series, she was even said to have surpassed her  surpassing portrayal of Leonora for Daniel Barenboim in Berlin - also available on DVD  and not to be missed.

As a glossily blonde and glamorous Lady Macbeth she looks voluptuous rather than murderous, and though she is given to standing on top of her bed, as well as to rolling on the floor, she supports such impetuosities with peerless singing and the richest beauty of tone. Even when reading the letter at the start of the opera, she sounds as heart-felt as Violetta in the last act of Traviata, and not at all the stern Lady Macbeth of so many performances.

From start to finish, she rivets attention, and though her smile looks devouring it does not lack passion.  She is vivaciously tipsy in the banquet scene and later a predictably enthralling sleepwalker.

But what of the rest of the cast?  As Macbeth, Zeljko Lucic gets away with a certain fuzziness of voice and a distinct resemblance to the actor Leo McKern comically wrinkling his nose as a source of emotion. He is presumably meant to look bonkers. Rene Pape, rearing up behind the celebrants at the banquet, is a lacerating and lacerated Banquo.

But it is unquestionably Netrebko’s night and she forms the heart of a production, by Adrian Noble, that updates the action to modern times, with plenty of rifles and revolvers, a gossipy array of witches with handbags, all staged without shirking the work’s historical aspects, despite the volume of bright red blood.

Fabio Luisi’s conducting has leopard-like litheness - listen to how the orchestra sizzles during Lady Macbeth’s entrance scene, and recognise that Verdi’s Macbeth is a masterpiece.
28 January 2016  

Programme Changes

If the raison d’etre for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s concert programme this week was the triptych of rare Mozart concert arias that formed its centrepiece, the absence through illness of the young Swiss soprano Regula Muhlemann, who was to sing them, sadly deprived us of this pleasure.

Mozart’s concert arias are a rare and marvellous mixture of good things and even better things, and Muhlemann’s  selection, starting with a dramatic scene based on  Metastasio’s once celebrated operatic libretto about the abandonment of Dido, Queen of Carthage, by  the roving Aeneas, was something  that boded well.

Mozart, on the brink of unveiling his great opera seria Idomeneo in Munich, grabbed the opportunity to portray Dido when it came his way with a superb Mannheim soprano (the future Ilia in Idomeneo) as soloist. Though Dido’s fate had already been indelibly commemorated by Purcell, and would be dealt with again by Berlioz in The Trojans, it was never the subject of an entire Mozart opera, even if  he gave us a glimpse here of what a Mozart Dido and Aeneas might have been like.

Partnered in this concert by two further Mozartian might-have-beens - comic arias brilliantly written as inserts into works by composers whose operas long ago bit the dust, though they were hugely popular in their time - this potent setting of Metastasio’s text (already the inspiration of many eighteenth-century composers) would have been a real experience.      

Depriving us of three such little-known gems by a mishap in programme planning - the SCO opted instead for three of Mozart’s most famous arias in a performance by the Sicilian soprano Laura Giordano, another bright young talent. In the circumstances, no doubt, Susanna’s “Deh vieni” from Figaro, Donna Anna’s “Non mi dir” from Don Giovanni, and Fiordiligi’s “Come scoglio” from  Cosi Fan Tutte formed a more than adequate exchange. But they changed the concert into something else and, impressive enough  though it was, it was not what was needed.  In concert surroundings these familiar items were simply a bunch of operatic excerpts, adding nothing to our Mozart experience but seeming simply to be flung at us as programme fillers.

But because it is always good to hear Mozart well sung, the evening was not a write-off, even though the dapper Spanish guest conductor Antonio Mendez approached it with what looked like the bravado of a young bullfighter, with Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony as the bull.   Though Beethoven in the Queen’s Hall tends to be very different from Beethoven in the Usher, and though Mendez’s  handling of the Seventh was by no means uninteresting, the overall intention seemed to be to make us think we were hearing the work for the first time, in Vienna in 1813, with the deaf Beethoven himself battling with it as conductor.  The performance, while meticulously attentive to the composer’s repeat signs, to the tramp of the allegretto and the circling swirl of the scherzo, had all the raw abrasiveness of a fist in the face.

Mendez’s is clearly a talent to watch, but not perhaps in the Queen’s Hall, where not only was Beethoven given a good thumping but the humour of Haydn’s 99th Symphony, at the start of the programme, was in danger of being changed into a concerto for kettledrums.
24 January 2016

This week's wine: Brazilian red and white

Between the World Cup and the Olympics, a good deal of Brazilian wine is presumably being drunk. But where to buy it? Unlike Chile and Argentina, it has not yet quite established itself as a safe and widespread  best-seller. Search a British supermarket and you could still have hard work tracking it down.  But Waitrose, in its wisdom, is stocking a pair of wines that smartly complement one another other - a red Merlot and a white Chardonnay - at an inviting enough price, £8.79 - to lure you into buying a bottle of each.

It is a risk worth taking, even by people who are so colour-conscious that they would generally prefer one to the other. Drink them both, for the simple reason that the one is as good as the other. The red should be sampled as a gutsy  winter tipple - though it will taste just as characterful,  I feel sure, in the summer - robust but not hard-edged, and well suited to spicy stews at any time of year.   The white - bold but not too in your face - measures up well to more familiar South American Chardonnays, and goes as nicely with savoury meat as with salmon or shellfish.

Buying a bottle of each therefore has much to be said for it.  Each works as an aperitif, and it is as simple to pass from the red to the white as the other way around. Nor is either of them too strong, though another Waitrose wine wins my prize this week for its combination of flavour and low alcohol content.

Surprisingly it comes from New Zealand and is a Sauvignon whose alcohol level is no higher than nine per cent - something you might expect from Germany but not the Southern Hemisphere.

Having been deterred by the sheer weight of many New Zealand sauvignons, excellent though they often are, I have found The Doctor’s Sauvignon Blanc at £8.99 delightfully fresh and fruity, with a tang all its own that contradicts, or seems to, its nine per cent alcohol tag.

Whether as an aperitif or with seafood, it is a captivating white, and I can confidently recommend it.
20 January 2016

The Secret Mozart

Flanked by the robustness of Haydn’s 99th Symphony and Beethoven’s Seventh, three rare  Mozart concert arias will fill the slot traditionally occupied by a concerto in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s programme at the Queen’s Hall, Edinburgh, on January 21 and at Glasgow City Hall the following night.

Given the close relationship between Mozart’s arias and his concertos, it’s a fascinating choice. His concert arias, many of them written as inserts into operas by other (at the time more popular)  composers, remain less familiar than they ought to be, and the three picked by the promising young Swiss soprano Regula Muhlemann, who has recently sung Papagena in The Magic Flute at several leading European festivals, as well as Despina in Cosi Fan Tutte in Zurich and Elisa in Il Re Pastore at Verbier, is clearly on the way up.

The three arias, all of them exquisite examples of their kind, form a concerto-like triptych, starting with the dramatic scene Mozart based on an episode from the distinguished  Metastasio’s libretto for Didone Abbandonata.

Depicting the fate of Dido, the tragic queen of Carthage who was abandoned by Aeneas,  Metastasio’s complete text was turned into operas by numerous composers - though not by Mozart, who contented himself with his scenic fragment and did not write an entire Metastasio masterpiece  until La Clemenza di Tito just before his death.

The two other arias are, in contrast, choice samples of Mozartian comedy which deserved a better fate than they received as add-ons to popular operas by lesser composers staged during his lifetime. With such a bright young soloist, and the Spaniard Antonio Mendez making his Scottish debut as conductor, they will surely be a treat.
13 January 2016

Happy New Year

I wish a happy and healthy new year to all my readers from around the world. During 2015 I have been very pleased to welcome readers from: Argentina, Austria, Australia, Canada, China, Curaçao, France, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Italy, Japan, Latvia, The Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Syria, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States of America.

If I have missed anyone please say hello in the comments below and let me know what country you are from.

Very best wishes to all,

Conrad Wilson