Remembrance day concert

Wednesday was Remembrance Day so some students from the college put together a concert of music and readings. We have some very talented musicians in college at the moment - singers and instrumentalists - and a very strong conductor, who also planned the concert.
The music ranged from an arrangement of Mozart's Ave Verum Corpus for viola and three cellos, through Elegies for cello by Faure and Kenneth Leighton, Pergolesi's Stabat Mater, and finishing with the Faure Requiem. The music was interspersed by readings of poetry. The Faure was interleaved with some Hardy war poetry. I didn't know these poems at all - and they weren't published as a set, they just have a common theme - but they worked really well with the music. And I learned something about the Faure from the juxtaposition with the Hardy: this Requiem is not all sweetness and light and eternal rest, there is some real fear and trembling to get through first.
I can't remember the last time I sang properly, so it was good to be singing again. But I had no voice at all thanks to the remnants of a cold. If I want to join a choir locally I will have to get back into practice, as I have no stamina at all. In fact the only part of the singing equipment that was working at all was my diaphragm. So I had breath control but was hardly making any noise.

Beethoven Symphony No 9 - LSO

Beethoven
Elegischer Gesang Op. 118
Opferlied Op. 121b
Symphony No. 9 in D Minor

Michael Tilson Thomas conductor
Janice Watson soprano
Karen Cargill mezzo-soprano
Anthony Dean Griffey tenor
Peter Rose bass
London Symphony Chorus

Last night I filled a gaping hole in my musical education by attending a performance of Beethoven’s ninth for the first time. I’m not quite sure how I’ve got to this point in my life without hearing this cornerstone of Western music – maybe something to do with my slight natural antipathy towards large-scale orchestral concerts. It was a last minute decision to go – we had a free Saturday night and there was nothing on near Cambridge except a performance of Berlioz’s Requiem. Andrew is not a Berlioz fan – and I decided that the Requiem was not the best way to convert him. So we decided to make the (not very long) trip to the Barbican for this LSO concert. I do like the Barbican hall, partly because it only takes and hour and a half to get there, and partly because the seats are so comfortable. After being squashed into the amphitheatre seats in the Royal Opera House rather a lot recently, the amount of leg-room at the Barbican seems positively luxurious. We were in the front row of the side stalls, on the first-violin side of the stage. We were slightly too close to the stage to get a proper balance (we got a lot of strings and not enough woodwind) but it was an advantage to be so close to the performers; we got a real sense of being in the performance, not just observing it.

I don’t think I have been to a concert conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas before. This was a good opportunity to observe him, because he was only a few feet away, and spent a fair amount of time turning towards the first violins, and hence in our direction. I liked him, because he isn’t too much of a ‘maestro’, at least to observe on stage (obviously I can’t comment on what he is like to work with). He gave us a brief introduction to the two choral works, which I appreciated, since the programme notes weren’t that helpful, and he spoke very well. Apparently these ‘quiet works’ were very close to Beethoven’s heart, because with his growing deafness, he found it increasingly difficult to hold quiet and meaningful conversations with people, and thus missed out on intimate discussions. Tilson Thomas is also a composer, although I don’t know any of his work, and he struck me as an intelligent musician. The Beethoven was all thoughtful, balanced and musical, without any histrionics. Maybe Beethoven needs slightly more revolutionary fervour for a truly stunning performance, but it was refreshing to find a conductor who doesn’t fiddle with the music unnecessarily. It felt as if he was letting Beethoven speak with minimal interpretation.
There was a last minute change to both the concert programme and the line-up of soloists. We won in one direction and lost in the other: we got two extra choral pieces at the beginning of the programme, but Alice Coote and the soprano were sick, and were replaced by Karen Cargill and Janice Watson. I was sorry to miss out on the opportunity of seeing Alice Coote in a dress after my recent Orlando experience, but Karen Cargill turned out to be a very respectable alternative. She’s a Scot who has studied in Glasgow, and seems to have achieved a lot given that she is only 28. She was very comfortable on the stage and with the music, and made the most of the Opferlied solo and her sections in the last movement of the symphony. Janice Watson was the complete opposite: she did not appear at all comfortable on stage, in fact she looked like she really did not want to be there. She was not in voice, and was distinctly ‘shouty’ in the top range. She did not even carry to us in the tenth row: I don’t know whether those further back in the hall would have heard her at all over the orchestra. Also, bizarrely, she was wearing her wedding dress. Why would anyone think that an ivory dress with embroidered bodice is suitable concert-hall attire?

The men gave a good account of themselves. Anthony Dean Griffey spent the whole evening with a beatific grin on his face, and camped up the tenor solo in the alla marcia section wonderfully. This was absolutely the right approach – how could anyone sing seriously over that ridiculous section of Beethoven’s band music?

The LSO Chorus confirmed my general view on big choruses, which is that the singers don’t sing, but rather shout over the orchestra. Of course they enjoyed themselves immensely in the symphony, which is an excellent shout, but their shortcomings were highlighted in the quieter choral songs. The tone in the more contemplative pieces was weak, and there were a couple of very hesitant entries from the tenors in the Elegischer Gesang. Intonation was not perfect throughout, hardly surprising when so much shouting is going on. It didn’t help that the average age of the tenor and bass sections was about sixty. There were a few younger women, but it must be very difficult to find decent tenors and basses.

Before writing about the symphony itself, I should set out my rather chequered history with Beethoven. The earliest Beethoven experience that I recall clearly was a performance of the 5th Symphony in Lincoln Cathedral when I was around ten. I vividly remember the music of the opening of the first movement, and given that this is now nearly twenty years ago it must have made a very strong impression on me to have stuck. Unfortunately, my other enduring impression from that performance is that I was willing the concert to end, watching the conductor turn the pages of the score and hoping each time he turned a page that it would reveal the last double bar. I must have found it too long a span of time to concentrate at that age.
More positively, I had a tape of Anne Sophie Mutter playing the violin concerto which I played endlessly as a teenager, so that the music got under my skin and is now one of those pieces that I return to at times of stress or emotion. It is a wonderfully exuberant and life-affirming piece.

I didn’t study Beethoven properly when I was a teenager, apart from learning the odd piano sonata movement, but I did once write a mammoth essay on symphonies I to V. I can remember sitting in the school library, really listening to the music, with orchestral score, being particularly astonished by the Eroica, which was such a leap from the previous ‘classical’ symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven. So the Eroica is also burned into my brain – and was refreshed recently by the excellent Channel 4 film ‘Eroica’ which was essentially a staging of the first performance of the symphony, with original instruments and in costume, with the composer huffing and puffing around being revolutionary to the shock of his patrons, the aristocracy of Vienna. The film brought a real sense of how shocking the symphony must have been to those who first listened to it (including the famous ‘false’ entry on the horn at the recapitulation of the first movement).

I have the Hanover Band’s recordings of the symphonies, also on original instruments, and was already beginning to think that I need a supplementary recording from a standard romantic symphony orchestra, as these performances, whilst very fine, were rather bloodless. This performance by the LSO confirmed my suspicions that I do prefer Beethoven with as much wallop as possible. The LSO didn’t overdo it, but having a full complement of metal-stringed strong sections does help the music.

The trouble with a piece as monumentally influential as Beethoven’s ninth is that it is impossible to have a first hearing of it that is unaffected by subsequent musical history. Although I had never listened properly to the piece before last night, I was already familiar with so many of the musical ideas: not just the Ode to Joy, but the Scherzo, and the first subject of the first movement. And of course the influence of this milestone in musical history can be felt in the symphonies of Brahms and Mahler, not to mention Wagner and Shostakovich. I don’t know anything about the history of the first performance of the ninth, but the massed forces of the choir and orchestra must have made a huge impact. As far as I know, this was the first time that choral voices had been employed in the formal structure of a symphony (but not of course the last) and this must be one of the reasons for the work’s importance.

Beethoven had already gone outside the proportions of the classical symphonic form developed by, most notably, Haydn and Mozart with his earlier works, and in particular the third and fifth symphonies. The ninth follows the standard classical structure of Allegro, Scherzo, Adagio and Allegro movements. However, the massive finale, which includes the famous setting of parts of Schiller’s Ode to Joy, is balanced out by the grand scale of the other movements, and the whole work is around an hour in length.
I tend to revert to my ten-year-old self when listening to a work on this scale: I can’t quite concentrate enough to follow it properly. This was most evident in the first movement, where I got lost after the first ten minutes of development. After a while, I stop analysing the music intellectually (following the modulations, the development of the thematic material) and just enjoy the noise. I always feel this as a failure, although maybe the whole point of Beethoven’s form of German Romanticism was that the listener should stop analysing intellectually and be overwhelmed by the emotions. Anyway, I find the sheer scale of the work rather daunting. But the first two movements are splendid to listen to, especially the scherzo/trio.
Once we get to the finale, there is a brief recapitulation of material from the earlier movements, which does serve to draw the threads of the symphony together. But all this is swept aside by the early entry of the Ode to Joy theme, which dominates the final movement until its end. The alla marcia section is definitely the silliest. It may be sacrilege to say so, but I find the Ode to Joy theme itself rather annoying in its simplicity – only five notes are used. By the time we have listened to it for fifteen minutes, the ear is rather dulled.

I did enjoy the performance, although I didn’t leave feeling full of joy at the brotherhood of man. It does fill a gap in my musical understanding, and I suspect that when I return to the Brahms symphonies they will make more sense with a better understanding of Beethoven’s late work.

Boris Godunov, The Royal Opera, Covent Garden, 4 October 2003

This Sunday matinee performance was meant to be a special treat for A and me. It very nearly turned into a complete disaster, as we were turned away by the nice girl in the red Royal Opera jacket on the main doors because, as she so politely pointed out, our tickets were for the evening performance two days earlier. I was rather upset by this, because the internet booking system had ended up sending me the wrong tickets (there is no way that I would have asked for two tickets to a Friday evening performance) and I hadn't noticed the error. We were just beginning to think of alternatives ways of spending a Sunday afternoon in London (the British Museum was one idea but that appealed to A more than to me). Fortunately there were two return tickets for seats in the amphitheatre, so after taking a deep breath and trying to force out of my mind the total cost of the afternoon's entertainment, we paid for the two return tickets.

Having had such difficulty getting through the front door, I needed a stiff drink. I had booked us a table at the Amphitheatre restaurant inside the theatre - the first time we had eaten there. I was pleasantly surprised by the standard of the food, especially since two courses of food plus a glass of wine each only cost us 30 pounds. We didn't have time for pudding, and sadly they don't serve dessert during the interval of matinee performances (I plan to do this one day for an evening performance and have dessert and coffee in the interval).

And the opera?

Some fantastic music, and very strong performances musically, but sadly let down by an over-long performance and the dreary, unchanging, set.

Running time: I don't know the history of the opera in depth, but from the programme notes, I understand that Mussorgsky himself revised the opera several times, adding in and taking out whole acts, and the Rimsky-Korsakov had his finger in the pie too. Is it just my imagination or do the Russians always revise each others' work like this? This version was researched by David Lloyd-Jones for this 1983 production. There are around 3 3/4 hours of music. The Royal Opera runs this with only one interval. Each sitting - of two acts - is nearly two hours long. This is too long! And to add insult to injury, the interval is very short, as the set does not need to be changed. It is not like the Royal Opera to reduce its bar sales by having a shorter interval than necessary. We had barely got our drinks before the 10 minute bell rang. But seriously, I don't understand why some judicious cutting wasn't done - there are whole stretches of repetitive choruses and orchestral interludes that could be cut without anyone missing them. I would have enjoyed the whole even more if I had been concentrating properly all the way through.

Music: some good stuff. I particularly liked all the peasant dances, and the little folk songs sung by the inn-keeper and nurse. The musical language is a little odd - I don't know enough about Mussorgsky to know whether the very Russian musical language/tonality is his natural language, or whether he is consciously writing in an assumed 16th century Russian idiom. Whatever, it worked for me. I also liked the development of the 'False Dmitry' theme that is played every time Dmitry is on stage, or his name is mentioned - it starts out very innocently, and then mutates into a military call to arms towards the end of the last act.

Performances: all excellent. There was obviously a competition between the men for 'largest Russian bass' - they are huge! John Tomlinson (the only British large bass) won hands down. He was excellent, I would love to see him in some Wagner. There were lots of up and comings as well, thanks to the Vilar young Artists platform. It was good to see Ailish Tynan again (she was Papagena in Zauberflote last season and won the BBC Singer of the World lieder prize this year).

Set: the performance is a revival of the 1983 production. It illustrates how far the ROH has come technically in 20 years - there is one set throughout, with no moving parts, and not much real interest on stage. I was practically begging for some pyrotechnics by the end - there isn't quite enough going on in the music to really absorb your attention if the plot isn't advancing - and all we got was a bit of twinkly snow coming down from the ceiling. Please, will someone pay for an up to date production, with about half an hour less music? I would pay to see that - I won't be paying to see this production again.