I mentioned in an earlier posting that I was taking some lessons in singing opera, mainly with the intention of getting a better understanding of what I'm listening to and writing about. I've come to the end of the series for now, and it's been a fascinating process - indeed, quite a revelation.
If you're a trained singer, don't bother reading this - you know it all already. If you're not, there are several things that may come as a surprise.
Amidst the alarming tale sent to me by my friend Rupert of the 111-year-old Philadelphia Orchestra filing for bankruptcy (the good news being that this doesn't actually appear to involve stopping playing or disbanding or anything), I couldn't help but spot the following paragraph:
The Royal Opera announced its 2011-12 season yesterday. The season has an unusual profile: there is a large clutch of interesting work that's not heard all that often, a large clutch of old faithfuls, and not all that much in the middle.
The old faithfuls include seven operas in the "world top 20" category: La Traviata (with no less than 22 performances), Rigoletto, Otello, La Bohème and all three Mozart/da Ponte operas. La Fille du Régiment, Salome, Rusalka and Faust are also very standard repertoire currently, making that an awful lot of the season in the "totally safe" bucket.
Having been to Covent Garden a lot recently, I can't help but be struck by the variety of music you get in the space of a few hundred metres. In order, from Monday's visit to Fidelio:
We’ve spent the last few days at the Opera Europa conference, where a few hundred opera people get together to talk about current issues and future plans, and (of course) take in some performances. Opera Europa is held in a different location each year; this year’s event was split across three sites in London: the Coliseum, the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre. It’s a fascinating means of getting insight into how the opera world functions.
Whenever you look at a libretto by William Schwenck Gilbert (whose middle name makes a good pub quiz question), you can be safe in assuming that it will be full of satire of contemporary public life. This means that you can also safely assume that politics won't be far behind, whether Gilbert is lampooning specific political figures of his time or making a more timeless point.
A current fashion in opera productions is to use a stage that's mostly dark, with spotlights giving brilliant splashes of light for those characters or features to which the director wishes to draw your attention. I would guess that over half the operas I go to are produced in this style, including the two I've been to in the last two nights (Lucrezia Borgia at the ENO, and Die Zauberflöte at Covent Garden.)
Doing a bit of reading ahead of a trip to The Barber of Seville at Covent Garden tomorrow, I found myself wondering about why the Figaro trilogy remains incomplete (in operatic terms).
New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini has recently asked for contributions to the list of 10 greatest composers.
A couple of months ago, I was sent a review copy of a 2008 recording of Bach's Goldberg Variations by the American pianist Beth Levin. I explained our usual drill: we're not expert reviewers here, but if I particularly loved the recording, I would write something about it.
I'm not sure I realised quite what I was taking on. If you're a trained musicologist and expert in recordings of Bach, none of what I'm about to say will be new to you. If, on the other hand, you're one of that elusive breed "the general classical music listener", it may help to explain why it's so difficult to make sense of any answer to the question "which recording should I buy".
Clearly, any recording has to pass some basic tests. The recording quality must be above a certain standard (unless you have particular cause to listen to a "vintage" recording), the edition played must be reasonably sensible (no outrageous cuts or excess of dubious additions), and the performer must be playing the notes correctly (give or take the odd fluff) and in line with what was written in the score. A majority of modern recordings pass these tests, and Levin's is no exception. She's certainly accurate, and the sound of the recorded piano is perfectly pleasant.
Next comes a question for you, the listener: do you want the thrill and imperfections of a live performance, or do you prefer the pristine clarity of a perfectly adjusted studio recording? There isn't a right or wrong here - it's purely a matter of your personal preference. If you're a committed fan of a particular work, you may even want one of each. Levin's recording is in concert, but I wouldn't have known it from the way it's recorded: not an ounce of sonic intrusion to distract you from the notes.
For an early music work, you also have a choice of instruments: do you want the authenticity of an original harpsichord, or the expressive versatility of a modern piano? Again, the choice is a matter of taste: Levin is clearly using a good modern piano.
But once you have disposed of these three questions, the territory becomes extremely murky, particularly with Bach. You can see the problem by going to IMSLP and looking at two copies of the score: the first edition, and the later edition by Czerny. The Czerny version looks pretty much the way piano students are used to seeing their music: there are tempo numbers, dynamic markings and all kinds of indications as to how Czerny thought that each variation should be played. The problem is that these were written by Czerny, not Bach. Go to the first edition, and apart from the obvious differences that it's hand-written and the quaver tails are written backwards compared to what you're used to, you realise that there are hardly any dynamics, expression or tempo marking at all. Bach has left it entirely up to the performer to play the music as he or she sees fit.
This means that in the course of a long work like the Goldberg Variations, the performer is making literally thousands of individual decisions as to the exact expression to be created out of each note or phrase. And at this point, I find myself totally unequipped to judge. As an example, I took the tenth variation, the Fughetta, and listened to half a dozen different versions on Spotify. There were enormous differences in each in the speed, the way it was accented and the way phrases were put together. The famous performances by Glenn Gould are each quite different from each other as well as from other pianists, and I can't think of any objective criteria by which they might be judged.
Any review that you read, therefore, is likely to be based primarily on how well the CD matches the reviewer's internal idea of how the music should sound. Unfortunately, there's no particularly good reason why this should match yours. In fact, there isn't even a guarantee that your idea of how the music should sound will stay consistent from one week to the next - depending on your mood and the increasing amount that you learn about the piece.
The Goldberg Variations is a work which permits almost infinite nuance and variety, and which will reward repeated listenings. The only advice I can give listeners is to listen to many different versions: one of them will take your fancy more than the others. And it could be Levin's.
7th January 2011
The classical music business loves its anniversaries, which provide a splendid framework on which to hang your programming. 2011 is a bit thin, though, with the only major anniversaries being Mahler and Liszt, Mahler giving us a distinct sense of déjà vu by having inconveniently died at age 51 and therefore having two anniversaries in successive years.
Since I've been writing a lot about opera this year, I decided to go and get a few singing lessons to get a better feel for what I'm listening to. After nearly half a century of singing this stuff in the bath, the first lesson came as quite a shock (all the bits about breathing and rib cage position made it feel a lot more like sports coaching than a music lesson) but it was fascinating none the less.
