Intermezzo

showbusiness as usual at Wigmore Hall

Karita Mattila / Martin Katz;   Sarah Connolly / Eugene Asti;   Angelika Kirchschlager / Ian Bostridge / Julius Drake;   Artemis Quartet - Wigmore Hall, 10 - 14 September 2010

Wigmore Hall's 110th anniversary season is made of awesome, with recitals coming up from just about everyone you could possibly want to hear, including rare visitors like Jonas Kaufmann, Martha Argerich and Daniel Barenboim.

But the season's opening weekend was almost derailed by illness, with both Karita Mattila and Angelika Kirchschlager suffering from colds. Kirchschlager's was so bad she cancelled her scheduled appearance on the Saturday, eventually appearing - only partially recovered - on Monday.

Die Dreigroschenoper at the Barbican

Die Dreigroschenoper - Barbican, 13 June 2009


Ian Bostridge and Cora Burggraaf

The original performers of Weill and Brecht's Die Dreigroschenoper were singing actors, not trained opera singers. And a seven-man band rather than an orchestra supplied the music. The name of course suggests it's an opera, but it has elements that owe more to musical theatre. Lengthy spoken sections (here replaced by a spoken narration that Brecht wrote specifically for concert performances) largely drive the action. And the vocal line is often simply doubled by an instrument.

It's not surprising a variety of performing traditions have arisen, with a mannered cabaret style at one end, a traditional operatic rendition at the other, and the more successful attempts generally falling somewhere in the middle.

Some time ago conductor HK Gruber recorded a version which approaches the spirit if not the specific textures of the original, incorporating his own chansonnier vocals, nostalgia singer Max Raabe, the frankly shouty punk legend Nina Hagen and the crack contemporary music ensemble Klangforum Wien. He brought them to the Barbican, and he again played Peachum in his own inimitable style, but this time he roped in opera stars for the rest.

Dorothea Röschmann, Angelika Kirchschlager and Hannah Schwarz

Some took to it better than others. Angelika Kirchschlager for one. She threw out the rulebook and played Jenny with her tongue in her cheek and a dollop of sauce. Polly Peachum's essential vulgarity was subdued beneath Dorothea Röschmann's elegant lieder technique but she displayed wit and superb comic timing in her spat with Cora Burggraaf's equally sophisticated Lucy Brown.

Ian Bostridge's Macheath was simply bizarre. London's most ruthless, dangerous criminal?  More like Basil Fawlty finding a fly in his soup. Angelika Kirchschlager looked as if she could eat him for breakfast, and in an encore of the Tango Ballad, proved she could.

Other parts were well taken. Hannah Schwarz's powerful Wagnerian mezzo gave her Mrs Peachum some heft, and Florian Boesch's Tiger Brown was idiomatic without being over the top.

HK Gruber himself was the least technically accomplished singer by far, but the one who seemed most at home in his role. He even managed to conduct Klangforum Wien after a fashion while he sang. I'm not sure I'd want to hear the whole thing sung HK style, but with the bandoneon, banjo and saxophones behind him, it made perfect sense.

 

 

****** more photos on next page *******

Robin Ticciati's House of Gingerbread

Hänsel und Gretel - Royal Opera House, 11 December 2008 (first night of second cast)

Despite the fact that Hänsel und Gretel is nominally a children's opera, there were precious few kids in the auditorium for this second performance in the run. There weren't many at the first either. But with tickets at up to £110 it's perhaps not surprising.

Less privileged children will just have to wait for the TV screening - now confirmed as BBC2 at 3pm on 25 December.

So 25 year old conductor Robin Ticciati was, as usual, younger than 99% of his audience.  This was not just the first night for the second cast, but also Ticciati's Covent Garden debut. Alternating conducting duties with Sir Colin Davis was not quite a mighty leap into the unknown, as he's just finished conducting Glyndebourne's touring production.

His Hänsel und Gretel is quite different from the dark post-Wagnerian elegance of Sir Colin's. For a start, he set up a cracking pace, knocking at least five minutes off each half. The touch was lighter, he pulled tempos and dynamics around less. It was a playful interpretation that emphasised the shiny surfaces more and the dark undercurrents less.

The orchestra, horns especially, played beautifully for him. Overtures apart, his eyes were locked on the stage almost constantly, with barely a glance at the score, still less at the musicians.  Obviously he's telepathic as well as talented, because everything held together perfectly.

In Alice Coote's Hänsel and Camilla Tilling's Gretel we had a less intuitively-matched pairing than the first cast of Angelika Kirchschlager (enjoying herself in row B of tonight's audience) and Diana Damrau. The first cast were best of friends; the second were more like real siblings, with all the differences and discords that implies.

Alice Coote's Hänsel was the boisterous dimwit familiar from her Met performance earlier in the year and powerfully sung. Camilla Tilling's voice was underweight in the first act, but improved, and she had a childlike vulnerability that eluded Diana Damrau, for all her impressive technique. We all now know girls are smarter than boys, but it's also woven into the Hansel and Gretel storyline, as Coote and Tilling beautifully illustrated.

Irmgard Vilsmaier as Mother and Eike Wilm Schulte as Father got a head start on laughs - she's about twice his size in all directions. They sang more accurately and enunciated more clearly than the first cast, even if they lacked some of their dramatic confidence and presence.

Ann Murray's more governessy character terrified less than Anja Silja's definitive witch, though the voice is in better shape. As reader ljg pointed out, she may be the first singer to tackle a role previously performed by her husband (Philip Langridge at the Met).

Eri Nakamura's Sandman and Simona Mihai's Dew Fairy were both nicely done, though the rubber-masked Sandman costume still gives me the creeps  - far more so than the dead children strung up in the witch's freezer which have so perturbed 'children's campaigners'.  The Tiffin schoolchildren on the stage didn't seem to have the least problem with any of it.

Incidentally, Green & Blacks have been giving out their very yummy chocolate before selected shows for a while now, and I was pleased to find the Royal Opera House have recruited another  sponsor, this time Acqua di Parma, handing out cologne samples. One commercial intrusion I really don't mind.

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hansel & Gretel at the Royal Opera House --- jetzt neu mit Hexentitz !!!

Hänsel & Gretel - Royal Opera House Covent Garden, 9 December 2008 (opening night)

 

Most of the 'new' productions at Covent Garden this year have been borrowed from places like Munich and Salzburg. Leiser and Caurier's Hänsel und Gretel is one of the few to be produced in-house. What's more it's about to be shown nationwide in cinemas, and even on Xmas telly. So it's not just a show. It's a mission statement, temperature gauge, and table of fare. All important these days when the Royal Opera House is scrabbling for a shrinking funding pool, not to mention bums on seats.

 

Leiser and Caurier are a safe-(ish) pair of hands. You know you're not going to get impenetrable intellectualism, half-dressed Nazis or criminal haberdashery abuse. Their ROH Turco, Cenerentola and Barbiere, were, by general consensus, 'fun', if not downright adorable. Their Zurich Clari a few months back was brilliant. Well I thought so anyway.

 

The first half was packed with sweet childlike touches - a Mogwai Sandman (actually, that one freaked me out just a tiny bit), a Princess Barbie Dew Fairy, fluffy squirrel-headed angels with light-up wings hanging from the ceiling. (Probably some people will want to stick their fingers down their throat just reading that. This production is not for you, dear grouches.) So far, so cute.

 

The biggest surprise came in the second half. The last thing I expected to see here - or indeed anywhere - was Anja Silja, legendary Wagnerina and grandmama, entering with - gasp - !!! her bewbs out !!! At Covent Garden! A closer look revealed - heart attack over - they were merely comedy t1ts of the stag party strap-on variety (or a posh ROH makeup dept version anyway). It was naught but a flash, and it was over in moments. She swiftly rebuttoned her open cardie.

 

But it was just the shocking start the third act needed to jolt us from the comforting world of sweet dreams and gingerbread houses into her witch's horror chamber of dead children hung from meat hooks and baked in giant ovens.

 

It's still a fairytale and it's still fun and the nastiness has a comfortingly cartoonish quality. But where the first act glossed over the children's hunger and their mother's neglect (if you're in the market for psychodrama, don't shop at Leiser and Caurier) this part of the production reminded us firmly that Bad Things can happen.

 

So the production was uneven, but the casting was perfection and the performances superb. In the title roles, Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau channelled their respective inner children so effectively that they were still larking around like eight year olds long after the final curtain had dropped.

 

The ingenious first half set - a teeny wonky-walled bedroom inside a huge tree-scene box - gave them plenty of reverberent surfaces and their voices projected powerfully through the auditorium.

 

Diana Damrau took a while to settle vocally, but both found themselves in the best part of their ranges and played off each other instinctively, relishing the words and enunciating them with a truly childish glee (a shame though that the surtitles entertained some inappropriate modernisms in translation).

 

Elizabeth Connell and Thomas Allen as their parents struck just the right balance between fecklessness and heartfelt concern, and made the most of what could be a thankless first act duet with some wonderful physical comedy.

The Sandman of Pumeza Matshikiza and Dew Fairy of Anita Watson were charming, but neither could avoid the odd scratchy note. Nerves? Both are well cast and should improve as the run goes on.

But Anja Silja was the star of the show. The voice is not the most accurate or the most beautiful, though in darn good shape for someone who's been singing professionally for fifty years. Her witch has a panto look, but a disturbingly authentic menace. I know the opera, I know the story, but as with all great actors, I never quite knew what Silja was going to do next.

Or was Sir Colin Davis the star of the show? He drew a wonderful performance from the orchestra, somewhat stately in pace, but deliciously nuanced. Some people think Hänsel und Gretel is just a cute children's opera; for Sir Colin it's a gateway drug to Tristan und Isolde. The score may not have Wagnerian heft, but it has a driving narrative thrust and glimpes of real harmonic invention. Sir Colin whipped up the drama where needed - the terrifying explosion of the witch's kitchen brilliantly handled - but the gentle lyricism of the dream scene, or the bouncing mock-Viennese waltzes rang just as true. If there was magic in the air, it was all in the pit. Can Robin Ticciati and the second cast match up?

 

   

      

       

 

 

 

Production photos: Bill Cooper

Curtain call photos: intermezzo.typepad.com

A Christmas present from the Royal Opera House - watch Hänsel und Gretel online

Banksy

A welcome confluence of circumstance. 

A BBC2 broadcast of Covent Garden's Hänsel und Gretel sometime over the Christmas period (date not yet known), plus the start of live online streaming for BBC1 and BBC2, means that you should be able to watch Hänsel und Gretel online.

Depending on which performance they choose to film, the cast includes Angelika Kirchschlager and Diana Damrau, or Alice Coote and Camilla Tilling as the children, with Thomas Allen or Eike Wilm Schulte and Anja Silja or Ann Murray in support. Colin Davis (in possibly his last ROH show) or Robin Ticciati conduct.

The Royal Opera House website may have further information on its TV page here at some point.

Simon Keenlyside's Wiener froth

Simon Keenlyside / Angelika Kirchschlager / Marc Minkowski / Les Musiciens du Louvre - Barbican, 3 November 2008

Johann Strauß IIÄgyptischer Marsch
Franz von Suppé (BOCCACCIO): Hab’ ich nur deine Liebe; Mia bella fiorentina (Florenz hat schöne Frauen)
Franz Lehár (EVA): Zwanzinette
Emmerich Kalman (DAS VEILCHEN VON MONTMARTRE): Heut' nacht hab' ich geträumt von Dir
Johann Strauß II (DIE TÄNZERIN FANNY ELSSLER): Draußen in Sievering blüht schon der Flieder
Franz Lehár: Gold und Silber 
Franz Lehár (GIUDITTA): Meine Lippen, die küssen so heiß
Emmerich Kálmán (DIE ZIRKUSPRINZESSIN): Wieder hinaus ins strahlende Licht
Johann Strauß II (Die Fledermaus): Ouverture
Franz Lehár (ZIGEUNERLIEBE): Nur die Liebe macht uns jung
Emmerich Kálmán (DIE CSARDASFÜRSTIN): Weißt du es noch

Viennese operetta is like the morris dancing of Austria - deeply ingrained in the cultural heritage, ineffably inexplicable and best enjoyed at source. For Angelika Kirchschlager the attraction is obvious but what Simon Keenlyside's doing is anybody's guess (clues here). It sounds like mating music for teddy bears. Still, it has plenty of fans, and they were out in full gushing force at the Barbican.

La Kirchschlager accomodated herself to the medium successfully. This kind of thing plays to her assets - the charm, the warmth, the almost conversational way with words - without drawing too much attention to her - oops - threadbare lower register. She looked yummy in the same purple satin frock she'd worn at the Proms and cavorted girlishly around the first violins, sounding pearlescently perfect up top.

Simon Keenlyside on the other hand was like a Ferrari in a 30mph zone. He was clearly having a great deal of fun with the physical side of the performance - not least when he got a message from a bottle as his beery prop suddenly spurted forth. He couldn't wait to obliterate the unwanted froth (I'd had enough of it by then, too), crouching down and mopping up with his hanky as he sang.

But Simon's qualities rest in elegance and nobility, and too much of the material was the opposite. Not to mention shoved down from higher keys - to its detriment. The worst culprit was his encore, Lehár's Dein ist mein ganzes Herz - it just cries out for a big, ringing tenor. 

The sweetly bonkers Marc Minkowski and his mostly French band sounded out of place too, lumpish and coarse where they should have been crisp as Strudel and unctuous as Schlagobers. There's only one way to play this music, and it's the way handed down by unbroken performance tradition in Vienna.

It is only fair to say that I was very much the mouse pewp in the chocolate box- every number was rapturously received by the vast majority of the audience. I just hope it's a diversion for Simon Keenlyside, not a new career direction .

 

 

 

 

  

All new Gürzenich Orchestra - now with added Stockhausen !!

Prom 48: Gürzenich Orchestra / Stenz / Kirchschlager - Royal Albert Hall, 22 August 2008

Mahler Symphony No.5 
Stockhausen Punkte (1952/1962/1993)
Schubert Ständchen, D921 orch. David Matthews, Bei dir allein, D866/2 orch. Manfred Trojahn, Nacht und Träume, D827 orch. Colin Matthews, Das Lied im Grünen, D917 orch. Detlev Glanert
Beethoven Overture 'Leonore' No.3

This was perhaps the oddest-looking but most fascinating programme at this year's Proms. 

Mahler's Fifth Symphony was premiered by Cologne's Gürzenich Orchestra in 1904, and the first idea for tonight's Prom was to reproduce that programme. Then new orchestrations were commissioned for the Schubert songs, performed at the 1904 concert with piano accompaniment. Conductor Markus Stenz wanted to add something by Cologne-born Stockhausen, as 22 August would have been the exact date of his 80th birthday. So we ended up with a two-interval concert, the old programme sandwiched with Stockhausen.

The big symphony came first, 70-ish minutes of non-stop music, in a reversal of the modern day practice which normally places it at the end. Or was it? We nowadays often programme the new stuff at the start of the night - and that's just what they did in 1904, before soothing the duly baffled Cologne audience with some more familiar Schubert and Beethoven. If nothing else, tonight's programming highlighted that even the most venerable of chestnuts were new once.

As once was Stockhausen's Punkte - but that was nearly sixty years ago. Unremarkably, the ageing Mahler fans who form a large part of the Arena audience came out with the usual lame jokes and mutterings. But to their credit, the vast majority returned from the bar after the interval for the Stockhausen. A few passive-aggressive old bats chose to demonstrate their superior musical tastes by ostentatiously rustling their boiled sweets and Sudoku 'books' throughout, but the vast majority stood there silently and perhaps attentively, prepared at least to give the music a chance.

I doubt if many were converted - Punkte is one of the early works where musical effect is subsumed to the underlying idea, and the idea sustains more like 27 seconds of music than the 27 minutes it extends over. Although Stockhausen went back later and revised the work, it remains, despite a supple and accurate performance by the Gürzenich, largely dry and unrewarding. "It wasn't flowing" complained a nearby prommer, who unwittingly grasped the Punkt of it all "just a load of different noises with gaps in between".

Stockhausen's legacy is I think better served by the outright sonic manipulation of later works. But Punkte I guess slotted better into this programme, because it deploys relatively conventional orchestral forces. The unconventional but typically thoughtful layout (violins to the right, a harp on each side of the conductor) provided the main foretaste of the spatial soundgames Stockhausen was later to play. 

Orchestrating Schubert lieder is a rather quaint and unfashionable practice, but one that might be worth reviving if cast the songs in a new light.

But all four of the newly-commissioned orchestrations for this evening were dull and formulaic. I've heard more interesting arrangements on ye olde scratchy lieder 78s (and would have been happy to hear these revived - what's the point of revisiting if you're not going to rethink?)

A couple were worse than dull - Colin Matthews' stodgy brass band lullaby for Nacht und Träume entirely missed the point of its hidden death wish, and Detlev Glanert's leaden Das Lied im Grünen had none of the joys of spring.

Careless programme editing didn't help - the text for the Rellstab Ständchen D957 was printed instead of the required (identical in name only) Grillparzer Ständchen D920. (Correct text and original music is here for anyone interested, translation is here, and here's an idea for the editor's Xmas list.)

Angelika Kirchschlager, dressed as everyone's favourite Quality Street, nuts and gooey caramel in a purple wrapper, did her effortful best to project over some unsympathetically dense orchestration. The upper end of her range sparkled. The lower notes, her weak point anyway, often just disappeared. But at least she brought a charm that the grimly serious earlier part of the evening had lacked.

Just when I was thinking the Gürzenich was a fine professional orchestra but nothing more, they surprised by flashing their opera house credentials with a weighty and truly stirring Leonore No.3 Overture to finish, and capped even that with their encore, a nice bit of Parsifal. We were by now more than three hours from the start, but I could happily have stayed for hours more. Why is it only at the Proms, and then only rarely, that we get orchestral concerts of any substantial length?

Angelika Kirchschlager shouts some Schubert

Angelika Kirchschlager/András Schiff - Wigmore Hall, 6 November 2007

Angelika Kirchschlager is capable of singing very beautifully indeed. A fresh-minted sweetness and purity of tone are her hallmarks, and that's exactly how she packaged most of her higher notes in tonight's Brahms/Schubert recital.

But it was disappointing (to those of us who go in for that sort of thing anyway) she chose to deploy her lower register in a semi-conversational style bordering on sprechgesang. In the lighter songs - like Brahms's Och Moder - it was comically effective. But elsewhere it was over-employed to the point of mannerism. I can't recall noticing this in her singing before (at least not to this extent). Not one true chest note all night, so I don't think it can be passed off as interpretive choice. Illness, affectation, nerves? -- baffling.

At the other end, her highest notes were paper-thin, so it's perhaps fortunate the programme had been judiciously selected to minimise these.

She remains at least a marvellous actress, with an ability to bring songs to life physically even where the vocals are lacking. In the elegant silky bias-cut dress pictured above, and painful looking high pointy stilettos she commanded the stage.

The evening was billed as 'Songs with and without words', and accordingly each half was bisected with a group of short piano solos. Although the sort of thing András Schiff might have had difficulty working into a regular piano recital, here they slotted in neatly. He gave a typically poised and thoughtful reading of three Brahms Intermezzi inspired by poems, and later on cut loose for three characterful Schubert pieces, from the songlike Hungarian Melody to the rumbunctious Grazer Galopp. They're pieces you might not get to hear very often, unless you play them yourself, so were all the more welcome.

Brahms Wach auf mein Herzensschöne; Es steht ein Lind: Da unten im Tale Op. 97 no. 6; Och Moder, ich well en Ding han!; Vor dem Fenster Op. 14 No. 1; Feinsliebchen, du sollst mir nicht barfuß gehn; In stiller Nacht;
3 Intermezzi Op. 117;
Von waldbekränzter Höhe Op. 57 No. 1; Wenn du nur zuweilen lächelst Op. 57 No. 2; Es träumte mir, ich sei dir teuer Op. 57 No. 3; Ach, wende diesen Blick Op. 57 No. 4; Unbewegte laue Luft Op. 57 No. 8

Schubert An Silvia D. 891; Der liebliche Stern D. 861; Geheimes D. 719; Wiegenlied D. 867;
Hungarian Melody in B minor D817; Allegretto in C minor D915; Grazer Galopp in C D925;
Am Bach im Frühling D. 361; Der Pilgrim D. 794; Lied des Florio D. 857 No. 2; An den Mond D. 259; Sehnsucht D. 636