Pyrotechnic Prom: Nielsen, Sibelius, Mozart and Walton in Prom No 1

And apparently there were real fireworks at the end of the second piece? Wish I'd been there now. I'm not sure I did hear the fizz of them going off, even listening to my recording from Radio 3 on professional 'cans'. . .

If I hadn't  been told, I might have just thought it was someone in the audience sneezing. Why, oh why, have concert (and opera) audiences these last two or three years become peculiarly bronchitic? The coughs (one sharp one had me ripping my headphones off) damn nearly ruined Sibelius's mock Turkish confection altogether.

So it's unfamiliar? So it's a it of a candy floss kind of thing? Still doesn't entitle you to cough all the way through it. I was reminded of an old joke from the Arena years ago, who chanted after the interval "That was an orchestral suite, not a cough suite!"

As an orchestral suite, of course, it was a little peculiar, starting off with all the wobbly belly dancing any Sultan could desire, but lapsing rather strangely into a kind of Nordic blues over a misty Finnish lake. Which did complement, in its way, Nielsen's Maskerade Overture which began this festival with a real fizz and sparkle.

I'm not, on the whole, a great fan of BBC Proms commissions; few last, after all. Probably Gary Carpenter's Dadaville won't either. Though it was nicely raucous and vivid (like most of this first Prom!) and there was a wonderfully fat tuba and some pretty vicious percussion. Otherwise, a rather odd (but appropriate for the first half, I suppose) mix of Nordic moodiness and blues broken up by some thoroughly Neapolitan (or maybe even Ischian?) crockery crashing and banging about in the cucina.

Max Ernst 'Ddaville'; courtesy of Tate Modern Liverpool

Lars Vogt's Mozart Piano Concerto was eloquently raucous too, lyricism unabated only for part of the middle movement. I understand why the audience wanted to applaud after the pyrotechnical first movement, but that's not to say I sympathise. Vogt is doubtless dynamic, and determined; but I do tire these days of that kind of relentless dynamism and devilry, however exciting it can be.

Though the prom goer who could tire of the BBC SO and the various BBC Chorus's (were any left at home last night?) Belshazzar's Feast in its Walton incarnation would have to be tired of life. Intensely lively and vivid, with astonishing singing. A very fiery performance indeed.

On the BBC iPlayer from today

This blog may close . . .

. . . soon, due to lack of interest.

And Google . . .which no longer seems to be the least bit interested in indexing its own bloggers for its own search engine.

There will, however, be a review of the first night; and probably of the first Chamber Music Prom on the 20th of July here. However, I was not particularly enamoured of much in the first half of the season and have booked tickets mostly for August and early September.

We'll maybe see you in August . . .

Fur, Feather, Fetish and Fuzziness

 I can’t really do better than Mark Valencia on Bachtrack . . .at least for the moment, while I'm dealing with some other issues.

Except for a technical note. |I watched the Aix en Provence Alcina off the Opera Platform on a widescreen telly connected to my Mac. The video was produced by Arte; and it was awful. It was frequently fuzzy, sometimes stuttered, the frame rate was too low and the soundtrack a few milliseonds out of sync. All the hallmarks, in fact, of an amateur and quick transfer to an MP4 video.

Now, my own speciality is audio, not video, but even I can do better than make an MP4 that looks like a poorly copied VHS video. And, surely, Arte can too? Especially when the original must have been broadcast quality.

The production is clever and absorbing, the orchestra brilliant. But the video . . .I had to give myself an extra interval during the acts to rest my eyes.

I’m pretty enthused about The Opera Platform, but poor quality video, especially for a production of this complexity, is a bad advert for it.

All the same, well worth catching. (See update below!) Even more worthwhile it you can read the subtitles: in French on The Opera Platform, or in German on Arte.de. Come to think of it, if The Opera Platform is really to be as 'European' as it apparently intends, wouldn't a choice of subtitle languages be useful?

Update:

In response. Luke O'Shaughnessy, Project Manager at The Opera Platform wrote to us:

"The version that is currently online is a plain recording of the live streaming and will shortly be replaced by a remastered version that is currently in preparation. I hope the quality of the next version, that will be subtitled in six languages also, will be of a better quality."

At last! I was beginning to wonder if a 'European' Opera Platform could truly be so if most of its online offerings were only subtitled in either German or French. 

It's probably easier for people who are truly bi- or tri-lingual, but I just watched the Rotterdam production of Terry Gilliam's Benvenuto Cellini. (Also Arte, and decent quality!) It's peculiarly distracting to hear an opera sung in French (or Italian) but to also be mentally translating German subtitles at the same time if you happen neither to be French or German. (That, though, was partly my own fault: I found there was a version without subtitles afterwards.)

Tricks and Hallucinations Playing on our Minds

(Along with furry fornicators.)

If there was a key phrase that set up Alden’s production of ENO’s The Queen of Spades, it’s that phrase sung by Hermann as his gambling disease becomes terminal. It is, for all the productions that emphasise the glamour of Tsarist Russia, all the grandes dames and grander jewelry, a sordid story.

Surrounded by dissolute army comrades (a word of some resonance in this production, as we will see) a gambling addict, callously engages in the seduction of a young woman to find the perfect system, murders an old woman to get it. And the girl commits suicide.

Of course, the perfect system doesn’t work. Though, never having had any aptitude of any sort for any card game apart from Snap myself, and however effectively I can suspend my disbelief, the efficacy of a Three, a Seven and an Ace has always struck me as the most implausible part of the entire plot. But then perhaps someone desperate and crazy enough might kill in the belief the target has Saturday’s winning lottery number, though I rather doubt anyone has. Yet.

It is something of a melodrama, and both the production and Edward Gardner’s orchestra reminded us of that in the first act, with probably the most effective and melodramatic torrential downpour and thunderstorm ever produced with nothing more than an orchestra and flashing lights across the stage. Coming from a part of the country where vivid storms were frequent and scary, I’m not easily impressed by theatrical representations that often belong in teacups, but that was truly superb.

It does seem, judging from comments around the place, and with which I suspected a couple sitting near me would agree with, that a lot of people didn’t quite get this production. Though, if they’d not taken the point before the interval, Hermann’s “What if it wasn’t true? Tricks and hallucinations, playing on my mind?” should have jolted the brain cells into action.

It was a production of many tricks and hallucinations. Set in a drab early Sixties Soviet (seeing a mess  of Soviet soldiers attempting the Twist was just that, and hilarious) it is not only Hermann who is subject to hallucinations. So is the Countess: living now in a kind of White Russian dream world; though it is stretching things a bit accepting that as she sings of Madame Pompadour and the King.

It is perhaps less of stretch to accept the scenario of bored and alcoholic Soviet-era soldiery and citizenry in a dreary strained world drinking gambling and dancing themselves into a misty kind of nostalgia for some better existence that still can’t be either quite imagined or hoped for.

You don’t have to read Pushkin or Tolstoy or Dostoevsky to know that. A few years ago, I spoke to a Russian musician, whose orchestra had just received a huge ovation for a spectacular performance. “People thought that was wonderful, but none of you looked very happy,” I said. “Oh, we were.” he said. Then he fell silent for a few seconds, looked strangely sad himself and walked on a few paces. Then he turned back to us. “Perhaps,” he said, struggling a little with English, “it is because we are Russian. Many sad things. A long time. In Russia.”

So, there is drinking, dancing, even clunky piano playing in a sad earnestness and desperation for some fulfillment: and sad, because it is only half-conceived and joyless in this production. So is the sex: subsumed in the supposedly, but obviously illusory ‘greater’ thrill of gambling. As is the furry fornication on stage which many of the audience couldn’t quite take. Hermann was not altogether seeing pink elephants, though there was an elephant-headed fornicator among the furry animals, so much as a zoo.

Tricks and hallucinations. Playing on the mind. Why is it, I have to ask yet again, that so many opera goers don’t seem to worry about their minds being played with by opera plots, but are so intransigent often when the staging or production messes with them? How is it people willingly suspend their disbelief as someone spends five minutes after what should have been an instantaneous death singing about it? But cannot, or will not, do the same faced with an ‘untraditional’ staging?

Though perhaps that is changing. Much to my relief, I have at last noticed rather more people ineligible for bus passes in the last two operas I’ve been to: Il Turco in Italia at Covent Garden, and Thursday night at The Queen of Spades.  I hope that means a new generation more open and less curmudgeonly. We need it.

For those at the Coliseum who might have preferred to shut their eyes (and their minds) and only open their ears, what they heard was brilliant Tchaikovsky from Gardner and the orchestra; a single opera score played with every nuance, subtlety, glorious tonal colour and development, and above all timing, that you might at almost any moment have believed you were in the middle of a great Tchaikovsky symphony cycle instead.

Brilliant. And a glorious finale to Edward Gardner’s tenure at ENO.

There  are only a handful of performances left. If it’s only to hear superbly played Tchaikovsky, whatever you have heard or read about the production, go!

Brainstorming Szymanowski: Król Roger at Covent Garden

Production Photo of Król Roger© ROH. Photograph by Bill Cooper, 2015

Getting inside anyone's head is a tricky business, but with the Royal Opera House's superb production of Szymanowski's Król Roger it's a case of two heads being trickier than one. In this case those of both Kaspar Holten and Szymanowski.

Working out what was triggering the synapses of the former is perhaps a little easier than figuring out the electrical (but not, maybe, musical: for they were plentifully supplied by Pappano and the orchestra) sparks of the latter.

It's mildly disconcerting, anomalous even, to be faced with a twelfth century Norman King in a business suit, let alone a prophet-shepherd in a kind of mid-sixties Elvis costume, wearing some of the widest flares ever seen on stage, even at the Hammersmith Apollo. Or a 20's bright young thing Queen missing only the foot-long cigarette holder.

Perhaps that accounted for what I thought was somewhat more reluctant applause at the end of the second act than it deserved. It could be much of the audience was taking longer than might have been expected to grasp we were in the head of Szymanowski in the 1920's, not ahead of him.

Though in this production, by the end of the opera, we are a good couple of decades ahead; and, if we're thinking properly and are alert enough, or we bought the programme with its photos of a Dionysiac cult in Venezuela which I for one had never heard of before, a good eight decades on. Having passed through, with this time nothing more than the orchestration and playing to aid us, rather hurried through Timothy Leary's time and the 'Me Generation'.

Well up, in fact, if you think about it with the 'Millennials' so-called, whose minds, I take it, far from being expanded,  have contracted to a narrowed vision of self and a near total withdrawal from the general tribulations of climate warming and almost perpetual war. Or, in other words, any philosophical regard beyond mere introspection and any political activism that might outlast the life of a YouTube video of sitting demonstrators being pepper-sprayed or black boys being shot by the cops for the better future good of mankind.

The programme, in fact, was a model of its kind, though I would have liked to have been warned rather more in advance that I was expected to think about Nietzsche (whose Also Sprach, having got hooked on the Strauss version, I read at school and though it's still on my shelves have never had the psychological strength to go back to) or Schopenhauer, with whom I only have a passing acquaintance, and something of a second-hand one at that.

Now, while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche may have helped us to get our heads around the heads (both the towering one on stage, and Kaspar Holten's) I'm not entirely convinced it altogether lifted the top of Szymanowski's cranium at least as far as the music, more than the libretto, was concerned.

For all the hints in the programme at Debussy and orientalism—a neighbour I overheard during the interval mentioned Ravel too; Ravel?—it was Scriabin I kept hearing. Scriabin with words, instead of scents and lightshows. And by the end, and, for all we'd been warned at the interval that Marius Kwiecien was feeling unwell—it didn't show—in the King's aria to the sun I couldn't help but feel this was all, in Szymanowski's head, as much, if not more, about his homosexuality as the rise and collapse of the Superman.

Though perhaps I was led there partly by the curious effect of listening to an opera in a totally unfamiliar language and having to rely entirely on the English surtitles.. It is odd, I realise, how much one normally takes from the nuances and phrasing in opera, even when your knowledge of French, Italian or German may not be fluent.

The singing was extraordinarily powerful. So was the orchestra, So was the production. So was the applause at the end. (By then most of the audience must have got over the Elvis costume; perhaps the Shepherd changing into a suit helped.) It is a terrible shame that it has had such a short run. Please, Covent Garden, bring it back.

Wheelies at the Proms

'Carbonblack' wheelchair. Photo from carbonblack.

No, not really. For one thing I'm banned by my friends from doing wheelies in my wheelchair. That was after some great black youngsters stopped my loaner from running rampant and mowing down a bunch of Japanese tourists at the bottom of the Turbine Hall ramp at Tate Modern.

I was new to using wheels then, and younger, and I hadn't yet realised the importance of wearing gloves: I burnt the palm of my hands trying to stop it as it dawned on me too late that the ramp was steeper than it looked and I was going a bit fast . . .

They asked 'Can you do wheelies in that thing?" 'Course," I said. And demonstrated, Then spotted twenty Japanese tourists scattering in fright out of the corner of my eye. That was Lesson Two in wheelchair management. If you're going to do wheelies on a ramp, don't.

At the Albert Hall in the Proms Season, I don't do wheelies. I do a nifty pirouette or two every now and then waiting for the lift though to ease the boredom of waiting for it to empty of the people whose only disability is either laziness or an appetite for junk food.

Well, it makes me happy, though my friends tend to get embarrassed. But as I point out, often, I can''t see why being disabled means you can't play every now and then.

Waiting for the lift is in fact about the only disadvantage for a wheelchair user at the Proms. The last few seasons, as I've come to use my wheelchair more and more often, I've found the stewards unfailingly helpful. They even buy my gallery tickets for me when they spot me in the gallery queue.

It has to be the gallery, though, if I haven't got other tickets. Unlike the Colosseum (in Rome, I mean, not the London one) which offered even the lions a free lift up to the Arena, as far as I know the Albert Hall doesn't. Not even if the Lions are music critics. And while I'm thinking of that, did any of them dare take up the offer of 'free seats for critics' at Covent Garden's Mahagonny?

This is by way of being a little 'thankyou note'. It is so nice to be treated with a smile and a real offer of help without feeling patronised or only part human, Which, despite the success of the London Paralympics, which really did change the way many people looked at people with a disability, does still happen. It means I really look forward to the Proms.

Apart from people who don't really need to using the lifts, of course. I'm not that bothered having to wait at the end of a Prom, though it does tend to annoy my friends who in turn have to wait for me, but the intervals are different.

I need my interval cigarette. Some concerts I may need more than one, and a stiff drink to go with it to dare go back for the second half. Or at the very least I might need to eat my sandwiches if I haven't been able to eat before I leave home. With the lifts full of the 'non-disabled' (I like that phrase: turns the tables neatly, I think) managing either or both in time can really get tricky.

So, if this season you are one of the non-disabled, please think before you dash for the lift. You may be leaving a prommer sandwich-and-nicotine starved.

[The wheelchair in the picture above, by the way, isn't mine. I just wish it was, but unless I win the lottery I'll just have to lust after it. I've heard of 'Kickstarter'. Wonder if there's such a thing as 'Prommercarbonfibrwheelchairstarter'?]

Apples and (Clockwork) Oranges. . . and Prom 38

Steve Jobs at home in 1982 with  records and  a Michell Gyrodec.

photo:Diana Walker

Know who that is? Well, he and this blog's author share some things. Here's a hint. This blog is written on an Apple Mac, and I've had Apple Macs from the day I put my typewriter in the bottom of the wardrobe and forgot about it. Not that I totally forgot: it was a pale lime green portable Olympia.

Apparently you can still buy one like this in the USA. (For almost the same price as a MacBook Air!)  I should have kept it to sell on eBay shouldn't I?

My first Apple that wasn't the kind you were supposed to give teacher was a Mac SE. . .that was the cuddly little beige one with a monochrome screen about the size of an iPad's, and the small iPad at that. It wasn't that much bigger than my typewriter, and all the software was on floppy discs. How on earth we produced magazines on those, I can't imagine now, but we did.

And behind him? Way back under the window on the floor to his right? That's an original Michell Gyrodec. That wasn't my first turntable, but I fell in love with it just as I did with Apple Macs before I could afford either.

I first saw a Gyro in the small Georgian window of a small hi-fi shop in Shrewsbury late one summer night. It had gold weights under the platter . . . and it had been left to spin quietly at 33rpm reflecting gold from a small spotlight everywhere. I wasn't just entranced; I was hypnotised.

As was everyone who came to my flat when I finally managed to get hold of one. Most still are. So much so some don't get around to actually listening instead of watching until the first side's nearly done.

I knew (probably anyone who knows much about either film or hi-fi does) that Stanley Kubrick had a Michell turntable (though not a Gyrodec) and put one in A Clockwork Orange. And that John Michell created the model of the spaceship for 2001 A Space Odyssey mostly out of Gyrodec parts in his workshop near enough to the studios you might have been able to hear HAL over the traffic. Sadly, it disappeared from Boreham Wood Studios long ago.

But Steve Jobs owning a Gyrodec? The man who was practically the inventor of the antitheses of (analogue!) vinyl? And who people could, with some justification, blame for it spinning in its grave? That really was news to me. But it feels nice to know we have more than an apple in common, even if our bank accounts were, even then, as far apart as . . .well, as apples and oranges.

What's this got to do with the Proms? Not a lot, but something. Between concerts if I want to hear what someone else makes of Messaien's Turangalila apart from Juanjo Mena and the BBC  Phil in Prom 38 I'll be listening to one on a Gyrodec. And I'll be recording some to listen to later, or maybe even again on one of my Apple Macs.

Perhaps that Gyrodec was at least partly responsible that Apple seemed to really care about their recorded sound right from the beginning. And later, perhaps for the BBC using Apple Macs to edit their recordings of live concerts on.

The Turangalila I may be listening to between now and mid-August  one that I doubt many are familiar with at all, but which I like: Seiji Ozawa conducting the Toronto Symphony on RCA Victor.way, way back in 1967. There's something about that performance that makes it cleaner and (despite the size of the orchestra) almost minimalist in textures that you don't get elsewhere and which Petrenko and the NYO Messaien's Turangalilo at the Proms 2012 didn't really achieve at the Proms three years ago.

It was reissued on CD a couple of years back, and got a 'Record of the Month' from MusicWeb International. Deservedly I thought. Though if you want to hear it, or even a snip from it, you'll haver to look for it second hand, I'm afraid. It's not even on YouTube . . .

Not all music ever recorded or played is, some of those who'll be dropping into Prom 37 for Mista Jam and Stormzy but probably won't be listening to Messaien even with a score of lager and Baccardi shots in front of them the following night, need to know. Some was even played before the London Tube that'll be taking them to the Ministry of Sound existed, let alone YouTube.

Let's see (or hear, rather) if Prom 38 in August will also become a fave rave of mine.