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

    

Launching the Portamento Restoration Society

I’ve decided to start a new musical lobby group – the Portamento Restoration Society.

If you listen to early recordings from around 1900 until the First World War, all musicians – singers, string and woodwind players, chamber groups, orchestras etc – used to slide between notes naturally, using portamento.

Then, sometime in the 1920s, the musical world decided that portamento was vulgar, and so it quite quickly became forbidden, a sign that performers who used it were irredeemably old-fashioned and lacking in taste.

Of course, in more recent times, players have been very interested in understanding how performers from the time of a composition actually played, and so, among other things, they have modified the way they use vibrato. And, unlike earlier generations, one can actually hear from recordings how leading players from the pre-WWI period used portamento.

But players still seem wary about its use, as though they still might be seen as unnecessarily sentimental. But it’s not sentimental to use portamento to create feeling. It’s what all the best players (and orchestras) did.

For me, to play Mahler, Richard Strauss, Debussy, Elgar and their contemporaries without it is to sell them short.

BTW, the Society’s by-laws: one paid-up member only. (Me.) Very happy to have friends and supporters…   

Conducting and leadership

In 1925, the composer of Der Rosenkavalier and much else, Richard Strauss, who was also an outstanding conductor, wrote “Ten Golden Rules for Conducting” for a young colleague:

1. Remember that you are making music not to amuse yourself, but to delight your audience.
2. You should not perspire when conducting: only the audience should get warm.
3. Conduct Salome and Elektra as if they were Mendelssohn: Fairy Music.
4. Never look encouragingly at the brass, except with a brief glance to give an important cue.
5. But never let the horns and woodwinds out of your sight. If you can hear them at all they are still too strong.
6. If you think that the brass is not blowing hard enough, tone it down another shade or two.
7. It is not enough that you yourself should hear every word the soloist sings. You should know it by heart anyway. The audience must be able to follow without effort. If they do not understand the words they will go to sleep.
8. Always accompany singers in such a way that they can sing without effort.
9. When you think you have reached the limits of prestissimo, double the pace.
10. If you follow these rules carefully you will, with your fine gifts and your great accomplishments, always be the darling of your listeners.

I feel sure that all conductors should know these by heart.

But, at a metaphor level, maybe all leaders in all fields should consider them too.

I think Number 4 is particularly important. How about you?

Someone I never met

Although it’s in an extraordinarily beautiful part of England, Uppingham School in the late 1950s and early 1960s was mostly a stultifying experience for me.

With the aim (for him) of following my father as a General Practitioner, I was coerced into studying sciences at school, whereas all my own interests were in the arts, history and languages. In many ways I’m grateful now that I have some understanding of science and scientific method. For example, it has enabled me to spend a working life up to my armpits in the analysis of data. And to facilitate innovation meetings on leading edge subjects such as nanotechnology.

I’ve also been able to pursue my own preferred path consistently since leaving school at eighteen.

One thing that was an enormous help to me was to identify, while I was at Uppingham, a former pupil who went on to forge a brilliant career in the arts – in his case as a film director and opera producer – John Schlesinger. While I was still at school, he directed a wonderfully vital documentary about Waterloo Station, later going on to make many of the best movies on his generation – A Kind of Loving, Billy Liar, Darling, Far from the Madding Crowd, Midnight Cowboy, Sunday Bloody Sunday, Marathon Man and many more.

His example was with me both at school and thereafter. I followed everything he did. And on Wednesday, on the hundredth anniversary of the première of Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier, I took time out to watch (on DVD) his timeless production of the opera at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. This is the final trio with Kiri Te Kanawa, Anne Howells and Barbara Bonney: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WIscFQy1CQ&feature=related

He’s gone now, but I owe him a great deal.

Do you have someone you never met who unknowingly helped to shape your creative life?