A Five-star Flute - No such luck

There was a time, in and around the nineteen-sixties, when The Magic Flute, for all the sublime simplicity of its inspiration, seemed the hardest of Mozart’s great operas to bring off.  Failed productions of it littered the European operatic scene as depressing evidence of the directorial blunders of which this lovely work, written in the last months of Mozart’s short life,  was constantly  the unfortunate victim.

Are things any better today? The balance between simple fun and Masonic severity remains a precarious one, which all too easily prompts the more theological aspect of  this remarkable yet strangely self-destructive score  to topple into inertia.   That The Magic Flute is a masterpiece of the choicest sort  is indisputable. Why, then, does it so often go wrong?

Three famous DVD recordings of it,  which have recently come my way, have provided no answer. Indeed, choosing between David McVicar’s clever and resourceful Covent Garden production, conducted by Sir Colin Davis, the Salzburg Festival’s Mozart birthday  production with Karel Appel’s marvellous decor,  Pierre Audi’s polished staging and Riccardo Muti’s musical expertise,  and Kenneth Branagh’s maverick movie version  set amid the trenches of the First World War, has proved in various ways quite dismaying, leaving behind a desire never to see any of them again.

Forced to make a decision I would probably opt for the Covent Garden version, even if Davis’s conducting, after an exquisite Act One and a deeply moving Pamina-Papageno duet,  grows increasing slow and stately, and Franz-Joseph Selig’s Sarastro is insufferably ponderous. But at least Simon Keenlyside’s clodhopping Papageno is a pleasure,  McVicar’s priests (particularly Thomas Allen’s crabby old Sprecher) are diverting, and Dorothea Roschmann’s Pamina is genuinely touching, even though her Tamino lacks any sort of masculine charm.

But Covent Garden is really too  grand a setting for Mozart,   and the same must be said for Salzburg’s vast Festspielhaus, where Appel’s Alpine rocks look alluringly climbable and the veneer of the Vienna Philharmonic is as good as it gets (though the Covent Garden  orchestra plays more sweetly for Davis).

But impressively though the cast sing, their characterisation  amounts to surprisingly little. Papageno’s arrival in a clapped-out Citroen Deux Cheveux is a joke that cannot be sustained, and    Christian Gerhaher’s portrayal is an empty vessel - as unfunny as Papageno can be.  Diana Damrau’s verve as the Queen of Night is, however, undeniable  and Rene Pape’s Sarastro is a grandly sonorous, if not greatly likeable, presence.

Pape, fascinatingly, is also the Sarastro of Branagh’s movie - and a very different one, young, casually dressed, not at all the dignified high priest we are accustomed to seeing. Here he is the man in charge of a field hospital, perhaps also of some sort of Findhorn community around which he rides on horseback. Though by no means ostentatious, he is quite the most watchable character on view.

Filmed at Shepperton studios near London, the action is  explosive, rain-swept, muddily entrenched, acoustically divorced from opera as we know it. Yet, irritating though all this can be, including a panoramic vision of war graves,  it does not lack ideas.  Tamino, smartly uniformed, is a tenor whose voice you initially expect to be that of a counter-tenor in some new-fangled Handel production.  Papageno is a cheery trooper whose pigeons are trained to detect poison gas.  There is a suicidally crazed Queen of Night, vocalising at virtuoso speed.

Many of the singers, including the pretty Pamina,  are novices - lovely to look at if not always to listen to.  But the atmosphere of twentieth-century warfare is certainly caught, even if it distorts the story. Where the orchestra is situated is anybody’s guess but  the American conductor James Conlon, a fine, firm Mozartian who was once  principal guest conductor of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, brings vivacity  to the accompaniments.

If asked to supply a star rating, I would confine the Branagh movie to one star (plus half a star for expensive effort), the Salzburg version to two, and the Covent Garden to three.   In other words, hardly enough.  A five-star  Flute is elusive on DVD, though I still have a soft spot for the good old Ingmar Bergman film.
29 April 2016

The Art of the Interview

Interviewing celebrities, genuine or otherwise, is an art which, in my old age, I have largely discarded, or at any rate lost much of my interest in.

This is  not only because life has changed but because the act of interviewing people has grown so utterly different, just as today’s celebrities themselves have done, accepting, as they are said to do, the presence of agents, minders, or timers, who control the confrontation between interviewer and interviewee, monitor every word that is spoken, and decree when the meeting must end.

Thus, as a journalist, you are briefed beforehand about what you are allowed to ask, and what topics you are forbidden to mention. Any encroachment of what is permissible involves instant intervention.

Since I seldom interview people now, I cannot say from experience how true these restrictions  actually are, though I am glad to report that I have never been a victim of them and would resent having to be thus hemmed in.  But it is easy to feel suspicious about such things.  In my time, arranging an interview tended to be the simplest of procedures, though its outcome did depend on luck. Sometimes an interviewee had simply nothing to say, though at least in my experience everybody - with the exception of the playwright Ronald Duncan, librettist of Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, who was memorably rude - welcomed the chance to talk about themselves and were generally generous, sometimes over-generous, not just with their time but with their money, for they would insist on paying for lunch or  dinner and rarely complained even if the outcome of our talk was not quite what they expected.

In my day everything was pre-arranged between us, however improvised the written result may sometimes have seemed.   I have interviewed Simon Rattle on a train, Vladimir Ashkenazy in an airport arrival hall (I had flown to Heathrow to meet him off a flight, just before he gave a concert), Antal Dorati in a chauffeur-driven car between a recording studio in Watford and his London hotel, Neeme Jarvi while squatting in the aisle of an aircraft in which he was flying first-class to Rome, Anton Mossimann in the kitchen of a Park Lane hotel, Benjamin  Britten while strolling in the grounds of Haddo House in Aberdeenshire,  Hans Werner Henze while squashed between him and his male  partner on a sofa, and Leopold Stokowski on the telephone (I asked him a single question, and his reply in a single sentence lasted half an hour).

Sir Michael Tippett once drove me around the Cotswolds, talking all the way. Sir William Walton smoked in his dressing-room before a London concert, and Alexander Goehr drank a mug of tea while chatting  in a Cambridge university canteen, CP Snow lay in bed, his wife (Pamela Hansford Johnson) at his side, with his eyes bandaged after a cataract operation; the young Kingsley Amis merrily eavesdropped on a pair of pompous Cambridge dons who were talking about him in Miller’s Wine Bar, while in our interview we were discussing Mozart piano concertos.  

But mostly my interviews have taken place in restaurants, hotels, or the interviewee’s home. In this respect, Sir Alec Guinness stood out as a glorious example of the pre-arranged interview that seemed not to have been planned at all.

He had invited me to lunch with him in Prunier’s more than half a century ago to talk about some of his latest films. Arriving early, and somewhat flustered, I went straight to the  toilet to spruce up, and found him standing there alone, beaming at himself in the mirror like Sidney Stratton in The Man in the White Suit or Wormold in Our Man in Havana. I introduced myself and he ushered me to our table for portions of Dover sole and glasses of white burgundy that he paid for with a crisp  £10 note (those were the days).

On reporting back to the London editor of The Scotsman afterwards, and telling him what it had cost, he replied, with a sigh of relief,  “Thank God we were not paying for it.”
22 April 2016

Blurring the image

Edinburgh comes ninth in this year’s list of the ten best classical music festivals in Britain  assembled in yesterday’s edition of The Times.  In churlish mood, I personally would feel inclined to place it tenth, on the strength of what The Times has called - with reference to Barry Humphries’ Weimar Cabaret at the Usher Hall - the blurring of the image between the original festival and the fringe.

Gone are the days when you could open the festival brochure with a real sense of unblurred anticipation, knowing that, at the very least, your batteries would be recharged by the forthcoming event. This year it all looks depressingly like the mixture as before, with hardly a glimmer of genuine novelty value of the sort supplied by Lord Harewood or Peter Diamand back in the1960s. Not since Brian McMaster - though even he could show a dispiriting reliance on package deals - has the festival seemed really worth its salt.

Operatically, what was once one of the world’s great festivals grows thinner and thinner.  What’s new?  Three performances of what looks like being an oversexed new Cosi Fan Tutte from Aix-en-Provence hardly seem likely to fill the bill. For all its greatness, what was once the most underrated of Mozart’s major operas has now become the most overplayed and and increasingly distorted.

Three performances of Bellini’s Norma from Salzburg with Cecilia Bartoli look more promising, but what of the single concert performance of a Russian Rheingold conducted by Valery Gergiev at the Usher Hall?  Where is the rest of the Ring? Of all the works in Wagner’s cycle, Rheingold is the one that does not stand on its own feet - particularly in a concert performance - and this event seems unlikely to be more than a titillation. Scottish Opera, which once staged the entire cycle as the entity it was intended to be, is conspicuously absent this year.

At Greyfriars Kirk, the Hebrides Ensemble’s performance of Hans Zender’s orchestration of Winterreise will be the latest unnecessary attempt to transform Schubert’s searing song cycle into something more operatic.

As for the Usher Hall concerts, what else do we have? In such large-scale surroundings, Bach’s St Matthew Passion seldom works effectively - remember how laborious it seemed even with Claudio Abbado as conductor? - and though John Eliot Gardiner’s performance should be as good as they come it would be better heard at Canongate Kirk or the Queen’s Hall. Only the potential size of the audience will justify such a rendition, but much of the work’s impact will inevitably be lost.

Sir Antonio Pappano’s two programmes with Rome’s Santa Cecilia Orchestra, including Rossini’s Stabat Mater, will be better suited to these premises as will Gardiner’s evening devoted more sombrely  to Schumann’s Manfred. But Edward Gardiner’s account of Elgar’s Apostles with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra - its only festival appearance so far as I can discern - is strictly for devout Elgarians, and the BBC SSO’s Boulez memorial concert, featuring a movement from Pli Selon Pli along with some Debussy and Berg, will only bring back memories of more startling days, when Boulez was around to do these things himself.

Marin Alsop’s programme of Villa-Lobos, Bernstein and Shostakovich with the Sao Paulo Symphony Orchestra looks like something swiped from the London proms, but Robin Ticciati’s complete Berlioz Romeo and Juliet with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra will surely be pure gold - a real Edinburgh Festival event, something not to be missed amid so much that seems routine.

Mahler’s Ninth and Tenth symphonies from the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Rotterdam Philharmonic need to form part of a more complete Mahler survey to make their point but will be welcome all the same, since both of them are still rarities in Scotland.

An air of routine again hangs over the concerts by the Russian National Orchestra and Leipzig Gewandhaus, but Pohjola’s Daughter from Oskar Vanska, the Minnesota Orchestra’s Sibelius authority, should shine as something special, even if it lacks a symphony to back it up.  

And where’s Runnicles, as a longer-estabished Scottish music blog might put it?  He is saying farewell to the BBC SSO in the festival’s closing performance of Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder - a great event at last and something much  to look forward to.

The Queen’s Hall as usual will keep its own flag flying with an array of morning recitals with the look of a separate little festival within a festival, with connoisseur appeal. Don’t miss the Dunedin Consort’s Handel programme with  Danielle de Niese as soloist. So the day has not yet come when I shall advise sidestepping the  festival altogether.  But I fear it is getting closer.
17 April 2016

A ring in Bordeaux

Alan Massie’s quartet of Bordeaux novels, recently completed by End Games in Bordeaux, is a modern Ring cycle, a bleak picture of wartime France, with a Wotan (Inspector Lannes), an Alberich (the venomous advocate Labiche), and a Valhalla of sorts (Vichy, the temporary seat of the shabby wartime government).

The tetralogy, written like Wagner’s over a period of years, needs to be experienced from the start. Lannes, its sustaining feature, fails to bring it to the happiest of ends, after Paris has been liberated and the Nazis driven out.  The main villains of the story are the French themselves, and Massie sardonically spares them nothing in his quartet’s substantial denouement.

He is a skilled and sensitive writer, whose exploration of European corruption has spread through numerous excellent books. That he is a fellow Scot and one-time Edinburgh neighbour, whom I got to know in my days as Scotsman music critic, when he was the paper’s principal book reviewer, has contributed to my feelings of closeness to him.  His articles in The Spectator, now collected in book form, are well worth reading.

But the Bordeaux books, though genre writing in the John Le Carre tradition, have developed quietly into a minor masterpiece, filled with acute observation of what Bordeaux, as opposed to Paris, must have been like in the  war, with life struggling on in the city’s bars, where vital glasses of Armagnac seemed always to be available even if the food and the coffee were deplorable. The saga has a discreet vividness and, I would guess, truthfulness that pays off on every page.

Massie, like the much-missed James Kennaway (author of Tunes of Glory) and my musical predecessor on The Scotsman, Christopher Grier, was schooled at Glenalmond, which must have implanted something in him that has influenced his writing. The Bordeaux quartet, though not unflawed, is something to be savoured and to be disturbed by, but it needs to be read complete, if possible without a break, not just because, dead or alive, characters keep recurring, but because its desolation becomes so powerfully pervasive.
13 April 2016

Dear Peter

The death of Peter Williams, on the day before Bach’s 331st birthday, formed a touching little link between the great composer and his most perceptive modern biographer.

Peter was a close friend from the time when I was music critic of The Scotsman and he was a lecturer, and later professor, in the music department of Edinburgh University. We were neighbours. living round the corner from each other, he in a flat at the bottom of classical Dublin Street, I in a flat - upstairs from the artist Anne Redpath -  in London Street. Between us, overlooking Drummond Place, lived the celebrated Scottish tenor John Rainsh.

I first heard Peter play the harpsichord -  he was a deservedly renowned exponent of the Goldberg Variations, acute, illuminating, fascinatingly  improvisational  -  in a recital of baroque rarities with the violinist Leonard Friedman, up from London to make his first Edinburgh appearance at the Reid Concert Hall (he stayed on and founded the Scottish Baroque Ensemble.) It was an event that has stuck in my memory for almost fifty years.

Peter and I soon got to know each other and he invited me to a party at his home where the guest of honour was Dover Wilson, Edinburgh’s senior Shakespeare scholar.

Other get-togethers followed, in one house or the other, along with many conversations during concert intervals at the Usher Hall and elsewhere. Peter was already the most quizzical of Bachians, a dedicated Wagnerian, a passionate Mahlerite. When I became the Edinburgh Festival’s programme editor, a sideline I performed for sixteen years, he was one of the first people from whom I sought programme notes, which I collected from him in batches at his home - by then he had moved to nearby Northumberland Street, in company with a fine harpsichord and a big Adler typewriter, where we chatted about our enthusiasms - not only Bach, as I have just indicated - over glasses of Dutch gin, a taste he had presumably acquired from the Dutch harpsichordist Gustav Leonhardt, whose pupil he had been.

The international shortage of knowledge about Bach’s life never perplexed him. He discovered what he needed to know through the music (particularly the organ music) itself and through a form of Sherlock Holmesian osmosis. He  startled readers with his discoveries. The most sensational of these was that Bach was not the composer of the great organ Toccata and Fugue in D minor, so long associated with his name. In fact it was a solo violin piece by someone else, just as Bach’s civic duties, especially through the St Matthew and St John Passions with their Easter associations, were not as straightforward as they  seemed.

As Leipzig’s  famous cantor and municipal music director, Bach had been expected as a matter of routine to attend, and direct his choristers, at grisly Easter scenes of public execution - by the sword (for women), by hanging (for Jews) , and, worst of all, by the wheel (for more serious crimes) - in an area patrolled by the army and the clergy outside the city walls.

As Peter once put it about  the Passions, “Something of the intensity is lost when we sit silently listening to them, with knowledge neither of such things nor of the usual Good Friday traditions.” But it does help to explain the grimness of the music,and of baroque musical pietism in its darkest form, with its whips and thorns, torture and trickling blood, rather than melodious abstractions offset by the words.

Death, as  Peter reminded us, was a perpetual presence in Bach’s life, in his numerous church cantatas and in domestic tragedies - he  once returned from a trip to find his first wife dead and buried.  The last of Peter’s studies of Bach, whose proofs he was reading at the time of his death at the age of 78, will be published this summer.

When he left Edinburgh to become a professor at Duke University, South  Carolina, - where the Scottish composer Iain Hamilton also taught - we largely lost touch with each other. I had resigned from my editorship of the  Edinburgh Festival’s programme notes, and Peter was seldom back in Scotland - though a recital of Bach’s Two-Part Inventions celebrated his recovery from an accident he suffered in his semi-retirement, when he was living in a manor house in Gloucestershire and fell on top of his electric lawnmower, mutilating one of his hands.  With movement restored to his fingers, he managed to  play again and went on writing - as his last book will confirm when it is published this summer.
11 April 2016