The Shostakovich Story

People are asking me if I have read Julian Barnes’s new novel about Dmitri Shostakovich, The Noise of Time.  My reply is that I am reading it - indeed well into it -   but am finding it a bit of a trudge.

The problem is perhaps that it reads like a biography where too little is said about the music, though as a novel inspired by a frightened twentieth-century Russian genius it fails to illuminate his personality in a way you would expect an author as perceptive as Barnes to do. The Shostakovich story, as told here, is much as we already know it. The inner man is probed in a series of musings but not, it seems to me, freshly or enthrallingly enough.

Shostakovich, as is generally known, was scared of Stalin, and constantly feared punishment, not merely rebuke, for being a composer of whom the Soviet leader disapproved. He accepted the accusation that what he produced, in his opera  Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, was politically  unpalatable “muudle not music.”

Stalin’s response to it sounds a bit like an intensification of the British establishment’s response to Britten’s Gloriana.    Yet there was no reason to expect Stalin, seated with his cronies, to react otherwise.  Why such a man should have accepted Shostakovich as a great composer any more than Winston Churchill or the Queen would have done is explained as usual in terms his power and desire to interfere and humiliate.  The difference is that Shostakovich and Stalin were both Russian and that Stalin had the power - or Power as Barnes constantly  calls it - to be so menacing that the composer developed the habit of standing beside the lift shaft outside his apartment each night with a small suitcase in his hand waiting to be arrested.

It is obviously a harrowing story, but - I speak as a music critic - we already know it. Barnes, however, is presumably intending to reach a different public, which is not already aware what Shostakovich’s life was like - though anyone who saw his quaking appearance at the 1962 Edinburgh Festival which, thanks to Lord Harewood, the festival’s director at the time, he was permitted to attend, was able to guess. By then Stalin had been dead for nine years but the scars still showed.  The Fifth Symphony was a recognised masterpiece and landmark in Shostakovich’s output, but it remained a deeply ambiguous one, the triumph of its finale riddled with undercurrents where the truth about the composer, above-all his sense of irony, was evident.

It is the fact that Barnes could have faced us more strongly with Shostakovich’s contradictions is what makes his book a disappointment. What makes some of the music trivial and some of it not? We may not expect Barnes the novelist to supply the answer, and he does not do so.  The material is there, on page after page, but it does not quite add up to the major novel the book could be.  I shall go back to it, but without the hope raised by its beginning, with Barnes’s glimpse of Shostakovich stranded at a desolate Russian railway platform, out in the wilds, in the presence of a beggar - a hint here of the Simpleton in Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov - hoping for a kopeck.
28 March 2016

The Truth about Cosi

I have been watching the DVD of Cosi fan tutte conducted by the late, much-loved Nikolaus Harnoncourt in which the sisters, Fiordiligi and Dorabella, are portrayed as identical twins.

This is not quite so revolutionary as it sounds - Cosi is an opera nowadays much interfered with -  though it adds a perhaps unnecessary degree of visual it also, in a curious way, weakens the impact of Mozart’s most perplexing comedy.   Neither Fiordillgi nor Dorabella, sung in this performance by Edita Gruberova and Delores Zieglier, is as dramatically convincing as they often are when portrayed by singers who look quite different from each other, whatever illumination it may be thought to bring to the amorous complexities of the story.  It is certainly no improvement on Elizabeth Harwood and Janet Baker in the masterly old Scottish Opera, however marvellously Gruberova voices Per Pieta in Act Two.  

So I cannot quite see the point of making the girls so utterly indistinguishable from each other, as Jean-Pierre Ponnelle did in this production, though it certainly adds to the inspired symmetry of Mozart’s flippant yet ultimately heartfelt comedy.

With Harmomcourt in charge of the Vienna Philharmonic, the orchestral accompaniment is admittedly in masterly hands. The touch is light, adroit, sensitive, frivolous where it matters, with as fleet an unfurling of the overture as I have ever encountered. Harnoncourt’s tempi, we should remember, were never fast or slow as a matter of principle, but as a matter of rightness.

But Ponnelle’s filmed version of the opera - where the arias are dubbed and the seascapes are less real than they seem- disappointingly fails to match the DVD of Harnoncourt’s more recent  Salzburg Figaro, which is a proper live performance in front of an audience, with Harnoncourt visibly in the pit.

Nor does Ponnelle’s film answer the many questions about Cosi that invariably arise.  Do the girls recognise their lovers in disguise or do they not? In one really good recent Salzburg Festival  production, available on DVD, they definitely do so, because they have inadvertently witnessed the plans for the plot against them yet the action still moves inexorably to this outcome.

But Ponnelle never makes his position wholly clear. Maybe the girls rumble the plot. Maybe they don’t.  But at least, in the end, the eighteenth-century moral is drawn, and Don Alfonso (thanks to Paolo Montarsolo’s knowing portrayal)  seems not quite the hard, cruel scoundrel he usually does today.    And the lovers - though no more convincing than they tend to be - are allowed their moments of fury when the plot begins to work against them.

Yet Anthony Besch’s perceptive old Scottish Opera production lingers in the memory because it made none of the mistakes made by so many more recent, over-ingenious, over-heated productions of Cosi. Besch’s  was a model of truth and wit, and it worked. The sudden startling transition from monochrome to colour at the start of Act Two, and the almost shocking return to monochrome at the end, were perfectly judged. The effect was that of a romantic dream that went wrong but was resolved when reality returned, and the way it did so was surely Mozart’s way. It surpassed any other production of Cosi I have seen, providing a rare moment of operatic magic and exactude and sublimity in the modern history of the work.
16 March 2016.

Harnoncourt the Great

Dead at 86. Count Nikolaus de la Fontaine und d’Harnoncourt Unverzagt (more simply known as Nikolaus Harnoncourt) was the great pioneer of what we have come to call historically informed performances. For all his fame in Vienna and Salzburg, he rarely appeared at the Edinburgh Festival, but when he did so in 1978, Peter Diamand’s farewell year as director, it was with his renowned Monteverdi triptych - The Coronation of Poppea, Orfeo, The Return of Ulysses - for which he was justly praised.

The productions, by Jean-Pierre Ponnelle, had their superficial aspects, but it was the music of Monteverdi’s three surviving operas, and Harnoncourt’s handling of it, that mattered. His performances, with the Zurich Opera, stick in the memory, and it was sad that we never heard any of his comparably enlightened Mozart opera performances.

In his memory, I watched the DVD of his Salzburg Festival Figaro, recorded in 2006, the other day and thought it as revealing as ever - not too fast (though he could be very fast), lucidly articulated, unsurpassingly cast with the alert young Anna Netrebko as Susanna, Ildebrando d’Arcangelo as a light-footed Figaro, Christine Schafer as  delightfully childlike Cherubino, Bo Skovhus as a grimly perspiring Count, Dorothea Roschmann as the most forlorn of Countesses. It was a performance, polished on the surface but filled with undercurrents, that explored every facet of the music.

Luckily for posterity, Harnoncourt was a master of recording, in a way like Herbert von Karajan, whom he reputedly despised and whose musical obverse he was. The parallels between them - the Salzberg Festival connections, or disconnections, whereby he was banned by Karajan for twenty years, the devotion to Mozart whom Harnoncourt conducted infinitely better  - were finally (though not until Karajan died) in Harnoncourt’s favour.

But it was the sheer authenticity of his conducting, something the smooth and autocratic Karajan never possessed, that mattered most. At a time when performances on original instruments, with the shunning of vibrato, seemed thin and weedy, Harnoncourt’s were alive, confident, utterly secure. His ensemble, the  Concentus Musicus Wien - the Vienna Philharmonic of baroque chamber orchestras except for the fact that it contained many women - rehearsed for five years with his wife Alice as leader before it made its first public appearance and recorded all Bach’s surviving church cantatas.

His cycle of Mozart symphonies with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra employed modern instruments in a historically informed manner and the often explosive results were a revelation. The Scottish Chamber Orchestra spoke of winning him as guest conductor but got Charles Mackerras instead - a like-minded choice and a musician in a similar mould.

But we did need to hear more of Harnoncourt here, and it was a shame we didn’t.
10 March 2016

This week's wine: Offers

Cut-price Chablis, if it comes from Waitrose, is worth watching for, and the latest is no exception. A product of the excellent Cave es Vignerons, as fine a French co-operative as you will find, it is a classic of its kind, an unostentatiously alluring white burgundy at full price (£11.99) but reduced until March15 to £9.49.

Though it possesses the wine’s bench-mark steeliness, this 2014 version is not at all aggressive.  In fact, though it shows its mettle, it is attractively light and pretty, not marred by oakiness, and lovely to drink before a meal as during one.  It is what I have been buying recently and shall keep on doing so for the coming week or two.

Not that it has no rivals. Triade, produced from three good southern Italian grapes (fiano, greco,  falanghina) is another current Waitrose offer which, though obviously different, can be drunk in the same sort of way. This 2014 Bianco Campania, down from £8+ to £6.59, knocks spots off many a more familiar Italian white, and is worth sipping on any occasion.

Rather dearer, but forming a conspicuous part of Lidl’s Easter array of bottles, a 2014 Montagny at £11.99 looks like being worth a try. Montagny, though not the most famous of white burgundies, is almost always worth buying, and The Times has advised us to grab this one now. I’ll be letting you know what I think of it.
6 March 2016

Worth the Small Detour

New cafes in the Morningside area of Edinburgh are ten a penny, but few of them are interesting enough to make much of a mark.

What used to be the gatehouse, and is now the Lodge Cafe, at the start of the Hermitage walk along the Braid Valley is showing ambition, however. A cramped little cottage, which once served as a tollbooth beside the clock at the bottom of Comiston Road, it was moved stone by stone to its present site some years ago and has prompted many bypassers to say it should be turned into a cafe.

This has now happened, though work is still in progress, with the promise of a terrace with outdoor service by summertime.

At present it looks like a gardener’s cottage with a gleaming espresso machine in its kitchen, the atmosphere perhaps more rustic industrial than woodland chic or walker’s dream. But it is friendly, faintly quaint, and definitely an asset to its surroundings, with parking space outside, smart new hand-made benches to sit on, and varnished Singer sewing machine treadles converted into round  tables where you can drink good Italian coffee while devouring Victoria sponge or pastries.

It opens early, too, serving fried eggs in a roll, bacon and Stornoway black pudding as well as other toothsome things  to ladies with substantial dogs. I liked it enough to try it again, so watch this space.
4 March 2016