A Rare Russian Treat, Tomorrow on BBC Radio 3

Rozhdestvensky (right) at a rehearsal with Shostakovich and Rostropovich, in 1960.

Few great musicians of the era of Shostakovich survive now, but the legendary conductor Gennadi Rozhdestvensky is still out there, offering a very real link to the greatest of Soviet composers. Rozhdestvensky worked with Shostakovich between the early 1960s and his death in 1975, most notably on the late revival of the opera The Nose. Rozhdestvensky's appearances in the West are relatively rare these days, but he did appear, in Dresden, earlier this year, conducting the first and last Shostakovich symphonies. The concert is broadcast on Radio 3 on Monday 13th November, at 2pm, and will be available for 30 days afterwards for UK users.

Rozhdestvensky leads the Dresden Staatskapelle in tomorrow's broadcast. The orchestra has a fine history with Shostakovich, and recordings are available of them in symphonies conducted by another great Shostakovich maestro, Kirill Kondrashin. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

BBC Radio 3's Russian Revolution

Looking through the schedules for this week, I note with delight how much time is being given over to Russian music and culture on BBC Radio 3. I then wonder quite how I'm supposed to listen to it all. One programme at a time, I suppose. I've made a list of everything I could, though you'll note that some of these things are now in the past. UK readers can follow the links (for 30 days) to catch up with all that Russian goodness.

Composer of the week continues next week with music from the post-Stalin period. The anniversary (calendar-corrected) of the actual Bolshevik Revolution is marked by a special afternoon discussion on Tuesday of this week.

Sunday 5^th

5pm – The Listening Service on Shostakovich’s 15^th Symphony

5.30pm – Words and Music: Russia after the Revolution

6.45pm – Sunday Feature: Emigranti – 1917 Revisited

7.30pm – Concert of Tchaikovsky from the Verbier Festival

9pm – Drama on 3 – Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons

Monday 6^th

9am – Essential Classics: interview with BBC foreign correspondent Bridget Kendall (all week)

12noon – Composer of the Week: Scriabin and Prokofiev

2pm – Afternoon Concert: Music by Tchaikovsky and Taneyev

7.30pm – Evening Concert: LPO in music by Shostakovich and Rachmaninov

10.45pm – The Essay: Ten Artists that Shook the World (all week)

Tuesday 7^th

6.30am – Breakfast: Live from the Mariinsky Theatre

12noon – Composer of the Week: Mosolov and Roslavets

1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Elisabeth Leonskaja plays Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky

2pm – Breaking Free: A century of Russia culture, live from Lenin’s London office

7.30pm – Evening Concert: Shostakovich and Rachmaninov from the RLPO

10pm – Free Thinking: Man With a Movie Camera

11pm – Late Junction: Russian Experimentalism

Wednesday 8^th

12pm – Composer of the Week: Myaskovsky and Popov

1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Alexei Vlodin

7.30pm – Evening Concert: Cedric Tiberghien plays Prokofiev and Mussorgsky

10pm – Free Thinking: Svetlana Alexievich and Stephen Kotkin

Thursday 9th

12pm – Composer of the Week: Shostakovich and Kabalevsky

1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Anna Vinnitskaya

2pm – Afternoon concert: Rimsky-Korsakov’s Golden Cockerel

7.30pm – Evening Concert: Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov from the RPO

10pm – Free Thinking: Russian Art and Exile

12.30am – Archive recordings of Kirill Kondrashin

Friday 10^th

12pm – Composer of the Week: Prokofiev and Khrennikov

1pm – Lunchtime Concert: Vadym Kholodenko

2pm – Afternoon concert: Music by Tchaikovsky

Saturday 11^th

9am – Record Review: Includes Gerard McBurney on Shostakovich’s 11^th Symphony

12.15pm – Music Matters: Discussion with Teodor Currentzis

3pm – Sound of Cinema: Russian Revolution special

6pm – Opera on 3: Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth

1am – More archive recordings of Kirill Kondrashin

Sunday 12^th

12noon – Private Passions: Interview with Simon Sebag Montefiore

2pm – The Early Music Show: Music form the court of Catherine the Great

7.30pm – Evening Concert: Music by Glazunov and Schnittke

The header image is from the BBC Radio 3 website and is one of a number of designs being used to promote this season. Read more about co-opting propaganda imagery here. Any copyrighted material is included as "fair use" for critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s).

Chesterfield on Classical: Wagner's Clap

Devil’s Trill is delighted to post this guest blog by the veteran record producer and music critic Roger Chesterfield.

I sometimes wonder, what with Radio 3’s baffling disregard for the finer details of elite record collecting, who will sweat the small stuff when I’ve taken my stalls seat in the great concert hall in the sky. Reassurance is at hand in the form of the latest volume of Philip Philpott’s magisterial Matrix Numbers of the Lesser Known German Labels of the 1940s, which has, over the last few months, been a light at the end of the tunnel of interminable wet-weather walks with the dog. With bedraggled lab on the rug and my own fireside seat secured, a glass of Highland Park in my hand and the new MNLKGL40 (as it’s affectionately known) in my lap, the hours waltz by, the chimes of midnight barely registered among the close-typed dashes and digits lining some 1600 pages.

Perusing those lines dedicated to the much missed Bavarian imprint Schnappstein-Gimellphon, I happened upon the matrix numbers for the original release of Herrman Schnipelbrumpf’s 1947 hecklephone recital with pianist Wim Vomm, apparently much prized by hecklephiles. When released, Schnipelbrumpf’s recital covered some fourteen sides on 78rpm shellac record including – and here’s where it gets really fun – three sides given over entirely to applause. This is all the more curious given that the recital was entirely studio-recorded in Schnappstein-Gimellphon’s bespoke property, located deep in the mountains and powered entirely by hot air donated by patrons at the Salzburg Festival.

All this stirred some misremembered something deep within the Chesterfield brainvaults and I recalled a long discarded custom which was, at one time, encountered at Bayreuth in odd-numbered years, of giving a single clap some way into the second act of Dutchman, in tribute to a similar gesture once given by Wagner in 1880. Some wags carped that Wagner had simply been squashing a recalcitrant fly, but such was the strictness of observance of the custom among some Wagnerites that Deutsche Grammophon’s then-director, Ludwig Donkwurt, insisted the clap be included in Karl Bohm’s 1971 yellow-label traversal. Apparently, Gregory Peck was flown in from New York to do the honours and got it down in one take.

And then, with his customary lightness of touch, Philpott joined the dots which had been just out of focus to the poor old Chesterfield varifocals. It turns out that Donkwurt began his career at Schnappstein-Gimellphon (of course) and had adopted the practice of including applause at unusual moments in a variety of music. His belief in the “Wagner Clap” had resulted in a string of scholarly discoveries, including the revelation that Beethoven had insisted on applause after the exposition of the first movement of the Fifth Symphony. Once at DG, Donkwurt had a special recorded-applause unit established and one Carlos Kleiber was so taken with the idea that he led nineteen rehearsals with the ensemble, before abandoning the project and declaring their clapping “too provincial”.

Happy to resist the many entreaties to “tweet” my thoughts to the Third Programme, I communicated all of this to the director of Radio 3 via e-mail, though it is with some dismay that I report the station’s most recent relay of the Kleiber 5^th was accompanied by nothing of this remarkable scholarship. No doubt the Beeb’s subscription to MNLKGL40 lapsed long ago, and those fresh discoveries nestled amongst the matrix numbers will have to remain between the dog, the Highland Park, and myself.

Radio review - Rare Bowen and Wigmore celebrations

When planning what to do with this blog, it struck me that a vast amount of classical music broadcast on radio and, occasionally, TV, goes uncommented on and that, perhaps most importantly, lots of it is free.  Why not comment on stuff on the radio?  What’s more, much of it is available to listen to (in the UK) for up to a week after broadcast, so, unlike an unbroadcast concert, you could follow the links and listen for yourselves.  

And so, here is the first of what should be a weekly series of radio reviews.  Looking through the schedules, it became apparent to me that I might need to clone myself to cover everything interesting that BBC Radio 3 play in a week, so this will unfortunately have to be a roundup of select highlights.  And if I’ve missed something great, or even not string related, why not mention it in the comments?

On to some broadcasts that caught my eye.  The final concert of the 2011 English Music Festival in Oxfordshire (Monday, 30^th May – Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra/David Hill) featured a couple of rarities, including the first ever performance of an early cantata by Vaughan Williams called The Garden of Proserpine (read more about the concert at Classicalsource).  The string music interest came in the form York Bowen’s Rhapsody for Cello and Orchestra, Op. 74, performed by that champion of the unusual, Rafael Wallfisch.  It wasn’t a first performance, but it must have been the first of modern times, having only recently been published and its appearance rides a recent wave of interest in Bowen’s music that has seen his discography swell.  I’ve not been that taken with Bowen’s music in the past, but this was more memorable; certainly patchy, but with an unexpected attack at the outset that reminded me most of Hitchcockian scores by Bernard Herrmann (I was initially dismayed that the usually excellent radio host Catherine Bott compared the sound of what was to come to that of film music – how often anything tonal and mid-century is likened to a movie score – but in this instance she was right) and it was most successful in the quiet mysterioso moments when Bowen resisted heaping too many elements on top of each other.  

Two starry concerts broadcast live from London’s Wigmore Hall marked the 110^th anniversary of the hall’s opening.  As the effusive tribute doc informed us, the hall was originally called the Bechstein Hall and its list of past performers reads as a roll call of the great musicians of the last century.  These two events lured some of today’s top players, the first of which featured the Takács Quartet and pianist Stephen Hough in music by Haydn, Beethoven and Dvorak (Tuesday, 31^st May).  The Takács are feted as the greatest quartet of our time and, surprisingly, I had only ever heard them before on disc.  The same concentration I have heard them bring to the Beethoven in their famous Decca cycle was present in Beethoven’s Op.135 and its wonderful slow movement was flowing and silken, but I was surprised by some of the more conspicuous rough edges from the violins.