A wild Mozartean ride at Glyndebourne

 

The truth is that I’d had mixed feelings about going to Mozart’s La finta giardiniera at Glyndebourne. Early Mozart operas can be a somewhat tedious procession of recitativo alternating with aria, the latter usually of the ‘stand and deliver’ variety.

What’s more, it was to be produced by a young director with virtually no track record either on the opera stage or in the theatre, Frederic Wake-Walker. Would it turn out to be another tiresome travesty, the goings-on on stage apparently unrelated to the work and its universe?

Of course, in the event it was one of the most exciting productions seen at the house in some 45 years of Glyndebourne visits. The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, conducted by Glyndebourne’s new musical director Robin Ticciati, were, as expected, on top form, producing scintillating sounds. And the seven who took the principal roles (Christiane Karg, Rachel Frenkel, Joélle Harvey, Nicole Heaston, Joel Prieto, Gyula Orendt and Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke) were all outstanding, both as actors and singers. So far, so good.

But it was the production itself that was an extraordinary revelation. First, the director Wake-Walker and his designer (Antony McDonald) had actually located the action (at least initially) in the Rococo period. Quite a shock in itself. And the performers had clearly studied art of that time, at least sufficiently to reproduce credible Rococo gesture (see above).

As time went by – I seemed to be holding my breath for long periods – the production took on a wild, improvisatory life, one that clearly took a bewitched audience on a theatrical ride that all seemed to spring from character and situation – and from the music.

Who knew that nineteen year-old Mozart could be so breath-taking?

Prima le parole?

To Birmingham for a concert performance of Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier. It was preceded by a study day created and led by David Nice on four German operas to be performed in the city in coming weeks – Götterdämmerung, Ariadne auf Naxos, Moses und Aron and yesterday’s Rosenkavalier.

The rich heart of the study day was four presentations by leading scholars (William Mival, Michael Tanner, Stephen Johnson and David Nice himself), together with some Richard Strauss songs from Birmingham Conservatoire students (soprano Carrie-Ann Williams, baritone Samuel Oram and pianist Shah Johan bin Shahridzuan).

But the major revelation was the performance of excerpts (sans music) from the librettos of each opera by a group of our finest thespians ‒ Dame Harriet Walter and her husband Guy Paul (both above) taking the lead roles, with Daisy Boulton and Joel MacCormack as the young things.

What it showed so clearly was how persuasive and powerful Wagner himself was as a dramatist, and how brilliant was Strauss’s librettist, Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

We tend to think of operas as being predominantly the work of their composers, yet in a few cases the words are so important that we would do well to consider them fundamentally as co-creations – Da Ponte-Mozart and Hofmannsthal-Strauss top of the list, together, of course, with Wagner-Wagner. Not so sure about Schoenberg-Schoenberg.

Here is Harriet Walter as Lady Macbeth. Strong stuff: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hREqqNr9AyI

    

Patiently waiting for the reviews

I went last Wednesday to the English Chamber Orchestra’s concert at Cadogan Hall in London. The orchestra was in tremendous form.

It was an extraordinary programme, featuring the world première of a new work by a Brilliant Young Composer ("Serenade for Strings"); a mature piano concerto by Mozart (No 23 in A, K488), directed and played by the same BYC; Tchaikovsky’s "Rococo Variations" for Cello and Orchestra, scintillatingly played by Michael Petrov and conducted by our BYC; and the fourth symphony of one of our best and best-established British composers ‒ a follower of Benjamin Britten ‒ David Matthews, and conducted by the BYC.

Hmmm… Britten. Didn’t he famously undertake all three roles - conducting, composing and playing concertos at concerts with the same ECO - half a century ago?

Surely our London music critics will all have been there last Wednesday? After all, it was a pretty rare occasion. What’s more, there was nothing else in the classical music line at the other leading concert venues in London that evening.

Really, I’ve been waiting, quite patiently, for the reviews. Thus far, there’s been not a word. And we’ll not need to hold our collective breaths any longer. Perhaps they all needed an evening off.

The Brilliant Young Composer, conductor and concerto pianist was, of course, the amazing talent that is Alissa Firsova.

Colin Davis RIP

As a young man Colin Davis came to conduct a concert at school. Was it in 1958? With the BBC Symphony Orchestra? And which Stravinsky did he conduct so blisteringly? The Rite of Spring probably. My first ear-opening experience of that composer.

My study-mate at Uppingham, Nick Billingham, announced that he would obviously become a star. “How do you know?” I asked him. “Well, he came on quickly, and with a little skip,” said Nick, as if this was the most obvious and conclusive evidence.

Then, a couple of years later, my mother took me to my first opera – Carmen at the Coventry Theatre. It was the Sadler’s Wells company – conducted by Colin Davis, of course – and it lit a flame for life.

He seems to have been ever-present in my musical life since those days. Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Britten’s Peter Grimes (with the incomparable Jon Vickers) at Covent Garden. Berlioz’s Trojans at the Barbican. Just three special memories. And so many fine recordings.  

So RIP Sir Colin Davis, who died last Sunday, aged 85.

Just one…

One of the most popular and successful TV ad campaigns that I ever worked on was for Cornetto. And, in a rather degraded form, it was still running quite recently, thirty plus years later.

Early commercials in the series were all shot in Italy, and, of course, I had to be there. But the truth is that, if all the pre-production work has been done well, there’s nothing more for someone like me to contribute. I’d just be in the way.

So, after the first take had rolled, I would walk. That’s why I know, for example, Venice so intimately.

After one long and tiring day - walking the towpaths, crossing the bridges, visiting church after church - I fetched up in a square with an imposing building straight ahead. It was Venice’s legendary opera house, the Teatro La Fenice. I’d read about its fabulous rococo interior, but had never been inside. The front door was open, so in I went.

“This way,” I was instructed, probably in Italian. And this…. And this…

And I found myself walking into the first notes of the overture to Cosi fan tutte, then and now my favourite of Mozart’s great series of operas. It was the dress rehearsal. I was in heaven.

The commercials? They were great.  

Leading, directing, conducting?

The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment has been advertising its recent concert series as “Look! No conductor”. I caught them at my favourite venue, St George’s in Bristol.

Now in itself doing without a conductor is not a new thing. Neville Marriner “directed” rather than “conducted” the Academy of St Martin in the Fields from the first desk in the early 1960s – and many have followed in his footsteps.

What was special about this OAE gig was that three different soloists directed the orchestra. First Stephen Isserlis (together with his cello) directed Haydn’s scintillating last symphony, No 104 (The London). Then the violinist Isabelle Faust directed and played (meltingly beautifully) Mozart’s third violin concerto. And finally, Isserlis and Faust were joined by the American fortepianist, Robert Levin, in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto (for violin, cello, piano and orchestra).

Who knew that this could be such an exciting work? And who on earth was directing? Well, so far as I could tell, leadership switched constantly between the three soloists, with Levin perhaps doing most.

But when they started the second movement, none of the soloists moved a muscle. It was the OAE’s leader, Kati Debretzeni who discreetly beat them in. I suspect that there were other leaders at work around the orchestra that I didn’t spot.

That’s how orchestral music can be. Completely collaborative. Just like chamber music. And jazz, of course.

Learning to be more creative

I haven’t yet read Jonah Lehrer’s new best-selling book on creativity, Imagine: How Creativity Works, but I have read his extended article in last week’s Wall Street Journal, and I’m not impressed.

He starts from the proposition that “there’s no such thing as a creative type” and that “anyone can be learn to be creative”. It is not an encouraging thesis.

Basically it’s an extension of Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours insight. And while it’s true that everyone can improve their connection-making skill (this being at the heart of all creativity), nevertheless it’s quite observable that some amongst us have creative skills of a quite different order.

Think Shakespeare, Mozart, Einstein, Edison, Turing… To be frank, even with a million hours of skill-building, I’m unlikely to achieve their level of, well, genius. And to deny this strikes me as, well, blind.

I have been training people in creative thinking over several decades now, and I notice consistently that the students who have lost their creativity (or suppressed it or never seemed to have had much anyway) can indeed up their game substantially. However they never catch up with the ones who have real self-confidence in their connection-making capabilities.

The latter make massive progress in a structured training session, because they are enabled to hone skills that already exist, taking them up to a whole new level. Whether the basis for their special talent is nature or nurture seems to me to be of secondary importance.

Pianist, composer and conductor

I suppose this combination was quite common in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, Brahms…

But more recently? Benjamin Britten comes to mind.

A major talent of this kind for the future is Alissa Firsova, who led a performance at the Royal Academy of Music in London on Monday. She opened by playing and directing Mozart’s great A major Piano Concerto K488 and followed this by conducting the first London performance of her own “Freedom” Clarinet Concerto. She ended with Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. Altogether an amazing achievement.

Currently a conducting student at the Academy, she had around her some dazzling young talent. Anna Hashimoto was the clarinettist and soprano Fiona Howell the soloist in the Mahler. The orchestra seemed to be a gathering together of Firsova’s student friends from the Academy. They were extraordinarily good.

I first met the then teenage Alissa several years ago, introduced by clarinettist Mark van de Wiel, who brought her clarinet quintet “LOSS”, played by the Philharmonia Soloists at our local village music festival in King’s Sutton. And she has been coming back ever since.

A name to watch.