Too much Schicchi

The Los Angeles Opera’s new Sony DVD of Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi is, perhaps inevitably, a disappointment. As so often, too much goes on in it - even the sight of the conductor Grant Gershon laughing uproariously during the opening bars borders on the manic.

But the sight of Placido Domingo in the title role, wagging his fingers at everybody while sporting a gangsterish pin-stripe suit an example of over-the-top updating.  Adriana Chuchman’s smooth young Lauretta, in slinky black, is unmoving in the few minutes of what should have been touching  repose provided by O mio babbino caro.  The relentless updating takes Puccini too far into the realms of Menotti. The final evocation of Florence makes no effect.

How did it happen?  Though the Los Angeles Opera never misses a chance to exploit the presence  of Domingo, as a tenor or baritone or conductor, this time the result is an example of too much being thought to be not quite enough.

It is not that Woody Allen, as director, is necessarily the culprit, though he certainly does nothing to retrieve the situation.  Allen in his films is invariably musically sensitive and his use of Schubert’s great final G major string quartet on the soundtrack of Crimes and Misdemeanours haunts the memory. But most of the comedy in this Gianni Schicchi is just jokiness of a sort that quickly wears thin, the way some of Peter Ustinov’s operatic ventures used to do.

I do not think I shall be watching this DVD again, which is a pity because Gianni Schicchi is a small masterpiece of subtle musical wit, as Tito Gobbi, if I remember rightly, once confirmed in Edinburgh.
30 June 2016

A Bergian Grimes

Among the annual pleasures of father’s day - or faither’s day, as my daughters prefer to call it - I have received a bottle of one of my favourite white burgundies, good French and Italian cheese, some specialist chocolate, a jumper and two unexpected items. From my wife came a black linen cap, bought in Marks and Spencer, which I have been wearing indoors and out, like a rustic Italian or an old-fashioned journalist with an eye shield;  and from my son a recently issued and fascinating DVD of Britten’s Peter Grimes, filmed at the Zurich Opera, a handsome, intimately scaled auditorium under the conductorship of Franz Welser-Most, whom Private Eye once nicknamed Worse Than Most but who is now becoming conspicuously Better Than Some.

Though I do not lack DVDs of Peter Grimes, this one was new to me. Switzerland is not a country in which I would expect to encounter a truly  illuminating performance of the first great modern British opera, but here it is in all its glory.  The cast, admittedly, is English-speaking, and the director is the ever-progressive David Pountney, Scottish Opera’s, one-time director of productions, who gave us a Macbeth with green blood, a brilliantly minimalist Magic Flute and a romantic Seraglio, as well as the company’s great Janacek cycle and Kurt Weill’s Street Scene.

For the Swiss company he devised, aptly enough, a Peter Grimes without much sea. Whatever shock value lies in its shunning of the more recognisable aspects of a Suffolk fishing village - and which Britten himself had insisted on being included in Colin Graham’s Scottish Opera production presented at the1968 Edinburgh Festival under the composer’s own attentive aegis - Pountney’s mind was clearly on Britten’s  adolescent desire to become a pupil of Alban Berg in Vienna but from which he was forced to refrain by the British musical establishment, which raised its eyebrows at such things as atonality and Viennese expressionism infecting an English composer.

Yet just beneath the surface of Britten’s first operatic masterpiece lies the world of Berg’s Wozzeck and of the downtrodden soldier who ends up stabbing his mistress.

The outsiderish elements of Peter Grimes, and the contempt of the villagers for him, are fundmaental, of course, to Britten’s opera as we know it.  But by stripping it to its essentials, in this unusually abstract and surrealist production, Pountney has highlighted, as surely never before, its Bergian roots.  The principal characters - Christopher Ventris’s Grimes, Alfred Muff’s Balstrode and Emily Magee’s piercing   Ellen Orford - are vividly observed, but so, quite lacerating in their effect, are the minor ones. The whole cast is enthralling, as is Welser-Most’s lean and sharp-bladed conducting, with its shrill Swiss woodwind. The DVD, from EMI Classics, is on two disc,
23 June 2016

A Timely Honour

In 1953 a young Scottish composer, still in his teens, made one of his first visits to Covent Garden for the controversial  premiere of Benjamin Britten’s coronation opera Gloriana.  The performances, attended by the poshest and least appreciative of audiences, were a famous fiasco, from which the work - a masterpiece - took years to recover, but John McLeod, for one, never forgot the music.

Two years ago, around the time of of his eightieth birthday, he was in the process of producing a fascinating bundle of works, in which his inspiration was showing notable new developments. One of them was a substantial Guitar Fantasy on themes from Gloriana, written for the gifted young guitarist Ian Watt to play at the Aldeburgh Festival, over which Britten had presided for most of his career.

For McLeod this has been a creative period, marked last week by the award of the CBE in the Queen’s ninetieth birthday honours. The thought of a forthcoming trip to Buckingham Palace to meet Her Majesty is pleasing him greatly. Though the award, he admits, has come as a surprise, he has encountered the Queen twice before, first at her coronation itself when he was Clarinettist No 25 in the RAF band which marched seventeen miles to pay tribute to her, and then in 1983 when she visited Merchiston Castle School in Edinburgh on its 150th anniversary and he, as music teacher, composed an anthem for her.

By that time, as a music critic and friend, I had got to know him and was aware of his high ambitions on behalf of Scottish music and musicians in general. He had conducted the Perth Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in a celebrated performance of Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Chabrier’s glittering Marche Joyeuse in Glasgow’s Kelvin Hall  Proms. As conductor of the Edinburgh Royal Choral Union (the only conductor I have ever heard who stripped the orchestral accompaniment from And With His Stripes in the annual performance of Messiah) and, in John Currie’s absence, of the progressive John Currie Singers, he might have developed a career in quite different directions. But composing music was his challenge and that, after Peter Donohoe played his Piano Concerto at the Perth Festival (he wishes Perth would repeat it sometime), that was the way he went.

In recent years his music has gone in strikingly new directions, making it more and more interesting to listen to. He is not a composer to rest on his laurels. His Edinburgh home, which he shares with his wife Margaret, a distinguished piano adjudicator and examiner, resounds with to  the strains of her Steinway and his Bechstein, though he remains a clarinettist at heart. But vitality his Fifth Piano Sonata, another product of his eighties, has gleamed around the world in performances by Murray McLachlan, its Scottish exponent (hear it on You Tube).    

What next? From the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, after his recent tribute to Carl Nielsen entitled Out of the Silence, has come a commission for a viola concerto for their principal viola, Jane Atkins.  Viola concertos, among which Walton’s stand high, though McLeod has an affectionate memory of Edmund Rubbra’s, long dead and gone, are rare and special compositions.  McLeod says he sees the instrument as a source of energy in the middle of the orchestral  strings, just as his beloved clarinet holds a similar place amid the woodwind (Brahms’s two poignant clarinet sonatas can also be played by viola).

Not for nothing was it Purcell’s, Bach’s, Mozart’s, Dvorak’s and Britten’s personal instrument of choice. So McLeod’s concerto will be a work to look forward to.  He has time, two years yet, in which to write it, which will leave him space for other surprises.  Meanwhile I send him, as Scotland’s senior composer, my congratulations on becoming a CBE.
16 June 2016

Saul in Sussex

Ivor Bolton’s brief spell as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s principal conductor was one that left no lasting impressions. The players, if I remember rightly, thought of him as one of those conductors who are referred to as visually distracting. He for his part failed to draw from them performances that sounded as interesting as they looked. Interviewing him once in Edinburgh, I found him alert and direct, a conductor with distinct, attractive enthusiasms which for some reason   he was perhaps  not yet wholly transmitting.

But now, on the international scene, he is certainly doing so - and with a vengeance, especially if the composer happens to be Handel. His Salzburg Festival Theodora with the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra, directed by Christof Loy, was more gripping than Peter Sellars’s famous but fussy Glyndebourne production, presented with relentlessly semaphoric gestures from the singers though coolly conducted by William Christie; and last year Bolton himself was at Glyndebourne, conducting, with high intensity,  Barry Kosky’s no less irksome staging of Saul, another great Handel oratorio ingeniously, or not wholly persuasively, transformed into an opera.

One of the signals that Glyndebourne’s annual summer  season has begun is when one or two of the previous year’s highlights begin appearing on DVD. Saul has now done so, but is it really worth buying? Musically the answer is yes. Bolton’s unfolding of the rich score, filled with glorious choruses and moments of drama, is a triumph.  But Kosky’s sumptuous production, much of it eye-challengingly dark and quite meldramatic, is diminshed by being viewed on a domestic screen. Much of it simply looks too crowded. Whatever it was like in the theatre - and it did earn some admiring reviews - is largely lost at home.

But not the music. It’s true that Bolton, seen in close-up in the Glyndebourne pit, looks as jerky, if not more so, than in his Scottish days, but the sounds he draws from the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, not least the exquisite oboe tone, are ravishing.

Here is high Hendelian emotion. Even when the stage is over-stuffed with candles, as it is in Part Two, the music shines through. But too many of the singers, particularly Christopher Purves madly articulating the title role, veer frequently into grotesquerie. Saul, after all, is a grand  oratorio, which I would like to hear from Bolton on the concert platform, and not a Handelian  version precursor  Ligeti’s Grand Macabre.

Despite the performance’s  many beauties - and Iestyn Davies’s counter-tenor voice is of the sweetest tenderness in the role of David -  the production on screen can only be called  disconcertingly over the top.  A bit more of Bolton at Glyndebourne, however, will not go amiss.
7 June 2016

Cosi again.

With a little patience, I have managed to track down what appears to be the new production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte which is being brought to the Edinburgh Festival this year. Though somewhat murkily filmed last summer, it at least provides hints of how it may look at the Edinburgh Festival Theatre.

So what is it like?  Certainly very different from the first Aix-en-Provence Cosi I ever saw, back in 1965, with Teresa Stich-Randall (looking like Barry Humphries and Tersa Berganza as the sisters.)

The old production was a mostly sunny example of how Cosi used to be staged, with lots of laughs and little despair.  But times, as the new production confirms, have changed. The new one is Cosi Fan Tutte as opera seria.

From being a piece of Mozartian frivolity and certainly not his greatest opera - both Wagner and Ernest Newman, we should remember, despised it -   it has become the emotional peak of his achievement, quite as good as, if not better than, Figaro and Giovanni, the other comedies to libretti by Lorenzo Da Ponte.

The latest Aix version certainly has no doubt about its status.  Staged in semi-darkness and entirely indoors in what seem to be mostly windowless rooms, it is strangely phantasmagoric in effect. The disguises - presumably  deliberately  - are hidden in darkness. The characters seldom look directly  at each other. People not directly involved lurk mysteriously in the background. The nudity promised by the Edinburgh Festival advertising is an idle threat.   There are no parasols, no placid seascapes; Vesuvius is invisible.

So, it must be said, is the fun of the piece. Guglielmo’s comic aria is like a dirge.  Even Despina, impersonating Dr Mesmer, loses her falsetto voice, though she regains it in time to play the notary in the last act.  The ending, which I shall not disclose, is not optimistic.

How it works with cast changes  and a different conductor in Edinburgh remains to be seen.  But it is not uninteresting, though the jury must remain out on whether it is one Cosi too many.
3 June 2016