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).

Those were the Proms that were

Semyon Bychkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Proms (Photo: Andrew Morris)

It's gone so quickly, especially when seen from a distance. There may be two weeks left, but my Proms are over, save the delayed TV relays and the Last Night hate-watch which, as ever, I hope none of my non-classical friends tune in for. And the distance is because I have never lived further from Prince Albert's mighty, wildly unsuitable hall, so four visits was my lot this 2017 season.

One solitary promenade in the arena meant I stood for less than any season since 2002, but that one Prom was a whopper. Rattle's Gurrelieder - effectively beginning his LSO tenure in style - was the one I'd mentally marked on P-Day (when the Proms are announced and which, now I think about it, is NOT a good name). UK people with a internets can see it on the iPlayer until the end of September, and would be advised to seek it out as, like an eclipse, it's a heavenly wonder that doesn't come around that often.

The others were all Bachtrackers - two from the BBC NOW at the start of the season (Prom 5 and Prom 6), the highlight of which was Nicola Benedetti's completely incredible performance of Shostakovich's First Violin Concerto (and you may have heard that I like him). My last visit was last week's BBCSO performance of Tchaikovsky's Manfred, which you can read about here (look out for a favorite character from Toy Story in the review. See, you want to know now.)

All At Sea in the Met's Tristan und Isolde

It is, as shown by all of social media, staggeringly easy to be cynical. As I sat in a West Country multiplex yesterday, though, I felt the snark lift from my eyes and, for a few minutes, basked in the pure technical wonder of the Metropolitan Opera’s Live in HD screening. That I am able to pop along to my local(ish) cinema and watch a 5 hour Wagner opera live and as it happens is a marvellous, nay, miraculous thing.

Staying with the wondrous, the Met sent us a performance of Tristan und Isolde that will, when broadcast on the radio, surely be one for the ages. Nina Stemme gave a wild eyed and driven Isolde that never dipped in pure emotional and vocal projection. Stuart Skelton’s Tristan was hugely persuasive too, though a little caught in the shadow of Stemme’s brilliance. The other parts (and there really aren’t that many) were universally winning, particularly Rene Pape’s authoritative King Marke. The real man of the hour(s and hours) was Sir Simon Rattle, who has talked about the lucidity he discovered in the myriad of markings written in Mahler’s personal score of the opera. That special knowledge allowed heft and transparency into the music, but the sense of flow was all Rattle’s own – note the great aborted climax which rips the lovers from each other’s gaze as Marke discovers their treachery, half way through Act 2.

But oh, the rest. Tristan begins at sea, which allows for director Mariusz Trelinski’s modern naval setting. Longing, searching, navigating, whatever, is represented from the off by the circular sweep of a radar beam, which also looks like the safety curtain buffering while the set loads. Within the circle, the thrusting prow of a ship pounds the waves like a particularly wet nautical dream. Water and flame are motifs throughout, glimpsed first in flashbacks cut like an amateur homage to Andrei Tarkovsky, for whom they were recurrent and pleasingly baffling symbols. And a great churning projection of the sea reappears whenever things get, you know, a bit choppy. Trelinski seems really uninterested in representing or heightening the emotional state of the characters, setting Act 2 in a massive dingy cargo bay, with Tristan and Isolde bumping into what look like toxic compost bins as they paw at each other. And by Act 3, the visual ideas have dried up almost completely, save for a lighter-wielding 10-year old (some sort of health and safety violation, surely) and a brief episode in a ruined house.

And so while the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera and Sir Simon and a stellar cast carved out a flowing, yearning, exhausting Tristan, the staging returned me to cynicism. Some of what I saw I liked – the big black sun that hovers above the lovers is a really creepy and magnetic image – but if the cinema-inspired Trelisnki is drawing on the symbol-filled films of Andrei Tarkovsky, the images need to suggest an enticing but enigmatic logic in a way that they don’t here. Maybe it’s a production from which more would emerge with repeated viewing, but right now, I just want to hear it on the radio.

Now read Tristan und The Director.

Tristan und The Director

A lot of air has been expended lamenting the decline in column inches given to arts coverage and criticism, so it’s good to see The Guardian Online giving apparently free reign to New York based critic Seth Colter Walls to pick apart the Met’s new Tristan und Isolde at length. NY’s Metropolitan Opera presents the meisterwerk in a production by Polish director Mariusz Treliński, which has met with a fair deal of opprobrium of the sort he encountered in Wales when his noirish Manon Lescaut was staged by WNO. It was a big ol’ mess but there were some fascinating ideas in it, but Seth goes after the way in which Treliński’s new Tristan trivialises the themes at the heart of opera

“That the director prefers to make his own pictures take precedence over the sounds and words of the opera is, in itself, notable. More important – and more quizzical – is the fact that director has elected to make an opera-wide fetish out of such a minor point in the work. The great length we have to travel for a reveal of such jaw-dropping inconsequence is just one mark of how turgid and unrewarding this staging can feel.”

But what I really like about Seth’s long-form takedown is that it does what I always wished criticism would do when I was a nipper, feeling my way into the critical language. Early in the review, he carefully establishes critical criteria, an approach to the subject, and proceeds from this point. Lack of space (and sloppy thinking) usually precludes this hugely instructive approach, but if criticism is for anything, surely it’s to offer a framework through which performance might be understood.

“Directorial license in the world of opera takes place between two poles of extremity. One one side, there is the lighter touch. This less-controversial style involves activist moves that nevertheless seek to harmonize in some way with opera as it has been historically understood. These directorial interventions might include putting the action in a new century, using modern dress, or adding some “framing device” – not in the interest of revising the drama, but rather to make its poetry more readily approachable in the moment. The opposing approach might be called the “rewrite” style, wherein the historical intention of the work holds no particular authority, and can thus be stretched, tortured or abandoned at will.”

So often, criticism fails to define its own criteria of assessment, as though the means by which we arrive at a conclusion about a thing might be self-evident. Of course, they’re not.

As for Tristan, the Met’s seems to have the fairly common sight of musicians (among them Sir Simon Rattle, Nina Stemme and Stuart Skelton) soldiering on valiantly against the tide of directorial concept. Opera lovers around the world will be able to judge for themselves on Saturday 8^th October, when the production is broadcast live in HD to cinemas.

Now go and read the whole review.

13 years on, Rattle and the Berlin Phil back at the Proms

In some ways, Sir Simon Rattle’s Berlin adventure has run in parallel with my own engagement with classical music. We’re not totally alike – he’s a hugely in-demand musician touring the world with some of the planet’s finest musicians; I didn’t get out of bed today until half 10 and haven’t so far left the house – but his first visit to the Proms with his Berlin band came as I was just falling in love with the sound of an orchestra, and I’ve tried to catch his Proms visits ever since. It was with some alarm, while queuing on Prince Consort Road under a grey London sky, that I realised that that first Rattle/BPO visit was in 2003, 13 years ago. Still, the sound of a mobile phone cutting across the opening bassoon solo of The Rite of Spring is still fresh in the memory.

This year, he brought a pair of concerts that seemed to mirror the programming concerns of his two 2003 Proms. Prom 64 (September 2nd) weighed heavily under the mass of Mahler’s difficult Seventh Symphony, preceded by Pierre Boulez’s Éclat. This 1965 piece shimmers and judders with a fluid discourse of piano, a smattering of orchestral instruments, melodic tuned percussion and mandolin and guitar. The way Boulez’s limpid textures flow and stop, seeming to hang in the pauses like a freeze-framing of rapid nature, is entirely his own, and the handling of colour is very impressive, but for a man held by some as the defining voice of post-war classical music, Boulez’s insights seem slight to me. As someone who once covered an very long weekend of Boulez (including anexcellent Q&A with the man himself), I feel I’ve heard enough to satisfy myself that I don’t hear anything other than technique and aesthetics, nothing of the grab-you-by-the-collar immediacy of Xeankis or Ligeti  or (to further compare apples and oranges) Lutoslawksi. The fact that I feel quite so nervous writing this reflects the extent to which some in the contemporary music world would disagree.

But as a piece of programming, Éclat made perfect sense. Mahler’s Seventh also features guitar and mandolin, and Boulez’s own advocacy of Mahler was undoubtedly very important. There’s also a sense that the scale and the particulars of the Seventh must give conductors as many sleepless nights as must the prospect of tackling one of Boulez’s orchestral scores, because the Seventh is an ungainly beast that left even Mahler authority Deryck Cooke scratching his head. Essentially, it doesn’t offer the same kind of titanic emotional journey found in the Sixth or the Ninth and ends up with a rather silly sounding finale that must give conductors nightmares. Rattle played the whole thing pretty fast and pretty straight, not pretending there was any hidden depth beyond the surface drama of the first movement or the atmospheric landscapes of the central three. Mark Valencia summed it all up very well here.

The following evening, rain kept down the queues and got me to near the front of the arena for a much more satisfying aural treat. Rattle brought a new piece by Julian Anderson (who had to climb under a barrier to reach the stage and shake Maestro’s hand), an entire set of Dvorak Symphonic Dances (too much of a good thing by some way) and Brahms’s Second Symphony. The Brahms brought out the best of the Berliners’ playing (though a moment of miscoordination in the finale had Rattle nervously trying to pin down the beat) but I felt the momentum ebb away from the first movement and, while beautiful, found his attempt at Brucknerian monumentalism in the second rather distancing. Still, there’s a sense when Rattle’s in the hall that this is the Proms at its best, and it will be a shame if, given his looming move to the LSO, it’s his last with the Berlin Phil.

To finish with an aside, the issue of applause is always a tricky one, and I may one day put down my own thoughts in writing, but one audience member hit a new low but shouting “Bravo” and applauding loudly as the Berliner’s ploughed into the final chord of the Brahms. There are many words one could use, but arrogant and rude are the two that I’ll stick with for now.

Stop it, James

Hopping channels last night, I stumbled across BBC2’s Artsnight, a 30 minute show dumped in the gaping hole in the schedule left by the Beeb’s bizarre decision a few years ago to jettison Newsnight Review in favour of a monthly arts roundup. Satirist Armando Iannucci took an intriguing look at the role and value of the arts in contemporary society, alighting at classical music, one of his own personal passions. He spoke to pianist James Rhodes about the allure of classical music and about the state of the art today. Unsurprisingly, Rhodes continued the narrative of alarm he’s been peddling for a while. Not without good reason, of course, as we should all be concerned about falling audiences and funding opportunities. But Rhodes seems to have defined himself in direct opposition to the orthodox, to the “scowling pianist” stuffed in a white shirt and tails, and he seemingly needs to attack and caricature the “opposition” in order to justify his own approach.

There is, of course, room for many approaches, and I’m as proud a wearer of jeans to the opera as anyone else who doesn’t believe your attire helps you hear any better. But when speaking, in the short interview in last night’s programme, about the business of classical music, he’s just plain wrong. Despite Rhodes’s claim a new multi-million pound concert hall “seems to be a condition” of Simon Rattle’s arrival at the head of the London Symphony Orchestra, Rattle and the LSO have said that no such condition is in place. He went on:

“Take that £400 million – that’s 4 [or] 5 years of the entire music education budget! We don’t need another hall, and everyone who bleats about “oh well, the acoustics at the barbican aren’t...” Come on! Really? You really care that much? It’s like... Stop it!”

He’s certainly right that this is an enormous amount of money in the face of a culture of underinvestment in music education, but yes, the acoustics at the Barbican are insufficient to showcase the brilliance of an orchestra like the LSO, and no, we are not wrong or somehow elitist for caring that much. Neither is Rattle wrong to care, on two fronts: he is used to getting the best from some of the most miraculously brilliant ensembles in the world and is quite right to ask for the best conditions in which to make music. Secondly, his track record in Birmingham shows how reinvigorating such a project can be: the building of Symphony Hall was a milestone in the city’s cultural history and is a multi-purpose venue, as any in London would surely be.

Anyone who’s ever sat in the cheap seats, at the back of the Royal Festival Hall, the Barbican or in the gods at the Royal Albert Hall can confirm that our precious, wonderful art-form can seem pretty remote and uninvolving from up there. A concern for how our music sounds is not incompatible with a desire to see more switched on to its wondrous brilliance. There are many valid arguments for and against the project, which I’ve no intention of further rehearsing here, but when it comes to the tedious ad hominem attacks on those of us who value slightly different things, please, James, stop it.

BBC Proms week 8: Rattle's brilliant Lutosławski

Witold Lutosławski on the podium

What a difference a day makes. Only the previous evening, I'd been feeling a little deflated at the too-perfect-by-half playing of the Berlin Philharmonic in a couple of French items, but after their second Prom (Prom 64) with chief conductor Simon Rattle, I positively floated out of the Royal Albert Hall. The difference? The Berliners did what they do best - Romantic German stuff - and Rattle did what he does best - weird twentieth century stuff.

Yefim Bronfman joined them for the biggest and best of Brahms's concertos, the Second Piano Concerto. His was a robust and confident performance, perhaps without the nobility of Emil Gilels or the vivid storytelling of Nelson Friere, but compelling none the less. And the Berliners were at home in Brahms's classicism, which seems only to gain from the orchestra's inherent refined weight.

But it was the orchestra's performance of Witold Lutosławski's Third Symphony that really sent me away with a grin on my face. It's hardly a concert hall regular, but the symphony is a forceful drama that communicates something urgent and belligerent (those punchy Es heard as a recurring motif). Rattle knew Lutosławski and has remained a champion of this highly distinctive composer, and in the Berlin Orchestra he has an ensemble able to deliver every glistening detail of this score. He also judged the mood in the hall just right, including an encore (Dvorak's Slavonic Dance in C, Op.72/7) after a piece that he would usually have given the last word.

Week 7 at the BBC Proms: Visitors from Europe

Frank Peter Zimmermann

We’ve got to that end of the Proms season when the big boys roll in, and this year is bigger than most. As though they were moths attracted by the glow of London’s Olympic summer, the Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandaus and Vienna Philharmonic all appear twice in the space of nine days and while there are some who decry the arrival of the touring bands with their stock programmes, it’s a pretty exciting time to be a prommer.

Prom 57 brought the first hint of that special European sound usually saved for the Musikverein and the Concertgebouw. They may only be (relative) youngsters, but already the players of the Gustav Mahler Jugendorchestre seem to have mastered the super refined sense of balance heard in the Vienna and Berlin orchestras, where the honeyed brass tone is a restrained extension of the greater ensemble and the strings behave as though they were one big instrument. That much was immediately evident in the Act 3 Prelude and Good Friday Music from Wagner’s Parsifal, the opener of conductor Daniele Gatti’s wonderfully logical programme exposing different strands of Austro-German romanticism. It’s a cliché worth ditching to describe these operatic extracts as ‘bleeding chunks’; they provide such a wonderful way in to Wagner’s monumental music dramas for so many people – especially when performed as well as they were here – that I have to roll my eyes whenever I read someone reaching for that tired metaphor. Gatti completed to circle at the concert’s end with the Act 3 Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, realised as glowing as the Parsifal.

Frank Peter Zimmermann was a formidable and inviting guide in Berg’s Violin Concerto. In some ways, it isn’t surprising that this is the only firmly established serialist work in the concert repertoire – there’s a tender expressive core to it that makes it so much more than a demonstration of twelve-tone techniques. I’m sure that other violinists would push Berg’s anguished moments further than did Zimmermann, but his was a reflective performance that wasn’t afraid to turn ugly when the music required. And for once, the ubiquitous Bach encore was justified, by Berg’s own delicate reference to a Bach chorale towards the end of his concerto. And Zimmermann’s Bach was its own captivating journey, wringing more intensity of feeling from the A minor Solo Sonata’s Andante than many manage.

Richard Strauss’s sumptuous Rosenkavalier waltzes (patched together later by others and much disparaged in their concert form) made for a revealing contrast with the leaner, meaner waltzing madness of Ravel’s La valse. I’d always thought the Ravel to be extravagant (deliberately and self-destructively so, of course), but it came off as restrained when coupled with Strauss’s excess. Gatti drew tremendously delicate playing from the GMJO, but maybe showed his hand too early in the Ravel by painting the whole in the psychotic colours that are usually reserved for the conclusion. A great concert, though.

I’m afraid I felt a little less enthusiastic about Prom 63, the first of the Berlin Phil’s two appearances this year, which as I write is clocking up more and more rave reviews. Sir Simon Rattle’s programme – Ligeti, Wagner, Sibelius, Debussy and Ravel – looked a hotchpotch on paper and turned out to be in the event. I could follow the thread of the first half – exquisite clouds of melting sound in Ligeti’s Atmospheres flowing without a break into a wonderfully sustained Prelude to Wagner’s Lohengrin, followed by the bleak granite-like blocks of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony – but I couldn’t see the connection to Debussy’s Jeux or Ravel’s Daphnis second suite. Maybe the connection was buried deep, but these Rattle programmes often feel like we are being Told Something and not getting the link just leaves me feeling like a bit of a fool.

But my real problem was how slick the whole thing was. No one on Earth plays with the finesse, refinement and jaw dropping perfection of the Berliners, but neither is there ever a sense of danger or risk. I’ve never heard the end of Daphnis et Chloe more gorgeously turned, but I’ve certainly heard it sound more thrillingly rumbunctious, more like it could explode or collapse at any moment. This is, after all, one of the hardest things an orchestra can play. Listening to this orchestra is like being in a car – a Rolls or something – and seeing the countryside flash past at great speed, and not being able to feel a single bump in the road. A technical marvel, certainly, but hardly the ride of your life.

 

Restoring Debussy

Simon Rattle and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment stripped back the accumulated dust of decades in presenting music by Fauré, Ravel and Debussy on Sunday night:

 “They'd taken their programme of French orchestral music on a short tour around Europe, presumably settling in to their new-found sound and getting to grips with repertoire at least a hundred years outside their comfort zone. And the result? A little softness in the strings; a little more warmth in the brass; a whole lot of wobble from the oboe. Not much, in fact, and if you did know already about the instrument switch (the programme notes hardly mentioned it), you'd barely have noticed the difference.”

In fact, I was a little miffed to read that the late night repeat of the second half (part of the OAE’s attempt to lure in a younger, cooler audience) had included a chat about the older instruments used. Had they done the same at the 7pm concert, the whole thing might have felt more worthwhile. Jessica Duchen reports on the Night Shift event. You can read my full review at Classical Source.