Opera, witches, werewolves, trolls etc are an unlikely mix, but are brewed up and served beautifully in Terry Pratchett's Maskerade, which was brought home from my son's school library and avidly lapped up. (It was published in 1995)

Pratchett isn't everyone's cup of tea - you have to share his anarchic and pythonesque (verging on the batty) sense of humour, and enjoy, or at least put up with, the continual spoofing of by-now-conventional fantasy themes. It helps if you have got to know the standard Discworld characters: the housewife-and-mother-and-witch Granny Ogg, Death (who ALWAYS SPEAKS IN UPPER CASE), etc. If you're generally in sync with all this, he's side-splittingly funny.

His take on opera is up to his usual gloriously irreverent standards, and while mostly rather loving, can be alarmingly near the bone. The subjects lampooned range from the (obvious) characters taking too long to die, the overfed tenor Enrico (real name Henry Slugg), the underfed ballerinas, the new owner of the opera house, to whom it has to be explained that "opera doesn't make money, opera is something you put money into", and the description of the Ring of the Nibelungingung (sic), something along the lines of "three days of the gods shouting at each other and forty minutes of memorable tunes". And Pratchett's one-liners come thick and fast To give you a flavour:

"The singers all loathe the sight of one another, the chorus despises the singers, they both hate the orchestra, and everyone fears the conductor; the staff on one prompt side won't talk to the staff on the opposite prompt side, the dancers are all crazed from hunger in any case..."

"After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way."

The whole book is also a semi-continuous spoof of the Phantom of the Opera, complete with a dapper Ghost in a white mask and everyone continually looking up nervously at the enormous chandelier in the auditorium.

A treat for any opera lovers, particularly so if you're already a Pratchett fan...

David
5th July 2008

A shiny new glass and steel office block next to a major railway station might not seem like an obvious concert venue. But that's precisely what developer Peter Millican has attempted with the new Kings Place development, and it looks like he's pulled it off.

Kings Place is otherwise a nicely designed office building, done in the current style with a tall atrium and backing attractively onto the canal (the less said the better about the urban landscape of Kings Cross station at the front). You simply don't expect to find an art gallery and a 460-seat concert hall inside.

And when you get there, the hall is stunning - spacious, elegant, and with everything beautifully finished in light wood. More impressively, the architects and acousticians both seem to have been equally satisfied. From our seats at least, the sound was very clear, warmed up with just a touch of reverberation: perfect for the Vivaldi and Corelli concerti being played. The tall wooden panelling behind the stage looked as if it would help the performers to hear themselves also, always a worry for chamber players in a large hall.

The music at last night's launch party was performed by young players from a scheme of The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who will be taking offices and a residency in Kings Place. It will presumably be a limited version of the OAE who play there, as it's not an enormous stage - you'd struggle to fit 20. It looks like it will be a truly fabulous venue for chamber music.

The real opening will be a festival in October, with an innovative format of 100 45-minute concerts of many different styles. London is already well provided with major orchestral halls, but the number of really top chamber venues is small, and Kings Place looks to be a great addition.

19th June 2008

Having been completely blown away by Gustavo Dudamel's performance of the Shostakovich fifth Symphony (see the review), I was on the lookout to see what other critics made of him. The answer is surprisingly polarised.

In the Evening Standard, Barry Millington was as enthused as me (and the audience) by the “high-octane performance”:

“Nor was it only the players who were susceptible to the blistering intensity of the finale: the surge of adrenaline in the stalls was palpable. Within seconds of the last great timpani thwack, the entire audience was on its feet. You don’t see that every day at the Festival Hall.”

In the Guardian, Andrew Clements came away convinced by the musicality also: “What characterised Dudamel's account of this most familiar of all Shostakovich's works was its thoughtfulness.”

But this isn't everyone's reaction. There's definitely a set who aren't comfortable with the extreme energy levels that Dudamel brings. In the Telegraph, Ivan Hewett complains that “even in this tragic and grim response to the horrors of Stalinism, a certain aloofness and holding back might not go amiss.” Richard Fairman, in the Financial Times, covered the Sunday performance of the Tchaikovsky fifth. Fairman describes Dudamel as “exhilarating and exhausting”, and makes it clear that he would have preferred a more restrained offering, ending with: “His shattering performance is just not one to be experienced often”.

And finally, there's the “If it's not in the score, I don't want to hear it” view, represented by Bob Briggs in Musicweb :

“Why Maestro Dudamel chose to interpret this work the way he did, contrary to the score, is a mystery to me. His performance was wild, insane, out of control, banal, vulgar, glorious, intense, funny, deeply felt, exciting and I loved every minute of it – but I never want to hear Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony like this again!”

I get the distinct impression that the world is divided into the classical purists and the rest. Dudamel is definitely outside the purist camp: he loves popular music and claims to listen to Salsa and bolero music on his iPod before a concert. Everyone, detractor and promoter alike, will agree that he takes things to extremes, painting the music in vivid colours, and you can't argue with his knowledge of the score, even if he chooses to disobey it.

The purists are clearly disturbed by the intensity of feeling that the performance demands of them: they don't want to be dragged along, needing a bit of mental space in which to enjoy the music. And the sheer amount of movement on the podium offends and distracts them from the music.

Personally, I'm unequivocally in the opposite camp. I left the Royal Festival Hall exhausted and delighted, on a massive high that felt like leaving a rock'n'roll gig, but the exhilaration came as much from the delicate build-up of the first movement and the ironic humour of the second as it did from the thunderous ending. I can't think of anything better: if we want to bring a younger generation into the classical world, I am sure that this emotional intensity is essential.

Los Angeles audiences are drooling with anticipation about Dudamel's forthcoming appointment to head the LA Phil. The LA Times printed this about Dudamel's March performance:

After intermission, Berlioz got the full, highly charged, dripping-with-color Dudamel treatment -- a fabulous, in-your-face "Symphonie Fantastique." Berlioz portrays drug-induced dreams and nightmares. Dudamel added Technicolor, wide screen and multichannel sound in an avid performance that underscored absolutely everything he could possibly underscore.

Dudamel is conducting the Gothenburg Symphony in Symphonie Fantastique at the Proms in August (inexplicably in the lowest price bracket). I guess that several of the reviewers above have no desire to be there, but I've got my tickets and I can't wait!

You'd normally look on the phrase "Prescient music critic" as something of an oxymoron, but here's a remarkable example, taken from Misha Donat's wonderful programme notes for the Wihan Quartet's performance at Blackheath Halls of Beethoven's Op.130.

The Op.130 quartet was originally written with a long, complex last movement of fantastic intensity - and very avant-garde for its day. Writing after its premiere in 1826, the reviewer for the Allgemeine musikaliche Zeitung commented:

The first, third and fifth movements are serous, gloomy, mysterious, and at times bizarre, rough and wilful; the second and fifth full of wantonness, cheerfulness and mischief. In them, the great composer, who in his earliest works especially only seldom managed to find the right proportions for his objectives, has expressed himself with unusual brefity and concision. A repeat of both movements was demanded with stormy applause. But the meaning of the fugal finale is something the reviewer cannot explain: for him it was as incomprehensible as Chinese... Perhaps something like this would not have been written if the Master could hear his own compositions. But we should not dismiss it too hastily: perhaps the time will come when what seems to us at first sight opaque and confused will be perceived as clear and pleasing.

Beethoven's publishers prevailed upon him to write a shorter, simpler last movement: the original was subsequently published as the "Grosse Fuge", Op.133. It is now considered one of the pinnacles of string quartet writing. Hearing the Wihan play it in its proper place at the end of the Op.130 quartet was a joy.

Maybe the German reviewer was being sarcastic - but if not, how right he was!

2nd June 2008

Schubert's Trout Quintet is one of the best loved pieces in the repertoire, full of hummable melodies, easy to listen to and improbably combining energy and relaxed conviviality – what Stephen Johnson tags with the Viennese word “Gemütlichkeit“ in his wonderful piece on BBC discovering music. It's an unusual work in that Schubert was so young when he wrote it, and yet already had so much technical mastery.

Also unusual is the instrumentation. Rather than the usual formula of piano, two violins, viola and cello, the second violin is replaced by a double bass. This completely changes the balance of the music, with the double bass providing a solid foundation which frees the piano to play a variety of interesting melodic lines in the middle and higher registers. These radically alter the sound quality (musicologists would say the “timbre”) from what is found in much chamber music.

The instrumentation also makes the Trout an almost impossible piece for home sound systems. The bottom E on the double bass plays at 41 Hz, which is simply lower than many speaker systems will reproduce. My Genelec studio monitors, are fabulous loudspeakers for almost everything, but even on those, the instrument's contribution is dramatically reduced (I don't have a subwoofer). On my iPod, the instrument actually vanishes completely. Since the bass line is a crucial part of the sound from the very beginning of the first movement, this is a bit of a disaster.

The correct balance was very much in evidence when hearing the Trout live, played by the Greenwich Trio (plus violist and bass) at a concert at Netherhall House organised by our friends at Cavatina. I've commented on the Greenwich's impeccable balance elsewhere: in the Trout, the extra instruments allowed a great injection of excitement. Apart from anything else, the physical presence of the double bass is imposing, and Stjepan Hauser's cello and Rivka Golani's viola played tightly together with extreme levels of attack, quite tumultuously so in the second movement scherzo. Perhaps because I've listened to a lot of folk music, I love that amount of attack in string playing: most studio producers don't seem to permit anything close to it, presumably because it's so likely to stretch the performance of any sound system.

I've always viewed a subwoofer as something only for people who want the vibrations from the helicopter scenes in action movies, and unnecessary for music. Opera, orchestral, piano music, rock, jazz are all fine, and even Bach organ music works OK without one, because the organ produces such strong overtones that your brain is capable of reconstructing the low notes without actually being able to hear the fundamental. Hearing a double bass played in the Trout is the first time I've really missed having a subwoofer.

I could always go out and buy one, but then there's always the option of just going and seeing more music live, which is probably the right answer!

31st May 2008

Welcome to this first blog entry. I don't yet quite know what directions the blog will go in, but as Bachtrack is a classical music web site and my main interests are music, internet technology and running technology businesses, that should give some clues!

I've been listening to opera since I was a very small child. Growing up in France in the 1960s, there wasn't much in the way of kids television (if you discount five-minuters like The Magic Roundabout and Bonne Nuit Les Petits) so I listened to opera on my parents' gramophone: mainly Verdi and Bellini. I was even taken to see Maria Callas singing Norma at the Paris Opera House – the greatest of privileges and an experience to remember forever.

But in adult life, although I've listened to plenty of opera on CD, I lost the habit of seeing it live, mainly because of the expense and the difficulty of booking. Good tickets to Covent Garden have been over £100 a throw for a long time, and you have to be mega-organised to get them, since the popular events sell out early. With a maximum of one or maybe two visits a year affordable, it was simply too much hassle to go through the whole process of joining “Friends” lists and doing the season's planning well in advance, at a tight deadline for the priority booking forms.

I'd heard of Glyndebourne, of course, but viewed it as out of financial reach. There's the ENO, of course, but I speak adequate Italian and don't particularly enjoy Italian opera sung in English. I simply assumed that not not much else was on.

Today, doing a search on Bachtrack for opera in London paints a very different picture. As I write this, the system shows over 300 events in London which are either complete operas or opera extracts. As well as Covent Garden and the ENO, there's the Holland Park Festival, Massenet's Cendrillon at Queen Elizabeth Hall, aria recitals at Cadogan Hall, Handel's wonderful Orlando at Wigmore Hall, Vaughan Williams' Pilgrim's Progress and Bernstein's Candide at Sadler's Wells, Philip Glass's Waiting for the Barbarians at the Barbican, and a bunch of other concert performances. You can even catch snatches of Parsifal at the improbable venue of St Paul's Cathedral. Just gone by, there have also been low cost semi-pro performances from Opera London and Hampstead Garden Opera.

If I widen the search to 100 miles from home, using Bachtrack's new distance filter, I pick up over 100 more listings, including Glyndebourne, major opera festivals at Garsington and Grange Park, performances in Brighton by the Russian State Opera Orchestra, and a variety of other bits and pieces.

Put simply, there is an enormous wealth of opera being performed within easy reach of home that, in spite of being an opera lover since childhood, I had absolutely no idea about. It makes me wonder two things:

1. How many closet opera fans are out there who would go to a lot of these performances if only they knew they existed?
2. What happens in the marketing teams of the organisations who put on these events? How come none of their material reached me?

(But that's a subject for another blog...)