I don't often go to the Royal Opera House, in spite of living a mere five miles away from it and having strong pretensions of being an opera fan (as you'll have figured out if you read most of these blog entries). The main reason is the ticket prices: £140 for a ticket in the stalls just feels like too much (and it can be more - £195 if you want to see Dessay and Florez).
Modest Mussorgky's Pictures at an Exhibition is one of the best loved piano suites of all time: its musical imagery seems so vivid and tangible. It has spawned any number of adaptations, ranging from the frequently performed orchestration by Ravel to the 1971s synthesizer-heavy progressive rock version by Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Every performer and arranger of the work superposes their own interpretation of the pictures that Mussorgsky tried to depict in the music.
We've just had an "interesting" experience failing to book tickets for a heavily oversubscribed festival (not classical, as it happens). Tickets went on sale at 9am today, with several authorised outlets available. At 9am, we were online attempting to log in to various websites while at the same time trying the phone numbers.
Having just spent a great evening listening to Shostakovich's large scale works at the Royal Festival Hall (see the review), it was fascinating to listen to a work on a very much smaller scale - at least instrumentally - in the shape of his D minor Cello Sonata. This was played last night by the new pairing of cellist Gemma Rosefield and pianist Katya Apekisheva in a private run-through as preparation for a concert next week.
When you're in Italy, classical music does seem to crop up in some unlikely places.
Early this morning, a correspondent sent in the following terse note through the contact form:
Where to start? All we know about our correspondent is that he's male and writes e-mails early in the morning: from this, how on earth can we pick five works from the entire classical canon? But never being one to refuse a challenge, here’s a go. And just listing five CDs to buy isn’t really good enough.
First point: start by going to a real concert, not by buying a bunch of CDs. You’ll understand what all the fuss is about much more quickly and powerfully. Buy the CD after the concert if you like.
For a starter in the concert hall, try Dvořák’s Symphony no. 9 - the “New World” Symphony. It’s really easy to listen to, rich in orchestral texture with big brass, lush strings thumping timpanis. More importantly, it’s choc-a-bloc with fabulous melodies (if you’re above a certain age, you’ll recognise the Hovis advert). There’s something about the orchestration and the drive of the last movement that makes you just want to punch the air (but don’t try that in the concert hall).
Next stop is to move up a gear in emotional intensity, and it doesn’t get any more intense than Mozart’s Requiem. If you’re already of a Christian religious bent, you’ll be predisposed to what the music is communicating, and if (like me) you’re not, don’t worry about it: this is still the most passionate, soul-enhancing, traumatic music that you can listen to, and it’s suitable for a novice - you will get the point without having a trained ear or a great musical vocabulary.
Once again, if you want to do this properly, don’t buy the CD - go and see the Requiem in a church. The Requiem is much performed: in Eastern Europe, this tends to be in a church, free, and as part of a bona fide memorial service. We saw it at the Matthias church in Budapest, which was a life-changing experience. Another way of getting to grips with the Requiem is to watch the movie of Peter Shaffer’s play “Amadeus”.
After all that high emotional drama, come back to earth with Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. When Mussorgsky's artist friend Viktor Hartmann died at the age of 39, an exhibition was held in his memory: Pictures is a suite for solo piano which imagines the listener walking around a gallery and stopping to look at each painting. Each “picture” is a miniature masterpiece in itself and leaves you astonished at how much imagery you can get out of just one musical instrument. Read the concert programme or the sleeve notes as you go - to get the full effect, you need to know things like “Baba Yaga is a witch in Russian folklore”. The piece is often played in an orchestral arrangement by Ravel: personally, I go for the piano version every time.
If these pieces have seemed a little old-fashioned, try something written in the 20th century: Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. If you’re interested in dance, go and see this at the ballet, otherwise buy a CD of one of the three Suites that Prokofiev extracted from the full score (which is far too long to be played outside the context of an actual ballet). I’ve chosen this because it contains a healthy dose of the discords and musical clashes that add excitement and interest to 20th century music, while still being very accessible, dramatic and full of melodies that are easy to get to grips with. By the way, here's some trivia: at some point in the last few years, Sunderland Football Club played the Knights’ Dance from Romeo and Juliet over the P A system at the Stadium of Light. It went down so well with the fans that it’s now played whenever the team comes out.
Finally, here’s something completely different, purer and much, much older: take a trip back in time to Restoration England and listen to some of Henry Purcell’s vocal music, starting with Dido’s Lament “When I am Laid in Earth” from the opera Dido and Aeneas. I'm going to cheat by adding a second of my favourites: the song “Music for a while”. This is contemplative and escapist music, to be played when you need to be removed from the cares of your daily life. To use Dryden’s words, “Music for a while shall all your cares beguile”. Music for a while can be sung either by male or female voices: if you want a truly unearthly sound unlike any non-classical music you've heard, find a CD sung by a counter-tenor (the recording shown below is a vintage one by the wonderful Alfred Deller).
Before anyone complains, yes, I know this is completely subjective, I haven’t put in any Bach or Beethoven and there isn’t a single concerto. What I’ve tried to do is to give a novice listener a taste for the range of different experiences available, hoping to tempt them to more. But then, five pieces was never going to be enough...
Here are some links to the pieces mentioned:
In concert:
Every now and then, people send us questions on the "Contact" form: most frequently, these take the form "How do I find a recording of Schnabel's 1941 concert at Carnegie Hall" or "Where can I get a recording of Richard Drigo's Harlequinade". We do our best, which usually means searching on Amazon, Archivmusik and a few other selected sites, although I'm not terrifically sure why people expect us to know the answer or to do their research for them.
My daughter sings in the chamber choir at her school, which is having a big anniversary celebration at the Barbican next month. It's a girls school, so they're perennially short of tenors and basses, with the result that somehow, I've been inveigled into joining the tenor section.
Do we need professional music critics? And if so, what for? My eye was taken by a discussion kicked off by Norman Lebrecht asking the question, so here’s my £0.02 worth.
The best place to start, I think, is the viewpoint of the average newspaper reader (or website visitor) with an interest in classical music. I’ll leave aside the question of publications which are geared to the trade and are mainly read by musicians: those involved in the business have a set of needs and interests that are quite distinct from those of the general public.
Yesterday was a good rainy night in, so we settled down to watch Verdi's La Forza del Destino on Met Player.
La Forza isn't performed all that often. Its page in our database shows just one production coming up next year, at the Vienna Staatsoper, compared to the usual wall-to-wall La Traviata and Rigoletto and several of lesser known works like Simon Boccanegra and Macbeth. I can't understand why: for my money, it's got the greatest opera overture ever written, packed with memorable themes that are then woven into the fabric of the music in the rest of the opera. It even has its place in popular culture, with one of the main themes having been used for the classic French movie Jean de Florette (improbably scored for chromatic harmonica and played by the incomparable Toots Thielemans) and thence finding its way into British beer commercials for Stella Artois. The plot is the usual Verdi mix: standard operatic melodrama to keep the censors happy coupled with some underlying hard edges for anywhere who cares to look a bit closer: in La Forza, these are about racism, family bigotry and superstition.
The performance on Met Player dates from 1984, conducted by a very young-looking James Levine. The first thing that's unmissable is Levine's energy - big hair, flailing arms and a death-defying tempo as he races through the overture. The TV direction and editing has been done by someone who knew the music very well: every cut is perfectly in place to the bit of the orchestra that you want to see for that particular moment in the music.
When the curtain goes up, we find Leontyne Price as Our Heroine Leonora. Price's voice is in tremendous, authoritative form. It's a big, rounded voice, without a hint of harshness, quite unlike anyone I know who's singing today - something like hearing a baritone an octave or two up. The rest of the cast are in equally sparkling form, with Leo Nucci a suitably malevolent Don Carlo, and the show stolen by a young and gorgeous Isola Jones as the gypsy Preziosilla, looking for all the world as if she's just stepped in from the set of Carmen (which later became her "signature role", according to her agent's bio). The other characters are excellently sung, from Our Hero to the ill-fated father to the dodgy friar.
OK, so the acting is a bit wooden - more of a series of tableaux than any attempt at actually portraying the characters. But Verdi's music comes up trumps, making the performance a truly memorable one: this is an opera that ought to be performed a lot more often. At $3.99 a throw for a night's rental, I think it's a steal!
6th December 2009
P. S. If you don't have the Internet setup for Met Player, this performance is also available on DVD:
