JDCMB readers are warmly invited to a drinks party on Friday at Houben's Bookshop, 2 Church Court, Richmond (about 5 mins from Richmond station) to mark the start of the ALICIA'S GIFT Concert tour-ette. 6.30pm-7.30pm and copies of the book will be on sale, as will concert tickets. Space is limited, so please call to book your place! 020 8940 1055 or 07889 399 862.
A concert trailer is here, with Viv McLean playing Rhapsody in Blue: http://jessicamusic.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/a-trailer-for-alicias-gift-concert.html
Monday, November 04, 2013
Gubaidulina speaks
As The Rest is Noise at Southbank Centre reached the 1970s, the composer Sofia Gubaidulina arrived to talk to us about spirituality in music. With Dr Marina Frolova-Walker from Cambridge to translate for her, this living legend spoke not only of those times but current ones as well; and she articulated some deep-seated truths about composition and culture that I suspect many of us sense but could scarcely express so well. Today, Gubaidulina said, is the most dangerous time humanity has ever faced, because we are facing "the global impoverishment of the human soul". We are in danger of losing the most human part of ourselves.
Art, she suggested, is always spiritual, because it springs from the subconscious, intuitive part of the mind. It reconnects us with a higher power, the higher part of our own spirit. This also serves as a moral force: she suggested that those who have lost touch with this aspect of art/culture exist without the knowledge of humanity's sensible limits, and she added that she sees such people around her all the time. Art, however, can be our "salvation".
As the space for the quiet, intuitive, spiritual self is eaten up by the ever-increasing flow of technology, information and the superficial part of the intellect, so that aspect of ourselves reduces until we risk losing it altogether. And that is what's dangerous. Along with the fact that art cannot exist without support, which means there must be people/organisations who believe in it enough to provide that support, if it is to survive...
The talk should in due course be available to listen to on the TRIN website and I'll post a link when it is up. Read more about Gubaidulina in this wonderful interview, and don't miss her violin concerto, 'Offertorium', which is to be performed on Wednesday night at the RFH, along with three works by Arvo Pärt.
Saturday, November 02, 2013
Sizzling Vespers at ROH
A last-minute invitation to the Royal Opera House's Great Big Verdi Bicentenary Production yesterday was more than welcome. Yet it conspired with blocked local train lines and slow rush-hour tubes to ensure that I arrived a hair's breadth before curtain up for an opera I didn't know, without having had time to read the story.
What a marvellous way to listen. You wouldn't look up the plot before attending a film, would you? If someone gave you a programme containing a synopsis, indeed, you might be cross. You'd call it a 'spoiler'. OK, some operas are so convoluted that we might need a little help. After our 20th Marriage of Figaro, we might have unravelled the plot enough to have some idea of what's going on. But in the era of surtitles, and of certain directors who actually know how to tell a good story when they get the chance, do we still need advance briefing? The only giveaway, in this state of blissful ignorance at a grand-scale, nearly-four-hour romantic roller-roaster, was knowing that the finish time would be 9.50pm. If hero and heroine start singing happy wedding songs at 9.20pm, you can bet your bottom dollar it's all going to go horribly wrong.
Stefan Herheim's production contains a few absolute masterstrokes. In the prologue, a ballet class is in progress. Soldiers burst in, taunt the girls, abduct them. Montfort chooses one and commits violent rape. The act is witnessed by the ballet master, powerless to help his dancer. He is Procida and becomes the rebel leader after years in exile - and you know exactly where he found his motivation. The rape victim demonstrates to her attacker what is about to happen: evoked in ballet, we see the pregnancy, the baby, the mother and child. The little boy will become Henri. Ballet is a vital part of the storytelling throughout, representing Henri's mother and her appalling history as a vital presence while the action progresses. The details are superb: for instance it's clear that the ballet girls in the crowd recognise, love and respect Procida for his original incarnation in their own world. And we see, on Procida's return to his studio, exactly how the rape of his dancer has become equated in his mind with the rape of his country.
As for Verdi in French - it sounds even weirder, if that's possible, than Verdi in English. But it is authentic, so... what was needed was better diction from most of the cast other than Hymel. And despite all the ballet - no actual ballet. There's around half an hour of designated ballet music in this opera and there was to have been a major collaboration on this between Royal Opera, Royal Ballet and Royal Danish Ballet. But thanks to some operatic goings-on behind the scenes some months ago, the whole thing went ballet-up. It's fine dramatically as it is, of course - probably better - but still a pity to lose that.
There are reasons, one suspects, why the opera is not presented more often: it is vintage Verdi in many ways, but the music is more generic and less distinguished than such works as Otello, Rigoletto or Falstaff, while tenors who can pull off the role of Henri are few and far between. Hymel is a godsend, in that respect. This production, despite a few inevitable flaws, seems set to become a classic that will be remembered for many years to come.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Speaking of women conductors...
...a lot of us did just that on Saturday, in a discussion that formed part of the Women of the World Festival at Southbank Centre. A sizeable and spirited group was convened from all corners of the classical music business, including a number of women conductors, composers, performers, writers, directors, educators and more. It was especially wonderful to have Marin Alsop with us. Helen Wallace has written up the event on the BBC Music Magazine website: http://www.classical-music.com/blog/why-arent-there-more-women-conductors-jude-kelly-leads-discussion-southbank-centre
Karita Mattila: Power from Start to Finnish...
Meet my latest interviewee: the astonishing Karita Mattila. "The Finnish Venus" needs no introduction except for this:
(A short version of this interview appeared in The Independent on 26 October. Karita Mattila sings Marie in Berg's Wozzeck at the Royal Opera House, opening 31 October.)
Karita Mattila is not eight feet tall, but such is the force of her presence and her voice that she almost seems it. At 53, the soprano nicknamed "the Finnish Venus" is among today's most powerful operatic stars, not only vocally, but also as a visceral actress. When she performed the final scene from Strauss's Salome at the Royal Festival Hall recently, a mesmerised audience lived the princess's horror-laden sensuality almost as voraciously as she did.
It is no wonder that opera directors often play to her
strengths. “Because I’m such a physical person, they find a physical way for me
to serve the character,” she says.
“I understand singing, too, as a physical process, so it becomes
fascinating to put those things together.”
A farmer’s daughter from rural Finland, whose career
launched when she won the 1983 Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, she has grown as an artist and kept on growing. The increasing range of her pure-yet-soul-shattering voice has brought thrilling new roles within her grasp. She began as a classic Mozartian. Now she is singing Marie in Berg’s Wozzeck for the first
time, at the Royal Opera House: next year she is doing her first Ariadne
auf Naxos and Schoenberg’s Erwartung, while Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre
and the Kostelnicka in Jenufa by Janacek are in view.
She prepares her roles rigorously: “I try to do my
homework,” she declares. “I think it would be an impossibility for me to go on
stage and try to do a part without knowing who the character is. In a nutshell,
I feel I can’t use my instrument in full if I don’t understand the dramatic
background. It’s not just learning your part and knowing the story; you read
and you listen to all the material you can get these days. I think it’s
wonderful we have everything in the Internet – you can read all kinds of
analysis. Then you go to the rehearsals and hope that the director and the
conductor are well prepared too – which,” she adds darkly, “is not always the
case.”
You wouldn’t want to get on the wrong side of this lady. “I
work hard before I come to rehearsals, so I’m quite demanding towards the
others,” she says. “I demand so much of myself because I know my level and it’s
very hard for me to reach it, so I’m expecting everyone else to do their
homework too. I’m sure there are directors or conductors who think I’m a
piece of work. But you know, I am the most willing tool – if I am convinced
that the person who is about to direct me or conduct knows what they are
doing.”
Despite that, she insists she has only ever walked out once for anything but health reasons: “It was a concert, a performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The conductor not only mocked me in front of the whole orchestra, but tried to blackmail me into doing something that it had been agreed I wouldn’t do, a recording on the morning of the performance. At first I thought, ‘Oh, he sounds like my father’ and didn’t walk out – but I realised I could not be at the mercy of a conductor whose goal is not the music, but a personal putting-down.” It was a traumatic moment. “Luckily I was old enough and experienced enough to come to terms with the idea that those kind of fossils, those kind of dinosaurs, still exist. And they will soon be dead.”
Despite that, she insists she has only ever walked out once for anything but health reasons: “It was a concert, a performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. The conductor not only mocked me in front of the whole orchestra, but tried to blackmail me into doing something that it had been agreed I wouldn’t do, a recording on the morning of the performance. At first I thought, ‘Oh, he sounds like my father’ and didn’t walk out – but I realised I could not be at the mercy of a conductor whose goal is not the music, but a personal putting-down.” It was a traumatic moment. “Luckily I was old enough and experienced enough to come to terms with the idea that those kind of fossils, those kind of dinosaurs, still exist. And they will soon be dead.”
She pinpoints a few
key moments that inspired her and opened up new vistas: “When I did my first
Fidelio with Jürgen Flimm directing, at the Met in New York, I went out of the
first rehearsal determined that I was going to cut my hair and dye it brown!”
Leonore in Fidelio is desperately misunderstood too often, she insists: “Flimm
made her this wonderful woman, so moving, so bright, so brave. But there are so
many chauvinist directors - maybe it’s
this patriarchal society, that the directors are in their own prison with their
ideas! I remember reading such crap analyses written by such men, who didn’t
have a clue about Fidelio. There were
even women who thought ‘Leonore is so ruthless’!” Now Mattila is on fire: “As if you wouldn’t be ruthless when your
husband is in jail and it’s up to you to save him! Any woman in love with her
husband would do anything for that!”
Many might modestly put enduring success down to good
fortune, but Mattila insists that it’s plain hard work. “My big film idol,
Jeremy Irons, once said in an interview that the people who succeed are the
ones who work a little harder. They put a little more of themselves into
things, they make more sacrifices and they don’t even think about it. That’s
exactly how I feel. Yes, you have to be lucky, and I’ve been lucky to be in the
right place at the right time and to have the type of voice that I have – but
luck alone wouldn’t have got me to the place I’m in now. I’m proud of this
wonderful life.”
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