Blog Archives

Gabriel/Samuel Adamson – The Globe

21/7/2013

We’re in the 1690s. The Duke of Gloucester suffers from hydrocephalus. Cue Purcell’s ‘Birthday Ode’. A waterman has cuckolded another. Cue farty sound from trumpet. King Charles II cured a lump on this man’s neck. A drunken trumpeter is left naked in Holland. Cue chorus from the Fairy Queen. Someone’s baby was stillborn (do we care?) They’re training a starling to speak (keep up). Three trumpeters argue (about what?) Spurious cunnilingus. Purcell is dying. Queen Mary is dead – cue Funeral Music.

There were moments when I thought I’d woken up in a nightmarish episode of Horrible Histories. But it wasn’t good enough for that. And when countertenor William Purefoy gave a gleaming duet on ‘Sound the Trumpet’ with Alison Balsom, accompanied by the spirited English Concert, you could almost forget this meant to be a ‘play’ at all – until actress (Jessie Buckley) sang a grindingly flat rendition of ‘The Plaint’ from the Fairy Queen (they could fork out for two male singers, but a soprano was apparently a luxury too far).

How on earth did this ‘entertainment with trumpet’ come into being? Alison Balsom approached director Dominic Dromgoole saying she wanted to play at the Globe. Purcell’s ravishing late music for trumpet, and the royally-employed Shore brothers for whom he wrote, became a focus. So far, so promising. One could imagine conflicts between royalty, impresario, composer and musicians ripe for dramatisation. Then Samuel Adamson was asked to conjure a play and, being au fait with late-17th century fashions, opted to pen a ‘masque’ even though he admits in the programme that ‘Unfortunately, semi-operas don’t stand up dramaturgically’. Quite. So, hey presto! a rag-bag of sketches and non-sequiturs.

The best aspect of the evening was, inevitably, Purcell’s music and the refined yet resplendent trumpet playing of Alison Balsom, Mark Bennett and Adrian Woodward alongside game members of the English Concert. The worst was the empty trotting out of all the vibrant tropes of a Globe performance. There were random borrowings from Midsummer Night’s Dream, comic engagement with the groundlings not through developed characters but a puppet bird poo-ing on someone’s head. Superb live music and dance, a willing audience, a cast acting their socks off – but no drama to give it meaning. Wasn’t it the Bard himself who said, ‘The play’s the thing…’?

Gabriel runs until 18 August

Totentanz

17/7/2013

Thomas Ades led the BBC Symphony Orchestra through two dances of death last night, by Britten and Lutoslawksi, culminating in his own remarkable Totentanz. It was an inspired programme which had the startling effect of unifying three utterly different musical voices.

The dance made its first appearance in Britten’s sombre Sinfonia da Requiem, whose Dies Irae scherzo erupts in flutter tonguing and sharp, sarcastic trumpets. Ades has never hidden his scorn for Britten’s music, but this coruscating reading – one of the best I’ve ever heard - revealed a respect for the composer’s raw, early orchestral work. He masterfully nudged the Lachrymosa into being, allowing it to grow with each insistent figure until it achieved vast monumentality. Incisive direction made for a biting Dies Irae, with its hauntingly strange saxophone solo leading to violent break-up. Cello arpeggios rose like vaporous prayers in the luminous D major Requiem aeternum.

The very same note opened Lutoslawski’s defiant Cello Concerto (1970, this time played by soloist Paul Watkins with disarming indifference (as marked). In this starkly dramatic work the cellist is pitted against orchestral forces in what, too, becomes a dance of death, the cello hunted down into sobbing exhaustion. Watkins is an elite instrumentalist who is free to revel in such a complex role; together he and the orchestra articulated their fraught dialogue with such rhythmic verve one could almost imagine the words. After the soloist’s five minute opening the trumpets impertinent interruption struck a note of high comedy, while the lamenting Cantilena for which the strings swarm around the soloist was powerfully moving. His encore, Lutoslawski’s delicate Sacher Variation for solo cello, continued the conversation in intimate style.

It was in memory of Lutoslawski that Ades was commissioned to write a new orchestral work. The result, Totentanz, is a cycle of songs taken from a 15th century frieze in a Lübeck church in which Death calls on those from all levels of society to join his dance. It hurls us into a labyrinth the senior composer would recognise, but which is darker and more manically brutal than anything even he conceived. Simon Keenlyside and Christiane Stotijn, who sung the parts of Death and his victims with searing eloquence, needed amplification in the face of a vast orchestra and battery of percussion crowned by a taiko drum the size of a house. We’re in the world of Tevot, but with a narrative of overpowering momentum. The menacing score thunders forward like a force of nature, whip-cracks ricocheting off its surface, intensity building to claustrophobic levels as Death commands his victims: Emperor, Pope, Cardinal and King are scythed down until we reach the Monk; a gong stops play and in the stillness a bell tolls, the Monk laments his fate. Next comes the Knight with riding rhythms, snare drum, and a burst of Mahlerian military band; the tension ratchets up again and Mayor, Doctor, Usurer are dismissed, while a gleaming duet builds around the Merchant to a terrifying crisis. Tension is released in thinning textures as we enter the supposedly innocent world of the lower orders, celeste and strings accompany the Parish clerk, swinging horns and drum celebrate the release of the Peasant. Is Death singing a curdled love song to the Maiden, becalmed on his sinister line: ‘Girls don’t usually turn down a little dance’.

The shock arrives with the child: celestial trumpets which, in Britten’s work herald peaceful resurrection, here announce the passing of one who must dance before he can walk. We seem to have arrived in a scene from Mahler’s Das Wunderhorn and for a disorientating moment one can almost smell a sentimental ending. But Ades draws back, offering instead the child’s stark, lonely appeal, consumed by an unheeding Death. It’s a work of rich, operatic moment, pure Ades but seen through the dark glass of 19th century German Romanticism.

A Britten Century

10/7/2013

This is a rather odd miscellany: some of the pieces have appeared elsewhere

(by Hans Keller, Alan Bennett and Philip Brett), some are new. It can be disorientating: Paul Kildea’s waspish appraisal of Britten’s fellow biographers (rightly identifying Michael Kennedy’s pre-eminence) rubs shoulders with Keller’s gloriously impatient 1960 defence of Gloriana; Colin Matthews plunges us into the frenzied final scoring of Death in Venice while Ian Bostridge explores the Britten-soaked 2012 film Moonrise Kingdom.

Curiously, editor Mark Bostridge left it to Nicholas Kenyon to introduce the essays, but his trenchant survey alone is worth the price of the book. He brilliantly sets out the ‘contest for possession’ that has dogged Britten, and reminds us that the reception of both leading biographies have been dominated by the unprovable, second-hand account of a sexual trauma. Kenyon rightly stresses the importance of Philip Brett’s ground-breaking work on the centrality of Britten’s sexuality to his work. Indeed, Brett’s rigorously argued essay (a 1997 Proms lecture) is the stand-out piece. He makes a convincing case that Britten set out to be ‘head boy’ of British composers by colonising those very areas he supposedly despised in his ‘insider’ forebears: ‘Britten’s artistic effort was an attempt to disrupt the centre that it occupied with the marginality it expressed.’

Janette Miller’s account of her time as the original Flora is a vital corrective to the view that only boys were of interest to Britten. Edward Gardner’s confession that he felt ‘strait-jacketed’ by the minutely detailed scores until he heard Britten’s own conducting leads to an important insight: that Britten achieved greatness only when he allowed himself ‘unusual freedom’. Ian Bostridge reminds us of the stature of the works for children with subtle eloquence, while Roger Vignoles’s illuminates the neglected Five Canticles.

For those familiar with the literature on Britten in the 1930s there’s little new, and in The Race to the finish John Bridcut treads old ground, though it confirms him as the most intuitive writer on Britten today.

Helen Wallace

Mahagonny Opera: The Burning Fiery Furnace/ City of London Festival

5/7/2013

Was that really Roger Vignoles looming out of the shadows, cloak swirling, clattering the cymbals with unalloyed glee? It was just one of many phantasmagoric images in this dream-like production of Britten’s The Burning Fiery Furnace played in the gathering gloom of Southwark Cathedral late last night.

In fact the distinguished pianist Vignoles was not only cymbal player but music director of Mahagonny Opera’s inspired production by Frederick Wake-Walker, which opened in St Petersburg (a Russian premiere) and has already played to packed audiences in Orford Church as part of the Aldeburgh Festival.

I’ve always felt that The Burning Fiery Furnace was the most potent of the three parables, successfully marrying Medieval mystery with Noh theatre and, here, Balinese dance traditions to create raw drama. Unlike the other three, too, it’s spliced with dark humour which Wake-Walker brings out with great charm.

The opening plain-song procession of hooded monks culminates in the arrival of the Abbot, the giant figure of bass Lukas Jakobski, whose mesmerising presence compels throughout. The vast shadow of his raised hand in the rivets of the arch above was just one happy result of Ben Payne’s sensitive, glowing lighting.

Jakobski rapidly transforms into the menacing astrologer whose snake-like, quivering dance heralds the arrival of James Gilchrist’s haughty Nebuchadnezzar. Wake-Walker’s choreography, derived closely from Balinese dance, animates and articulates the drama with a sensual rightness all-too rare in opera. The chorus’s hand and arm movements give life to the rhythm of their singing, while the angular gyrations of the three boy entertainers are sheer delight (played with winning cheek by Alfie Evans, William Rose and Theo Christie from the Suffolk-based Jubilee Opera).

Britten handled the palette of male and boy voices with alto trombone, horn, viola, harp, organ, flute and percussion with such acute mastery one is continually arrested by sonorities which speak as eloquently as any of the singers. Ensemble was impressively close, given that the Aurora Orchestra players, Vignoles and the singers could barely see each other. Musical treasures spill out: the floating, gamelan-like texture of the story’s beginning, the snarling trombone which drives the dance of death, James Gilchrist’s burnished chromaticism answered by the touching homophony of the three Israelites (Samuel Evans, John McMunn and Rodney Earl Clarke), their moving appeal to God and the piercing perfect fourths of the young angel (Lucas Evans) who delivers them from the furnace.

There are still tickets for tonight and Saturday (5, 6 July), www.colf.org

after which you can catch them at the Buxton Festival 14,15 July www.buxtonfestival.co.uk