Prom 75: Vienna Philharmonic's 'Dream'

We welcome this review by guest contributor Martin Fraenkel, from the Proms in London. Readers are invited to listen to this concert online (Part 1 | Part 2).

Elgar, The Dream of Gerontius, J. Baker, J. Mitchinson, J. Shirley-Quirk, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, S. Rattle (2003)

Earlier this summer, Daniel Barenboim brought his Berlin Staatskapelle Orchestra to London’s Royal Festival Hall and gave a profound account of Elgar’s second symphony. Barenboim was awarded the Elgar Society Medal and spoke movingly of the role of Elgar in his life, and especially of his late wife, the “great Elgarian” Jacqueline du Pré. His mission, he said, was for Elgar to be recognized not as a great British composer but simply as a great composer.

Yesterday, across town, at the Royal Albert Hall, Prom Number 75, the penultimate of the season, marked a further step in Elgar’s ascent into the stable repertory of the world’s great orchestras. In the second of its two appearances this season, the Vienna Philharmonic was on stage, led by Simon Rattle, performing the most monumental of all Elgar works, The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar has been a prominent part of Rattle's career, too, and this performance showcased many of his characteristic hallmarks: expansive orchestral phrasing, ample use of pauses, and the lingering suspended silence following the final “Amen.”

In these hands, there was no doubting that this work had more to do with European Fin-de-Siècle angst than the pomp and circumstance of imperial England, with which Elgar is so firmly associated by his best-known works. Written in 1900, shortly after the Enigma Variations had brought Elgar to prominence, The Dream is an outpouring of Elgar’s Catholic faith, both splendid and anguished, trying to reconcile it with the long choral tradition of the Anglican empire. The depth of tone of the Vienna string section more than rose to this task, with the viola section relishing their unaccustomed prominence right from the opening prelude, including a hauntingly beautiful solo by the principal. At times indeed this Dream sounded more like an orchestral tone poem with vocal accompaniment than a choral work. The trombone section, although prominent, never overplayed the moments of magnificence Elgar accorded them.

Other Reviews: Andrew Clements, Vienna PO/Rattle: The Dream of Gerontius review – persuasive dramatic power (The Guardian, September 9) Alexandra Coghlan, Prom 75: The Dream of Gerontius, VPO, Rattle (The Arts Desk, September 9)

Sadly, the brilliance of the orchestral playing was not quite matched by the vocalists. Through much of Part 1, Toby Spence’s rather thin Gerontius was often straining to make his presence felt over the orchestra. The lighter orchestral accompaniment of Part Two gave him rather more opportunity but was offset by similar challenges for mezzo-soprano Magdalena Kožená’s Angel, exacerbated by her over-prominent hand gesticulations. Only baritone Roderick Williams’s Priest had the depth and warmth of melodic tone to impose himself, producing the one moment of real vocal drama with his first entry.

The massed ranks of the BBC Proms Youth Choir, a collaboration of several youth choirs, performed admirably throughout. With nearly five hundred performers on stage, at times it seemed that Rattle was strained to the limit to keep the ensemble together. With this great orchestra playing at the peak of its capabilities one was left feeling that a truly outstanding evening required more from the supporting cast.

BSO Season Preview

Vivaldi, Le Quattro Stagioni, Concerto Italiano, R. Alessandrini (2003)

Charles T. Downey, BSO at Strathmore skips the uncommon music in season preview (Washington Post, September 11)

Ensembles and concert series around the Washington area are coming back to life. On Thursday night at Strathmore, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra offered a preview of the season to come.

The musical tasting menu was a hodgepodge of mostly single movements from a range of pieces. The first movement of Debussy’s “Ibéria” featured castanets and some Spanish flavor, with the mood remaining on the sedate side throughout the first half... [Continue reading]

Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
With Jonathan Carney (violin) and Christopher Seaman (conductor)
Music Center at Strathmore

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Charles T. Downey, BSO skillfully illuminates familiar terrain of Vivaldi, Handel and Bach (Washington Post, July 25)

À mon chevet: 'Storia della bambina perduta'

À mon chevet is a series of posts featuring a quote from whatever book is on my nightstand at the moment.

I was very tired, and paid less and less attention to my appearance; I lost weight. And yet my editors and the audiences I encountered night after night liked me. Moving here and there, discussing with this and that person in a language that wasn't mine but that I rapidly learned to manage, I gradually rediscovered an aptitude that I had displayed years before, with my previous book: I had a natural ability to transform small private events into public reflection. Every night I improvised successfully, starting from my own experience. I talked about the world I came from, about the poverty and squalor, male and also female rages, about Carmen and her bond with her brother, her justifications for violent actions that she would surely never commit. I talked about how, since I was a girl, I had observed in my mother and other women the more humiliating aspects of family life, of motherhood, of subjection to males. I talked about how, for love of a man, one could be driven to be guilty of every possible infamy toward other women, toward children. I talked about my difficult relationship with the feminist groups in Florence and Milan, and, as I did, an experience that I had underestimated suddenly became important: I discovered in public what I had learned by watching that painful effort of excavation. I talked about how, to assert myself, I had always sought to be male in intelligence -- I started off every evening saying I felt that I had been invented by men, colonized by their imagination -- and I told how I had recently seen a male childhood friend of mine make every effort possible to subvert himself, extracting from himself a female.

I drew often on that half-hour spent in the Solaras' shop, but I only realized it later, maybe because Lila never came to my mind. I don't know why I didn't at any point allude to our friendship. Probably it seemed to me that, although she had dragged me into the swelling sea of her desires and those of our childhood friends, she didn't have the capacity to decipher what she had put before my eyes. Did she see, for example, what in a flash I had seen in Alfonso? Did she reflect on it? I ruled that out. She was mired in the lota, the filth, of the neighborhood, she was was satisfied with it. I, on the other hand, in those French days, felt that I was at the center of chaos and yet had tools with which to distinguish its laws. That conviction, reinforced by the small success of my book, helped me to be somewhat less anxious about the future, as if, truly, everything that I was capable of adding up with words written and spoken were destined to add up in reality as well. Look, I said to myself, the couple collapses, the family collapses, every cultural cage collapses, every possible social-democratic accommodation collapses, and meanwhile everything tries violently to assume another form that up to now would have been unthinkable: Nino and me, the sum of my children and his, the hegemony of the working class, socialism and Communism, and above all the unforeseen subject, the woman, I. Night after night, I went around recognizing myself in an idea that suggested general disintegration and, at the same time, new composition.

-- Elena Ferrante, The Story of the Lost Child, pp. 56-57 (trans. Ann Goldstein)

The wait for the last volume of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels is over -- see my posts on Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3. If the earlier installments of these more autobiographical novels allude to the publication of Ferrante's first novel, L'amore molesto, the last volume seems to be related to her shorter, earlier novels I giorni dell'abbandono and La figlia oscura. Like her characters in those books, "Elena" watches her marriage fall apart, which distances her from her children. Like the narrators in those early novels, she is the one most deeply affected, as she experiences her own lack of caring, ashamed of her feelings. Even the title of this novel alludes to the story told in La figlia oscura. We do not know if Elena Ferrante is an actual person or an assumed identity, but some of the passages in this book, like the one quoted above, seem like hints that the author may really be a man, as so many of the rumors have it. At some point, someone who knows the identity of "Elena Ferrante" will hopefully let the cat out of the bag.

Briefly Noted: Barto's Bach Busonified

Bach, Goldberg Variations, arr. Busoni-Barto, T. Barto (released on May 12, 2015) Capriccio C5243 | 60'57"

Tzimon Barto is a regular in Washington these days, because Christoph Eschenbach favors him at the National Symphony Orchestra. The American pianist can be infuriating or galvanizing: we have heard him both ways on disc and live. In this new recording, featuring his own odd adaptation of Ferruccio Busoni's already strange arrangement of Bach's Goldberg Variations, he shows both sides of that unpredictable musical personality. Busoni's arrangement of Bach's famous set has the usual excesses one expects of him, the filled-out chords and contrapuntal voices, the bass octaves. Its best moments are the two-keyboard variations, where Busoni essentially recasts pieces designed for a multi-manual harpsichord for the grand piano, where there is only one keyboard but a much larger compass to play with (the antic leaps of register are really fun).

To be clear, Barto is not playing directly from the Busoni edition, and in a number of places he does his own thing. Exaggeration is the name of the game. Busoni advised skipping some of the variations in concert; not only does Barto ignore that, for he plays all of the variations, he plays many of them absurdly slow, none more so than the Adagio of Variation 25. The tempo choices, in fact, are so outrageous that, even without taking any of the repeats, he still requires fifty-five minutes to play the whole set. In many ways, Barto acts against Busoni's recommendations: Busoni marked Variation 7 as Allegro scherzando, and Barto takes it rather slowly and not at all playfully; the Fughettas of Variations 10 and 22, where Busoni advised Alla breve, Barto takes in a pokey four, often with grotesque distortions of tempo; in Variation 15, Barto emphasizes the top voice, where Busoni indicated that the middle voice of the canon in contrary motion should be distinguished. Busoni's extravagant extension of Variation 28 into the piano's upper octaves receives a music-box timbre smudged with heavy pedaling, but rather than Busoni's completely redone version of the Tema at the end of the set, Barto plays the original version of the Tema, even more indulgently than the first time around. Obviously, not for everyone.

Production Photos from the Bayreuth Festival's Tristan & Isolde

The year before Katharina Wagner assumed her quasi-inherited reign on the Green Hill – Richard Wagner’s Festival House in Bayreuth, she gave her Festspiel-debut as a director with a production of Die Meistersinger. It being one of the most difficult-to-stage operas, for technical but also for political reasons (in Germany), Katharina Wagner delivered a controversial, partly panned product which I thought (and still think) was actually, sneakily, extraordinarily clever. She takes a shot at the all-too-quick conversion from rebel to reactionary and the danger of an original reformer becoming precisely the kind of gate-keeper to block all future reform which is necessary to keep anything – tradition included – alive: Topical for opera in general and especially so just before assuming leadership of such a festival.

Now, eight years later, she has put forth her second Hill-production, again amidst the air of scandals and succession-battles: her half-sister and co-director for the last eight years, Eva Wagner-Pasquier has allegedly been booted from the Festival grounds; Christian Thielemann, the ingenious conductor and a controversy-magnet himself, has been named musical director (a newly created position) of the Festival.....

Full review on Forbes.com. Click on excerpted images below to find a higher resolution version of the full picture.

All images courtesy Bayreuth Festival, © Enrico Nawrath

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Yo-Yo Ma's Bach at the Proms

We welcome this review by guest contributor Martin Fraenkel, from the Proms in London. Readers are invited to listen to this concert online.

Bach, Solo Cello Suites, Yo-Yo Ma Complete Cello Suites: Inspired By Bach, Yo-Yo Ma

The Last Night of the London Proms is still a week away, but on Saturday night Yo-Yo Ma concluded a remarkable series of late-night Proms focusing on the solo music music of J.S. Bach. A few weeks back, Alina Ibragimova covered the complete violin partitas and sonatas. Pianist András Schiff followed with an intimate rendition of the Goldberg Variations.

Tackling this monument of music was Ma's latest achievement in a Proms career spanning more than 40 years. In front of a packed audience in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall, he performed all six unaccompanied cello suites in one sitting, without interval. With a thousand members of the audience standing throughout the two and a half hours, this was truly “sharing music,” as Ma mentioned in his post-performance comments. Each of the six suites contains the almost identical sequence of six French dance movements. Ma did not shirk from exploring the extraordinary breadth of Bach’s inventiveness lurking not far beneath the formal structure he imposed upon himself.

The familiar opening bars of the first suite often are played as a firm statement of intent. Ma chose something far more delicate, and set an immediate intimate context for the dialogue between the performer and his vast audience. The entire opening dance scarcely reached above a mezzo forte until its concluding bars. Only in the sixth movement of the suite did he allow the deep resonance of the instrument to impose itself, providing a confident basis for the segue into the second suite. The mood became immediately more introspective, in the key of D minor, delving deeper through each of the successive movements. At times, these seemed scarcely dances at all.

The end of Suite 2 established the concept of a journey through the six suites as a cycle, each related to the one that followed. Suite 3, however, is probably the one performed most often on its own, and its grandeur undermined the cohesiveness of the cycle, as if Ma did not quite know how to fit it into a cycle of six. Moving into Suite 4, the journey wandered slightly further astray, as minor blemishes of tone and intonation finally appeared in an otherwise faultless display of technique.

Any such minor doubts were put aside in the spellbinding Sarabande of Suite 5. Stripped to its barest essentials, this was a stark contemplative interlude; a mood change even more remarkable after two hours of continuous playing. Yet in the midst of this huge physical and emotional effort, Ma could pause to ask the most profound and basic questions. Resisting the temptations of a triumphant conclusion in Suite 6, Ma went out in a firm but understated way – reminding us once more that these are intimate and introspective suites, which would challenge the best of actual dancers.

To bring the evening to an end, Ma came back on stage to play the Catalan El cant dels ocells, a favorite of Pablo Casals, the great cellist who rediscovered the Bach suites and brought them back into the repertoire.

Perchance to Stream: Rest from Your Labors Edition

Here is your regular Sunday selection of links to online audio and online video from the week gone by. After clicking to an audio or video stream, you may need to press the "Play" button to start the broadcast. Some of these streams become unavailable after a few days.

• From the Chorégies d’Orange, Bertrand de Billy conducts music by Weber, Ravel, and Dvořák, with pianist Cédric Tiberghien as soloist. [France Musique]


• Watch the three finalists in the Clara Haskil Competition, with the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. [ARTE]


• From the Salzburg Festival, a recital by pianist Mitsuko Uchida, playing impromptus by Schubert and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations. [ORF]


• From the Schubertiade Schwarzenberg, tenor Piotr Beczala and pianist Helmut Deutsch perform the song cycle Die schöne Müllerin. [ORF]


• La Risonanza performs Semele, an opera by John Eccles, at the Utrecht Early Music Festival. [AVRO Klassiek]


• Violinist Renaud Capuçon joins the Orchestre de Paris and conductor Jukka-Pekka Saraste, for music by Bruck and Sibelius, recorded in July at the Alhambra in Grenada. [RTBF]


• Vox Luminis and La Fenice perform Purcell's King Arthur at the Utrecht Early Music Festival. [AVRO Klassiek]


• Mezzo-soprano Alice Coote sings Handel arias with The English Concert and conductor Harry Bicket. [BBC Proms]


• John Blow's Venus and Adonis performed by the Dunedin Consort at the Utrecht Early Music Festival. [AVRO Klassiek]


• Listen to a performance of Bach's Mass in B Minor, with Peter Dijkstra conducting the Bavarian Radio Choir and Concerto Köln, recorded at the Bachwoche in Ansbach. [BR-Klassik]


• Peter Oundjian conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in Bruckner's seventh symphony, plus music by Messiaen and Mozart. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• Jonas Kaufmann stars in Beethoven's Fidelio, recorded at the Salzburg Festival. [France Musique]


• Andrea Marcon leads La Cetra in a performance of Vivaldi's La fida ninfa, starring Robert Invernizzi, Romina Basso, Topi Lehtipuu, and others, recorded in April at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. [Radio Clásica]


• Rüdiger Lotter leads the Hofkapelle München, soprano Sunhae Im and other soloists in opera arias by Hasse and Gluck. [ORF]


• Charles Dutoit leads the Sydney Symphony Orchestra in Debussy's Nocturnes, Ravel's Rapsodie espagnole, and Berlioz's epic Te Deum, with tenor Joseph Kaiser as soloist. [ABC Classic]


• Music of Mahler, Schoenberg, and Henry Cowell from the San Francisco Symphony, with Jeremy Denk as piano soloist. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• Thomas Sondergard leads the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Mahler's fourth symphony, plus music of Nielsen and Andersson. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• Watch William Christie and Les Arts Florissants perform a program of Baroque music at the Philharmonie de Paris. [ARTE]


• Marin Alsop leads the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment in music of Brahms. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• Daniil Trifonov is soloist with the Orchestre National de Belgique, in music by Chopin and Bartok, recorded at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. [RTBF]


• In a recital at the Cadogan Hall, pianist Jeremy Denk plays music by Scriabin, Bartok, and Beethoven. [BBC Proms]


• From the Salzburg Festival, Angela Gheorghiu stars in Massenet's Werther. [France Musique]


• Pianist Rudolf Buchbinder, violinist Albena Danailov, and cellist Tamás Varga perform piano trios by Beethoven and Mendelssoh, recorded at the Grafenegg Festival. [ORF]


• Michael Tilson Thomas leads the San Francisco Symphony in music of Beethoven, Ives, and Bartok. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• From the Abbaye du Val-Dieu in Aubel, the Trio Atanassov gives a recital, recorded last June. [RTBF]


• Pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja joins the Emerson Quartet for chamber music by Barber, Debussy, and Shostakovich. [BBC Proms]


• Francois Leleux conducts and plays oboe with the Camerata Salzburg, violinist Renaud Capucon, and pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, in music by Mendelssohn, recorded at the Salzburg Festival. [ORF]


• From the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Avner Biron leads a concert by the Israel Camerata in music of Mozart and Haydn, plus Beethoven's second piano concerto with Boris Giltburg as soloist. [RTBF]


• Listen to Vladimir Jurowski conduct the London Philharmonic in music of Beethoven, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich. [BBC Proms | Part 2]


• Nelson Goerner perform preludes by Debussy and Chopin at the Festival Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• Roberto Zarpellon leads the Venice Monteverdi Academy and Ensemble Lorenzo da Ponte in a performance of Claudio Monteverdi's Selva Morale e Spirituale, recorded at the Musik Sommer Pustertal. [ORF]


• Philippe Jordan conducts the Vienna Symphony in Webern, Brahms (the violin concerto with Nikolaj Znaider as soloist), recorded at the Carinthischer Sommer in Villach. [ORF]


• The JACK Quartet plays music by Webern, Cage, and Boulez at the Salzburg Festival. [ORF]


• Watch cellist Marc Coppey perform Bach's six unaccompanied suites. [ARTE]


• Yo-Yo Ma also performs Bach's unaccompanied cello suites. [BBC Proms]


• Listen to a performance of Verdi's Otello, starring Gregory Kunde and Erika Grimaldi and conducted by Gianandrea Noseda, recorded last year in Turin. [ORF]


• Cédric Pescia performs preludes and fugues from the Well-Tempered Clavier, at the Festival de Radio France et Montpellier Languedoc-Roussillon. [France Musique]


• Listen to some highlights from the Montreux Jazz Festival, featuring Dianne Reeves, Christian McBride Trio, and more. [France Musique]


• From concerts recorded in 2011 and 2012, Riccardo Muti leads the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in music by Respighi, Dvorak, Martucci, and Mendelssohn. [CSO]

Taste Your Music D.C.

Gourmet Symphony, Taste Your Music D.C. (photo by Jati Lindsay)
Last night, we had the chance to experience an event hosted by Taste Your Music D.C., a program that connects musicians, chefs, and social service organizations. The evening featured the Gourmet Symphony, in collaboration with the Capitol City Symphony, in an attempt to bring different audiences to classical music by way of culinary temptations. In the performance/dinner venue The Hamilton Live in downtown Washington, guests and donors heard and ate a four-course meal, pairing selections of music with courses of delicious food, each accompanied by a specially chosen libation.

The work that the program does, raising money and hosting events in support of worthy organizations like So Others Might Eat, Bread for the City, and Miriam's Kitchen, is laudable. At the same time, this was also a fun way to spend an evening, enjoying the food prepared by Chefs Anthony Lombardo (of The Hamilton) and Andrew Markert (of Beuchert's Saloon). If you are looking for a way to introduce a friend to classical music, this is a low-key and enjoyable way to do so. We sat next to some trained musicians and some folks who were new to classical music, and everyone had a good time.

The musical menu, chosen by conductor John Devlin, began with the familiar -- the first (most famous) movements of Mozart's Eine kleine Nachtmusik and Beethoven's fifth symphony -- but was not limited to chestnuts. Two movements from Mahler's fourth symphony were an especially ambitious choice for the main course, paired with herb roasted lamb over risotto and a light Austrian white and/or Washington Syrah. Soprano Mandy Brown did the honors on the delightful poem of the Mahler finale, describing the feast in a child's vision of heaven, complete with fish that swim up to be caught on fasting days. Her voice was particularly suited to the guilty dessert of Samuel Barber's ultra-nostalgic Knoxville: Summer of 1915, which went with knockout profiteroles of cream and strawberries, recalling the dessert mentioned in the James Agee poem set by Barber.

No future events have been announced, but you can sign up with the group to receive them when they are.