"A society performing their national myth" - Sir David Pountney on his production of Prokofiev's War and Peace

WNO War and Peace (Photo: Clive Barda)

When Welsh National Opera returns to the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, this week, they bring with them a real rarity – a production of Prokofiev’s mightiest operatic undertaking, and perhaps his greatest disappointment. Prokofiev conceived of his setting of Tolstoy’s War and Peace as a contribution to the Soviet war effort at a moment, during WW2, when Russians were finding themselves living out a national drama of Tolstoian proportions. Prokofiev’s adaptation grew in scale, from a compressed narrative of 11 scenes – first performed in 1945, one month after the final victory against Germany – to a two-evening epic, which Prokofiev would never see staged in its entirety. A souring political climate in 1947 and 1948, culminating in the infamous denunciation of composers including Shostakovich and Prokofiev, put paid to the composer’s hopes of seeing the opera produced and he died 5 years later – on the same day as Stalin – bitterly regretting its failure.

Veteran opera director Sir David Pountney first brought War and Peace to WNO in 2018 and it now transfers to London for two special performances. Pountney’s production places the novel’s characters into a Nineteenth Century setting, but has Soviet wartime soldiers and personnel, from Prokofiev’s own day, watching and participating in the action. During the opera’s second half, which focuses on the Napoleonic war episodes, Pountney uses battle scenes from Sergei Bondarchuk’s epic 1960s film, projected behind the set, to evoke the novel’s action and to broaden further the commentary on Russian retelling of War and Peace. 

I spoke to David Pountney ahead of the London performances about his production of the opera, and about his broader experience with Russian culture. 

Sir David Pountney during rehearsals for WNO's War and Peace (Photo: Jimmy Swindells)

AM: When did you first come to Russian opera and culture?

DP: Well, I used to go with my parents regularly to the theatre in Oxford and when it came indeed to the opera, my parents actually took part in something called “music camp”, which was basically a way of people taking holidays during the war. They met in this farm house near Newbury and made music, and there was quite a lot of really good musicians there. And I remember, in 1952, they did a performance of Fidelio, for the Coronation, and I vividly remember sitting in an angle of the beam of this barn, and hearing Floristan singing his aria. I also remember the members of orchestra digging the pit, which not many orchestras would do now! Then my parents took me to see Boris Godunov at Covent Garden, I remember, a couple of years later when I was seven or so. So I had plenty of contact with opera from a relatively early age. 

And was it Boris Godunov that sparked an interest in the Russian side of things? 

I’ve no idea. I remember it was a last-minute decision to go and we got a couple of seats in a box above the orchestra, above the brass, which I remember was very exciting. I became a trumpeter, by the way. 

You’ve been associated with a lot of projects related to East-European and Russian music. Did you travel much to the Eastern Bloc before 1991? 

I did. I went to St Petersburg in the 70s – Leningrad as it was, obviously, then – because I was going to do a production of [Tchaikovsky’s] Queen of Spades in Kassel, and I decided that since so many of the locations are actually existing, I thought I’d better go and see these locations. It was a terrible mistake because the stage is nothing about real locations. For one thing, real locations tend not to fit on the stage, like mountains and things like that. I actually directed an opera at the Komische Oper in East Berlin during the 80s, before the Wall came down. And I spent some time in Poland and quite a bit of time in Czechoslovakia, as it then was. So I knew my way around the Eastern Bloc quite well.

When you came to working on Prokofiev’s War and Peace, how did you make sense of the different versions that exist?

I knew [Scottish musicologist] Rita McAllister, because she and I had worked on [Prokofiev’s] The Gambler together many years ago and I knew that she’d done this reduced “original” version. I thought that since that meant reducing it in some way, that that might make it more performable for us. So I started a conversation with Rita about that, and of course we ended up doing something of a hybrid really, because it turned out that from a purely pragmatic point of view, there were too many good things that weren’t in the original version, like the Ball Scene, for example, and it seemed a pretty dumb idea to do War and Peace without the Ball Scene. So we ended up creating a kind of hybrid version, which I think Rita was not terribly pleased about in the end, because she’d done all this research and wanted something that kept close to her research, but I think it was a practical solution. 

Do you happen to recall any significant portions that didn’t appear in your version? It’s my impression that the Kirov/Mariinsky version runs another 40 or 45 minutes.

Well that’s right – you’d have to look up and compare the versions. There’s a lot of choruses. The Bolshoi version, for example, has a terribly tedious long chorus at the beginning of it - a chorus to the Tsar on his birthday, which is very much better left out. And there are of course innumerable warlike choruses and that kind of thing. I think the version that we got is pretty good. Some people might complain about the “comic” ending, which is the original ending, and of course we slightly had our cake and ate it by giving the Soviet ending as a curtain call, if you remember that.

Well, it’s so glorious that you can’t not have it – such an incredible tune. 

It’s a good tune, yes.

Yes. Now, in a sense, the opera is a massive compression of the source material – it has to be. What is the effect of going from an enormous novel to a four-hour opera on the characters in it?

Well, I think there is a very considerable degree of simplification, no question. I guess the character who is not entirely simplified, but which it’s most difficult to realise is Pierre. What you don’t get at all are the periods of his fairly grotesque misbehavior, his sort of “hooray-Henry” past history. So you meet Pierre at a point at which he’s already become rather sensitive and complex and the sort of “Boris Johnson” version of Pierre, which you do get in the novel, is missing entirely.

Do you think the libretto does a good job of compressing the novel?

On the whole, I think it does. As it inevitable for Russians undertaking this exercise, I think they were a little too faithful to the novel. Virtually all of the dialogue is actually taken from the novel. And I think sometimes they’d have been better off writing it themselves. Sometimes the libretto is actually not very clear because they’ve lifted sentences from the novel without the huge background buildup to that sentence that the novel has.

Were there moments as a director that you felt you had to underscore in a certain way in order to convey the importance of a moment or piece of information?

What is missing, quite badly missing – and I don’t think I was successful or found a way of putting this into the opera – is the way in which Natasha is erotically captivated by Anatole Kuragin. The whole description of her going to the theatre and having Anatole stare at her eyes the whole time, or stare at her tits, basically, is all missing, and so I think you do have a feeling in the opera that you’re not quite clear how it was that one minute she was dancing ecstatically with Prince Andre and then the next minute she’s running off with this cad. It’s unexplained in the opera, I think.

WNO War and Peace: Lauren Michelle as Natasha and Mark Le Brocq as Pierre
(Photo: Clive Barda)

And is it a problem that characters disappear for a long time? Were you aware of that problem when you were working things out?

You mean Andrei? Of course, Natasha disappears totally.

Yes, and we spend a long time with Kutuzov in the second half – necessarily of course – but I guess that means we’ve left a lot of the characters behind while we’re with the war.

I mean, it is odd that they didn’t somehow deal with what happens to Pierre and Natasha after. It’s not entirely clear in the novel either, but you’re definitely left with a feeling that they’re about to get together.

And on to this, we have something of a framing device – Tolstoy appears in your production and Pierre assumes his mantel at the very end.

Absolutely.

When you’re coming up with something like that, do you have to make a careful calculation about how much time you give to an idea like that?

Well, I think in this case you can only see how much time there was. I couldn’t have given any more time to it really – there weren’t opportunities. So it was really a question of whether it was possible to read that idea in the amount of time available.

You decided to produce it in English rather than Russian – what informs a decision like that?

Actually, very simply, that in the piece you have over 60 named roles, so the idea that you have all these people performing away for over three hours in a fog of incomprehension is a problem. Of course, people are professionals and they learn what is being said to them, and the top principals will obviously put a lot of effort into that, but nonetheless you are hearing something you learned somewhere – “that’s what he’s saying to me in this bar”, rather than actually hearing what he’s saying to you in this bar. So I think there’s an incomparable generation of stage energy and feeling and emotion coming from that fact that everybody understands what everybody’s saying. In an opera that is about collective experience, it would have made it much less intense from the performers’ point of view if they were struggling to remember what they once looked up the chap singing at them was actually saying. I think this is an aspect that is not sufficiently discussed when people are talking about so-called linguistic authenticity.

But does this need to be decided on a case-by-case basis, rather than a blanket rule one way or another?

Yeah, right. I mean, no one needs to know exactly what’s being said in La Traviata.

This production needed to fit into a least 4 different theatres. Does that have an effect on the decisions you make about what goes on on the stage?

Yes, obviously. We could only contemplate doing it because we knew we could do it with a smaller group of people because there were fewer of the huge choral numbers. There wouldn’t be dressing room facilities in those theatres for those numbers of people, so you’d have to be hiring porta-cabins, or having them change on a bus or something. So, I mean, there were definitely practical considerations. 

And you made use of some preexisting set as well, from Ian Bell’s In Parenthesis [produced at WNO in 2016]. Was that a similar kind of consideration?

Well, actually, that was more idea-based, because when I was thinking about what this War and Peace would feel like, I had the idea of it of being a sort of collective narrative, as though a society were performing their national myth, rather as we might reenact Dunkirk, or the Battle of Britain, or whatever. In order to achieve that one would need something like a kind of amphitheater, in which the characters could both perform and be an audience, and having thought about that for a short while, I realised that I’d actually got that set in the cupboard. I didn’t need to redo it.  

Some of the press coverage at the time raised an eyebrow at some of the contemporary resonance of an emboldened Russia. Was that something that you thought about, amidst all of these glorifying choruses at the end of the opera, that it could in a sense be Russia in 2018 or 19?

Well, or course, not least because the whole Novichok thing came along quite some time after we’d decided to do it, and also because we were involved with the Russian ambassador in one way or another in an actually unsuccessful attempt to find an oligarch who help fund the enterprise. But of course, we were aware of that and the fact is in the events that inspired this opera, the Soviet Union was our ally. We’d certainly have had a hell-a-lot harder job beating the Germans if the Soviets hadn’t been largely doing it for us. 

In the context of the Russian and Soviet canon, how important do you think this opera is?

I think it inspired Prokofiev to write some of his most eloquent and lyrical music, so it’s sort of inherently a “popular” opera really, once people thought of going to it. I think it responds to the tradition of the artform, particularly as set out by Verdi, as an expression of the state on stage, which has become increasingly rare amongst contemporary operas, which tend to focus on other things. So it’s a kind of grand element in the operatic tradition, and I think it has three or four wonderful characters in it, wonderful operatic characters, quite beautifully realised by Prokofiev. I think it’s very worth keeping in the repertoire.

Welsh National Opera's War and Peace will be performed on Tuesday 23rd and Wednesday 24th July 2019 at The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

My thanks to Sir David Pountney for the interview and to Welsh National Opera for the use of the photographs.

Stalin's Favourite Stalin

The actor Mikheil Gelovani as Stalin in the film The Fall of Berlin (1950)

At school, I run a film club, and our most recent film was The Death of Stalin. The text that follows is from my introduction to the movie:

As chance would have it, I was just the other night at the first performance of Welsh National Opera’s new production of Sergei Prokofiev’sepic opera War and Peace. War and Peace caused Prokofiev no end of trouble: he had been lured back to the USSR in 1936, after almost two decades away in Europe, with the promise of artistic freedom and of a position as the Soviet Union’s leading composer. But in reality he found he was not free at all, and he spent the last 13 years of his life trying to get his mega-opera staged in its entirety. He thought he’d hit upon a winner: Tolstoy’s story of heroic Russian victory against Napoleon seemed totally right for the 1940s, just when the USSR was taking on Hitler’s army in the greatest war in history. It was potentially tricky, because the book and the opera commemorated one of the great triumphs of Tsarist Russia, but history was too important a weapon in the propaganda war to be ignored entirely. The audience could forget about the Tsar and instead focus on the great military hero of 1812, General Kutuzov, and make the obvious connection with their leader and teacher, Joseph Stalin. The Soviet government, though changed its mind very often about what was acceptable and what was not, and Prokofiev’s opera never quite made the cut. A second, much sadder occurrence of chance was that Prokofiev and Stalin died on the same day in 1953. Apparently, there were no flowers at Prokofiev’s memorial, because they had all been taken for Stalin’s funeral. But Stalin had, after all, spent two decades terrorising the Soviet people, liquidating millions of them in his slave labour camps and deliberate famines. Even in death, the fear lived on. No one was brave enough to steal so much as a rose from Stalin to offer to a mere composer.

It’s difficult for us now to imagine how powerful Stalin was, or what it would have been like to live under his rule. One well-known musician, who grew up in those days, told me that it is simply not possible for westerners to understand. You cannot imagine, he said. In the 1930s, Stalin had terrorised his population with arbitrary executions and deportations to Siberia. It didn’t really matter who died; Stalin wanted to eliminate his opponents, but he worked out that you could just kill anyone and the effect was the same. City authorities were instructed to round up and kill so-many thousands of people, regardless of their identity. If you introduced enough fear into people’s minds, they just stayed in line. Husbands or wives would be taken in the night by the secret police, and at work the next day, the remaining partner would have to make sure they smiled. To shed a tear for your disappeared spouse was to cry for an enemy of the people.

Terror was only one tool of the tyrant, however. Stalin controlled all information. Had you visited Moscow in the middle of the last century, you would have seen giant banners of the gods of Communism: Marx, Lenin and Joseph himself. The food on your table was put there by Stalin. The wage in your pocket, the school where you studied; thank you, Stalin. He may as well have been the sun in the sky. The films in the cinema celebrated all the wonderful things about Soviet life. They told you that Stalin had brought order to the chaos of Tsarist Russia. They told you that Stalin had led the nation against the greatest evil in history, and won. They didn’t have to tell you this; they showed you. More than one actor played Stalin on screen, but he had a favourite. Mikheil Gelovani was so good at it that he wasn’t allowed to play anyone else. Once you’ve played a god, you don’t act the part of mere mortals. European history was rewritten for the epic propaganda film The Fall of Berlin in 1950, which shows the saintly Stalin (dressed in white) leading the good fight while his supposed allies scheme and plot. It’s actually a lot like Prokofiev’s War and Peace, which the composer was still fiddling with at the time, though it was Shostakovich who got to write the music for the film. There’s a love story, the lovers are separated by war, and then Stalin leads his Soviet people to victory. At the end of the film, Gelovani’s Stalin flies into Berlin to give a speech to the Russian victors. It didn’t happen, but Stalin liked the scene so much that he regretted not having done it for real.

A lot of people smile in The Fall of Berlin, but the smiles were only for the camera. When the film was released, Stalin was in the middle of unleashing a fresh wave of terror, which culminated in the supposed Doctor’s Plot, a fake conspiracy which was used to purge Jews from the medical profession. All of this was carried out by Stalin’s right-hand man and secret police chief, Lavrenti Beria, who in his spare time liked to cruise round Moscow in his limousine in the small hours and pick up young ladies to drug, rape and bury in the garden. But the terror and fear and executions finally did it for Stalin. When he fell ill, in 1953, it took hours before anyone was brave enough to enter his bedroom. There weren’t any doctors left; they were all in prison. And without the boss to tell them what to do, his deputies ran around frantically, suspicious of each other and trying to stay alive. It would have been funny had it not been so awful.

There’s a fine line, though, between funny and awful. Armando Iannucci saw as much in Fabien Nury and Thierry Robin’s graphic novel La mort de Staline, and he’s made it into a funny and horrible film. If, at the end, you wonder how much of it is true, the answer is: the broad strokes. They’ve compressed the timeframe; what appears to take days in reality took longer. We don’t really know all the details, and that suits the storytellers just fine. It works as a comedy, because the way in which people behave in awful situations is often so absurd. Not everyone saw the funny side – one leading historian wrote a rather po-faced article, counting the historical errors and referring to the film as “Carry On Up the Kremlin”.

Jason Issacs in The Death of Stalin

But the joke really fell flat in Moscow, where The Death of Stalin has the dubious honour of being the first film to be banned since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991. Public figures called the film “vile, repugnant and insulting”, and although the banning was partly an attempt by the Russian government to put behind it an embarrassing episode involving the release of Paddington 2, it was also clear that the film did not fit a particular version of history which Putin’s government is keen to impose. Like General Kutuzov before him, Stalin is a figure who suits the aspirations of the current leader of Russia. In Stalin, if you ignore the killings and the torture, rests the image of strong leader who, if you tell the story right, united the Soviet state behind the single purpose of defeating fascism. Stalin was not the only person who could cherry-pick from history. And so, the Russian film industry is very busy producing sumptuous films which glorify the Second World War and the heroism of the Russians who fought in it. A notable example is Panfilov’s 28 Men, a 2016 war film telling the story of a group of Russian soldiers who held out against overwhelming German forces during the Battle of Moscow in 1941. At the time, the Soviet newspaper Pravda carried a report detailing the noble self-sacrifice of the troops; the problem was, it was only partly true. It happened over 70 years ago, but when the distance between the legend and the reality was brought up recently, the Russian culture minister retorted angrily that the story was “a sacred legend that shouldn’t be interfered with. People that do that are filthy scum.”

Of course, it’s easy to point out the holes in other people’s national myths. We certainly could ask where all the successful British films are that properly interrogate the complex legacy of colonialism. And it is true that Putin is no Stalin. There are no untold millions languishing in secret prison camps in Russia today. There aren’t long lists of names being issued by the Kremlin for immediate liquidation, though here in Wiltshire, we know they’re dabbling. But Putin’s government demonstrates the familiar irritation that authoritarians usually show for those who fail to treat the useful bits of history with the required respect. 

Image(s) are used under the principle of fair use for the purposes of review and study and will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s).

Music in the age of YouTube

I have a certain wariness of just recycling classical PR. The decision to make this blog contactable by email means I receive a lot of press releases, and I'm often left wondering what exactly the senders of these things imagine I'm going to do with them. But the stuff that some organisations put out as "PR" does transcend the bland norm, and some London orchestras are getting pretty good at using YouTube to spread the message and offer something genuinely interesting.

The Philharmonia is one such group whose marketing department have come up with things that are actually worth watching, including the lovely video from Pekka Kuusisto, talking about the indefatigable Vladimiar Ashkenazy. I must own up to a special fondness for both these men, who came to my local concert hall when I was sixteen and gave one of those concerts that propels you towards a life-long infatuation with this wonderful thing called music. I can also concur with Kuusisto's assessment of him, that he's "a really cool dude". It's been my pleasure to have met Ashkenazy a few times, and I can only say that, in his case, "never meet your heroes" is a piece of advice I was happy to have ignored.

There's a lot more to watch on the Philharmonia YouTube page. They're showing the way on this. 

In addition, if you can, do watch the London Symphony Orchestra's live stream on Sunday April 22nd (7.30 BST) - Simon Rattle conducting Tippett and Mahler. Free. And live. What an age we live in.

Header picture screencapped from the Philharmonia's linked video. Images used are done so in line with "fair use" and will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s).

Prokofiev for Two

I’ve been enjoying a new release from pianists Martha Argerich and Sergei Babayan entitled Prokofiev for Two, made up of arrangements for two pianos by Babayan. There’s familiar numbers from Romeo and Juliet, but also some real rarities, including incidental music to Eugene Onegin, The Queen of Spades and Hamlet. I must admit that, to my shame, I hadn’t realised that Prokofiev had written music for these plays; before hearing them, I had to check that these weren’t some Tchaikovsky arrangements thrown in for good measure. Best of all is a waltz from Prokofiev’s opera War and Peace which, rather excitingly, is to be staged by Welsh National Opera in the autumn.

The internets led me then to the next in Doremi’s series of Argerich recital releases, pairing her with violinist Ruggiero Ricci, in a concert given in Leningrad in 1961. I’ve been listening to the second recital (Doremi released a previous one already), the highlight of which a blistering account of the Franck Violin Sonata, much better than some rather relentless solo Bach from Ricci at the recital’s start. There is, for a Soviet music fan, an added thrill in imagining who might have been in the audience that night.

"My Teacher Played Me Commie Music!"

I wrote a little guest post for Jessica Duchen's Classical Music Blog about how I introduced my students to Prokofiev, via Joe Stalin. Here's a taste:

I try to smuggle a little music into my lessons. Students studying Napoleon heard snatches of Beethoven’s Eroica and the story that went with it. Recently, with a GCSE class investigating culture and politics in Stalin’s USSR, I used interview footage featuring the great Russian conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky, recounting the way in which, during the Soviet period, books themselves were altered as officials and artists feel in and out of favour. But I had an ulterior motive: the interview, from Bruno Monsaingeon’s documentary The Red Baton, plays with clips of Sergei Prokofiev’s choral ode to Stalin, Zdravitsa (“A Toast” or “Hail to Stalin”). It’s beautiful, sweeping stuff.

Read the whole lot here.

Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Rachmaninov Uncovered

When I first thought about writing about music, I remember the limits of my ambition being the idea of writing the programme notes for my local amateur orchestra. One day, it happened - the man who did them retired, and it turned out it wasn't as sought after a job as I'd imagined. A little later, I started playing the violin with the orchestra, very very badly, at the back of the 2nds. The job of designing to posters also came up, and I tried that out too.

I thought of all this the other day when I saw an angry professor of music on Twitter taking exception to the design of the CD on the cover of the new issue of BBC Music Magazine. I like to think of the professor of music in question as a friend of this blog, though I don't bring it up here intending to weigh in on one side or the other. Rather, it got me thinking about the way in which design suggests intention, or maybe its lack, and whether when borrowing imagery from the past, we aren't sometimes a little blasé about its origins.

But back to those posters. The only tools I ever had at my disposal were MS Publisher and the image editing software Gimp, which was on the receiving end of a lot of swearing and which I never really figured out. One of my first efforts was for a concert we put on of Russian music and, far more ignorant of Russian history than I now am, I reached for as many cliches as MS Publisher was fit to hold.

I threw slanty propaganda-style text at it, a splash of anachronistic red (look at the composers involved) and an image of St Basil's Cathedral for good measure. I had remembered putting in some Cyrillic style backwards Rs, but I clearly thought better of it before submitting the final draft. This concoction of visual stereotypes seems rather ghastly to me now, but it did the job at the time.

Next for the over-literal-visual-treatment was the New World Symphony. You can probably spot some Morris tropes beginning to develop - the big white spaces (you couldn't have a hard edge or border because the cutting process wasn't that precise), primary colours, and a favourite MS font which sadly doesn't appear in more recent versions of the programme. You know what, though? I still rather like this one.

This next one came from the legendary occasion when we played a November 11th remembrance concert with a difference - the difference being the inclusion of the first movement of Shostakovich's Leningrad Symphony, for reasons which made sense to us at the time. It was as incredible as it sounds. And a fun fact - the future principal trumpet of the Philharmonia was one of 4 trumpet extras we added to our existing two, just for that piece. 

Now this one, if I may say, was a visual coup. I still have no idea how I managed to get Beethoven's eyes inside the shape of a lark (again, look at the programme).

The same sea of white space in this Elgar one, but you know what? I stand by it. Nice job.

This was my last and, if I may say, Best Ever BSO poster. I had learnt what to do with the oodles of required information, and I think really maxed out the potential of MS Publisher. But enough of BSO posters already - what about Rachmaninov?

Rachmaninov left Russia for good in 1917, after the October/November Revolution. Florid programme notes (like mine) like to describe the eve of his departure, with bullets whistling down the streets outside while the composer, in a white-heat of inspiration, rewrote his youthful 1st Piano Concerto, barely noticing the sounds of the world changing. But he was no fan of the Bolsheviks, and the loss of his homeland was clearly a source of great distress to him.

So it's rather incongruous for BBC Music Magazine to have slapped a picture of Lenin (in stained glass??) on the front of their cover CD, which features a performance of Rachmaninov's Preludes. What did Rachmaninov have to do with Lenin? As little as possible, the joke might end. Our musicologist friend put this to the publication, who responded that Lenin had more to do with Prokofiev and the disc's artist, Sviatoslav Richter, though it's hard to know quite what - Prokofiev skipped the country a few months after the Revolution and only resettled in the country in 1936, twelve years after Lenin's death. And Richter, though based in the Soviet Union until its demise, had his international career thoroughly thwarted by Soviet concert planners, who clearly saw him as some sort of flight risk (this is covered in Bruno Monsaingeon's excellent documentary on Soviet music, The Red Baton (Notes Interdites in the original French), and quite possibly in his essential film-interview with Richter, though it's been years since I saw that so I can't remember).

So there's an issue of relevance, though that's hardly new - British cultural institutions are quite happy to wheel out the Russian visual cliches to shift their Russian concerts, etc, and I can tell you that when designing that first poster, I was just drawing on the sort of visual shorthands for Russia that are all around in PR (silly me). It isn't unusual to see musical programmes relating to aspects of Russian history that include music only very tenuously connected to it. I wonder if we'd accept the same sort of tokenistic approach to cultures more readily associated with the current interest in identity politics?

There's a deeper problem, though, and it has to do with the willingness to reach for imagery that has altogether more sinister associations. It's actually unthinkable that a CD company would decorate their disc with an image of Hitler, and highly unlikely they'd go for Mussolini, or Franco, yet the Soviets aren't so off-limits. Lenin didn't commit the crimes of Stalin, but his rule was based on a large-scale disregard for the lives of those deemed outside the Communist project, and it's worth remembering that his economic policies during the Russian Civil War led to the deaths of millions of people through starvation. What would we be saying about our attitudes towards or even knowledge of these issues if we thought of his image as something attractive to cut and paste onto out CD cover? It's certainly not "overthinking" the problem to ask this question.

It's not as though BBC Music Magazine is alone in appropriating the imagery of totalitarian Russia. We are particularly in thrall to Stalinist propaganda, and with some good reason - its distinctive, highly effective and visually appealing. But we have to ask what that style was in service of, and whether we betray a certain crass disregard for its implications by pinching it to spice up our PR campaigns. I suspect this problems arises from the lack of clean break with Leninist and Stalinist Russia, which never fell from Western favour with the force that some those European fascist regimes did in 1945. Stalin lived on, having really won the Second World War, and his own propagandist legacy never decisively became the other half of a binary shared with Western might and light, in the way Hitler's did.

So the imagery stays with us, but without the black and white moral colouring of an SS uniform. Images, though, do add up to something, particularly in combination with other images. Any designer should be aware that pictures from the past carry worlds of baggage and meaning, and that we must dip into the art-box of history with caution. 

There was some discussion about the preferred spelling of Rachmaninov - He himself was apparently in favour of Rachmaninoff, but I just can't do it myself. I do look forward to hearing the Rachmaninov disc, and to discovering if the cover article on Shostakovich and the Soviet government departs from the formula.  The image of the November issue of BBC Music Magazine was posted on their Twitter account. I made all those posters, so I suppose the copyright rests with me; any other images have been used for the purposes of review and study and fall under "fair use"; they will be removed at the request of the copyright holder(s).

Mixed fortunes at the BBC Proms

Conductor Vladimir Jurowski (Photo: Sheila Rock)

The combination of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and music director Vladimir Jurowski often promises something special, but in Prom 64 we were left waiting a while for it. Certainly, the concert got off to a pleasant start – I’m always eager to hear something from off the beaten track, and if Granville Bantock’s rarely heard 1902 tone poem The Witch of Atlas wore its debt to Tchaikovsky on its sleeve, it did so with considerable charm. It made an intriguing pairing with Sibelius’s mighty tone poem Pohjola’s Daughter, whose taut construction and vivid storytelling showed up the slack structure of the Bantock, but which received the less assured performance.

I had to feel for pianist Anika Vavic, whose day this clearly was not. She seemed nervous and uncomfortable in Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto from the off, and it was simply a relief that she reached the end, albeit loosing handfuls of notes along the way (including, bizarrely, the entire mini-coda to the second movement). Ultimately, though, keyboard-malfunction-of-the-night went to the organist in Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, who accidentally planted an almighty organ parp right in the beautiful string-led passage that follows the famous ‘sunrise’ opening. Otherwise, Jurowski’s conducting and the LPO’s luminous playing in the Strauss were the highlights of a variable evening, with particular brownie points going to the string section principals, who demonstrated what a fine collection the orchestra currently has.   

Review: Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood at Wigmore Hall

Bell & Haywood

Joshua Bell and Sam Haywood at Wigmore Hall, London

11 December, 2012

Of all the violinists doing the rounds, Joshua Bell seems closest to the model of the mid-twentieth century greats who made their way in America – as comfortable in the serious repertoire as in showpieces and the old-style crossover. His Wigmore Hall programme – given with regular recital partner Sam Haywood – offered the kind of variety that we’re used to from this hugely popular American violinist. It alighted on the territory of some of the last century’s greatest – Heifetz and Oistrakh – and found him standing tall in their company.

Bell began with Schubert’s Rondo in B minor, D895 - a vigorous workout of a piece that tripped up the violinist more than once. Largely, though, his rapid finger-work was precise and his tone wonderfully clear. He was on surer ground in Richard Strauss’s Violin Sonata in E flat, Op.18, which revels in the kind of long singing lines that Bell is so good at carrying. It’s one of those finely crafted but rather anonymous early Strauss pieces that offers only glimpses of the instantly recognisable style familiar from the career that followed. Strauss struck his personal sound very suddenly in 1889, the year after composing the Sonata, with Don Juan; had we known him only from the Violin sonata, we’d remember a fiercely Romantic imagination coupled with forgettable melodies. There are some intriguing things, though, in the slow movement, such as the gently turbulent figures that dog the piano part – so delicately captured by Haywood – and the sudden burst of fire that grips the finale in its closing moments.

Bell suspects the influence of Gershwin (or at any rate, jazz) on Prokofiev’s Second Violin Sonata. I can’t hear it, but he placed Jascha Heifetz’s arrangements of Gershwin’s Three Preludes before the Sonata to make the point. The Preludes, originally for piano, sit a little awkwardly when spread between two instruments, but Bell’s swaggering way with them had an authenticity that I suspect only a New Yorker can muster.

Prokofiev originally composed the Second Violin Sonata for flute, adapting it for violin at the suggestion of David Oistrakh. He then wrote what became known as the First Violin Sonata – a work of such ferocious mechanical anguish that the Second can seem a pale flower beside it. Bell and Haywood, though, made it surging but nostalgic and richly coloured. Bell’s vivid sense of narrative flow carried it in a way I’ve never heard before, enriching it with a fragile turn of phrase that didn't negate power. The audience went wild for what followed – Sarasate’s Zigeunerweisen and an arrangement for Chopin’s C sharp minor Nocturne – but it was the Prokofiev that stole the evening.

UK readers can hear the recital on BBC iPlayer until Tuesday December 18th.

Proms preview: Vadim Gluzman interview

Violinist Vadim Gluzman makes his debut at the BBC Proms this year, with a performance of Prokofiev’s First Violin Concerto. I spoke to him a few weeks ago about the piece and about growing up in the Soviet Union. You can read my interview over at ClassicalSource.

Week 1 at the BBC Proms

Another Proms season judders into life, like a massive classical music Olympiad. Of course, this year, there’s another festival of remarkable human achievement going on up the road, promising to make London a no-go area for a chunk of the summer. But Prommers are hardy folk, and they’ll continue to fill the Royal Albert Hall somehow.

The First Night was a curiously programmed celebration of British music. Despite good intentions, I never did hear the whole thing, sampling only Mark Anthony Turnage’s Canon Fever. It caused a lot of ire over at The Guardian but seemed a fairly innocuous example of the contemporary music that gets some people so het up. The first Prom that I really got stuck into was Prom 4, in which John Adams conducted the combined orchestras of the Royal Academy of Music and the Juilliard school. It culminated in a performance of Adams’s City Noir, his 2009 symphonic canvas that explores the sultry atmosphere of the Californian film noir genre. Adams presented it with the LSO a few years back and then, as now, I found it a slightly rambling and insufficiently varied romp through the very post-minimalist style into which the composer has settled. It still has a cracking ending, though.

I made it to the arena for Prom 5, to hear the BBC Philharmonic and Juanjo Mena bringing refined lyricism to Struass’s Also sprach Zarathustra and Sibelius’s Seventh Symphony. It featured the British premiere of Leterna magica, by Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho, but her fifteen minute tribute to Ingmar Bergman paled in comparison to the masterpieces of orchestral writing with which it sat. I fear, though, that the concert will be remembered for Anne Schwanewilms’s performance of Strauss’s Four Last Songs. Her poor form was pretty astonishing and it later emerged that she was feeling ill. Certainly, there’s little point sticking the boot into her already much discussed problems, but if she knew she was ill, why not withdraw and save it for another day?

Sakari Oramo took to the podium for Prom 6 (replacing Jiri Belohlavek) with the BBC Symphony Orchestra. The programme concluded with an outing for Prokofiev’s Sixth Symphony, one of the composer’s most significant works and a piece that seems to grow and grow in stature each time I hear it. Oramo’s view was brighter than some, making less of the sombre tone that got Prokofiev into trouble with the Soviet authorities. But Prokofiev’s balletic colours shone brilliantly and the sting in the tail cast a long shadow over what had gone before.

Devil’s Trill will be away for week 2, which continues Daniel Barenboim’s cycle of Beethoven symphonies with the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. So you’ll have to let me know if you enjoyed all of the Boulez with which they’re coupled, or whether the whole things feels like a series of barbed wire sandwiches. Enjoy.

Big orchestra in a little town

I’m afraid to say I wasn’t that taken with the St Petersburg Philharmonic’s visit to The Anvil in Basingstoke at the weekend.  No orchestra can claim to be closer to the symphonies of Shostakovich, but they seemed a bit too comfortable on this occasion.  Read my full review at Classicalsource.

Kuusisto wows; Vengerov steps in

A review and a bit of good news to bring you.  First: I was again bowled over by the refreshingly quirky Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who joined Thomas Adès on Monday for a Britten Sinfonia gig.  He tore through Adès’s Violin Concerto, titled ‘Concentric Paths’, making a far better impression in it than Anthony Marwood did at the Proms, back in 2005.  Then there was an utterly lovely encore.  Read my full review at Classicalsource and listen to the concert (UK readers only) on the BBC iPlayer until next Monday.

Secondly, Intermezzo brings great news for violin fans:  Maxim Vengerov returns, replacing Martha Argerich in a concert with the St Petersburg Phil at the Barbican next month.  He’ll be playing Prokofiev’s 1^st Violin Concerto.  A Wigmore Hall recital follows in April, though both concerts are predictably sold out (it’s worth checking the Barbican website for returns, which are listed as they appear).  Incidentally, I met Vengerov, briefly, this week, and he’s a jolly nice chap.

UPDATE:  If you're happy to pay full whack (£55) then you'll have no problem getting hold of a returned ticket.  More than 15 have appeared since this morning.  The rest of us might have to wait until next time.

Prokofiev's Violin Concertos from Pavel Berman

Prokofiev 

Violin Concertos

Sonata for two violins

Pavel Berman (violin)/Anna Tifu (violin, Op.56)

Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana/Andrey Boreyko

Dynamic CDS 676

He may have been a pianist, but something about the violin excited Prokofiev enough for him to produce some of the instrument’s finest works.  Not much of the twentieth century’s repertoire for the violin can match the dazzling colour of the First Violin Concerto, completed in 1917 but not performed until the dust had settled after the Russian revolution, or the gravity and rhythmic energy of the Second, composed in 1935, shortly before Prokofiev returned to the Soviet Union to assume the role of most favoured composer.  Pavel Berman’s attractive coupling of the two is complemented by the Sonata for two violins of 1932, an ingenious and witty work much favoured by the father-son partnership of David and Igor Oistrakh.

In keeping the menu an all Prokofiev affair, Berman’s Dynamic recording would initially seem a more appealing proposition than some previous sets featuring both concertos.  Maxim Vengerov’s recordings with Rostropovich were at one time available with the Glazunov concerto, while Decca’s CD rerelease of Kyung Wha Chung’s 1970s performances came with the Stravinsky concerto.  Both of these venerable sets offer more persuasive performances, however, and while there are still things to be enjoyed in Berman’s playing, it was a disc that I found myself liking less as it progressed.    

The First Concerto begins promisingly.  Berman sets an unusually swift tempo, lending a dancing and dotted character to the opening melody, but this creates problems when he reaches the faster central section.  There’s nowhere to go and little contrast to be found, and this lack of care over the pacing continues across both concertos and, ultimately, everything feels rather generalised.  There are fine moments, though, particularly the first moment’s tranquil coda, captured very well by Berman and the Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana.

Berman’s performance of the Second Concerto is also a mixed affair, with the first movement proceeding quite carefully; indeed, one moment seems to find Berman struggling with the basics of getting his fingers round Prokofiev’s passage work.  The Andante suffers from more generalised pacing, stretching it out and making it feel more repetitive than it ought to. But the finale is a success, with Berman finding more grit and swagger for the unhinged rustic dance.  In the Sonata for Two Violins, Berman is well matched with partner Anna Tifu, though the recording here lacks body.

This review originally appeared at Musicweb-international. 

Divine Art's Prokofiev

Russian Piano Music Vol.7: Prokofiev

Piano Sonatas 2 & 7

Visions fugatives (selections)

10 pieces from Romeo and Juliet (selections)

Sergei Dukachev

Divine Art DDA25096

It seems appropriate that Prokofiev wrote some of his finest and most varied music for his own instrument, the piano.  Prokofiev left a handful of recordings of his own playing for posterity, setting a high standard for those wanting to follow in his footsteps and tackle this remarkable oeuvre.  That bar was maintained by two of Prokofiev’s pianist colleagues, Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Ricther, so that anyone attempting this repertoire is stepping into a mighty tradition.  This volume continues Divine Art’s survey of an even grander tradition: the hi-ways and by-ways of Russian piano music.

Divine Art’s Prokofiev compilation begins with the Second Piano Sonata of 1912, the most substantial among the first five.  It’s a case of serving the best first in Dukachev’s case, as this performance is the most secure on the disc with only the final Vivace suffering from a few blemishes.  The Andante is successful, with Dukachev building the tension effectively throughout. 

Only a few notes into his selection from the Visions Fugitives, however, and alarm bells ring.  Dukachev misses a chord in the left hand of No.1, leading to a bar or so of mismatched left and right hands.  It sounds so deliberate that I questioned my own edition of the score, but checking the original Russian print confirms that it must be a mistake on Dukachev’s part.  It turns out that these are live recordings, taken from a number of different concerts; not that you’d know from the back of the box.  So, a memory slip could be forgiven - it’s certainly happened to the very best in the past – but who is going to want to listen to this mistake again and again?

Armed with the knowledge that these are live recordings (only confirmed inside the booklet), the lack of audience noise throughout (save for the end of the 7th Sonata, which includes applause) is a relief, and the disc’s live status goes some way to explain Dukachev’s untidy finger work in the faster passages of the Op.22 selections.  All pianists make mistakes in concert, but these performances aren’t persuasive enough in their own terms to warrant anyone returning to them and hearing those mistakes again.

Four of Prokofiev’s Ten Pieces from Romeo and Juliet suffer from the same issues, though they confirm that Dukachev is at least good at dreamy atmosphere, such as that conjured for the beginning of Romeo and Juliet before parting.  The Seventh Sonata, one of Prokofiev’s fiercest works in any genre, is given a reasonable performance which impresses mostly in the shell-shocked second movement Andante coloroso, but the Precipitato finale is disappointingly underpowered. 

Across the entire disc, there is the added problem of poor sound, which varies quite noticeably between pieces but which is always consistently bad.  It would have been poor by the standards of four decades ago; the fact that all of these recordings were taped during or after 2000 makes the situation particularly unforgivable.  I’m inclined to give Dukachev the benefit of the doubt in some cases of muddy playing, as the acoustic and production can only have made the problems worse than they might have seemed at the time of the performances.  But the sound problems are enough on their own for me to direct anyone interested in sampling Prokofiev’s wonderful piano music elsewhere, such as to Bernd Glemser’s three budget priced discs of Prokofiev’s complete piano sonatas (including the Romeo and Juliet pieces) on Naxos (8553021; 8554270; 8555030), at the very least.

This review originally appeared at Musicweb International.

Proms week 5 - All the Russians

Fewer of the tripartite, double intervalled Proms grace this season.  They look good on paper but are hell to stand through and for that reason I wimped out and listened to Prom 43 (Litton/RPO/Wang - Copland/Bax/Barber/Bartok/Prokofiev - August 16th) on the radio.  The programme drew on the musical legacy of conductor and double bassist Serge Koussevitsky who had a hand in commissioning many of the twentieth century's great orchestral works.  A few of the works on show here were only tangentially linked to Koussevitsky - Prokofiev's Fourth Symphony was performed in its longer 1947 version and not the original 1930 version performed by Koussevistky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and Barber's Adagio for Strings owed its existence (in orchestral form at least) to Toscanini.

It was a long but nonetheless enticing and unusual programme, particularly for the Royal Philharmonic, who must have relished being allowed away from Beethoven and Mozart for a night.  The highlights were a rare outing for Arnold Bax's Second Symphony, which grew on me after a second hearing, by which time the initial over load of post-romantic harmony and complexity had started to reveal a compelling journey.  The original version of Prokofiev's Fourth Symphony is a favourite of mine and while I'd not claim it to be one of his greatest works, it does include a couple of wonderful episodes dropped for the more symphonic spread of the revised score.  Litton is a fan of the later version, telling Radio 3 that he thought Prokofiev had 'fixed' the first version's problems.  I hope he fulfils his promise to play it more often.

I stood for Prom 44 (Salonen/Philharmonia/Batiashvili - Shostakovich/Stravinsky/Tchaikovsky - August 17th), though my legs told me the programme was longer than it needed to be.  It was a packed house - I was standing further from the stage than I'd have liked to have been and some of the mischief of the suite from Shostakovich's ballet The Age of Gold was lost in the Albert Hall's temperamental acoustic.  Luckily, Lisa Batiashvili projected her solo line in Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto beautifully and her volume was never at the expense of warmth of tone.  I felt she coasted a little through the first two movements, really hitting her stride with an impassioned third movement and making the most of Shostakovich's astounding cadenza.

Proms week 3: Part 1

Only a week away and yet so much Proms water is under the bridge.  I returned from six nights abroad on Saturday and was persuaded to go to Prom 21 (CBSO/Nelsons/Midori - Strauss/Walton/Prokofiev - July 30th).  Conductor Andris Nelsons is only 33 and is already the talk of the town.  He has a particular love of Richard Strauss's music and his Don Juan showed his supple control of its shifts of tone and texture.  At the other end of the programme was something of a Nelsons party piece: The Dance of the Seven Veils from Strauss's opera Salome, an odd choice of dessert to plonk after Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.  Nevsky was bold and clear with smaller than usual choral forces making the vocal textures lighter than they can be, though I'd have liked a bit more terror in the famous Battle on the Ice.  Before that, Midori proved unpersuasive in Walton's little heard Violin Concerto; her performance might have been more appreciated in a smaller venue but didn't make the case for what seemed like an episodic work.

I caught the next few on the radio.  Prom 22 (BBC Phil/Noseda - Rachmaninov - July 31st), the latest in the 'choral Sunday' series, was a treat for Russian music nerds.  Rarely heard bits of Rachmaninov included his cantata Spring, composed around the time of his Second Piano Concerto; some short choral pieces and a pair of dance from his student opera Aleko.  All very nice, if not quite top draw Rach, though his own favourite amoung his works, The Bells, concluded the concert and made a better impression on me than previous hearings.  I couldn't take soprano Svetla Vassileva's warbling in Vocalise, though.

Prom 23 (BBC Phil/Noseda/Hough - Beethoven/Saint-Saens/Liszt - August 1st) took me back to my student days, when I heard Stephen Hough's magical performance of Saint-Saens's Fifth Piano Concerto (The Egyptian) with the LPO at the Festival Hall.  I'd never heard it before and was bowled over by its wit and stylistic sleight of hand.  Hough did it all again at the Proms on Monday, remarkably enough giving the work its first Proms outing since 1918.  It's still dazzling and great fun, though Hough took some of the charm from the finale by driving on too fast.  Liszt's Dante Symphony (another concert hall rarity) didn't completely hold my attention, so too swift a dismisal would be unfair - Liszt does still strike me, though, as a composer more remarkable for his inovations than for the general quality of his music.

The links above will take you to the Proms listings, from which UK readers can listen to the concert for a limited time only.  Prom 21 was broadcast live on BBC TV.

Tchaik Comp: Round three, day two

Imagine a world where we didn't have to sleep.  What would you do with the hours of 11pm-7am?  I'd probably end up playing too many computer games, though this week I'd certainly be watching as much of the Tchaikovsky Competition finals as possible.  Even with my self-imposed focus on the violin prize, there's not enough time in the day to see everything. 

The second night of the third round saw a pair of Tchaikovsky Concertos and a Prokofiev 1st, which was an interesting opportunity to compare at least two soloists in the same repertoire.  With time at a premium, I focused on the first movements, and found three quite different players gradually winning me over with their playing.  First up was American violinist Eric Silberger (pictured), giving a nervy but persuasive Tchaikovsky Concerto which settled down as it progressed.  I admired his engagement with the work's expressive core, but it was his misfortune to share an evening with Russian fiddler Sergey Dogadin, whose ease with the solo part's difficulties was exceptional and whose calm control and perfect technique reminded me of Julia Fischer.  Between them came another American, Nigel Armstrong, whose choice of concerto (Prokofiev's 1st) was wise and whose performance was hugely enjoyable.  You'd have to say, though, that on this evidence, Dogadin has the edge.

One issue of sound did concern me, however.  Listening remotely is always going to be a different experience to being in the hall, but I was very aware of the dry tone of both Silberger and Armstrong during the first half, which had been replaced by a warmer and more reverberant sound for Dogadin.  Had the technical people altered the mix for the second half, or was Dogadin simply standing in a better spot on the stage?  Whatever the answer, I was left wondering how different the perspective of the judges must be, sitting close to half way back in this large hall, and how close to acoustical reality our online vantage point really was.