Thomasina’s last waltz

A Chorus Line

On Sunday to see A Chorus Line at the Capitol Theatre. Thoroughly enjoyable, despite a nasty throat tickle that drove me out into the gilded foyer during “Dance: Ten; Looks: Three”. (Fortunately, my least favourite number in the whole show.) 

I’d never seen this musical staged before, although I’d seen the film as a teenager in the mid-1980s. Afterwards, I dragged my mother off to the specialist record shop near Michael’s Music Room (its name is escaping me just now) where the sales assistant advised us that the Broadway version was superior to the motion picture soundtrack. Nowadays, owning both, I can confirm he was right; the numbers added or updated for the film didn’t really improve on the impeccably honed score of the original. In particular, “Let Me Dance for You” – Cassie’s big number in the film – isn’t a patch on “The Music and the Mirror”.

Which is a long way of saying that I was glad to be finally seeing the show in its original form.

And now I hear of the death of its composer, Marvin Hamlisch, on Monday. He has gone to the great chorus line in the sky. Sobering – especially since he was only 68.

Apart from A Chorus Line, I became aware of Hamlisch through the family record collection: his soundtrack for The Sting, which also introduced me to the music of Scott Joplin, and the soundtrack for They’re Playing Our Song. 

In A Chorus Line I thought I’d recognised a sly nod to They’re Playing Our Song when Cassie sings, “Give me the chance to look forward to sayin’: Hey listen, they’re playing my song.” On checking the chronology on the weekend, though, I realised the nod would have to have been in the other direction if at all.

Seeing it at the Capitol Theatre seemed appropriate. In the old days, before the theatre was restored, that block was also home to the ballet studio of Joan and Monica Halliday. The Hallidays. I didn’t study there, but I did attend the intensive summer and winter schools. And it seemed lyricist Edward Kleban had been there himself when I heard his chorus for “At the Ballet”:

Up the steep and very narrow stairway
To the voice like a metronome
Up the steep and very narrow stairway
It wasn’t paradise, it wasn’t paradise,
It wasn’t paradise,
but it was home.

Not glamorous at all, but very, very serious. Does that song resonate with me? Well, I guess I’d probably take Bebe’s verse. 

A Chorus Line is in some ways a disturbing musical. Especially in productions where the director-choreographer Zack remains disembodied, Svengali-like and more than a little creepy – which is how I remember the film. There’s an underlying metaphor that can cut too close to the bone. But when I first saw it, it was just a strong, coherent musical with really well-written songs, a simple, compelling narrative and some fabulous choreography. “One. Singular sensation…!” Later, on learning how these stories had all come from workshops with real Broadway chorus dancers, it seemed more touching. And you don’t have to be a hoofer to feel keenly the experiences of Cassie (“Let me wake up in the morning to find I have somewhere exciting to go”) or Paul (whose collapsed knee and likely ended career prompts “What I Did For Love”).

Some obituaries…

New York Times
Chicago Tribune
LA Times

 

Visitors

The marketing cheekily (I thought) referred to her as the grande dame of Australian orchestras. And she came with all her opulent finery. The sound was velvet plush, draped silk, whispering voile. Distinctive and beautiful. But in a program dominated by musical sex, I did wish there had been someone to whisk her off her firmly upholstered sofa and waltz her into the bedroom.

Postscript…

As already wondered via the social media: Why publish a program book that lacks the one essential component: a program page? This is like publishing a book with no title page and no list of chapters. A puzzlement.

Skin and bones: a frindley theory

The other day Elissa Milne posted a thought-provoking post about preferred baroque keyboard composers and the possible correlation with personality types.

The tricky matter of French baroque music emerged, including the fact that it often doesn’t seem to satisfy or even be really successful when played on the piano. Which prompted me to air a long-held theory as to why Bach, Handel et al work on piano but the French baroque composers don’t…

Some music succeeds in its bones (think JS Bach, think Beatles). The things that make us love these works and which draw us in are at a very fundamental level of melody, harmony, rhythm and pulse. And such music can “take” a lot of varied treatments. You can play pieces like this on different instruments, arrange them, use them as the basis for jazz improvisation, you name it.

Some music succeeds because of its surface, its skin (think French baroque, think ABBA). The value is in the style, the gesture, the ornaments, the colours, the very mode of performance. This kind of music is much less malleable and often resistant to being rearranged, or having its performance style modified. It works when you play it “authentically” with the original performance practices of its creation and on the instruments intended. The further you depart from that the less satisfying it is.

As they say, the exception proves the rule, and one exception at the French baroque end of things is a delicious piece by François Couperin, Les Baricades mistérieuses. (When I eventually get a piano, this will be its baptismal piece.) In the Couperin the beauty and the appeal of the music is to be found in its harmonic bones and its textures. Which is why it can work very nicely on the piano.

Postscripts…
I’ve just learned that Angela Hewitt’s (piano) performance of the Couperin was used in the soundtrack for the recent film The Tree of Life.

Be wary of the performances of Les Baricades that are to be found on YouTube. Unlike Scott Ross, many keyboardists seem to miss the sensuousness of this music and play it much too fast. (Or, in one or two cases, they take it way too slow.)

Want to play it yourself? The 1717 edition of the ordre or suite from which it comes can be found here, with Les Baricades beginning on page 6 (requires the reading of alto clef for the right hand), and a modernised edition here.

 

Catherine the Great’s Lament

You wouldn’t believe what goes on in my court: Gambling. Harassment. A ghost. Multiple suicides. And I don’t even get a #walkon ! #opera702

That’s The Queen of Spades by the way. In the middle of Act II Catherine the Great arrives at a grand masked ball. Music is sung in greeting, but the scene ends before we actually see her on stage. Curtain.

Opera Australia and ABC 702 Sydney are running an operaplot style competition at the moment, hashtag #opera702. The prize is a walk-on part in Consumptive Courtesan by the Cove in March, which has prompted me to put a particular spin on my entries: each one has to convey the plot from a mute or walk-on cameo character’s perspective. Or in the case of The Queen of Spades, a character who doesn’t even get to walk on.

The problem with this approach is that it rather limits the number of operas that can be plotted, which is probably a good thing. Operaplotting can be addictive.

My other entries…

2 girls: trafficked. Pasha: spurned. Lover: to the rescue. Ruse: get my master drunk. Result: noble outcome. Me: I’m mute #walkon 
The Abduction from the Seraglio 

Door 1 red. Door 2 orange. Door 3 gold. Door 4 aqua. Door 5 white. Door 6 dark. Door 7 silver. Bartók and the Technicolor #walkon
Bluebeard’s Castle

I’m the deaf old servant, so while Figaro thwarts one marriage & facilitates another, I just get to #walkon and say “Eh?”
The Barber of Seville

I may have a stab at Lulu, so to speak, but after that I think I’m done. 

Fantasy Subscription 2011

Last week I was giving pre-concert talks here in Sydney, and I began by saying that the concert in question was one I’d been looking forward to all year – partly because it gave me a chance to hear in the concert hall two pieces I hadn’t heard live before (Tchaikovsky’s Voyevoda, Op.78 and Prokofiev’s Symphony-Concerto), partly because I’m an admirer of Osmo Vänskä’s work and of his Beethoven in particular. It also happened to be the final subscription program of the year and yes, when you’re feeling tired “final” has a very attractive ring to it.

This is one of the traps of working in music. Attending lots of concerts is a fabulous thing, enviable even, but it’s very easy to feel jaded after a while. So it’s helpful to imagine myself a “civilian” and think about the local orchestra concerts I would have attended if I were choosing to attend just nine – much in the same way that some people devise fantasy football teams. 

And so, my fantasy subscription for 2011:

Ashkenazy/de Lancie et al (Grieg’s Peer Gynt with narration)
The world needs more orchestral concerts that are conceived and presented as “shows”, as entertainments, without compromising artistic quality or programming integrity in any way. This was one of them. 

De Waart/Sydney Philharmonia Choirs (Beethoven, Barber, Adams)
Beethoven Seven. Best Beethoven symphony of the lot. ’Nuff said.
And Edo conducting Adams. 

Carter (Kerry, Grainger, Bartók)
The premiere of a new work by a composer I admire – of course I was looking forward to it. Topped off, on the night, by especially brilliant introductions by Andrew Ford. Grainger; the Australian guy in his shed. I won’t be forgetting this image in a hurry. 

Lang Lang in Recital (Beethoven, Albéniz, Prokofiev)
Every bit as astonishing as I’d expected. It was heartening to see he’d abandoned the satin polka dot suit and the unbearable OTT-ness I remembered from Blossom 2005.

Morlot/Pahud (Bach, Jarrell, Holst)
This was always going to be about the Jarrell flute concerto. Sue me. 

Evgeny Kissin in Recital (Liszt)
Fascinating, intriguing, jaw-droppingly impressive. There is nothing he can’t do. When I’m an old lady I will bore my sisters’ grandchildren with stories about hearing Kissin. Four times now. 

Strobel (Metropolis, restored with Huppertz score)
I had never seen Metropolis before. People I know who had seen it, told me that, with this new restoration, the whole movie made sense to them for the first time. The score lacked originality but what was so interesting about it was its sophistication and effectiveness as a film score given that this was a nascent genre in 1927.

Nott/Zimmermann (Brahms, Dean, Schubert)
It was the Dean I wanted to hear most of all, but my interest was further stimulated by the things Jonathan Nott had told me concerning his approach to the programming of the concert as a whole. 

Vänskä/Weilerstein (Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Beethoven)
See earlier comments. 

Inevitably there’s a concert you leave out of your fantasy subscription which turns out to be one of the highlights. This year that was the program with Nigel Westlake’s Missa Solis. I was aware from the beginning of the very personal significance of the piece and the terrible story behind it. But somehow that doesn’t prepare you for the experience of hearing the music, in the concert hall, with the composer conducting, and knowing that every musician on the stage is heart and soul behind this moving performance.

Classic 100 Twentieth Century: a personal response

The ABC’s Classic 100 Twentieth Century is over and it was every bit as frustrating as I expected it to be. Let me count the ways.

1. Frustration. Is “20th Century” a period or a state of mind?

Choosing a whole century as a category, especially one as stylistically diverse as the 20th, was always going to problematic. For some – including me – “20th century” means “modern” on some level, and by extension a lot of musical works written after 1900 are throwbacks or 20th-century only by a technicality. 

In the past, apart from the classic “general” polls, Classic 100 has polled for a genre, a composer or an instrument a clearly defined stylistic period. [Correction: there has never been a poll for a stylistic period.] Not this time. And if anything, it made the result less focused, less meaningful and, I suspect, less satisfying for nearly everybody. (See point 3)

2. Frustration. The unfair advantage of old age. 

Aka, the Gerontius effect. Acquiring favourite status inevitably takes time, especially in a deeply canonical art form such as classical music. For the repertoire that’s more than a hundred years old, age is immaterial. But when you’re comparing music that’s, say, 111 years old, with a piece that might have premiered last year, the newer piece is at a disadvantage.

The situation can be influenced by programming and promotion – I’m thinking of the clever way the Christopher Lawrence/Felix Hayman “Swoon” spot used to sneak in, with audience approval, all sorts of works that would normally have met with resistance on the grounds of youth and unfamiliarity. 

But mostly, the older a 20th-century work is, even if it approaches the “nasty modern music” end of the spectrum, the more fans it will have acquired. That’s one reason why the scattergraph for this poll shows a downward linear trend. That’s why the confronting (in character, not necessarily in style) Rite of Spring made it into the top ten, while other less-confronting but much newer works were ranked lower. Or perhaps The Rite of Spring is just better music… 

3. Frustration. (Or Amusement?) A polarised audience.

It was to be expected there would be parties throwing up their hands in disgust at the “dreadful noise” of Messiæn and others equally disgusted by the presence of backward-looking romantics such as Elgar. That’s the 20th century for you.

I could have treated it as a frustration, but the crux of the matter can be found in point 1 and this was really just the inevitable side effect. So I followed along via the social media and laughed.

4. Frustration. The vagaries of the Long Tail.

What didn’t make me laugh were some of the bizarre rankings at the bottom end of the list. (And towards the top too.) Given the very small polling sample (7,000 I believe, which must be barely 1 per cent of ABC Classic FM’s national reach) this is also not very surprising. I had to keep telling myself: “Small sample. Popularity contest. Small sample. Popularity contest.”

But despite the affirmations, I swore a bit when the Warsaw Concerto outranked Lieutenant Kijé; when ALW’s Requiem ranked higher than both Britten’s Serenade for tenor, horn and strings and Elgar’s Violin Concerto; when a folksong arrangement by Grainger came in three places ahead of Daphnis et Chloé (!!!!).

Of course, you see what’s happening here: I’m taking a poll that was unashamedly about “favourites” (and for which I myself was quite careful to choose my favourites) and I’m assessing the results against values of relative quality, importance and greatness. “Small sample. Popularity contest…”

5. Frustration. Insidious Albion.

This last frustration is purely a matter of personal taste. There are great works by English composers; I even shortlisted some. I just found it disheartening to see English music dominate the top 100. Especially so much English music of the pleasantly modal, folk-music inspired, stirringly hymn-like variety. But that’s just me. I have a serious bias towards the Russians and the French. And if there’s going to be folk inspiration I want wicked rhythms and wonky harmonies à la Bartók.

Postscript…

ABC Classic FM has shared the 100 runners up.

Classic 100 Twentieth Century: a personal list

The voting called for our “ten favourite works written since 1900”.

I took this literally: favourites. Not necessarily the greatest or the most seminal or the most famous or the most representatively “20th century”, whatever that might mean. Just favourites. For me this is music that I’m always happy to listen to, music which has given me inspiration or delight, music that has special significance for me.

The original shortlist was long (nearly 40 works) and, inevitably for the 20th century, stylistically diverse. More so than in any previous poll, it broke my heart to bring it down to ten. At this point it was necessary to invent some “rules” – each composer could be represented only once, for example, and I aimed for some representation across genres: orchestral, concerto, theatre, small ensemble…

My positive biases are evident: orchestral sound, music for dance, dramatic inspiration. Please don’t jump to conclusions about my negative biases, although the initials of one are DSCH. And I happily endorse the presence of musical theatre. Twice. Bite me, as they say.

In the end, four of my choices were in the 100, one of these scraped into the top 10 (Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet). Two of my composers made it in but with other works. The countdown isn’t over, but for the other four I’m resigned to being part of the invisible long tail.

And so my ten, annotated…

BARTÓK Bluebeard’s Castle
Thought about the Concerto for Orchestra (42 in the poll), which I've loved ever since we studied it at high school. But Bluebeard is so much more astonishing and powerful. (And I figured, correctly, that the Concerto would get plenty of votes without my help – this is a recurring theme.) 

(13) BERNSTEIN West Side Story
This is is far and away the best thing he ever wrote. And it’s cool.

KERRY This Insubstantial Pageant
This was a fond choice: I played my part in bringing this piece about. But I knew it wouldn’t make the 100, as it’s not available in a commercial recording. It should be. (Meanwhile, a reference recording can be borrowed from the AMC, and there’s an excerpt online including the quotation from Vivaldi’s “La tempesta di mare” flute concerto, which made me smile.)

LUTOSŁAWSKI Concerto for Orchestra
There’s a story here: heading off to a concert as a flute-playing teenager in order to hear Rampal play Mozart and coming away with my head buzzing with excitement about this piece by a composer I’d never heard of before. This choice is symbolic of what I strive for in my programming and ceaselessly hope for in my concert-going: come for one thing, go away thrilled by a discovery of some kind. (See Vasks.)

(10) PROKOFIEV Romeo and Juliet
Everything I love about Prokofiev’s music, plus heart in abundance.   

(62) RAVEL Piano Concerto in G
Another story. I first heard this exhilarating piece at the age of eight-and-eleven-months. It was in the theatre not as concert music, and as a result the movements now always sound as if they’re being played out of order – thank you very much, Mr Murphy.

SONDHEIM Sweeney Todd
«Have a little fop, Finest in the shop, Or some shepherd's pie peppered with actual shepherd on top…» This was the first Sondheim musical I saw. I considered others, but this one’s the closest in many respects to whatever it is that we define as “classical”, so it seemed right.  

(35) STRAVINSKY The Firebird
Oh, how I struggled in choosing between this, The Rite of Spring (9 in the poll) and Petrushka. How to decide between voluptuous beauty, pounding exhilaration and the slightly bleak but moving tale of a puppet come to life?   

WESTLAKE Omphalo Centric Lecture
There’s a reason this music for percussion ensemble is one of Nigel Westlake’s most frequently performed works (I believe). It’s just so damn addictive! Encore please. (Westlake has been represented by his Antarctica music (29); the Penguin Ballet number is kind of adorable.) 

VASKS Cello Concerto
When you program the Australian premiere of something unfamiliar, it’s not often the letters flood in, all with some variant of “I wasn’t expecting to like this piece at all and it turned out to be a highlight of the season.” (Yess!)

As a final note… I discovered after I finished that, quite without realising it, I hadn’t chosen any works that were technically 20th century but which spiritually (to my ears) belonged in the 19th. So no Rachmaninoff, no Mahler, no Elgar, no Richard Strauss. I guess that tells you something about the effect the label “20th century” has on my brain.

Postscript…

I send my regrets to Messrs Adès, Berg, Britten, Debussy, Edwards, Gershwin, Hindemith, Janáček, Meale, Messiæn, Nancarrow, Poulenc, Schoenberg, Schultz, Sculthorpe, Weill and Who-Killed-Cock-Robin, as well as the Misses Panufnik and Kats-Chernin. Some of you did just fine without me, I’m glad to see.  

Calligraphy porn

Or perhaps I should call it “Feathers, skin and gut”

Those who know me really well know that I think one of the most exquisitely sensual sounds in the world is the scratch of a quill scribing on vellum. And as I’ve pointed out before, clearly Peter Greenaway thinks it’s pretty special too. (Sadly, the video clip from Prospero’s Books that I’d previously linked to is no longer available, but try the beginning of this one.)

Now, thanks to Austin Radcliffe at Things Organized Neatly, I have another piece of calligraphy porn for my collection. No scratching in this one, but Bach ain’t bad.

 

Coincidentally, this gorgeous video turns out to be part of a campaign for Jumpstart Jr., a Dutch foundation which loans gut-string violins and cellos to gifted and ambitious young musicians dedicated to historical performance. (Australian cellist Catherine Jones is one of the beneficiaries.) Their slogan is “No gut, no glory” – I like it!

Oxford dons from the ’70s

So English pianist James Rhodes is in Australia with a recital scheduled for Sydney, and if no one invites me to be their date for the opening night of The Love of the Nightingale, I just may go.

He has the kind of life story and unconventional career path that publicists and journalists must love, at least for a debut visit. But so far I’ve been more interested in the often provocative things he has to say about concert presentation, some of which have already sent me to my soap box. And he’s at it again, with this interview for The Sydney Morning Herald.

As before, I ended up wholeheartedly agreeing with him and tearing my hair in frustration.

1. James Rhodes says he doesn’t want people reading the program notes while he’s playing. That makes perfect sense; I’d feel the same if I were performing. 

But I’d also add that if a performance is sufficiently compelling, well… you won’t even feel like reading the program, will you? (After all, one of the many valuable services a program book offers is distraction during a dull concert. And I say that in the same spirit as Mr Rhodes himself, when he writes that Beethoven “even had to play viola as a child in order to make money”.) 

2. Then he spoils it with a careless generalisation that simply panders to prejudice: 

“And [the program note’s] always written by some Oxford don from the ’70s about sonata form in Beethoven’s Vienna.* That’s f---ing boring. I’d rather talk about the fact that Bach was like a baroque Keith Richards and had 20 children and got arrested for drinking and f---ing.”†

Seriously James, I suspect that even in London, concert-goers aren’t seeing too many program notes from Oxford dons of the ’70s. And you’d be hard-pressed to find the donnish program note here in Australia. (Well, maybe from one presenter, but I’m not publishing directions.) 

As I’ve said before, some program notes – and they can be old or recent – are poorly written, stuffy and generally unhelpful. It happens, and if an artist is lumbered with notes like this by a presenter he or she has every right to complain. (Better still, the artist who cares about such things has every right to show an interest well beforehand. Just sayin’.) But what really bugs me is when artists or commentators suggest that the badly written and unhelpful note is the status quo. Because it’s simply not.

I get that James Rhodes would prefer his audiences not be reading. Ok, so don’t give us anything to read. A well-edited and comprehensive program listing is fine by me. (Since he’s being presented by the same venue, it’s likely that his program will contain about as much reading material as that one for Stephen Kovacevich.)

And I totally get that he would prefer to share his ideas with the audience by talking to us. (Although his written comments aren’t bad at all – thoughtful and sincere  – and I’m impressed that he’s one of the minority who’ve bucked the iTunes prejudice against providing digital booklets with albums. Go James!) 

But I wish he’d get off the bandwagon about program notes ‘always’ being boring. That’s just unhelpful. And unfair.

Because the good writing about music is out there. Notes that are illuminating; notes that communicate affection for the music; notes that reveal an appreciation for how the listener is going to be experiencing it in a live concert; notes that are elegantly and generously written; notes that reflect and support the artistic vision of the programmer/performer; notes that don’t take themselves too seriously but also don’t fall into the trap of cheesy joviality and cheap shots; notes that are conceived with imagination; notes that help the readers focus their ears on the music and perhaps notice things they wouldn’t have otherwise; notes that give insightful context for the music… I could go on. 

Footnotes…

* This kind of statement is just as bad as Rupert Murdoch’s recent throwaway line about American classrooms: “Most American classrooms haven’t changed much since the days of Grover Cleveland. You have a teacher, a piece of chalk, a blackboard – and a room full of kids.” (And why exactly is Murdoch suddenly interested in American education?) 

† It always pains me to temper a good story with the truth, but Bach wasn’t jailed for drinking and f---king, unless perhaps you use that last word in a loose, figurative sense. In 1717, while trying to arrange an early dismissal from his Weimar post so he could take up a more lucrative and satisfying one in Cöthen, Bach lost his temper with (probably) his noble employer. Thus “…on November 6, the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge’s place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from his arrest with notice of his unfavourable discharge.” Actually, you could argue that this is a far more interesting reason to be arrested than mere drunkenness, and more revealing of Bach’s personality. At least I think so.

Frequently Asked Questions

I don’t normally publish my program notes here, but this one has already been seen online and is about to get an Australian reprise. I’m quite fond of it, because it’s one of those occasions where I’ve been able to craft a piece of writing that in its structure and rhetoric mirrors some aspect of the music itself.

The work is Charles Ives' Unanswered Question, and the note goes like this:

FAQs

 Q. Who was Charles Ives?

A. Ives came from a well-off New England family with its fair share of eccentricity (‘…odd, but in a nice way,’ said his wife). He studied music at Yale then became a successful life insurance salesman who composed for the love of it. This freed him to be completely original without needing to court publishers and concert presenters. He didn’t belong to a particular stylistic school but he was hugely influential as the father of modern American music. When his Third Symphony won the Pulitzer prize he said ‘Prizes are for boys – I’m grown up!’ (He was 72.)

Q. What were his musical influences?

A. When Charles was a boy his father, a leading bandmaster, made him sing songs in one key while he accompanied him on the piano in a different key, which seems to have given him a healthy disdain for conventional harmony. Similarly, he was fascinated by things that we would call ‘wrong’: a mis-harmonised hymn tune, or the competing sounds of town bands marching in different directions, each playing their own music.

Q. What kind of music did he write?

A. Ives wrote in nearly every genre, including symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas, organ music and songs. He often quotes hymns and popular tunes, and the influence of folk music is strong. But the risk of sentimentality is countered by playful experiments with harmony and rhythm.

Q. How did he come to write The Unanswered Question?

A. The Unanswered Question was one of a pair of pieces, first performed as interludes in a New York theatre (the other was Central Park in the Dark) and together known as Two Contemplations. The flexibility of the theatre-orchestra tradition is reflected in the instrumentation: trumpet (which can be replaced by English horn, oboe or clarinet), flute quartet (third and fourth flutes replaceable by oboe and clarinet) and string orchestra or string quartet. Another theatrical aspect of the piece emerges in the staging instructions, which include placing instruments offstage.

Around this time, 1906, Ives was busy experimenting with new musical ideas. He revised The Unanswered Question in the 1930s and composer Elliott Carter arranged for its formal premiere in 1946.

Q. What does the title mean?

A. The original title was ‘A Contemplation of a Serious Matter’ or ‘The Unanswered Perennial Question’. (Central Park in the Dark was ‘A Contemplation of Nothing Serious’.) Ives’ own comments suggest metaphysical themes behind the music:

The quiet strings…represent the conventional life. We get up, and go to the office, and come home again, have dinner with the family, sit around in the evening…But sometimes there comes a Question: Is this all my life is good for? Shouldn’t I be doing something courageous for the good of humanity? This question crosses the conventional life, doesn’t fit with it. The flutes and other people try to answer, more and more intensely, but can’t seem to get through. Meanwhile the conventional life goes on, and when the Question is asked for the last time, it is still not answered.

Q. What will it sound like?

 

Yvonne Frindle ©2008

Classical Music according to Time

Recently, while making a program book, I got caught in a rabbit hole. I’ll be reproducing the Time magazine cover from 20 July 1942, which featured “Fireman Shostakovich”, and so I ended up in the Time online archives, searching for other composers – and classical musicians generally – who’d appeared on the covers since 1923.

The result isn’t very surprising. The Time covers paint as good a picture as any of classical music’s changing prominence in culture. Of the 64 covers devoted to classical music (63 if you don’t want to count Cole Porter) about three quarters appeared before 1956.

[Download a PDF of this sobering little timeline.]

Selected observations – some curious, some disheartening:

• The last classical figure to appear on a Time cover was Vladimir Horowitz in 1986. 
• The last composer to appear was Johann Sebastian Bach in 1968 and he’d been dead 218 years. (To put this in perspective, the other 11 composers to appear were all alive at the time.)
• The last musician of any kind to appear on a Time cover was Michael Jackson (in 2009).
• Opera singers were the most frequently represented type of musician, with 22 on 21 covers.
• Conductors were the next most represented, with 17. (The Rostropovich cover shows him with baton in hand and the caption “Maestro”, so I’m counting him as a conductor here.)
• The multiple appearances award goes to Toscanini with three covers. Runners up with two: Rudolf Bing, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, Koussevitsky, Paderewski, Lily Pons, Stokowski and Richard Strauss.

[EDIT: I used to have an interactive version of the timeline embedded here, but the service hosting it has long disappeared.]

Postscript…

What was surprising insofar as I hadn’t quite imagined it panning out this way, was the dominance of opera, with a relatively large number of singers. (Did Time have an interest in the Metropolitan Opera, I wonder…) Even amongst the composers and other figures, quite a few could be said to have an opera connection. Menotti, for example, featured on a cover the year The Consul won a Pulitzer prize. Mascagni is another Time composer; Richard Strauss was featured twice.

Where, oh where is Proper Discord?

Some time between 9 and 13 June 2011 Proper Discord disappeared. The blog was deleted; the twitter feed was protected then deleted altogether; the remarkable, hilarious Xtranormal videos were taken down from the YouTube channel.

I’m utterly devastated. Others’ reactions here. How will we now keep up with the Podunk Symphony Orchestra, not to mention the doings of principal oboe Puffy Sphincter? Who will make us simultaneously laugh and wince?

As one follower said, “I hope we’re not losing our voice of reason.” But I fear we have. The signs point to a sudden and comprehensive retreat from the internet; not abandonment or hiatus. One tiny consolation: the 364 of us who were subscribing via Google Reader still have the astutely witty and uncompromisingly logical assessments of the state of music marketing to consult in private.

Checkmate

I really didn’t want Checkmate to turn out a period piece.

My expectations were based on memories of seeing the ballet as a teenager, and the powerful images of fear and raw anguish present in the photos of Robert Helpmann’s performances as the Red King in 1937 and then – when he was on the verge of death himself – in the Australian Ballet’s first production in 1986. There’s an intensity of emotion that comes through even a still photo. Especially a still photo.

And there lies one of the ballet’s challenges: its 1930s stylisation and sometimes static staging – like a tableau – often work against the drama of the scenario by composer Arthur Bliss.

All the same, I liked it. I liked the stylisation, the arcane, almost courtly presentation of a passionate theme; I liked the music. The fact that the scenario was devised by the composer – as opposed to the composer writing to someone else’s scenario – is a source of strength. It’s a remarkable and important work. It has integrity. I even liked Ninette de Valois’ choreographic language, all sur la pointe and, as Colin Peasley so aptly describes it, “very stabby”.

So it made me sad that more people in the theatre didn’t really warm to it. At least not on Tuesday night, when for a moment I feared the tepid applause wouldn’t last long enough for a proper curtain call. 

If I’m rational about it, I can see why it might not truly resonate with audiences in 2011. At least nowadays, this is a ballet that digs its own grave.

If Death is going to win out over Love – and let’s face it, it does this on stage all the time – then we must want to cast our lot in with Love. But in Checkmate, Love’s representatives are old, frightened and feeble, or young, naive and sentimental. (Seriously, Red Queen, what made you think for a minute that pleading would gain you any ground against a stronger woman??) As for Death, he gets the better deal in that he draws the winning colour.

But the Black Queen… She’s the cool, calculating female who will win at any cost and at no cost, who will flirt without an ounce of feeling, who will stab you in the back (and your King too). We know that female and we do not like her. We do not like to see her win. (I sensed a faint collective desire to boo this character, but no one seemed to feel sufficiently worked up to actually do so.)

And yet. And yet… I like it!

Of course, for me it’s one of those ballets that’s loaded with association and significance. All the ballet biographies and histories I devoured as a kid instilled a reverence for the names: Dame Ninette de Valois, Sir Robert Helpmann, the ‘Vic-Wells’ company… even Margot Fonteyn had a role in the premiere. Long before I saw it, it was a ballet I wanted to get to know.

Checkmate is a ballet with a distinctive, coherent style – musically and choreographically. There’s no reason why, period piece or not, it can’t be appreciated for what it is. It is stylised, it does seem arcane. That’s not a terrible thing when the inspiration is chess – calculating, drawn out, merciless, and yet as capable of arousing passions as the next game. But is chess the best analogy for a contest between love and death? Life and death, yes; you don’t need Ingmar Bergman to prove that. But Love as a contestant? Perhaps that’s the weakness. A chessboard scenario with its cool strategy offers no sensible place for Love, which is perhaps why she is so poorly defended in the match.

In the end, the Tuesday audience gave its most rapturous applause to a set of slow pas de deux danced to Arvo Pärt. (Apparently a copyright symbol is a compulsory part of its title. What’s next? Hamlet^©?) There was no dramatic conflict here. It was perfectly controlled, exquisitely executed. In many ways it was even cooler and more technically calculating than Checkmate, the music was certainly more static. But, and this is the important part for the 21st-century sensibility, it managed to be more sensuous and was entirely lovely. Checkmate will never be “lovely” but it will always intrigue me.

’Twas on a Friday morning…

…the electrician came.

Actually, it was Friday afternoon and the fuse attached to the elderly wiring for my ceiling lights had blown. We established via scientific method that I still had functioning lights in my sunroom, kitchen, lounge room and office; the problem was somewhere in the cable for the bedroom and bathroom. What happened next I’m not sure, but I believe it involved a circuit breaker and more scientific method. I now have no lights anywhere until Tuesday, possibly Thursday.

As someone reminded me, all this sounded rather like the Flanders and Swann classic, The Gasman Cometh, which I give you here in a charming Lego animation by Rick:

 

Operaplot 2011: Butterfly Fan Art

The operaplot madness this year includes a fan art category. So I’m abandoning my customary wordie cleverness to pay tribute to the best operaplot of all with inks and aquarelles on watercolour paper.

Operaplot by @primalamusica, art by @frindley

Postscript…

If this Pinkerton looks rather more like a ballet dancer than an opera singer it’s because earlier this evening I allowed myself to get all weepy at the Australian Ballet’s Madame Butterfly.

Operaplot 2011: 5 out of 12

On this third time around (fourth actually, but I didn’t play in the first year), the Omniscient Mussel’s operaplot competition caught me off guard. As a result, my participation has been, let’s say, desultory.

But about four hours before the deadline (2pm Saturday, Sydney time) I figured there was no harm in submitting some old favourites. In the process I surprised myself by coming up with a few new ones, including one for Carmen, which has eluded me till now. Here goes (new operaplots are in bold)…

Just sayin’ what I’ve always thought…
“And what is the use of a Cinderella,” thought Alice, “without glass slippers or pumpkins?” #rossinidowntherabbithole #operaplot

Brutalised Soldat leads a dissonant existence; stabs inconstant mistress; only saved from serial crime by accidental drowning. #operaplot

Operaplotter makes underhanded attempt at playing critic…
The nuclear-physical Trinity meets the metaphysical three-person’d god in Adamsian setting. John Donne wins. #operaplot

The park is pointillistic, the whole thing rhymes internally, the hat is quite artistic, Georges’ Sunday lasts eternally. #operaplot

Former Australian convict returns to London for culinary career change & some nasty close shaves; mad wife smells mischief. #operaplot

Pretty respectable widow & proud former flame waltz around the matter of money in the shadow of the Pontevedrian economic crisis. #operaplot

Son abandoned after patricidal prediction, kills father anyway AND marries his mother. That kind of thing will turn you blind. #operaplot

She’s a heartbreaker, he’s a deserter, the other one’s on PETA’s list. Why weren’t they checking for knives at stage door? #operaplot

Weekly winding ritual and manifold, mixed-up indiscretions behind the counter prove good for clock business in Toledo. Cuck-old! #operaplot

The following evocation of a classic Sesame Street song left me yearning for just another 20 characters. As it was, an ellipsis had to stand in for the penultimate phrase – whistle or hum at will.
1 2 3 bat on a bench 1 2 3 jailing offense 1 2 3 fancy dress 1 2 3 oh what a mess 1 2 3 silly revenge… 1 2 3 doing the batty bat! #operaplot

Lively maid betrothed to village idiot :( But marriage bargain turns out ok in G&S-style birth switch :) Exit pursued by a bear. #operaplot

This last operaplot I entered again not only because I’m very fond of it but because this year’s judge, Eric Owens, has been reading selected entries on video. I live in the hope that he’ll sing this one…
Hello muddah, hello faddah, I'm in love w/ Gioconda! But she hates me (so enticing), And goes in for all this noble sacrificing. #operaplot

Catalogue of Characteristics Imputed to Keys. Updated.

C SHARP MINOR

c.1784 – C.F.D. Schubart
Penitential lamentation, intimate conversation with God…; sighs of disappointed friendship and love lie in its radius.

1792 – Justin Heinrich Knecht
Despair.

1827 – J.A. Schrader
A depraved, insane mind and despair are expressed by the sharp sounds of this key.

1830 – G.F. Ebhardt
Despair. [Still]

1835 – August Gathy
Serious, intimate conversation, sighs of disappointed friendship and love. [Now where have I read that before?]

1837 – Ferdinand Hand
Melancholy, sighing longing, lament over one’s sins, but also heartfelt pity. Beethoven wrote the Fantasy Op.27 No.2 [‘Moonlight’ Sonata] in this key…every listener is inwardly moved and exalted.

1843 – Hector Berlioz
Tragic, sonorous, elegant.

2011 – Tim Minchin
Profound, deep; the dark side. A dark red colour (thank you Wookie).

Trolls

Since I’m immersed in all things Peer Gynt…

The first is a trick for Mac users.
1. In System Preferences > Speech > Text to Speech, set the System Voice to Cellos.
2. In TextEdit, type the following:

We are nasty little trolls, little trolls, little trolls,
We are nasty little trolls and we are after you!

3. Select the text then choose: Edit > Speech > Start Speaking

Don’t own a Mac? It sounds like Steve Jobs should be paying Grieg royalties…

Nasty Little Trolls

This next item from a quartet of Sibelius Academy-trained cellists is suitably savage (adjust volume to taste):

 

The Six Stages of a Nickname

This year my orchestra is playing Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C major, K467. The concerto has a nickname but it’s not Mozart’s, and it rankles a lot of musical people who’d like to see it disappear. (The nickname not the concerto.)

I was reminded of this today, and so I offer you the Six Stages of a Nickname

1. Non-Name
Ein klavier konzert

2. Appropriation
Keep in mind that it wasn’t some obscure, languishing work that film-maker Bo Widerberg adopted for his soundtrack in 1967.

3. Nickname
At first, when the film is current, smart concert and record marketers tack on the name as a label for the concerto. As is generally well-known, any abstract work with a nickname (authentic or not) has an easier path to audience affections and recognition. This is proven yet again.

4. Shifting Fashion
The source film dates and makes its way to a dusty “Classics” shelf at the video shop. The nick-named concerto remains a concert staple, partly because of its inherent strengths (it was always going to be popular in the repertoire), partly because of the residual audience familiarity built up and then exploited via use of the nickname.

5. Role Reversal, or Perhaps Perplexity

(a) The situation reverses: instead of audiences hearing the music in the film and seeking it out in concerts and recordings, they instead encounter the nickname via the music and read its explanation in program and liner notes. They just might at some point, out of curiosity, rent the movie. (I did. Eventually.) The nicknamed concerto has, quite incidentally, become a promotion for an old film.

(b) Then, with the further passage of time (sooner in some parts of the world than others), it transpires that very few know the origin of the nickname at all. Perhaps – and why not! – they assume the nickname refers to a dedicatee, like Beethoven’s Razumovsky Quartets.

6. Rejection
Increasingly – and this is surely a sign of the times – the nickname is being rejected. In the 1980s we were urged to grin and bear it (the nickname is very handy and it’s here to stay). Thirty years later concert promoters and record labels are less and less likely to list the nickname in any way that grants it legitimacy. My orchestra, for example, no longer includes the nickname as part of the concerto’s title in its repertoire index or publicity listings. On the other hand, we’d be nuts to deny a famous label to which a good portion of the concert audience still responds. So the nickname is mentioned in passing in the brochure copy, and will certainly warrant a fleeting reference somewhere in the program notes.

My thoughts: first, nicknames are mighty useful and, whether we like it or not, they have a demonstrable effect on the reception of the music. Mozart’s contemporaries knew that, and there are plenty of 18th-century works that were given nicknames by the public or by canny publishers. Second, there’s no shortage of nicknames whose origins are irrelevant or uncertain or forgotten – ‘La passione’, for example – but we still use them. On those grounds, maybe we’re too harsh on this legacy from the 1960s. All the same, I’d like to see it fade away.

By the way, our soloist this year hasn’t seen Elvira Madigan. He’s not sure he really wants to!

Clapping, coughing, yawning…

So the local broadsheet published “the insiders’ guide to the arts” in Saturday’s Spectrum – “From scoring the best seat in the house to what you should wear to the opera, get your year in culture off on the right foot.”

It was an innocuous enough exercise – just space filler for the holidays. But it managed to make me twitchy all the same. Here’s why.

It was presented as a series of plausible questions, with responses from industry professionals.

Theatre: are programs worth the money? which performance in a run should I catch? where can I find innovative new work? do critics consider value for money in their reviews? is it worth buying tickets for previews? how should I enter a row to reach my seat?

Visual Arts: where can I spot the stars of tomorrow? how long should I look at a painting? should I read the caption/label before or after looking at the artwork?

Opera: which opera is the best introduction? what should I wear? should I read about the opera beforehand? should I read the surtitles?

Venues: where are the best seats in the house? (Fortunately Richard Evans didn’t reveal the truly best seats for orchestral concerts in the Sydney Opera House. Phew.)

Then…

Classical Music: “Why can’t I clap between movements?” [Yawn] “What should I do if someone near me is coughing (or I am coughing)?” [Double yawn]

You’ll notice I’ve italicised the four questions that relate to some aspect of etiquette or external behaviour. All the other questions are connected to one’s experience of the art form itself. And you’ll also notice that for every art form, except classical music, we have sensible questions that get down to the nub of things.

And for classical music all we get is two tired old questions about etiquette. Nothing about the experience or the art form.

I’m not sure who to blame here. The journalists? Perhaps. Or is it the classical music scene itself that’s at fault if these are the only questions that occur to people in relation to what we do? I fear this might be the case.

But how I would have loved to have seen Rory Jeffes, or whoever, answer these questions (freely ripped from our companion art forms):
Where can I find innovative new classical music?
Where can I spot the classical music stars of tomorrow?

Postscript…

Not to mention these ones:
Should I listen to the music or read about it before the concert?
Should I read the program notes before, during or after the performance?
Should I follow the printed text (or surtitles) during a vocal work?

Dear Commentator…

To: The blogosphere
From: Thomasina, who edits program books
Re: When you write about concert program notes

Don’t take the most arcane, technical descriptive phrase you can find, quote it out of context, and suggest this style represents the entire genre. I know, it’s amusing to make fun of this way of writing about music. (Shakespeare…announces his subject at once in the infinitive, anyone?) Just remember, it’s increasingly atypical. That’s why we can laugh at it.

While we’re on this point, if you’re going to make up the most arcane, technical descriptive phrase you can muster, admit to this. Don’t imply that you actually read it somewhere. (Although usually truth is more embarrassing than fiction.)

Be clear about your context and points of reference. Avoid extrapolating unfairly.

Which means, don’t tell your readers that all program notes suck and that they’re the source of classical music’s ills. This doesn’t help the cause, when many in this field are working their butts off for stylistic and technological change.

Some program notes, both new and old, can be poorly written, stuffy or unhelpful — you’re welcome to call us on it — but don’t suggest this is necessarily the status quo throughout the concert-presenting world today.

Better still, set yourself a challenge: for every weak or unhelpful example you give, find and cite an example that’s admirable, or which is heading in the right direction. Believe me, those examples are there to be found.

Along the same lines, before proposing your brilliant new idea, take a poke around the internet and check there aren’t concert presenters doing this already, perhaps for years. You’ll make a more positive contribution to the discussion by saying “The XSO’s scratch-and-sniff program notes are really great and I wish more people would try it” than by suggesting no one has ever thought of it before.

Postscript…

In case you’re thinking Thomasina is a tad humourless, she laughed her head off at this.

And thanks to David Carkeet, whose meme she nicked.

A period piece

At work we’re about to move premises, which has inspired a flurry of decluttering. (Although not perhaps quite as much a flurry as the organisers of the move would like.) This kind of behaviour is infectious, and has prompted some decluttering at home as well. The other motivation was the arrival of Richard Taruskin’s five-volume History of Western Music for Oxford, which made me realise that I needed to clear some shelves or buy some shelves.

I’ve not been as successful as I’d like, mainly because it’s too easy to be distracted by oddities unearthed. Like this number from 1968:

They don’t publish Teach Yourself books like they used to…

Some gems:

“It helps not at all towards a true understanding of his music  to be told that Mr. X is a serialist with neo-Romantic leanings, that he was born in Argentina, that he lives in Clapham Junction.”

“It is a characteristic of our age to take to pieces, to analyse. Yet what is remarkable is not that so much contemporary music is not understood, but that the listener should feel the necessity to understand it. No art exists primarily to be understood; it exists to be admired: to be a source of beauty, not of knowledge.”

And a quotation from Milton Babbitt’s 1964 description of Stravinsky’s Movements:

‘This compositional variety is mediated by a highly redundant set structure a second-order all-combinatorial set, each set form is hexachordally equivalent to or totally disjunct from fifteen other set forms, so that one-third of all the available set forms belong to a collection of sets which are hexachordally aggregrate forming, that is, hexachordally identical.’

You’ll be pleased to know that Mr Routh gives Mr Babbitt the benefit of the doubt. (And in fairness the source is an academic journal.) All the same, he’s right to point out how unhelpful this sort of thing is to anyone seeking to understand Stravinsky’s purpose.

Postscript…

And the composers? That’s always telling. Routh begins with Busoni and Debussy, followed by: Stravinsky, Messiaen, the Second Viennese School, electronic music and later serialism, Vaughan Williams and Tippett as well as “the English scene”, Ives, Copland and Varèse (and “the American scene”). The really interesting bits remain the appendices, setting out programming patterns for the BBC and selected British orchestras in the mid-1960s.

Florestan’s Follies: the Bob Schumann Show

Since I’m technically on holidays, I’ve decided to post a piece of pure whimsy that I unearthed while tidying my hard drive (well, what do you do when you’re on holidays?). It dates from my days working for a period instrument orchestra in Cleveland and it was intended for a subscriber newsletter, hence the “in” character of some of the jokes, especially those referring to mythology and matters celestial.

Florestan’s Follies

On arrival in heaven, Robert Schumann was granted one wish. Since he had always longed to be a late-night celebrity chat show host, “Florestan’s Follies” became a weekly highlight on celestial television. One memorable program featured Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert as guests. Through grave diligence and sheer imagination we have obtained a rare and valuable transcript of the conversation.

RS: My guests tonight are two of the profoundest and most inspiring composers I know: Beethoven the German genius, godlike and intimidating, and Schubert, a shy Austrian better known to his friends as Little Mushroom [Schwammerl]. They lived in the same city for three decades, and never met!

Well, tonight we bring them together in anticipation of the groundbreaking performances of their music that will be taking place in Cleveland, Ohio.

Franz – welcome! I’ve admired your work ever since I heard the Erlkönig song. I played it over and over again when I was at law school.

FS: Thank you! I’m proud of that one.

RS: And Ludwig – you’re looking well! I notice you haven’t brought your ear trumpet?

LvB: That’s the nice thing about being in heaven – I have my hearing back. What’s not so good is discovering that the mercury treatments probably caused more harm than good. You know, the best thing my doctor ever did for me was to send a crate of good wine when I was on my deathbed.

RS: Well, I have to say that one of the best things about heaven for me is that I’ve been able to hear all of Franz’s music that was completely unknown in my time. Perfect, poetic works that simply never saw the light of day, didn’t even get a private performance. Whole symphonies! And unwhole symphonies too. Take the Eighth Symphony…buried away for years before it was performed. And it’s sublime!

Now I’ve always firmly believed that where the rest of us use a diary to set down our momentary feelings, you, Franz, use a piece of manuscript paper. Your music is your diary. So tell me, what’s the story behind this particular Unfinished Symphony?

FS: Well, you know Bob, a rather clever musicologist working in the 1930s found a semi-autobiographical dream that I wrote down and speculated that this symphony follows the events of the dream. In which case it’s not “unfinished” at all, but quite complete in two movements.

RS: Fascinating. But that theory doesn’t account for the fact that you made a draft of a scherzo movement.

FS: Exactly! And the finale too. But the musicologists haven’t found that yet. So, for now, some people are compromising with an Entr’acte from my Rosamunde music. It really doesn’t work. Better to stick with the two movements I did finish.

LvB: And why didn’t you finish it? I didn’t finish my Tenth, of course, but death has this habit of getting in the way of works in progress. You can’t claim that as an excuse; at least not with this symphony.

FS: To be honest, Herr Beethoven…

LvB: Ludwig, please!

FS: To be honest, it was your fault. We were all left in your shadow, you know. All of us. Me; Robert here; Mendelssohn; Berlioz; even Wagner, though he was in denial. You know what Grillparzer said at your funeral? Well, of course you do, but the audience doesn’t. He said: “He was an artist…Who can stand beside him?’ After that, my friends and I went to the “Castle of Eisenstadt” and drank till one in the morning [got sloshed]. I mean, how do you write a symphony after “Beethoven Nine”? We all struggled with that. And I had only gotten so far in the Eighth Symphony. The Ninth – the Great C Major – was better in that respect.

RS: Was it ever! That is one amazing symphony – heavenly length, like a novel in four volumes by Jean Paul!

Now Ludwig, I’ve been meaning to ask you about your Pastoral Symphony, the Sixth. Franz was just talking about how his Unfinished could be heard in terms of a program, a narrative. That’s not so uncommon, of course, but what makes your symphony different? Can we really call it “program music”.

LvB: The first important thing is there on the title page, Bob: “More the expression of feeling than painting.” And the second important thing is that I wasn’t thinking of myself as a tone artist [Tonkünstler, the usual word for a musician], I was a tone poet [Tondichter]. That’s the crux of it. 

FS: But what about the thunderstorm? And the peasants dancing? And the bird calls? You even labeled them in the music: quail, cuckoo, and… what was the other one?

RS: Nightingale.

FS: That’s all program music: painting not poetry. How can you say that thundering timpani and a shrieking piccolo is “feelings in tones” when it’s blindingly obvious that it’s a thunderstorm?

LvB: [Ludwig looks uncomfortable and begins to scowl.]

RS: Well, we have to wrap before the next ad break. You know that Apollo’s Fire will be performing your symphonies in Cleveland next month?

LvB: Don’t we ever! Apollo talks about nothing else!

RS: And they’re beginning the program with your Leonore Overture No.3, Ludwig – one of the four overtures you wrote for your only opera, Fidelio. Now Franz, you were telling me how you first came to hear this opera…

FS: That’s right. The final version of Fidelio premiered when I was about seventeen. I had to sell my schoolbooks to get a ticket. But it was worth it.

RS: It certainly must have been. But that’s all we have time for now. It’s been great to have you both on the show.

LvB: Perhaps we should catch up again for those concerts? I hear they’re using all the right instruments.

RS: Absolutely. Concerts in Akron, Severance Hall and Oberlin. We’ll be there! Or at least, you two will; and I’ll be there in spirit!

Yvonne Frindle takes responsibility for whatever may have been lost in the translation of this curious artifact. All flights of fancy have at least tenuous connections to musical scholarship.

Cheese and composers

Last week The Telegraph, The Guardian and The Evening Standard trotted out a Reader’s Digest survey of 1516 people, proclaiming in turn that “Bocconcini cheese balls” were mistaken for classical music, that Britons are therefore “clueless about classical music”, and – here I’m really puzzled – that “Britons pick cheese balls as top composer”.

Why let the truth get in the way of a good headline? (And what more would I expect from a publication that makes a plural of rubato? But I digress.)

Apparently 4% (that’s 60.64 people) identified Bocconcini as a composer.

But what exactly does that establish?

96% recognised that bocconcini is a cheese. (Not a cheese ball, incidentally.) This has to be a good thing, for the state of a nation’s cuisine if nothing else.

And 4% quite possibly confused the cheese with the composer Giovanni Battista Bononcini, “perhaps one of the most underrated composers of the early-mid 18th century”. Which suggests that at some point they’ve actually heard of the composer. Given his astonishing obscurity, that’s no mean feat.

In Defence of the Harpsichord, Which Finds Itself in Mortal Peril

There’s one thing everyone knows about Beethoven – he was deaf. And there’s one thing everyone knows about the harpsichord – it sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin roof.

Exactly when Sir Thomas Beecham got to hear skeletons doing anything on a tin roof, I don’t know. Nowadays you’d be able to do some kind of CSI reconstruction: anatomically correct bones bouncing about on a suitable surface with groovy animated trajectories.

My science and my animation skills aren’t up to the task, but it doesn’t take much to imagination to realise that Sir Thomas got it completely wrong. Everyone knows that skeletons – on a tin roof – sound like this:

Skeletons on a tin roof

Postscript…

This post was inspired by a certain person’s effrontery in calling his blog “To Kill a Harpsichord”. Nonetheless, my best wishes go with him in what sounds like a really fabulous opportunity. If you’re feeling benevolent, head over and sign the petition.

Archer and the ACO: A compliment misses its mark

On Tuesday the people at Bell Shakespeare sent me off to The Australian with a provocative quote: “I personally probably don’t need to see another Shakespeare.” This turned out to be from an interview with Robyn Archer. She said something else too (I’ll include the journalist’s intro for context):

Archer qualifies this by saying that enlivening the classics and preserving heritage is important: “If a great piece of Haydn or Mozart in the hands of Richard Tognetti and the Australian Chamber Orchestra drums into you in a way that is so fresh you feel like you have never heard it before, go for it, but never at the expense of fresh ideas, because in the end, that is the heart of the creative country.”

And my instinctive reaction to that was: How I wish she’d said: “If a Haydn symphony in the hands of Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the SSO drums into you in a way that is so fresh you feel like you’ve never heard it before…”’

I saw the comment as a genuine compliment, and as the expression of an unimpeachable piece of advice: go for the classics when you can find them in vital performances but don’t turn your back on new ideas.

My only gripe was the way the ACO has become the cited-orchestra-of-choice whenever it comes to summoning up an image of fresh, vital performances of the classical canon. This is not all that surprising. But the cliché skews things, as clichés do, because the ACO does not in fact have this particular corner of activity completely sewn up in a bag.

It turns out, though, that the ACO, or rather one writer responding for the ACO, doesn’t see it as a compliment at all. Archer’s comment has been held up as some kind of negative alongside a glowing concert review from Vincent Plush that appeared the day before.

First the link. http://www.aco.com.au/Default.aspx?url=/blog

And the date, which you’ll need to find the post: 14 July 2010. It’s called “Response to The Australian”.

Now I sympathise with the frustration around this newly fashionable (and indeed pernicious) idea of “heritage” art. I wholeheartedly agree that there is absolutely no justification, in principle, for setting it up as the polar opposite to anything new and fresh as if they are mutually exclusive. And it’s true the interview as reported doesn’t make the point that the ACO programs old repertoire alongside new music in admirable ways.

But I challenge anyone reading the interview to interpret Archer’s comment as lambasting preservers of heritage. She’s saying that – although she personally never needs to see another Shakespeare – the classics are important, and she then singles out the ACO, not as “guardians of the old” but as an exemplar of an ensemble that interprets those classics in ways that make you feel like you’ve never heard them before.

And in my book that’s a serious compliment.

Postscript…

Previously the ACO used the blogger service. Just this week they’ve moved their posts onto their website at the address given above. At this new location there isn’t a feed that you can subscribe to or follow; it’s no longer possible to link to a specific post url; and it’s no longer possible to comment on posts. Whatever you want to call it, the ACO is no longer blogging.

Un Salon des Refusés

Following in a long and noble tradition, I bring you a Salon des Refusés. It’s a personal and in some ways haphazard selection – simply what caught my eye during the week and again during the checking process. I fear I may have forgotten some favourites, in which case I’ll have to add them in later. These may not have won in the main round, but they made me smile and I want to keep them around somewhere handy.

Organised alphabetically by opera (discounting the articles)…

Pattyoboe – Leaving your husband & child isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. In the end she finally gets on track.
Anna Karenina

Thos Carpenter – Let’s all try to figure out why the King of Sweden was assassinated in Boston. I think it has something to do with the censors.
Un ballo maschera

Jose S Piano – He sings. He schemes. He lies for the lovers. He steals keys. He evades arrest. But does he actually cut hair?
The Barber of Seville

Prima La Musica – Ad man, ladies’ man, lucky man. Dead man, changed man, madman. New man, green man, Honey’s man. Good man. It’s bliss, man.
Bliss

Prima la musica – Betty’s a Bitch, Johnny’s a Jerk, Lucy’s a Leftie, David’s a Dealer. Honey’s a Hooker-with-a-Heart. But Harry? He’s just a Joy.
Bliss again, #incaseyoumissedbliss

Prima la musica – Contestant on macabre Hungarian gameshow ignores all hints from the host and opens one mystery door too many
Bluebeard’s Castle

P Schleuse – Some folks shun CosiFanTutte, find its characters too fruity. Its moral yet is worth a ponder: Absence Makes the Heart Go Wander
(like it says)

P Schleuse – If a Trojan prince comes courting, take him hunting if you’re sporting. But beware of evil mirth, or you’ll end up laid in earth
Dido and Æneas

Dumble Dad – @belinda Remember me but oh do not archive my tweets.
(Because you can never have too much Purcell, although the same might not be said for Twitter)

Classical Review – Notion. ‘Potion’. Commotion. Emotion. Devotion.
L’Elisir d’amore

Sam Neuman – Today on Ricki Lakovsky: Eugene wouldn’t give Tatiana a second look when she was a kid-but look at her now! Come on out, Tatiana!
Eugene Onegin

Where’s Runnicles? – We’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars or, more specifically, dreaming of the moon and the 15th century
The Excursions of Mr Broucek

Jennifer Stumm – Hell, I would’ve been better off staying home with a margarita.
Faust

Otterhouse – Just like the opera she was called Leonora,but sacrifices that name for Florestans sake.This offer comes free with four overtures
Leonore Fidelio

Maura Lafferty – Max enters competition to win love. Kaspar has help from below, not above. Bullet flies, someone dies. Karma fits like a glove.
Der Freischütz

MMmusing – In2 the woods we hav 2 go/Our ma is really mad u know/Somebody call 2 DSS & get us an attorney/In2 the woods 2 GINGERbread house!
Hänsel und Gretel (ok, I confess, musical theatre references catch my eye)

Lattavanti – Creepy shepherd forms cult, convinces king to embrace Nietzsche waaaaaay before it was cool.
King Roger

Harry Fiddler – Desperate housewife shags the help, knifes the hubby, knocks off the in-law and ends up in a ditch. Should be on TV. Maybe it is
Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk

Nicole Brockmann – Hindu priest’s daughter, spurned by one who loved honour more, Delibes-erately offs self w/datura. Sponsored by British Airways
Lakmé

Olivia Giovetti – If you knew what happened to the first couple who heard it, you may rethink using that ubiquitous bridal march.
Lohengrin (I don’t know that it’s a plot exactly, but I wholeheartedly agree)

Alejoplay – Everyone thought Lucia was mad when she insisted it would be a simple ceremony
Lucia di Lammermoor

Prima la musica – Amatory lepidopterist traps fragile specimen among Nagasaki cherry blossoms. Fumbling to release her, he crushes her instead.
Madama Butterfly

Talopine – The crew play baseball / In the desert’s heat. And wait. / And…stay with the plane.
Madeline Lee

Meister Mole – “Nürnberg’s Got Talent”
Die Meistersinger

N Brockmann – Ripped from the headlines: sad clown loses it; stabs wife+her lover for real, not pretend. Hey–wasn’t this a Law & Order episode?
Pagliacci

Classical Review – Do the worst things happen at sea? The villagers seem to think so.
Peter Grimes

Otterhouse – The Postilion always marries twice…
Le postillon de Lonjumeau

Eighth Blackbird – An ageing, nostalgic Duchess recalls her youth. Sings an aria while giving fellatio. ’Nuff said.
Powder Her Face

Irene Vartanoff – I’ll build a castle in Paradise, I’m going to get there at any price; Stand aside, I’m on my way (Wotan, apologize to Gershwin)
Das Rheingold (despite not being that into Wagner, I am seriously into Gershwin)

David Karlin – The rivers of Germany are lined with gold. But if you have any sense of destiny, keep your hands off.
Das Rheingold again, my sentiments exactly!

Lattavanti – After decades away, man returns home to free faithful wife from contrapuntal suitors, burden of singing only in recitative.
Il ritorno d’Ulisse in patria

Pattyoboe – Love is in the air and at Bullier’s! But her sordid past nixes marriage; it’s something she just can’t swallow
La Rondine

MMmusing – The first chord puts tonality on notice. The ending lets Isolde Liebestod us.
Tristan und Isolde

P Schleuse – What with this hallucination, country life is no vacation. You’ll see him if you sort of squint: that creepy guy is Peter Quint.
The Turn of the Screw

Music Vs Theater – Mix one part Mary Poppins and one part Sixth Sense. Turn until screwed.
The Turn of the Screw

primalamusica – It’s just like The Sound of Music, but with ghosts & Freudian angst instead of schmaltz & Nazis. And the kids are even creepier
The Turn of the Screw (at least, I swear this one was entered for 2010, but it’s not showing up except for 2009; maybe I was just imagining it…)

Prima la musica – Unrequited lover’s talent for maudlin poetry is dwarfed by his spectacular gift for RUINING Christmas.
Werther

MMmusing – Pamina! I just saw a pic of Pamina. Her mom’s a crazy dame & sent it in a frame to me. Pamina! I just dissed a girl named Pamina.
Die Zauberflöte (there’s another very aMMmusing one on the same theme, which made its way into a movie trailer, but I got sucked in by the Sondheim/Bernstein reference of this effort)

****

I’ve already revealed my all-time favourite. If I had to pick two runners up they would be Otterhouse’s Le postillon de Lonjumeau – which is wonderfully epigrammatic, to the point, and a very, very clever use of a cross-cultural reference – and Primalamusica’s Bluebeard’s Castle, which is elegantly apt and completely unforced.

I would then give MMmusing a special prize for uniting the pleasures of musical theatre with the intricacies of opera. Pattyoboe would get the prize for punning. ClassicalReview would get the Sondheim award for perfect internal rhyming. And I could probably go on inventing prizes for everyone. Which is ultimately the greatest pleasure and reward of the whole week: following the whimsy and creativity of all these wonderful wordie-nerdie-musical types. Congratulations to everyone, and a big thank you to the OM for making all this happen.

Butterflies and tomatoes

Others have assembled their personal shortlist of favourites from the 2010 #operaplot entries; someone has even created a taxonomy of #operaplot types.

I’ve been too pressed for time, alas. And so, as the clock ticks down to the announcement of the final results, I will simply put in my personal vote for what I think is the best, the most compleat, the most brilliant, the most poetic, and the most beautiful of #operaplots – the one that should stand as a model for us all:

Amatory lepidopterist traps fragile specimen among Nagasaki cherry blossoms. Fumbling to release her, he crushes her instead.

And I swear, if @primalamusica doesn’t win this time, I will eat a plate of tomatoes!

Operaplot housekeeping: Part 2

And here follow my final 13 entries in the 2010 #operaplot competition. A few more reprises from last year, but also some eleventh-hour inspiration.

13. Die Ägyptische Helena
ß-blocking lotus potion turns tortuous plot (with only @missmussel as company) into “splendidly vacuous” Poseidon adventure. #operaplot

14. Feuersnot
The title’s a falsche Freund (burning mucous???); turns out a comely virgin will light the #operaplot fires on a bed of Wagner references.
I’d like to say that my misspelling of the German adjective (should be ‘falscher’) was deliberate in view of keeping to a character count, but in fact there was room for another letter and I just made a mistake.

15. Capriccio
You know it’s getting too meta when onstage chamber music takes over the overture & we launch into a conversation piece about Art #operaplot

16. Batavia
Some uptight, upright Dutch founder Down Under and all comes asunder. The Lord of the Flies meets the East India Co. #operaplot

17. Bliss (2)
Be still my beating heart; the dead white-suited male wakes to a polonaise. Hell, it seems, is a bass clarinet; heaven is Honey. #operaplot

18.b A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Britten)
Indian boys flit th’rough phrygian brier, lovers wander til they tire; fairy tricks, mechanical ass; triple wedding & a bergamask #operaplot

19. La Cenerentola
“And what is the use of a Cinderella,” thought Alice, “without glass slippers or pumpkins?” #operaplot #rossinidowntherabbithole

20. The Spanish Hour (L’Heure espagnole)
Weekly winding ritual & manifold, mixed-up indiscretions behind the counter prove good for clock business in Toledo. Cuck-old! #operaplot

21. Oedipus Rex
Son abandoned after patricidal prediction, kills father anyway AND marries his mother. That kind of thing will turn you blind. #operaplot

22. La Gioconda
Hello muddah, hello faddah, I’m in love w/ Gioconda! But she hates me (so enticing), And goes in for all this noble sacrificing. #operaplot
One of my favourites from last year – nearly forgotten!

23. Lucia di Lammermoor
How do you solve a problem like Lucia? How can a marriage splice the feuding kilts? (Madness, death & the moonbeam’s out of hand) #operaplot

24. The Love for Three Oranges
Been dying of boredom cos Morgana banned LOLs & now you’re saying I have to go find fruity princesses? W/E #operaplot sponsored by Sunkist

25. Wozzeck
Brutalised Soldat leads a dissonant existence; stabs inconstant mistress; only saved from serial crime by accidental drowning. #operaplot

Operaplot housekeeping: Part 1

This year’s entries so far, mostly reprises, with just over 12 hours to go before #operaplot 2010 is over. (Opera titles link to actual tweets for the pedantic.) Can I come up with 13 new operaplots in the time or am I suffering from some strange Antipodean writer’s block?

1. Bliss
What’s the Joyful feeling when the opera’s Harried hero dies three times (so the author said), but nobody dies at the end? Bliss! #operaplot

2. A double bill: Prima la musica…/Der Schauspieldirektor
First the music then the [Italian] words? Or a flustered impresario auf Deutsch? Opera vs Singspiel playoff in Joe 2’s orangerie. #operaplot

3. Rigoletto
He had a hunch, the Duke was up to no good. Precautions futile: between ducal charm & noble curse Gilda didn’t stand a chance. #operaplot

4. Doctor Atomic
The nuclear-physical Trinity meets the metaphysical three-person’d god in Adamsian setting. John Donne wins. #operaplot

5. The Golden Cockerel (aka Le Coq d’or)
Ki-kiri-kuku! Silly recumbent king finds that relying on avian warning system for border control costs him sons, bride and life. #operaplot

6. The Invisible City of Kitezh or the Maiden Fevronia
Saintly forest maid weds prince (cue balalaikas) Tartars disrupt honeymoon (cue Bb min) Ghostly reunion in misty city (cue bells) #operaplot

7. The Merry Widow (aka Die lustige Witwe)
Pretty respectable widow & proud former flame waltz around the matter of money in the shadow of the Pontevedrian economic crisis. #operaplot

8. Dialogues of the Carmelites [with thanks to the Met Opera quiz]
Begins in French. Shy miss flees aristo danger for Carmelite cloister. Martyrdom not quite the plan. Ends badly and in Latin. #operaplot

9. Der Rosenkavalier
The horns orgasm and it’s all downhill from there in the face of young love. Who’s it by? Mozart: you can tell from the costumes #operaplot

10. The Telephone (Menotti) [with thanks to Verizon]
Can you hear me now? [No] Can you hear me now? [No] Damn phone. [Goes out] Can you hear me now? Good. Will you marry me? Yes! #operaplot

11. The Beggar’s Opera
Polly is a sad slut: finds upwardly mobile marriage is more encumbered than suspected. Madness & folly in a totally Gay pastiche. #operaplot

12. Giulio Cesare [in tribute to Yvonne Kenny]
See the conquering hero comes (wrong #operaplot) while she bathes in ass’s milk. Revenge & plotting saves her throne but the bath gets cold.

Operaplot 2010

Around this time last year, I found me a new addiction and time waster.

And the Omniscient Mussel has just reminded me that #operaplot is happening again. Not that I’d forgotten exactly, but I hadn’t been paying proper attention to the dates.

And it’s this week. Yikes!

Entries open Monday 26 April at 9am EST. And I don’t think that’s Australian EST, so Sydneysiders are best to wait until after 11 o’clock tonight just to be on the safe side.

Entries close on Friday 30 April at midnight (or 2pm on Saturday). Thank God it’s only a week or I would get nothing done.

The rules and FAQs are here. The prizes are very enticing indeed.

Non-winning entries from the past are eligible, so those of us with treasured rejects can dust them off and send them out on another attempt. But half the fun is inventing the things, of course. The other half is following everybody else.

The entry limit is ten (your first ten contributions, anything after that is sheer indulgence). Unfortunately @FAKEfrindley was outed last time, although no one’s exactly saying you can’t enter from more than one account…

So off you go, get ye a Twitter account if you don’t have one already, and operaplot!

Postscript…

For geeky Mac-using types I recommend the Smultron text editor as a drafting tool (Smultron is Swedish for strawberry, by the way). It’s very simple, which is good for creativity, and it counts characters as you go.

Coco & Igor

The risk you run when making a movie about important musicians from history is that the pedants will be out in force. Salieri didn’t really plan to poison Mozart or make masked visitations, for example. There are really only two solutions. One is to make a truly great movie (which is why no sane person cares whether Amadeus is ‘historical’ or not). The other is to bore the pants off the pedants.

This is the solution adopted by the creators of Coco & Igor.

In theory, I should have liked this film a great deal: I’m interested in fashion history, I’m a Chanel No.5 girl, I adore Stravinsky’s music, and anything involving a substantial re-enactment of the premiere of The Rite of Spring must surely be a winner. But it left me unmoved, and by the second half I was stifling yawns continuously. Because – and there is really no getting ’round it – Coco & Igor is not a good movie.

First, an incident that might warrant a sentence in a book or a few minutes in a bio-documentary has been expanded beyond its means to fill two hours. This fleeting relationship is not a two-hour story. In fact, as a fellow sufferer kept pointing out to me, Stravinsky’s relationship with Vera Sudeikina (which followed hot on the heels of the fling with Chanel) and their eventual marriage is far more significant and interesting.

Vera is also reported to have been more beautiful than the real Coco. You wouldn’t know this, of course, because the film casts in the role of Coco a beautiful and willowy actress-model (and representative of the House of Chanel, incidentally). She does justice to the gorgeous clothes, but not so much to the script, which is minimalist, or to the emotions, which smoulder with the uniform stoniness of the modern catwalk. She is extraordinarily tall. Perhaps this is why her Igor must be a foot or so taller than he was in real life. They both look rather good in the nude. Repeatedly.

I give brownie points for the extended opening sequence showing the premiere of The Rite of Spring. (And for what sounded like a French bassoon.) The BBC documentary, Riot at the Rite, captured the ballet better and more completely, but it was spoilt a little by its English-accented audience shouting things like ‘utter twaddle’. At least the heckling in Coco & Igor is in French.

And Gabriel Yared doesn’t do too badly in creating a complementary soundtrack in a Stravinskian vein.

Someone has done some research, working into the plot Chanel’s financing of the December 1920 revival of The Rite… (to the tune of Fr.300,000), which used Roerich’s original costumes and decor but with revised choreography by Massine. But it’s probably best not to look too closely at the timeline in relation to the affair (winter 1920/21). Nor worry that Chanel’s foray into Ballets Russes costume design was later, for Cocteau’s Le Train Bleu (1924), or that Ernest Ansermet conducted the revival, not Stravinsky. Ah, picky details!

Someone – possibly the same someone – seems to think that Stravinsky practically recomposed The Rite of Spring for the revival. (Not so. Some very minor revisions were made, but after the score was published in 1921.) Even more amusing is the fond belief that composers spend their time playing over music that they composed six or seven years ago.

I can’t deny that it was all very beautiful: the aloof decor of Chanel’s villa, the period clothing eye candy. But I was left questioning the motivation behind this movie. For example, the conclusion involves a completely unnecessary ‘flash forward’, with a doddery Stravinsky yet again picking out that bassoon solo on the piano and a very elderly Coco wearing an iconic Chanel suit. I can’t help thinking that this sequence is there primarily to get on screen an example of a post-1920s Chanel design (the Chanel design), which otherwise couldn’t have been featured. The ‘aimable’ collaboration with the House of Chanel acknowledged in the credits seems to have dipped in the direction of a branding exercise.

Meanwhile, there is no genuine drama or convincing storytelling to compensate for the infelicities or the tedium. It’s not sufficient just to be good looking. I call it utter twaddle.

An imposter keeps going to the opera

I like Brett Dean’s Bliss enough to have seen it three times, but that doesn’t mean I don’t find it problematical. The stumbling block for me has been the ending, which (at its core) is simply not very operatic, or even theatrical.

The first performance I saw left me feeling slightly deflated, as if I’d just read to the end of a certain kind of New Yorker short story. Like the woman I overhead at another performance, I was thinking “That’s it then…” At this point I still hadn’t managed to finish reading Carey’s novel, so I heard Act III of the opera with no idea of what was in store other than curiosity as to whether Harry would actually die that third time. After I had finished the novel, it seemed to me that Brett Dean and Amanda Holden had dealt very well with the challenges presented by the book itself, which meanders to its conclusion in a way that isn’t suited to theatre. 

And after tonight I’ve decided that New-Yorker-short-story is the wrong analogy.

Here’s what really happens: Acts I and II are Harry Joy’s story. He’s the one you care about, the one whose struggles you share. But Act III is really Betty Joy’s story. She becomes the one whose ambition, pain and self-destruction draws empathy. A certain kind of good opera ends with someone dying, and as one person said to me, half joking, Bliss could easily end with Betty’s inflammatory suicide (not necessarily musically spectacular, but dramatically spectacular). That’s not entirely true, but you get the point. After the Board Room scene, the conclusion is something of an anticlimax. And I realised tonight that if Bliss weren’t strictly speaking all about Harry, then the final scene would probably be labelled in the libretto as the Epilogue.

You know what an epilogue is…

“No epilogue, I pray you; for your play needs no excuse. Never excuse; for when the players are all dead, there needs none to be blamed.…But come, your Bergomask: let your epilogue alone.”

But the players in Bliss are not all dead, and Harry must be there at the end, no question, and so we get the final scene, In Elysium. It’s not a Shakespearean epilogue, an “apology” and summons to applause, it’s more like the final chapter of a Regency novel. All the action has come to a conclusion, but we must needs find out what happens to the characters after and be given something improving, and possibly epigrammatic, to take away:

“If you would seek salvation, remember this:
a life in Hell can still aspire to BLISS.”

Postscript…

I’m not the first to say this, but it sure is bliss to have the libretto of a new opera reproduced in the program. Bravo Opera Australia!

Clap-trap

I should have known… Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique Symphony is on the program this week and at some point it was going to come up: this matter of clapping after the third movement.

In many ways the applause question is a big yawn. When Alex Ross’s recent lecture for the Royal Philharmonic Society turned out to be largely focused on the traditions and perils of concert applause, it occurred to me that the ABC orchestras were publishing similarly thought-provoking articles on applause back in 1994. And as one of the SSO’s fans reminded me this evening, Peter Goldsworthy’s novel Maestro (1989) offers its own brief commentary on concert-hall convention. [When earnest young concertgoer Paul shakes his head rudely at those clapping between movements, old concertgoer Herr Keller – musician and music teacher – makes a point of clapping himself.]

So what to do about the Pathétique? It’s a trap.

Everything about the third movement prompts the sensitive, uninhibited listener to applaud at the end of it. At the premiere they did. (After all the movements actually.) And you have to assume Tchaikovsky was expecting this. So is he playing up to expectation by writing something which you simply can’t resist applauding? It’s possible. The slow finale then emerges not just from the brittle triumph of the third movement but from under the echo of tumultuous applause. There’s real drama and tension in that, and Tchaikovsky would have known it.

On the other hand, if generations of modern listeners – trained by recordings to expect neatly sliced silences between movements – do the counter-intuitive thing and hold their applause after the third movement, so be it. This has its own tension and drama: the unnatural, unnerving hush following that euphoric coda, an almost palpable “sitting-on-hands”, and then the sighing opening of the finale.

For my part, I can enjoy the dramatic effect of either, which is just as well, since there’s no predicting – and certainly no controlling – what an audience will do. 

In the Pathétique there are really only two potential mishaps which have the power to spoil the drama, and neither rests in the hands of the audience: the conductor who ploughs on into the fourth movement under enthusiastic applause, and the conductor who mocks the applauding audience.

Postscript…

My solution as a program editor? It seems patronising to tell people how or when to respond to music. But it’s pointed out in two separate spots that the third movement sounds like it could be the end of the symphony but isn’t. What readers choose to do with that information is up to them.

An imposter at the opera, part the first

Not being a true opera buff, it so happened that I saw Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the first time in my life on Tuesday night. I knew only one part of it, the very beginning:

How the opening happens to be engraved in my memory is a curious story. It was played to us in Year 8 elective music as a dictation exercise and for some strange reason it’s stuck with me ever since. I’m not sure why, since I couldn’t name even one other work that was introduced to us in this way. I may have been especially attracted to the set of intervals on the words “We do wander everywhere”. Or maybe it was the glissando strings accompaniment, which wreaked havoc with our efforts to write down the melodies.

I’m quite pleased to have been able to unearth it on YouTube, especially since the only version I could find also happens to demonstrate that superbly reedy Spanish choirboy effect (Catalan, actually) that I was hankering for at times on Tuesday. Curiously, it shares echoes of the bilious green, blue and pink colour scheme in OA’s Baz Luhrmann production, but (I’m guessing) its moon remains that classic nail-paring shape for the duration of the performance.

Which brings me to the only truly annoying thing about the Luhrmann production (surely an achievement – I’m easily irritated). Perhaps because of Athens’ new-found sub-continental proximity to the Equator, the moon changed phase several times in the evening. And yet I did always think the whole point of Shakespeare’s play was that the forest adventures took place in one magical night.

But this was a very small thing – and it wasn’t enough to dampen the magic. This production deserves all the acclaim it’s earned. It’s bold, it’s imaginative and, most important, it’s sensitive to music, text and spirit. It’s a brilliant move to get the orchestra out of the pit and onto the on-stage rotunda and in doing so bring the staging further forward into the audience. If there was a downside to this, some of the orchestral balance seemed off at times. The harpsichord, for example, would emerge from the texture mid-phrase and at other odd times, and then be perplexingly inaudible in moments when I’m convinced it would have been playing. (Someone who knows and loves the piece well confirmed my suspicions on this front.) But it was nice to see the musicians as actors within the production: costumed and with a “part” to play that went beyond the usual black-garbed anonymity.

I wasn’t the only one to mark Tobias Cole’s stunning diction (and gorgeous sound): it’s a rare enough thing to be at an opera in English and not feel the slightest urge to check the surtitles. Could the interpretation have been more dangerous and oozing with the power-plays that underpin Oberon’s games? Perhaps. But I’m not sure – on one hearing – that this is in Britten’s opera; perhaps it’s only in my reading of the play, which for various reasons I’ve come to know best of all Shakespeare’s works.

All of which tells me that Britten’s Dream deserves more of my attention. And since I don’t listen to operas on recording if I can possibly help it, I guess this means I’ll need to go see it again. Once anyway.

Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire,
I do wander everywhere…