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Arnold Scoenberg’s music can be madly excessive and thorny but this wonderful concert revealed its beauty and titanic force
4/5
The 150th anniversary of the birth of Arnold Schoenberg has been only grudgingly celebrated. It seems the world still hasn’t forgiven the bogeyman of “beastly modern music” for forcing such disturbing, burning music on our ears.
Last night the London Sinfonietta’s wonderful tribute concert reminded us that though Schoenberg’s music can be madly excessive and thorny, it can also be overwhelmingly moving and even loveable. They played four works that ranged over almost his entire output, from the hyper-romantic Chamber Symphony of 1906 to the Ode to Napoleon of 1942, more obviously “modern” but underneath the surface just as hyper-romantic. This leopard never changed its spots. Intermingled were pieces by two gifted disciples who carried the Master’s new-fangled composing method into the world.
It was a canny move to launch the evening with Schoenberg in a rare sunny mood. His brilliant Serenade of 1923 is a cross between a Viennese nocturnal entertainment with strumming guitar and mandolin and serenading singer, and a Baroque suite with courtly dances. Being Schoenberg, it’s also intimidatingly complex and goes on too long, and by normal standards every single note is “wrong”. But in this performance, conducted with winning charm and flexibility by Jonathan Berman, all those wrong notes seemed absolutely right. Clarinettist Mark van de Wiel stood out for the achingly tender nostalgia of the country-waltz movement, and baritone Richard Burkhard for the elegant singing of the Petrarch sonnet in the 4th movement. But really it was the lovely give-and-take between the seven players, as natural and swaying as a Viennese café orchestra, that made the experience so delicious.
Two other performances were at the same stellar height. One came from pianist Andrew Zolinsky, who dared to give the huge silences in Schoenberg’s Six Little Piano Pieces of 1911 their full measure. As a result the tiny drooping phrases and muffled spectral chords between the silences felt huge. The other came from the 10 players in Six Tempi by Elisabeth Lutyens, doughty modernist and daughter of the famous architect. In an indifferent performance this could seem like “high note, low note, ear-bending chord, repeat”. Here it felt as if the mute stars on a clear night were being given a voice.
The other performances were not quite so exceptional. The fragile, almost-vanishing Symphony op 21 by Anton Webern actually needs a more robust performance – and a full complement of string players – if it isn’t to melt away like thistledown. And the First Chamber Symphony, one of the few works by Schoenberg that’s actually popular, was too unvaryingly hectic. As for the Ode to Napoleon of 1942, which sets Byron’s contemptuous yet awe-struck vision of the conqueror for baritone and small chamber group, the instrumental music was tremendous, and tremendously played. But the stiff narration seemed as dated as Oxford bags – and largely inaudible – despite Richard Burkhard’s eloquent rendition of it.
But it didn’t matter. Taken together, what we heard revealed a beauty and titanic expressive force which makes most contemporary music seem small. Bravo to the Sinfonietta for bringing it to us. IH
The London Sinfonietta performs Morton Feldman and Samuel Beckett at the Southbank on 29 November. Details at londonsinfonietta.org.uk
If you want to stand out in a crowded London orchestral scene, you’d better have a Unique Selling Point. Being canny as well as brilliant, conductor John Wilson has made sure the Sinfonia of London, which he raised from the ashes of two previous orchestras of that name in 2018, has several.
There’s the roster of players, a hand-picked bunch of the best players from UK and international orchestras. Then there’s the music they play. Respighi, Rachmaninov, Rodgers and Hammerstein typify a glittery, gorgeous roster. If you have a taste for quiet, introspective Brahms this may not be the band for you. Last but not least there’s Wilson himself, who is an utterly distinctive figure on the podium. Not for him the furrowed brow of some maestri. It’s all matinée idol elegance, and a kind of darting intensity that might remind you of Fred Astaire doing one of his routines with a rolled umbrella.
All these winning qualities were on jaw-dropping display at the Barbican last night. True, the programme seemed an unlikely one for this orchestra. The evening kicked off with Patter Songs, a recent piece by 50-ish British composer Kenneth Hesketh which evoked the harassed and pitiful figure of the government clerk Akaky in Gogol’s The Overcoat. One felt the delight of his tormentors in the non-stop chattering of the violins, their uproarious jokes in the eruptions from the tuba, and the self-reproaches of Akaky himself in the occasional moments of mock pathos. It was a brilliant piece, brilliantly performed, and was no doubt chosen to show musical modernism and the Sinfonia’s trademark pizzazz can live together happily.
Shostakovich’s 2nd cello concerto was a more unlikely choice. Sarcastic, gaunt, with only the occasional moment of good-humour or warmth, it received a heroic performance from Sheku Kanneh-Mason. At times Shostakovich asks the cellist to match the parodic shrieks of the orchestra in a responding shriek of equal intensity. It was a challenge he knew the work’s dedicatee the great Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich would rise to, and Kanneh-Mason rose to it too. And he found the heart-rending sweetness of those moments when the music glances back to a happier past.
We’d paid our dues to seriousness; now we were ready to be ravished by swooningly gorgeous romanticism. Which the Sinfonia duly delivered, in the shape of Rachmaninov’s 1st Symphony. Everything was maximally vivid; the surging upward melody in the first movement, the dark almost Gothic colouring of the slow movement, the dialogue between distant muted horns and full, cymbal-crashing orchestra in the finale. Sometimes it was just too much. The big trombone melody in the first movement could have charmed the ear rather than battering it, and overall some quietly lyrical music wouldn’t have gone amiss. But there were compensating subtleties such as the touchingly diffident, not-quite-fulsome melody in the finale, mimed by Wilson in a podium dance in which “yes, give me more” and “no give me less” came in quicksilver alternation. At these moments, pizzazz seemed almost deep. IH
The 1960 opera adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream by Benjamin Britten (music and libretto) and Peter Pears (libretto) has lost none of its capacity to impress and enthral. Britten’s lithe and intelligent score – which shifts between disquieting discordance, mysterious ethereality and romantic sweetness – is endlessly responsive to the tone shifts in the Bard’s play.
The libretto is marvellously faithful to Shakespeare’s original narrative. This revival of Opera North’s 2008 production captures much of the constancy of the Britten/Pears adaptation.
This is despite the fact that the production’s original director, Martin Duncan, reset the Ancient Athenian tale – in which supernatural forces wreak havoc on hapless mortals and the Fairy King, Oberon, perpetrates a wicked act of vengeance on his wife, Tytania – to the Swinging Sixties. The tortured lovers (Helena, Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius) venture into the enchanted forest dressed in patterns and pastels that are almost psychedelic.
The workmen-turned-thespians (Nick Bottom, the weaver, et al) are, likewise, attired for the 1960s (albeit in more conservative styles). Oberon and Tytania sparkle with mirrored silver like extras from Doctor Who in Tom Baker’s heyday.
Daniel Abelson’s tremendously naughty and mercurial sprite, Puck, defies categorisation. Half-naked and hairy-legged, he, alone in the cast, speaks instead of singing. None of which detracts a jot from Shakespeare’s purpose. Less successful, however, is Johan Engels’s set, in which the magical woodland is transformed into an unlovely landscape of corrugated plastic.
The initial novelty of Engels’s creation soon wears off. As pillars of Perspex (standing in for trees) rise and fall, each scene exposes the set’s lack of versatility. Even the occasional reflection of coloured lights – as if Oberon were conjuring up the Aurora Borealis – fails to lend the bland and naked set any real fascination.
Which is a great pity, as revival director Matthew Eberhardt’s production has much to commend it. The orchestra, under the baton of Garry Walker, expresses Britten’s ever-shifting score with subtlety and passion. The staging abounds with excellent performances. Soprano Daisy Brown’s gorgeously sung Tytania is gloriously dignified throughout, all the better to expose the cruelty of the metaphysical conspiracy between Oberon (the superb countertenor James Laing on appropriately self-regarding form) and Puck to have her fall in love with a beast of burden.
Acclaimed bass-baritone Henry Waddington (who is reprising his debut role here) gives a wonderfully comic performance as Bottom (even if the transparent, plastic ass’s face that accompanies his furry ears – and obscures his face – is another design mistake). The children of the chorus – who wear Andy Warhol-style blond wigs and represent the winged fairies – are as charming and humorous as they are talented.
The scene late in this 190-minute show – in which Bottom and his fellow amdram players give a royal command performance of their terrible play – is performed with uproarious comic gusto. This is an energetic and creative Dream, and one that is (despite its flawed stage design) worthy of this revival. MB
At Leeds Grand Theatre until October 31, then touring until November 20: operanorth.co.uk
Manchester Collective, a young string-instrument orchestra that focuses on new classical music, has been extravagantly praised for “rethinking the concert format”. But after last night’s odd mish-mash, I came away thinking the tried-and-tested format might not be so bad after all.
Not that there weren’t things to enjoy, on the level of individual performances. So let’s dispatch the annoying things in one paragraph, so we can move on. First, the habit of playing pieces “segue”, ie, each one followed by the next without even a tiny break. Having the romantic, regretfully tender world of Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings melt into the chilly, high “aethereal” sounds of American composer Caroline Shaw’s The Evergreen made no sense. And what was Tchaikovsky doing in this concert anyway, stuck incongruously amidst a bunch of contemporary pieces?
Then there was the weirdly inappropriate “expressive” lighting, accompanied somewhat lamely with clouds of dry ice. Ice-cold blue just isn’t right for Tchaikovsky’s overwhelmingly warm music. And why offer listeners a programme note for a piece by Messiaen, when what we actually heard was a fierce, stamping, folk-inflected string orchestra piece by Polish film and concert composer Wojciech Kilar?
Now for the good things. There were certainly some fine performances, inspired and led with natural, breathing rhythmic ease by the orchestra’s director and lead violinist Rakhi Singh. And it was good that the orchestra had searched far and wide for less familiar pieces in the treasury of 20th-century music for a string orchestra. One was Polish female composer Grażyna Bacewicz’s Concerto for String Orchestra of 1940, which subsumed its folkish echoes of Bartok into something utterly personal.
But the evening’s real highlight, which made one forgive all the annoyances, was the world premiere of Schiller’s Piano by young British composer Laurence Osborn. This is the second piece by Osborn the Collective has premiered – Rakhi Singh understands that nurturing a composer over years is more fruitful than just moving onto the latest fashionable name – and her faith in Osborn is not misplaced. It’s inspired, if that is the word, by the replica of a piano once owned by the great German poet Friedrich Schiller, which the largely Jewish inmates of Buchenwald concentration camp were forced to build as a monument to “great German art.”
However the piano was hollow – it was only a carefully crafted shell. The ironies and tragedies of this strange episode are explored in what is essentially a piano concerto, in which soloist Zubin Kanga played two pianos: a “normal” grand, and perched on top of it, a small synthesizer. This is programmed with the sounds made in a piano workshop: sawing, sanding, cutting.
It’s easy to imagine what this set-up could have led to: agonized expressive shrieks from the strings, rhythmicised sawing from the synthesizer, angry plunks from the piano. In fact the piece was remarkable for the exquisite tact with which Osborn approached its emotive theme, a quality echoed in Kanga’s self-abnegating performance. True we heard Kanga both sing and play the moving “Buchenwald camp song” – but it was whispered, with no emoting.
As for the other six movements, they combined musical images of oppression, distorted memories of a hallowed musical tradition, and in the world beyond the camp, birdsong, all woven into a finely-wrought meditative musical fabric. At the end, as the tender opening chant and recorded birdsong returned, one felt the possibility of redemption. IH
Leonard Bernstein was a tortured genius, and even though Bradley Cooper’s much-hyped biopic of 2023, Maestro, did not quite fulfil all expectations and notably failed to win anything at this year’s Academy Awards, it focused renewed attention on one of the great creative musicians of our era.
So whether or not coincidentally, it’s a good moment for Covent Garden to revisit the tangled story of Bernstein’s two linked one-act operas, the sprightly Trouble in Tahiti – written at the early peak of his powers in 1951 – and the late A Quiet Place of thirty years later (which opens Maestro as the older Bernstein works on the score). Neither quite succeeded when new, and led to several re-thinks: the operas became literally entangled when the two were brought together into a single evening in which A Quiet Place included flashbacks from Trouble in Tahiti.
That didn’t work either, and the Royal Opera’s director Oliver Mears was surely right to separate them back into two strongly contrasted one-acters in this new production. The plots are sequential: Tahiti is the taut story of Sam and Dinah’s tense marriage in the American suburbia of the 1950s, and Quiet Place takes up the narrative after Dinah’s death in a car crash and explores the impact on the wider family. The music of Trouble in Tahiti is classic Bernstein: sharp-edged, jazzy, angular lines set off against a satirical edge of radio ads before the age of Mad Men. The wide open stage of the Linbury is effectively used, with both Henry Neill as Sam and Wallis Giunta as Dinah make the most of their set-pieces, especially Giunta in her show-stopping re-run of the trashy Tahiti film she has been to see instead of going to their son’s school play.
Dinah is portrayed as a drinker, which causes her car crash and the suicide note she leaves behind. A Quiet Place is far less characterful musically, soft-edged and often plain soppy in its exploration of family tensions (which reflect Bernstein’s own troubled relationship with his own father). It starts strongly with the comedy of Dinah’s funeral (Sarah Pring acerbic as Mrs Doc), but when it tries the same sort of riffs on popular music as Tahiti (Henry Neill here reappearing as the gay son Junior) it sounds forced and feeble.
The emotional weight is here carried by the daughter Dede (Rowan Pierce, anxiously bright) and her bisexual husband François (Elgan Llyr Thomas, outstandingly clear), with old Sam (Grant Doyle, grimly impassive) and Junior creating a quartet of angst-laden woe as Sam clears Dinah’s belongings, reads her diaries, and heaps it all together, throwing her ashes on top. Mears’s strong direction makes the best case for it all, but the music and drama go from bad to worse under a weight of pretension about the problems of families’ living together.
Fine playing of the reduced orchestrations by Garth Sutherland under Nicholas Chalmers’ propulsive conducting can’t prevent the show sagging towards its protracted close. A committed attempt, but not quite a hit. NK
If an orchestra has decided to programme that ocean of sublimity that is Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony along with the spikiest of Shostakovich’s piano concertos and the gorgeous fantasy of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, what order should they play them in? With the Beethoven last so everyone goes home soothed and uplifted, would be the conventional wisdom.
On Wednesday night, the BSO defied that wisdom, which meant that we emerged into the damp Dorset evening with our ears ringing from the splendour of the Russian wedding that ends the Firebird. It was a concert in which the biting sarcasm of Shostakovich and the dark glitter of Stravinsky succeeded best, but the opening performance of the Pastoral symphony certainly had its high points.
On the podium was a young Swiss Australian conductor Elena Schwarz, who’s made a speciality of hard-core modernism, so you wouldn’t expect an indulgently lingering and spacious performance from her. In fact, it was remarkable for the way she infused a subtle urgency into those stately paragraphs. The brook in the slow movement seemed livelier than usual, the storm cracked with startling fierceness and in the final movement one could feel the dance steps under the spaciousness. If there was a fault, it was the orchestra’s over-bright and beefy sound; this dream of a country afternoon needed a more delicate, dusky weave.
That vivid sound – abetted as always by the super-bright sound of the Lighthouse concert hall – was actually a boon in the concert’s second half. It began with Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No 1, composed in the composer’s springtime before the horrors of Stalinism had crushed his high spirits. This performance produced the evening’s best music-making, thanks largely to the young soloist Martin James Bartlett, who won BBC Young Musician in 2014. It was one of those rare moments when a composer and a performer are so similar in temperament they seem to join hands across the years. The wild satire, mock-Lisztian heroics and sudden swerves into melting lyricism of the 27-year-old Shostakovich found their ideal executant in the 28-year-old Bartlett, who has just the right volcanic temperament and exuberant virtuosity to bring those qualities to life.
The frenzied final solo cadenza and the dash to the finish were taken at such breakneck speed that you felt the music almost escaping his grasp. And this too was apt, because, brilliant though the music is, you can sometimes feel Shostakovich was not entirely in control of his own incredibly exuberant talent. It should be said the honours were not all Bartlett’s. The orchestra and conductor matched him in mad energy, and the music’s rare lyrical moments were the opportunity for the BSO’s principal trumpeter Paul Bosworth to shine.
After that peak, the performance of the Firebird seemed somewhat less stellar. The capering Infernal Dance wasn’t as razor-sharp as it needs to be. But there were some beautifully turned solos to savour, above all from horn player Eleanor Blakeney, whose sad folk melody in the final scene seemed to come from some magically far distance. IH
Hearing a Moog synthesizer is like walking into a pub that has miraculously survived intact from the 1970s. Yes that orange carpet and swirling Artex ceiling make your eyeballs hurt, and yet they seem lovable. And unlike a ’70s pub, the Moog is somehow visionary. Its tremulous sound wasn’t just groovy and sexy; it pointed to a space-age future, especially when used in the score for a sci-fi film.
These contradictory feelings of Utopian dreaming and nostalgia swept over me at Tuesday night’s delightful concert at the Barbican. In an arc at the front were the ten performers of the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble, a bunch of enthusiasts for these now fragile and surprisingly small electronic keyboards, led by Will Gregory, the grey-haired, guilelessly enthusiastic co-founder of electronic duo Goldfrapp. Behind them were two dozen strings, wind and percussion players from the chamber orchestra the Britten Sinfonia, and at the front the capable, incisive but in truth not over-stretched conductor Ben Foster.
Laid out thus, you might think the Britten Sinfonia was fated to be merely a backing band for the Moogs, lending a touch of orchestral class to the angelic sounds. And that’s occasionally how it sounded, as in Purcell’s Funeral Music for Queen Mary in the arrangement by Wendy Carlos (of Switched-on Bach” fame),, which was immensely slow, and apart from the strings in the background exactly as one remembered it from Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange.
But mostly it was clear much thought had been given to keeping the sound-worlds distinct and yet related, the Britten Sinfonia amplified to bring its sound closer to the keyboards. Sometimes, the Sinfonia made sounds that were every bit as “spacey” and yearning as the Moogs, as in Bernard Herrmann’s wonderful score for Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451. In John Carpenter’s score to his own Escape from New York the Moogs took centre-stage, their ear-scraping metallic hammering and pounding bass riffs building to an enjoyably terrifying climax.
The most interesting among these short pieces in the concert’s first half was Charles Ives’s The Unanswered Question. The little interjections interwoven between the rapt string chorale and trumpet calls normally stand for suffering, questioning humanity. Here, played by Moogs instead of flutes and clarinets, they took on a different meaning. Were they the bewildered voices of our machines, or possibly AI, raised in fearful protest?
The second half was given over to the English premiere of a 45-minute, eight-movement suite for the Moog Ensemble and the Britten Sinfonia, composed by Gregory. Entitled Heat Ray: The Archimedes Suite, it is a homage from a lover of ingenious machines to the ancient Greek who invented quite a few himself, several of which were evoked in this suite, including the Archimedes screw, and the Claw that could grab entire ships.
Much of the music was a musicalising of mathematical ideas: colossal chords shifting out of perfect alignment, layers of rhythms piled up in ever-greater, manically ticking complication, etched in the Day-Glo yellows and purples of the Moogs, and flecked with subtler colours from the Britten Sinfonia. Was it a touch facile at times? Certainly. But it was also charmingly evocative, often with an irresistible dancing swing, and sometimes – as in the quietly immense, circling harmonies of The Claw – even moving. IH
Hear this concert at The Anvil, Basingstoke on October 9, and at Saffron Hall, Saffron Walden on October 11. Tickets: brittensinfonia.com
4/5
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English