Search results: "mother" Page 3 of 15

Bernard Haitink, conductor, orchestra, symphony, classical, performance, maestro

Remembering Bernard Haitink: Conductor, Vessel, Teacher, True Gentleman

More than a week has gone by since news came of the passing of Bernard Haitink. Tributes, fond remembrances, recollections, and analyses have poured from a number of sources across the classical world, notably from the organizations he was part of, including the Royal Opera (Music Director, 1987-2002), London Philharmonic (Principal Conductor, 1967-1979), Concertgebouw Orchestra (Chief Conductor, 1961-1988), and Glyndebourne (Music Director, 1978-1988) as well as others (including the London Symphony Orchestra) where he was a regular and beloved guest. BBC Music Magazine’s Michael Beek called Haitink “one of the most revered conductors of the last 65 years” and indeed, pondering the range of his influence, across  institutions, orchestras, conductors, even (or especially) listening, is a task which requests the very things one feels are lacking, especially in this, our pandemic era: attention, patience, time. They are things Haitink very often insisted on, with quiet confidence, through his recordings and performances across six decades.

The conductor, who grew up in Nazi-occupied Holland and hailed from a non-musical household, possessed a humble grace which was reflected in whatever he directed his own considerable attention toward – though, as The Guardian‘s Nicholas Wroe rightly noted in a (wonderful) 2000 profile, “his reputation as a taciturn and somewhat introvert figure is slightly overplayed.” Haitink’s greatness came not from his being so different from other conductors of his generation in his economy of gesture so much as being his very own self through such expression. He said a lot by saying very little, and in so doing, touched the lives of a great many. In reading through numerous tributes of late, I have found it increasingly difficult to put into precise words the ways in which Haitink’s legacy has influenced my own listening and appreciation. Much of my experience of his work relates to the alteration (or rather, evolution) of long-held perceptions around my own capabilities; he led music which, for various reasons, I believed was too complex, too intellectual, too … deep, too dense, too detailed, simply too much for a plain-Jane, non-Conservatory-schooled person who grew up in suburban Canada. Despite my years of piano playing, there was an innate feeling that certain composers, and certain works, were simply beyond my comprehension or appreciation. Haitink’s recordings showed me otherwise. His recordings, of those supposedly “dense” works (by Bruckner, Mahler, and Shostakovich), as well as symphonies I thought I knew well (Brahms) imbued a quiet confidence in my own abilities, as a listener, music lover, eventual writer and interviewer; such careful listening, and concomitant trusting, re-examining, and pondering, together with study, conversation, and engagement, are pursuits I credit Haitink with developing. He trusted the music, and he trusted the listener’s ability to experience that music. No daunting grand idea, statement, credo, or personality superimposed on top; there was, and is, only sound, something anyone can understand.

Lately I wonder about the context in which such artistry arose and was cultivated, especially now, in an age where image is so often conflated with impact. Listening to the recording he made of Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, (captured live at Covent Garden in 1997; released via Opus Arte), one’s thoughts turn to that last quality, mentioned above: time. It is a long work, but oh, how the time stops, and simultaneously runs by so quickly. “There is no force more powerful,” writes Mark Wigglesworth in The Silent Musician: Why Conducting Matters (Faber & Faber, 2018):

We cannot control it. We cannot influence it. […] Through music we can experience an hour as if it were a minute or a minute as if it were an hour. Music gives us the power to live in the present […] releases the present from the weight of its past and the expectations of its future. […] (Conductors) seek to organize music within time while simultaneously releasing it from the restrictions time imposes. We work within the boundaries of this paradox, managing the ebb and flow of music to defy a ticking clock and inspire a pulsing heart.

How might Wagner’s work have sounded, I wonder, had Haitink been a few decades younger? Or older? And how might I have received it in my younger days? 1997 found me chasing rock bands, reading the work of William Burroughs, listening to trip-hop; none of these pursuits seem reduced by my appreciating the work of Haitink (and indeed Wagner) now, but of course opera asks something different, something one may or may not be prepared to allow and to cultivate. As noted in the contributions below, the Haitink of older years was not precisely the Haitink of younger years. The conductor’s magic, then, was a most human one: he allowed time, and life, to change him, and he allowed us to experience that with him.

From Holland to the UK (to Chicago, to Vienna, and beyond), with heart surgery in 1998 and a hectic schedule of performances and recordings leading to a final performance in 2019 (at the Lucerne Festival with the Vienna Philharmonic), Haitink’s feeling for life, and the living of it, is expressed in sound as much as in the silence between those sounds.”There is no excuse for arrogance,” continues Wigglesworth, “and I actually don’t think you can be a good conductor without feeling humility toward the music and empathy with the players.” To exercise such empathy is a choice, a simultaneously brave and vulnerable one; music very often asks, nay demands, its cultivation, if not its outright expression. Empathy in concert with time, can have particularly bittersweet effect when experienced through this, our pandemic era. Through the loss of so many people whose work has had a personal effect, people who I admired and with whom I so wanted to speak (Graham Vick, Christa Ludwig, Edita Gruberova, Alexander Vustin, Dmitri Smirnov, and Alexander Vedernikov among them), Haitink’s passing in particular feels like something of a ‘last straw’ in grief. In her 2005 book The Year Of Magical Thinking (pub. Alfred A. Knopf), Joan Didion writes that “we are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” Facing Haitink’s death has proven a reckoning on a number of levels, inner and outer, and I continue to try to calculate these losses – of people I don’t know and will never get to speak with; artists whose work so touched my life and shaped so many of its winding nooks and cranies. I continue attempts, however futile, to integrate the work of such figures with the loss of a mother whose passion for music, and inherent mistrust of being educated in it, led me into this world. Haitink helped me feel a bit more welcome, and I never got to thank him.

There are, of course, plenty who did, in a great many ways. “A good conductor gives musicians the feeling that even though they’re doing things his way, they would have chosen that way for themselves,” writes Christopher Seaman in his 2013 book Inside Conducting (University of Rochester). “This talent for persuasion is something you’re born with; nobody can teach it.” Such sentiments are echoed in the contributions below, from a range of inspiring conductors across the classical world. Also included are the thoughts of two music writers whose experiences of Haitink, on record and live, offer further insight. Some of these contributors are people I have interviewed in the past; others are new, but all, I feel, offer unique and moving perspectives. I am deeply grateful to all of them for sharing their thoughts here.

Bernard Haitink, conductor, orchestra, symphony, classical, performance, maestro

Bernard Haitink leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in October 2013. Photo © Todd Rosenberg Photography 2013

Sir Antonio Pappano

Music Director, Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Music Director, Orchestra dell’Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia
Chief Conductor, London Symphony Orchestra from 2024-2025 (Designate from 2023-2024)

As the handover (of the Royal Opera) was happening in London, when he was leaving and I was taking over, he was very, very gracious – in fact, he invited my wife and I to dinner, and although he was not a man of many words, he made me understand how much he cared for the institution. I was very much aware of what he did, to keep the whole structure afloat. I’m talking about chorus and orchestra now, as a whole, because it was really in peril then, and there were so many political forces, trying to bring the place down, somehow, and he would have none of it. He was just firm, he didn’t go screaming and shouting – there was an inner conviction – and he continued to do concerts – the orchestra was performing outside the opera house; it was a wonderful defense of the livelihoods of so many musicians, and also how important the building was, I mean it was a crown jewel in British artistic life, so … you know, he will be beloved forever there. It was very, very important for me to understand what I had to live up to – I’m a completely different musician from him in the sense that I grew up in the theatre and all that, but I understood the esteem in which he was held. There was a firm foundation in the orchestra that I had to work with; he had his hands all of it, and I consider myself very lucky indeed.

I think everybody will say this about Bernard’s podium manner and his way of conducting, that “he let the music speak for itself” – well, what does that mean? What it means is that basically, he’s not getting in the way of the flow of the music, but he is guiding it; it’s not that he just lets it happen, no, he’s very much guiding it, and that creates a feeling of well-being in the players, and in the sound… the sound starts to glow because everybody is happy in the way the music is being shaped and the way they’re being guided. And this is something that you can’t really learn. It was just his presence. He had a way, a warmth, and a security … in himself, and the knowledge that the music, with just a firm guidance, would meld together, and that it would happen in his performances – that somehow, the intensity of the listening, and the well-being of the orchestra, created this sound. And it was a beautiful thing. My approach is completely different, and others’ approach is completely different, but this was really his, and it was a sort of trademark, a beautiful signature.

Amsterdam has a very rich Mahlerian history, which Bernard continued, and continued over time to refine and to deepen. It was an ideal hall also for the music of Bruckner – the Concertgebouw I’m talking about – because the resonance of that hall, and the way the instruments blend, it almost sounds like an organ, which is how one must approach Bruckner’s music, in some manner or form, and I think this music became a part of him, over time. But very interestingly, he conducted beautiful Debussy also, and wonderful Vaughan-Williams, he was much more than just Mahler-Bruckner… that which required beauty of sound, poise, and very strong foundations, like Brahms of course, that was, I think, very fertile ground for his way of making music.

Bernard came up during the recording era, so there are many documents of his work, but how does one describe “egoless,” you know, or “absolutely faithful to the composer”? We say that because it’s an exterior manifestation. We see it from the outside. His podium manner was not flashy, yet he could whip up the orchestras to a frenzy if he wanted to. He was very measured in dosing out intensity. One of the most difficult lessons to learn, and I can tell you I am still learning it, is, how, if you have a passion that is extraordinary, how do you dose that out? Because if you pour all that passion into every single bar in the same manner, it… basically it’s like you are ruining food with a sauce that is just too overpowering. That’s not the most elegant of comparisons, but you get the idea. I think he knew how to dose out, and how to measure, how to weight – he was a patient musician, and he knew the moment, and when the real moment was coming, and that is a life lesson for conductors.

Vladimir Jurowski

General Music Director, Bayerische Staatsoper
Chief Conductor and Artistic Director, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
Honorary Conductor, State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia (“Evgeny Svetlanov”)

The first time I saw Haitink conduct must have been autumn 1990, or winter 1991; I was just starting my conducting studies in Dresden and was trying to absorb as many musical impressions in concerts and opera performances as possible.

Luckily, Dresden was then one of those magical places in Germany which attracted world-class conductors, much in the same way a flower meadow attracts butterflies and bees… and the main point of attraction for all those great conductors was, of course, the Staatskapelle Dresden. Bernard Haitink was one of those musicians who chose to travel across DDR borders to work with the Staatskapelle. I remember very well the first ever concert of his I ever heard at the Kulturpalast (obviously this was long before it got refurbished, so the acoustics were still generally appalling and needed a real master to make the sound of an orchestra work in there), with Mozart’s “Haffner-Symphony” in the first half, and Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in the second half. His Mozart was absolutely revelatory: so lean and fresh and completely fat-free! I could not believe I heard the same Staatskapelle who played a Beethoven Symphony under another famous conductor only a week before and (on that occasion) Beethoven sounded like Khachaturian’s “Sabre Dance”… ! BH’s completely unaffected but affectionate way to care about a piece of music made the orchestra play on an edge of their seats for him.

I have seen Haitink conduct countless times since, mainly at the helm of the Berlin or Vienna Philharmonics, and they absolute moments of musical happiness for me: Mahler’s Third, Bruckner’s Eighth… this man had a gift to make other people suspend their egos for the time being and become one with the music they were performing.

I met him only a handful of times and I particularly cherish the memory of our first encounter. I believe it was in 1999 or in 2001 when he came to Paris with the LSO to perform Britten’s War Requiem at the Theatre de Chatelet. I was conducting Tchaikovsky’s Queen of Spades at the Opera Bastille around this time and rushed to the Chatelet on my free evening to hear the War Requiem. After the performance – which seemed perfection itself – I went backstage, introduced myself, and tried to express my gratitude for the incredibly loving performance which I had just witnessed. To my surprise, Haitink interrupted me and started praising… my performance of Queen of Spades which he saw the night before! He was apparently preparing this opera himself for a ROH production and went to see the piece on his free night. I shall never forget what he told me: “What I particularly liked about your performance was that it started right from the first note! Every performance should do it but not every performance succeeds at starting right from the first note…”

Our last two encounters were both due to mournful occasions – the death of Sir George Christie and Sir Peter Hall. But at the same time. Sir George Christie’s memorial concert in December 2014 was an unforgettable and most happy experience for me: to be conducting the same orchestra, sharing the podium with the great Bernard Haitink, and to also be witnessing him returning to “his” LPO!.. He chose to conduct the B-flat major Entr’acte from Schubert “Rosamunde” and there was barely any rehearsal (some 10-15 minutes beforehand, in an icy-cold church on an icy-cold London December morning) but what he conjured up from the LPO players for the memorial was of such noble and moving simplicity that tears came to my eyes. When he stepped from the podium and, after a moment of silence (there was no applause in that concert I seem to remember), sat down on the chair next to mine, leaned over, and whispered “You’ve got a very good orchestra, Vladimir” to which I answered, “Thank you Bernard. but it was you who shaped them!”

I feel privileged having met this great man and having inherited two artistic institutions of the highest calibre from him: Glyndebourne Opera Festival and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. His humility, modesty and conditionless love and servitude of music remain a model for all of us – and what a dignified way to leave the stage that he chose, entirely in keeping with his personality, and his approach to his art.

Paul Watkins

Artistic Director, Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival
Cellist, Emerson String Quartet
Visiting Professor of Cello at Yale School of Music

I was a kid in the European Youth Orchestra, or the European Community Orchestra as it was called then, around 1988-1989, on a tour where Haitink led Bruckner 7 and also the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I knew about him, of course, because he conducted some of my favorite recordings ever, particularly the amazing recording of the Brahms Double Concerto with Perlman and Rostropovich (Warner Classics, 1980). The orchestral playing was just as engaging as the solo playing in that, and I wore that record out listening to it. I loved his Mozart too.

So I knew his work as a kid, then with the EUYO, and then when I started my job with the BBC Symphony Orchestra in the early 1990s. He would come in now and again, and just rejuvenate the orchestra every single time he was there. When I left the BBC Orchestra and joined the Nash Ensemble, he came in to conduct us there; we did a program at Wigmore Hall with Felicity Lott, he led a chamber version of the Four Last Songs and the closing scene from Capriccio. In that scene there’s this wonderful horn solo at the start, and Richard Watkins, the horn player at the Ensemble (he’s not related to me!) who I don’t think had played with Haitink before, played this solo so magnificently in rehearsal. I looked at Bernard and he looked at me, and gave me this kind of smile and wink, of, “Oh my goodness… “ – and at the end he stopped, put the baton down, and said, “Bravo”, this heartfelt expression to this horn player he’d not crossed paths with before! That was so special to hear. The last thing I did with him was to play as a soloist in the Haydn Sinfonia Concertante on a tour with the EUYO in 2016. It was wonderful to work with him as a soloist.

I’ve seen a lot of obituaries in the last week or so saying Haitink was the “anti-glamour” conductor, and I think that misses the point: Haitink was actually a braver musician than people who would be characterized as “glamorous conductors”, the starry, charismatic maestri. Haitink had the most charisma of any artist I ever met – he let it come through the music; he became a vessel for the piece, a helper for the musicians, he was one of them. That’s not to say he wasn’t extraordinarily in control of the music – he’d studied the scores, absorbed them deeply, but he was also able to let go, and relinquish that control, and I think that’s why he got some deep, and warm, and human performances, That’s why people remember him. And he remembered everybody – he knew me, after only working with him those few times. I felt emboldened to get in touch with him then, and a lot of this was through his wife Patricia, who was so generous to me. Bernard would allow me to come to rehearsals; at that time, I had left the BBC Orchestra and was with Nash, and he was working with the London Symphony Orchestra. I would be allowed to attend those LSO rehearsals and would sit in the back of the hall with a score, and just watch and listen. That gave me an enormous education as a fledgling conductor myself. The way he was so patient, so quiet, but so intense at the same time – that quiet intensity is what I learned from him.

There are a lot of conductors very much in the public eye and known for being extremely flamboyant, but in the end the ones who have the deepest musicianship come back to that kind of stillness. It’s partly to do with being just getting older, and finding more economical ways to express what you have to express. I’m thinking back to pictures of Haitink as a younger man, and there was no shortage of fireworks from the guy then! It’s not like he didn’t have all this ability, he just found different ways to express it. He is really in the top five conductors of the 20th century. I’m not sure we’ll see that many like him in the near future, but give it ten or fifteen years – those characteristics and values will come back. He’s too great an artist not to have a far-reaching influence.

Bernard Haitink, conductor, orchestra, symphony, classical, performance, maestro, Ben Palmer, rehearsal, 2014

Photo: Ben Palmer. June 2014, taken immediately after Haitink’s first Mahler 7 rehearsal at the Royal College of Music.

Ben Palmer

Chief Conductor, Deutsche Philharmonie Merck
Founder and Artistic Director, Covent Garden Sinfonia

In 2014 I was invited by the Royal College of Music to prepare its Symphony Orchestra for Bernard Haitink’s performance of Mahler 7. As well as bringing the players together into a cohesive ensemble – the orchestra is assembled afresh for each project; I tried to rehearse in as much of Haitink’s own interpretation as I could, having done some intensive study of his most recent recordings. As a then-32-year-old, it was my first time conducting the symphony, and it was fascinating to learn it through someone else’s eyes, to try and make sense of their decisions and ideas. After a few days of intense work, I came into College to watch Bernard’s first rehearsal. Unsurprisingly, he was treated like royalty at the RCM: a welcome party of senior staff waited on the steps; the orchestra tuned and ready on the stage. There was complete silence as he stepped onto the podium. After a handshake with the leader, he said in a quiet voice, “We have a mountain to climb, so let’s start climbing.”

I almost had a heart attack when he began conducting in eight – I had rehearsed in four – but, of course, like every gesture of his, it was unmistakable. Much to my relief, he did all his tempi and rubato as we had prepared, and the first run-through of the first movement went extremely well. In those delicious moments of silence after it finished, he turned round, found me in the hall, did a little bow, and said “Bravo.” It still sends shivers up my spine thinking about it. Of course, in that rehearsal of his, I learnt more about the symphony than I had in all the weeks I’d spent preparing it. Passages that had been awkward or difficult for me, he navigated with a mere flick of the wrist; moments that left me sweaty he would conjure with a lightly clenched fist.

In 2017, the RCM asked me to prepare Daphnis et Chloé for him. The day before I was due to have my last two sessions with the full orchestra, the message came that Mr Haitink felt he might need an extra rehearsal, so my last one would be taken by him. I didn’t expect him to remember who I was, but when he arrived he walked straight up to me, shook my hand, greeted me by name, and apologised for “stealing one of your rehearsals.”

That he was so kind, encouraging and generous to me personally only proves what everyone says: he was a true gentleman. He was also, quite simply, my favourite conductor.

Kenneth Woods

Principal Conductor, English Symphony Orchestra
Artistic Director, Colorado MahlerFest
Artistic Director, Elgar Festival

The sorrow that came from hearing the news of the passing of conductor Bernard Haitink last week was, for me at least, made even deeper at the nagging thought that, widely as Haitink is already missed, we now live in a musical world that doesn’t share the unique qualities which made him such a remarkable figure.

Haitink was an exemplar of everything a conductor should be – and the antithesis of what most people assume a conductor is likely to be; he was a musician of real depth. In a climate where interpretive choices can sometimes be driven by fads and dogma, Haitink’s music-making was deeply intuitive, grounded in a deep knowledge of the scores he conducted, his artistry made all the more special through his famously collegial and collaborative approach.

For the last third of his career, Haitink stood out as a seasoned master in a craft which, more and more often, treats such experience with disdain. This is ironic because Haitink was something of a boy wonder, ascending to the position of Principal Conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra at such a young age – just thirty years old then! But, while some young talents seem to stop evolving the moment they achieve a first taste of success, Haitink never stopped growing. His life’s work is, if nothing else, a testament to the results of a lifelong commitment to learning and self-improvement. Haitink was absolutely allergic to empty display and conducted without a hint of vanity on the podium, yet he had possibly the most expressive, effective, and dare I say, beautiful conducting technique of anyone who ever waved a baton. He had a gift for drawing the most beautiful sound from any orchestra, but he also had a steely core and a plenty of fire within. His music-making could take the listener straight into the abyss when called for.

In an age that prizes first impressions above all else, Haitink’s performances offered more than a single listen could reveal. A wise teacher understands that even a fine student may not fully absorb a lesson for many years, but, nevertheless, shares their insights without impatience or condescension. Haitink was one of the last interpreters I can think of who made music in much the same way, serene in the knowledge that, as one grows as a listener, they will find more and more inspiration, more enjoyment, and more enlightenment in the scores he loved. I am grateful that I can continue to learn from his work.

Haitink, Shostakovich, recordings, compact discs, CDs, collection, music, Bernard Haitink, classical

Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

Alan Mercer

Director, GBF Media
Editor, The DSCH Journal

Haitink was no “hero” of Shostakovich’s music, no showman, no denier or decrier of the endless controversies that the West loved to drag along in the composer’s wake. “Loyal Son”, “Closet Dissident” were of no significance to Bernard Haitink, or at least to the manner in which he approached Shostakovich’s symphonic oeuvre. What did matter to the Dutchman, and indeed what ultimately made his interpretations of many of the great composers of our age so moving, was his ability to embody a sense of humanity through his art, to convey the composer’s inner mind to the audience. During recording sessions for his Decca recording of Shostakovich’s Fifth, Haitink is quoted as saying “You must read ‘Testimony.’ [Solomon Volkov’s controversial ‘Memoirs’] It’s tragedy, black tragedy – Shostakovich was an “unhappy man.” And I defy anyone not to be stirred by the 3rd movement Largo, in the recording of the Fifth with the Concertgebouw.

Few people imagine that the two men might have met, crossed paths and even exchanged a few words. Yet they did meet, in 1975, in Moscow, Haitink describing the sick and weary composer as “A nervous man, very wary.” Shostakovich told Haitink that he had been moved by his performance with the Concertgebouw that day, an account that the conductor related with evident melancholic pride.

It was at the London Proms in 2008 that I truly comprehended how a genius such as Haitink could communicate to an audience such extremes of angst, ferocity and desperation that a work such as Shostakovich‘s Fourth Symphony embodies. The orchestra – the Chicago Symphony was of course no stranger to this repertoire, given Gennadi Rozhdestvensky’s previous tenure – but if the Russian conductor drew out of the music its unmistakable Mahlerian influences, in Haitink’s hands the Fourth truly did, as one critic wrote “Appear from the depths of Stalin’s terror – as Shostakovich’s requiem.” Haitink’s control was subtle but absolute. The impulsiveness and orchestral volatility of the Fourth (which Haitink stated was his favourite of the cycle, along with the Fifteenth) can, in some performances err on the incoherent (no names shall be named): here the Royal Albert Hall shook with the intensity of the creeping violence of the 1930s, intertwining deafening expletives and hushed, fearful whisperings. After the final bars: silence. Sweat poured from the maestro’s brow, it seemed, onto the pages of the score. Silence. An unearthly peace had settled like the ashes of an existence.

Jari Kallio

Teacher
Music Writer

All my musical life, Bernard Haitink was there. My first encounter with Mahler 5 happened with his Concertgebouw recording on a 1970s Philips vinyl set. Picking up the Amsterdam tradition in the sixties, Haitink conducted Mahler way before it was cool. As years mounted, his recorded cycles of Mahler and Bruckner became paramount – and deservedly so. Alongside Austro-German repertoire, Haitink’s performances of Debussy and Ravel were equally indispensable, as a budget-priced re-release of the latter’s orchestral works, bought with my limited student money at the time, resoundingly demonstrated. As for Debussy, he was the one who first introduced me to the discarded fanfare in the last movement of La Mer; a discovery that ignited my inextinguishable fascination in the earlier versions of the well-known works in the repertory, and the musical processes concealed within the minds of composers.

My last two memories of seeing the man himself are both from London, one of his musical capitols. In May 2017, I had the privilege to join the Barbican audience for his Bruckner double-bill with the LSO, an orchestra he worked with in close association over the last two decades of his conducting career. While volumes could be written about the wonderful performances of Te Deum and Symphony IX, the fact that the London Symphony Chorus remained onstage after the intermission to hear Haitink conduct Bruckner’s last symphony, speaks more than any words I could come up with. A couple of months later, I saw him once more, engaged in post-concert discussion with Sir Simon Rattle, whose era as the Music Director of the LSO had just been augured in the hall below, with a marvellous contemporary programme. Though his name is mostly associated with the big works in the repertoire, Haitink did his share with contemporary music too, resulting in dedicated premieres, such as the terrific first outing of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s Chicago Remains in with the CSO in October 2007.

A Haitink performance was always about the music – no more, no less. His readings did not draw attention to the act of conducting; rather, they evoked the sense of rediscovery of the musical works and the notion of the extraordinary quality of orchestral playing, and when it came to performing concertos, Haitink was the most generous accompanist. In terms of architecture, he made Brahms interesting – unlike many of his esteemed colleagues. On the podium, he inspired and helped, without getting in the way.

Bernard Haitink, conductor, maestro, Haitink

Photo: Clive Barda

Top Photo: Bernard Haitink leading the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in October 2013. Photo © Todd Rosenberg Photography 2013
sunset, sky, color, Romanian Athenaeum, Bucharest, scene, perspective

Essay: Reflecting On A Romanian Festival’s Past, Present, & Possible Future

This year’s edition of the Enescu Festival came to a close with a sharp contrast of good news and bad news. The good news is that Romanian conductor Cristian Măcelaru, currently Music Director of the Orchestre National de France in Paris and Chief Conductor of the Orchestre National de France, will be entering the role of Artistic Director of the Festival, taking over from Vladimir Jurowski, who this autumn has begun his tenure as Music Director of Bayerische Staatsoper, in addition to his duties as Chief Conductor and Artistic Director with the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin. Along with duties in France and Germany, Măcelaru is also Music Director of the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music in California, and Artistic Director and Principal Conductor of the World Youth Symphony Orchestra at the Interlochen Arts Center in Michigan. He won a Grammy Award in 2020 for conducting Wynton Marsalis’ Violin Concerto with Nicola Benedetti and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Decca Classics). Timișoara is his hometown, which is where the next Enescu Festival is set to take place, in 2023. With such intercontinental experience, particularly within the realm of administration and festivals, Măcelaru may very well be the right man for the right job, coming in at just the right time, but just how much of that precious time he’ll be spending in Romania as a whole, especially in the coming months, remains, like much of the festival, an ever-shifting question mark. Classical, as a whole, has largely gone back to a sort of normal (ish), with an added frenzy provided by playing a massive, years-long game of catch-up, following months (sometimes years) of non-activity. Măcelaru’s responsibilities, like those of many other conductors right now, are mounting, outside of whatever tentative plans may already exist for 2023.

The bad news for the Romanian festival is that it’s losing its longtime General Director. Mihai Constantinescu is stepping down from what has been, one may safely assume, a hectic quarter-century of service. Very much a force behind the biennial fest, Constantinescu was also a continual presence who could be seen at any number of live presentations, backstage and in the audience, always talking to numerous people in-person or on the phone, via email, in messages. Along with arranging for artists (this year’s edition hosted 3500 of them according to the festival website), Constantinescu regularly liaised with branches of government, major sponsors, and all manner of management, marketing, publicity and touring teams to produce a busy, buzzy fest spread over several venues in Bucharest proper, as well as towns across the country. To see him at any point during the festival was to see the contemporary concept of “hustling” well and truly manifest. And no wonder: this year’s festival, its 25th, hosted a total of 78 concerts in Bucharest, and 13 events in other cities. That’s a scaleback given its usual size and sprawl, and one wonders how that sprawl might translate from Bucharest (population 1.83 million) to the smaller city of Timișoara (population roughly 306,000). Geographically the city is closer to the Hungarian town of Szeged than to Bucharest; having a more westerly locale may give the festival a more immediate presence (and easier, driveable access) through central and Western Europe, which may well benefit those visiting organizations, but proximity aside, the city has another reason for being an interesting choice for the future. Timișoara was the site of government demonstrations in 1989 that spread nationwide, ones that led to the execution of dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu (1918–1989) and his wife on Christmas Day of that year; whether or not these events enter into or influence the shape of the festival is a huge question mark. The festival, for all its ambition, could certainly do with a more specific vision. It will be interesting to see, over the coming weeks and months, the extent to which Constantinescu’s exit, Măcelaru’s entrance, the roles of history, memory, and geography might play. The question, as ever, remains: will audiences follow, go, support – locals included, or perhaps especially?

The Enescu Festival is one of the world’s Top 5 classical festivals, as its website proudly notes. This year’s fest featured continual enforcement of health codes, ones that become more stringent toward the closing in late September. Masks backstage became not optional, but de rigeur, for artists and visitors alike. What with an alarming pandemic situation (one which has steadily worsened in the weeks since the final note sounded), conductor and former Festival Artistic Director Lawrence Foster made an impassioned plea for vaccinations from the stage of the ornate Romanian Athenaeum, a landmark in the city opened in 1888. Before a small if attentive audience, Foster was leading an in-concert performance of Berg’s Lulu with the Transylvania Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra of Cluj-Napoca, in a reduced orchestration by German conductor/composer Eberhard Kloke and featuring young German soprano Annika Gerhards in the title role. During his speech, Foster (who revealed he’d had COVID 19 himself) also saluted the work of Constantinescu and shared his own personal memories of working with the outgoing General Director. One had the impression everyone, onstage and off, was simply grateful to be there, in this, of all years. Yet the fact the festival (which Yehudi Menuhin supported in its earliest iterations) exists into the 21st century is a noteworthy thing. Since its inception in 1958,  it has hosted a good number of big names, sometimes more than once (Joyce Di Donato, Valery Gergiev, Yuja Wang, Gautier Capuçon) with concerts through most of September presented every other year, alternating with the Enescu Competition for young musicians. Local audiences are given numerous opportunities to experience the work of artists and orchestras who don’t normally appear otherwise, and to experience live work that isn’t normally played or programmed across much of the country. Those benefits extend to tourists; tickets (and indeed, hotels, food, attractions) can be had for a fraction of the cost of going to Vienna, Paris, or Munich. The savings are concomitant with difficult historical and political details in a place that still struggles to fit a terribly difficult past with a very fraught future, and some Romanian musicians have quietly complained that the Enescu Festival gets the lion’s share of funding (it being a big glamorous event that attracts foreign talent and visitors), while local companies are left to wither. While the festival features numerous Romanian musicians, artists, and orchestras, at my visit to the country in 2019, I kept hearing, repeatedly, sentiments that “the system isn’t fair” and “we feel ignored.” Such criticism isn’t new but is indeed valid, and worth heeding; there is a sharp and visibly distressing disparity between Western and Eastern EU countries.

The country has one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the EU, and according to political scientist Iulian Chifu, who was an adviser to Romania’s president between 2011 and 2014, “corruption is the new communism.” Romania, with its painful past and seemingly-inert present, with a lack of socio-political willpower enmeshed with widespread (and again, distressing) corruption, horrific rising COVID rates (roughly 15,000 a day), government officials at odds with health officials, immense church influence across swaths of society, and a rapidly rising tide of right-wing political populism, such criticism feels both spiky on the surface and sharp around the edges; such realities have the very real potential to take a big bite (or two, or more) out of the country’s biggest and arguably most famous festival. The sentiment of many in Bucharest (and the wider country) of feeling ignored, of having their concerns be ignored, still strongly influences my memories of the city three years on, recalling the many sites that confirm the country’s painful past whilst at the same time trying, desperately, to paper it over. The immense Palace of the Parliament, built in 1977 by dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu , stands like a stern monolith in the middle of Bucharest, and its ghosts, even in the day, seem eerily intact; passing by after dark is shudder-inducing. It was surreal to visit the truly excellent National Museum of Contemporary Museum (MNAC), which is housed in one of the palace’s wings; even with its modern renovations and inspiring collection of abstract works, the building renders the presence of its creator a little too present, with its windows that look down menacingly upon various passers-by. A disparate group of elements always seems to be living next to each other in Bucharest, and no single can be discerned, let alone resolved; history, art, money, power, corruption, poverty, inequality, stagnation, and some form of glamour (which the festival has certainly celebrated and promoted) are neighbours in this post-communist society. The delicate layers of sonic magic from a concert just experienced seemed to wilt like petals with every evil glint from those palace windows, and the choice to run across the street, as it turns out, was obvious, and not only owing to impatient traffic lights and the aggressive drivers who seem to dominate the city’s roads.

Stavropoleos, Bucharest, garden, architecture, light, beam, green, arches, Orthodox, church, monastery, history

One side of the garden of the Stavropoleos Church and Monastery in Bucharest. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

Several ideas for repurposing the palace were tossed around after the 1989 revolution; possibilities included a casino, a mall, a Dracula theme park (!) before the decision came to maintain it, and to house Romania’s government within. For all its grim history and overblown pretentiousness, the structure gives a shred of order to what is a mostly chaotic urban layout. Wherever I wandered; I always managed to reorient myself in relation to its sprawling centrality. As Shaun Walker noted of Bucharest in The Guardian in 2019, “Decaying art nouveau mansions mingle with brutalist communist architecture. The city sprawls over a huge area and traffic is appalling. Masterplans for urban renewal have been written and ignored. The quarter around the Palace of the Parliament is perhaps the only area with orderly streets and layout, but has a soulless feel. “The whole ensemble makes no sense in relation to the rest of the city, and does not fit on the city’s main transport axises,” said Andrei Popescu, an urban planner and tour guide.” That delicate – some might say dysfunctional – infrastructure comes to light in ways one wishes weren’t so intermingled with the festival’s functioning, but geography, politics, the simple reality of Eastern Europe and the EU in the 21st century all make that impossible. Zig-zags of streets, punctuated by wide avenues pregnant with a seemingly endless zipper of roaring cars are, together with sidewalks, cracked, uneven, poorly lit, crumbling. They extend well past the immediate festival area into the touristy Old Town (surely a tip-off of a title), where the tiny if utterly delightful Stavropoleos Church and Monastery sits, a quietly elegant Orthodox jewel. Forget the giant Orthodox cathedral-monoliths dotting the city (including the one beside the palace itself); small is definitely beautiful, as the Stavropoleos so quietly, beautifully proves. A visit there, and a silent sit in the adjacent gardens, is good, and needed, medicine for the soul.

Close by is the bustling Romanian restaurant Caru’ cu Bere. Stained glass and wood panelling inside, with an expansive patio at the front, it (like the fest favorite, Romanian restaurant La Mama) features a distinctly Eastern European mix of offhand service, huge portions, reasonable price tags, rich, garlicky flavours and spicing that simultaneously embrace tradition and cross continents, their rich tastes intermingling with cigarette smells and loud laughs. Don’t go to such places if you’re alone, or rather, do go, but solo diners should be fully prepared to be largely ignored and exposed to numerous many happy young faces enjoying an extended summer. Many of them belong to visiting musicians in orchestras from everywhere; I heard Finnish, Russian, Italian, English, Norwegian, German, and French the times I visited these establishments, and others like them, through the afternoons and evenings between and around concerts. It was fascinating to see an assortment of musicians there, sometimes hours after a performance (or before), a concert in which they’d been more dressed, less free, but oh, young, beautiful, eyeballing every move of maestro, as if on some kind of shabby-chic safari. Oh, to be a young musician in Bucharest on a sunny day or starry evening during the festival, sipping beer in a garden with fellow minstrels, gossiping about the soloist, fidgeting with hair, smirking at the Sala’s notoriously poor acoustics, as the (male) musicians, spread around pushed-together tables, smile and nod silently, staring at bare shoulders and pert bosoms, holding up empties at the frowning, perspiring servers who would invariably scurry back with a full tray, plates of little sausages, fried potatoes, glinting shards of vinegar-dressed cucumber. Clouds of smoke would hang in the humid evening air like thought bubbles containing that word so present on everyone’s lips and minds: freedom.

Some way or another, the lot of them realized that concept, with varying degrees of success, at (perhaps ironically) the Sala Palatului, an acoustically dire hall built under the country’s Communist regime in 1959-1960, with its shabby velvet seats and worn floors and thick walls, amidst air so still and sweltering one could carve it with that little sausage knife. Modern sounds, amidst old Communist history; contradiction as balance. It would be the jolt the festival (country) needs, but oh the sound was (is) so bad. Whether or not Culture Minister Bogdan Gheorghiu will give a green light to that long-needed, much-requested new facility is an open question. With a background in theatre and television, Gheorghiu was, at the time of his appointment in May 2019, the fourth person to hold the position since 2015. Worth noting here is the Arena Națională, the largest sports arena in Romania, was opened in 2011, and cost €234 million. Earlier this year it hosted the UEFA European qualifying matches. Without going into tiresome false equivalency arguments around sports and arts, and populism and culture, what is notable is the just how quickly the government gears will turn, when, why, and for whom; it is a truth universally acknowledged that a small country in possession of a smaller budget must be in want of a big audience, with bigger wallets. “Every government from 2003 wanted to build a new hall, but every government refused to do it,” Constantinescu told me in 2019, “they told us in the beginning,”We’ll do it” but when the moment came, said, “We don’t have money or time” and “Oh, you need a different (location) for this hall.” It’s stupid, this is the best situated place in Bucharest – the hotels are here, the underground, buses – why move it? Bucharest doesn’t have so many places where you can situate a big hall.”

Sala Palatului, Bucharest, Romania, performance, venue, culture, Enescu Festival, immense, acoustics, architecture

Inside the Sala Palatului in Bucharest. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

When Jurowski presented an in-concert version of Enescu’s 1931 opera Œdipe at the Sala in 2017, Bachtrack writer Aksel Tollåli noted that “the loudness of the magnificently played orchestral climaxes was swamped, reducing what could and should have been a tidal wave of sound into a trickle.” At the close of this year’s festival Jurowski commented that “I think what it most needs is a concert hall. It has been promised to us by so many ministers of culture, I have seen three or four who have come and gone; they all made this promise, which remains unfulfilled to this day.” Any given performance at the venue at least during festival time, requires spending money on a seat near the front, or else much will be lost sonically; I did this, more than once, and found a better if no less troubling acoustical experience. Sitting further back one will observe audience members shaking fans and programs back and forth, dabbing foreheads with embroidered hankies, anxiously awaiting the appearance of a nattily-dressed soloist playing that popular violin or piano or cello piece, then exiting at  intermission or more notably during any not-mainstream work that might come after, Enescu symphonies included. They want what they know; sometimes, usually, the festival obliges.

“I’ve always observed it’s a vicious circle,” Jurowski said at a press conference just prior to the start of his tenure in 2017, “(that) conductors and orchestras come, visiting the festival, and all they usually put on their programs is hits.” Audiences, as anyone who’s been to the fest will attest, eat it up. Why shouldn’t they? Having performed Brahms’ famous Violin Concerto in D Major at the fest in 2019, violinist Julia Fischer (performing with the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin, led by Jurowski) was greeted with such sustained, loud, and enthusiastic applause, it seemed impossible to oblige with anything less than an intensely-delivered encore. (Attendees certainly would’ve liked more, something violinist Ray Chen did provide thereafter, following a performance with the ​​State Academic Symphony Orchestra of Russia Evgeny Svetlanov and conductor Gabriel Bebeșelea.) Similarly, Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor, performed in 2019 by Leif Ove Andsnes and the Oslo Philharmonic and led by conductor Vasily Petrenko, was wildly received. Petrenko, an affable presence and meticulous conductor, indulged the packed Sala, following a sweeping performance of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, with warm smiles to the audience and directions to clap along. He was met with cheers, whistles, numerous camera-phones held aloft before-during-after. In a small room set aside for media interviews at the hall the day before, Petrenko said he felt it was a “duty” for him to perform contemporary works alongside the so-called hits; on the program for one of his concerts with the Oslo Phil was Morgon i skogen (Forest Morning) by Norwegian composer Øyvind Torvund (b. 1976.) Neither the instinct nor the inherent risk to pair the new, and mostly strange, with the known, and mostly beloved, is confined strictly to Western orchestras, many wringing their hands over how to strike the right balance while attracting their own set of new and old audiences. “I think classical music should be alive,” Petrenko said, his blue eyes shining, “it should not be a museum, and the only way to have it alive is to perform new pieces. And I think it is the duty of every conductor and orchestra to perform music of local composers – if a piece is not played, it does not have a chance; we have to give a chance for them. If we don’t, who will?”

Indeed, Enescu himself, whose 140th birthday was marked this year, is among those “local composers” to whom Petrenko was referring, and his work has been a mainstay of the festival. This year, he took the opportunity, in his new capacity as Music Director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, to lead a series of works over two nights that prominently featured the work of Enescu. The composer’s Strigoii, which started out as a piano sketch for an oratorio in 1916 and was “assembled” in the 1970s by Romanian composer Cornel Țăranu (with orchestration by conductor/composer Sabin Pautza) was presented in Romania for the very first time this year, by the George Enescu Philharmonic under the direction of conductor Gabriel Bebeşelea (who has become something of a champion for the work, recording it in 2018 with Capriccio Records and the Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin). Cristian Măcelaru led the Orchestre National de France in a pair of concerts over two consecutive nights featuring the music of Shostakovich, Ravel, Dutilleux, Messiaen, Grieg, as well as Enescu, the latter featuring multimedia visual accompaniment by Romanian theatre director Nona Ciobanu and Slovenian artist Peter Kosir, part of the festival’s ambitious integration of various art forms through the medium of music.

Claims that the festival may have had some hand in the ascension of Enescu’s opera Œdipe, first presented in Paris in 1936, and being presented this season at both Komische Oper Berlin and Opera de Paris, speak to a certain optimism of influence, but such claims are not entirely accurate, especially if one considers the number of years opera houses plan in advance (at minimum four; usually more) and the demands being placed on the industry for new – but not too new – material. Wiener Staatsoper presented the opera as far back as 1997; La Monnaie/De Munt produced a staging (a co-production with Gran Teatre del Liceu and Teatro Colon) in 2010, one that was later produced (and revived) at Dutch National Opera. The Royal Opera Covent Garden staged Œdipe in 2016; the Salzburg Festival in 2018. It was also staged in Romania, by the Opera Națională București, in 2015 and again in 2019. Certain houses, under pressure to present newer material and to expand the so-called ‘canon’ of core repertoire (Verdi, Wagner, Puccini) might wish to embrace the sole opera of a Romanian conductor/composer/violinist, famous for his widely (some might argue overly) programmed Romanian Rhapsodies, inviting their respective audiences to experience a work that, while new, isn’t so far afield sonically; the work clearly references the music of Strauss, Debussy, and Ravel, thus retaining a perceived “safety” in having European roots. (It’s worth noting the opera is usually marketed sans the tiresome cliched Eastern exoticism that usually tends to otherwise characterize many Western initiatives involving the work of composers from Romania and much of the former Eastern bloc.) The opera has as its basis a widely-known story taken from Greek mythology, giving directors a wide palate of opportunities for creative presentation. Programming Œdipe is an expansion of the canon, those in charge might say, one that comes with risk – just the right amount of risk. Being just that much outside the known canon will mean, of course, finding the right artists for its realization, but listing a performance/production on a CV is an assured feather in the cap for any singer, one that can open potential doors to future parts, conductors, recordings, houses. The vocal writing is, in places, fiendishly difficult, with the lead baritone role required to maintain an immense energy and vocal flexibility throughout the opera’s nearly three-hour running time. Yes, the opera itself is a thing of immense beauty, but featuring the work as part of a season in Europe (or further afield) seems less a symbol of the Enescu Festival’s reach than a considered business decision for houses in what is, more than ever, a tenuous time for the industry, with repeated pushes and pulls to expand, explore, include, exemplify, examine, exhume, and execute as warranted. Between those demands, and threats to funding, drops in audience attendance, ever-changing quilts of venue entry and visitor restrictions (not enforced in some places and roundly criticized for enforcement in others), well… what’s an opera company to do? The sight of baritone Christopher Maltman stalking around the Opera Bastille stage recently (in Wajdi Mouawad’s thoughtful, beautiful production), his eyes covered by a patchwork of tiny, mirrored squares, seemed more relevant than ever. Reflect; refract; rethink. Revive, over and over.

Constantinescu admitted over the course of a lengthy and involved conversation (part of a feature eventually published in the Winter edition of Opera Canada magazine that also featured the thoughts of Petrenko) that he agreed with Petrenko’s sentiments around avoiding a sort of musical ossification. “We need to present the work of people who are alive,” he told me, but he added a vital detail: Romanian audiences have not had the privilege of hearing many works by Western composers, the very works other audiences may know and take for granted, since they live in places where the funding, education, and public support for such things exists and is regularly cultivated. “Vivaldi, Gluck, Handel and Couperin are names that are not often performed in (regular) season concerts in Bucharest,” he said, his eyes widening behind his owl-like glasses. “This is the goal of the festival: to educate people.” Such didactic instinct was realized in many offerings, particularly over the past four years, in drims and drams. The 2019 program saw the Romanian premiers of Strauss’ Die Frau Ohne Schatten (presented by Jurowski and the RSB), Britten’s Peter Grimes (performed by the Romanian National Radio Orchestra and Radio Academy Choir, led by Paul Daniel) and Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron (conducted by Lothar Zagrosek and performed by the Orchestra and Choir of the George Enescu Philharmonic together with Vocal Consort Berlin). Composer/conductor Lera Auerbach presented a number of her own works at the Radio Sala; Mark-Anthony Turnage premiered his new song cycle with tenor Allan Clayton and the Britten Sinfonia.

At the 2021 edition, Jurowski presented a series of works recognizing the 50th anniversary of the passing of composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971), leading eclectic and demanding works (Les Noces, Renard, The Flood) which had never been performed live before in Romania; included in the first evening of his and the RSB’s two consecutive concert evenings was the work of Romanian composer Anatol Vieru (1926-1998). Czech composer Ondřej Adámek (b. 1979) enjoyed the premiere of his new work, “Where are you?”, written especially for Magdalena Kožená & Sir Simon Rattle, by the musical couple together with the London Symphony Orchestra. The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, led by concertmaster Matthew Truscott and featuring soloist Yuja Wang, featured works by Haydn, Janáček, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich; members of the Berlin Philharmonic (including Noah Bendix-Balgley and Stephan Koncz) presented Enescu’s Piano Trio and Mozart’s Piano Quartet No. 1 (both pieces, rather interestingly, in G minor), while the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra closed the festival with two concerts, the first featuring Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini paired with the music of Carl Nielsen (led by Alan Gilbert) and the second comprised of Enescu’s Pastorale-Fantaisie, Wagner’s Tannhäuser overture, and Bruckner’s Symphony No. 7 (led by Daniel Harding). The sheer scale and ambition of the festival, particularly amidst the realities of this year’s pandemic, cannot be underestimated – nor can the realities of such future ambitions be ignored; while such realizations are certainly worth applauding, their direct experience can be, for want of a better word, totally exhausting, with little to any space given, in practical or theoretical terms, for contemplation of them in isolation, or more especially, broader relation to one another. Is there a connection? Should one attempt to be found? Whither the events of 1989? Themes given to the festival by its own team (this year’s was “The Sound Of Love”; in 2019, “The World In Harmony”) feel, somehow, too ephemeral, too vague. Together with data, such elements reveal and conceal simultaneously in a strange, Soviet-style bit of politicking. One would ask for something – not bigger and more impressive and more wow, but more substantial, meatier, more solid, and not from its foreign attendees from from its extant (make that shifting) leadership. The figures trumpeted on the Enescu Festival website are impressive, but obvious. Indeed it was “the world’s largest classical music festival of 2021” (bien sur) far more telling is the number of locals who attended in lieu of foreigners scared off or stuck by travel restrictions. I found myself happy to read this, but equally curious to know if these indoor attendees comprised the same audience who’d attended free presentations across the street in years past, at the giant outdoor screens which had been set up with rows of folding chairs, spaces which were half-occupied most daytimes, with mothers and prams and older people, stopping, sitting briefly, cocking heads and enjoying ice cream cones, before moving along, cloth shopping bags in hand. Perhaps this is just the sort of social milieu that might play into the 2023 edition and somehow (one hopes) shape future programming choices. Rethink, reframe, revive; se poate spera.

Sala Palatului, Bucharest, Romania, instruments, cello, classical, display, exhibition, music

Inside the Sala Palatului. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

A part of the infrastructure to which Walker alludes in his Guardian piece has an influence in shaping the perception of the music experienced live, in content as in performance. Works with noticeably little to no energy live, or delivered in a sort of rote manner, are suddenly, owing to the shared frenetic pace of Strada Știrbei Vodă and Calea Victoriei outside, infused with a manic quality. The effect also works in reflection, acting as a nifty sort of mirror to those concerts in which joy and good humour arise naturally, and there are plenty of those performances as well. The streets outside are bustling, sizeable thoroughfares; renamed after the 1989 revolution, they act as sharp lines of demarcation between festival venues (the Sala, together with the smaller Sala Radio and the Athenaeum, located opposite/behind-ish) and bars, restaurants, cultural attractions, as well as the many hotels used by artists and guests alike. How busy, how rushed, how intense it all felt being in the midst of it all. The festival itself, with its team of kind and ever-patient publicists, assistants, and other personnel, works hard, and is determined to shape a specific impression – Very Impressive, Very Big, Very Wow; like a happier, better version of that giant palace, perhaps. But it can all be too impressive, too big, too wow; the pace and sheer variety can be overwhelming, frenzied, mentally/emotionally/creatively/spiritually exhausting. (I can only imagine what it must be like for visiting artists.) Visits to the Stavropoleos: regular, and required – that, or after a concert, sheer solitude and silence. Following a beautiful performance (usually of a work I hadn’t heard live before) in a hot, stilted venue, the last thing I wanted to do was to rush off to yet another presentation – usually a midnight presentation of an opera. Nu, mulțumesc. I wanted to sit and simply be with the rather miraculous sounds I’d heard sitting in a hot hall in high heels and slowly-dampening hair over the past how-many hours. There was no respite at any bar or restaurant or street, large or small; the winding paths to my own hotel weren’t poetic, they were decrepit, depressing, scary to navigate even in flat sandals. (But oh, I was so grateful for the large bathtub, a rarity in Romanian hotels, or so I was told; I may well have had the biggest one in the city.) The race of footsteps along dim, cracked yellow-lit pathways shadowed by low-hanging branches and peppered with cars, the giggles and glass-clinks like staccato shots in the open-air gardens, the echoes in the long, goldfish-bowl-like, quasi-chic bars of hotels – the quiet contemplation of such creative experience one wished for, in conversation or alone, was simply impossible.

sign, Bucharest, Romania, city, Enescu, music, geography, architecture

In downtown Bucharest. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

Still, it’s tough to look at the festival in any careful way without being perceived as mean or peevish. It’s Eastern Europe, goes the (mostly Western) thinking, what did you expect? Well. I am not sure who is served by fluffy travelogues that ignore on-the-ground realities; certainly such reports fall into the “favourable content” category so favoured by online publishers (and marketers), but I’m not sure they do the artists, the administration, the organizations (visiting and local), or the country as a whole any favours. The city, once described to me as a sort of “shabby-chic Paris” by a previous visitor, is, as Walker noted, a hard-scrabble hodge-podge of new and old, have and have-not, blazingly modern in some sections, achingly dilapidated in others, a terrible if terribly real reflection of the country’s widening social divides. The Enescu Museum, a short walk from the festival locale proper, and with no real connection to the festival itself beyond the composer’s name (bizarrely), is in a horrendous state of disrepair. Perhaps there is a charm in the cracks, the discoloration, the water marks on the ceiling, the curling edges of paper and the worn velvet surfaces, but it’s one that can be experienced, or understood, as a visitor without romanticizing its actual, lived realities for so many; such romanticizing only serves to reduce the direct experience of its people, particularly the many young people I noted working in service positions across the city. They don’t want pity; they want to leave.

My mornings during my visit were largely were spent in a tiny cafe located with small wire chairs and shaky tables set out on a slanted, cracked sidewalk framed by yawning old trees and lining a narrow, similarly-cracked street hosting fast-moving cars. The servers at the cafe were all young, multilingual, polite; most were students, all of them hoped to leave Bucharest, in the near future, most probably for good. One server warmed up to conversation after consecutive days of my asking for extra milk for my coffee, and asked, with a cheeky grin, if I wanted a whole cow set on the pavement tomorrow. He wasn’t planning on staying in his country of birth much longer.

“There’s nothing here for us,” he said, “unless you are willing to work in a corrupt way, and then you can only go so far.” Where would he like to go?

Maybe Germany, although he didn’t think his German was good enough. Possibly France, probably Spain. Had he been? “Yes, Madrid is fantastic!” A broad smile, as he collected my empty mug. “Better coffee than here.” Had he been to any Enescu Festival concerts? “Only one, but that hall is so hot and awful. We go for other things here, you know, big musicals.” Did I know about them? Yes, I’d seen the posters outside the venue. “Sometimes I’ll go for those, but I don’t want to sit there sweating to music I didn’t know. And the tickets for the festival…” he said, waving at a persistent fly with his free hand, his brown eyes rolling up, “pfffft, I’d rather spend my money on other things. Maybe I’m a bad patriot, but… I don’t care, really. I’m too busy trying to survive, you know?”

The Opera Queen is entirely self-funded.
If you would like to make a donation, please go here.

Essay: Finding The Right Fit (Or Not)

Manon Lescaut, stage, opera, Puccini, performance, culture, women, image, branding, singing, lingerie

A scene from the 2013 production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut at La Monnaie / De Munt, directed by Mariusz Treliński, set design by Boris Kudlicka. Photo © Forster.

This essay started out as a love letter to fashion, within the context of the joys to be had in buying a dress amidst pandemic. Folded into this were contemplations on dressing up – for the opera, and otherwise; there were (are) quotes from Susan Sontag, Oscar Wilde, and Marlene Dietrich. I still intend to publish this essay in some form or another in future (hopefully sooner than later), but for now, it feels smarter, especially in light of the restart of live cultural events as autumn draws near, to explore my original idea, one I was encouraged to pursue by a longtime editor friend. It’s been in my mind to write this for a while, and the combination of seeing a production of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut recently, a closet full of pinned items, an overstuffed drawer of underthings I’ve come to despise, all seemed like cosmic signs urging me on.

Following my second jab in August I had an exchange with this individual which touched on issues of body image, fashion, fit, popular perceptions, and the longtime, frequently tortuous relationship I have with my body, and more specifically, my breasts. This time last year I arranged an appointment with a doctor to see about a reduction, a procedure I had long pondered. To relieve the near-constant shoulder and neck pain; to have the stacks of ribs, distorted by years of intense weight, corrected; to have things finally, at long last… fit… it seems, even now, like a distant and incredible dream. To have a breast reduction would (could) mean I might at last look like the actually-size-2 woman I am, that I might actually for the first time in my life, be in proper proportion without the aid of acres of close-fitting fabrics. I wouldn’t have to worry about stares, smirks, or judgement; I could wear what I like – a low-cut gown at the opera; a fitted turtleneck in the classroom; my strapless sundress in the supermarket. Ultimately I decided against the operation – for now. The thought of removing chunks of my own flesh, of living with permanent scarring on a part of my body to which I have an already-troubled relationship, of navigating postoperative pain, of courting judgement (and possibly real horror) from would-be lovers at the sight of my scarred body… such concerns created a mountain of anxiety I am not, even now, able to scale. So I contend with thick straps, well-padded cups, tight, strong bands; a good bra really is a piece of marvelous engineering, and a well-fitting one is something I will pay (have paid) good money for. Finding one that fits off the rack is (like any item of clothing) a rarity; I have a litany of bras sitting in a drawer, all of them impaled with pins in a desperate attempt to fit a much-shrunken frame (I have lost a significant amount of weight over the past eight months or so). It’s good enough for now, but oh, for the freedom of awakening without pain, of moving around without aches, of fitting things perfectly, of never having another button pull or another visible strap or of having to buy things two sizes too large. Oh, to never have to feel I am inviting lecherous stares, acrid judgment, social ostracizing, or risking professional advancement, credibility, acceptance, approval.

It’s an odd thing, to write a piece which might come off as a complaint, when one admittedly receives attention, and more specifically certain types of attention, over the very thing (things) one purports to dislike. I do get a jolt of joy from the reactions I elicit through my highly-curated posts; it bolsters the shaky confidence of an isolated woman whilst reassuring some form of public worth, however superficial. That satisfaction is finite (perhaps intentionally so), as I wonder why in hell I can’t seem to get over 100 likes on anything, all the while knowing the reason: algorithms don’t favour aging female bodies, or faces, unless scantily-clad and heavily-filtered – since wrinkles, cellulite, stretch marks (more precisely, real, lived experience) are unwanted within fantasy landscape celebrated and promoted throughout much social media, Instagram in particular. A thusly-filtered photo of me in a bikini, bum expectantly up, breasts prominently displayed, head orgasmically thrown back, ultra-posed, ultra-horny, ultra-algorithm-pleasing, would unquestionably hit that magical 100 (200? 400? 700?)-likes mark. Indeed, such measurement (of worth / goodness / hotness / popularity / desirability, and much else, maybe) is an unfortunate tool in the freelance world, one worth knowing how to wield, if requiring very careful handling. Post the wrong (so-called) things, and one is ignored, along with one’s work and oeuvre; post the right (so-called) things, and one’s work is read (my own analytics bear this out) but one courts judgement in the process, along with distinct and narrow forms of categorization. One risks judgment and labels as well: dumb, shallow, vain, needy, an attention-whore, wannabe, poser, super-bitch. Bimbo. Dilettante. Sycophant.

All of these labels (and worse) run through my head whenever I post anything imagistic; I often wish there was a “reduce giant boobs” filter that might lessen such anxieties, but then I wonder if it’s really me who has the problem(s). My mother certainly didn’t think so. Years ago she and I attended the opening night of an opera season; it turned out to be her final one. A night of dressing up was a blessed bit of relief between chemotherapy sessions and hospital runs, and she looked so pleased and proud as watched me descend the stairs of our house wearing a black, strapless Yves Saint Laurent vintage piece (found in a consignment shop for a song), a dress that fit perfectly. I knew there would be hate-filled stares entering the members’ lounge – those always greeted me, they were predictable, if very wearing; I was good at pretending such nastiness didn’t bother me; I still am. “I love how you scoop your hair up and put your shoulders back and stick your bust out and don’t care what anyone thinks,” she said later that night. I didn’t have to look at the faces in the lounge to actually feel their all-too-clear judgments; I threw my head back indeed, jutted chin out, batted eyelashes, gave a tremendous smile. It’s a skill I have come to perfect. To quote Marquise de Merteuil (from Christopher Hampton’s Dangerous Liaisons; play 1985, film 1988), “I learned how to look cheerful while under the table I stuck a fork onto the back of my hand.” Add to that making a tremendous middle finger.

There exists in my closet a lovely line of beautiful gowns, one a sumptuous, sweeping, super-low-backed, very fitted number, ordered in a fit of restlessness amidst the worst of the pandemic last year. I slipped it on at New Year’s in an attempt to summon some needed optimism. “If I ever have the nerve to wear this publicly,” I thought, “at least I’ll know what’s required.” (Two rolls of tape, carefully applied, and even more carefully removed; I will use more if and when that time ever comes.) But dare I court the inevitable judgment if I wear it? Dare I risk dumping whatever little professional credibility I might have (and have fought for), all for the sake of my innate love of fashion, and an even more innate need to feel the joy of wearing something that actually fits, and amidst (sigh, post) pandemic times, when dressing up is a pleasure that has been so long denied? I think, to a certain extent, many women, especially us large-breasted ones, are raised to ignore, to carry on, to try to keep head held high (when our necks and shoulders aren’t screaming in agony), and to fight against the high tides of judgement while riding the big, bouncy waves of attention. The digital era has brought a keen awareness of the pressures of playing to desire, of its inherently performative nature, of the idea of “sexy” being somehow divorced from presence (in the symbolic sense), of the lines between fantasy and reality blurring, of the perceived “power” in playing to a male-gaze-y algorithm that dictates what is seen, when, how, by whom. Susan Sontag wrote, in a 1999 essay “A photograph is not an opinion. Or is it?” (published in Women (Random House, 1999), a book of photography by Annie Leibovitz) thusly:

To be feminine, in one commonly felt definition, is to be attractive, or to do one’s best to be attractive; to attract. (As being masculine is being strong.) While it is perfectly possible to defy this imperative, it is not possible for any woman to be unaware of it. As it is thought a weakness in a man to care a great deal about how he looks, it is a moral fault in a woman not to care “enough.” Women are judged by their appearance as men are not, and women are punished more than men are by the changes brought about by aging. Ideals of appearance such as youthfulness and slimness are in large part now created and enforced by photographic images. And, of course, a primary interest in having photographs of well-known beauties to look at over the years is seeing just how well or badly they negotiate the shame of aging.

As an aging albeit large-chested woman with a chosen online presence – one I require and have cultivated as a freelance writer and educator within a particularly narrow cultural field – I am simultaneously aware of both the judgement and the attention, the inherent risk of professional punishment, and virtue-patrolling, to say nothing of professional discreditation and social ostracization, all of which run concomitant with potential benefits and possible advancement. (Whether that advancement manifests in actual dollars and opportunities remains to be seen, and various classical and academic ingenues might tell you something similar, however quietly.) Damned if you do; damned if you don’t; such has always been the case for women, and never more so than now, in the pandemic-ridden 21st century, whence a screen is professional, social, political, cultural, creative, and personal, all in one. My mother’s pre-boomer, always-wear-lipstick generation didn’t have to face this, but then, if she had, I’d suspect she’d be very popular.

My mother had a ballet dancer’s body: a long torso, long legs, just-right shoulders, a long neck, and perfectly (to me) small hips/bum/breasts. She had my ideal body shape, one I still covet and dream of having. Anything else, to my mind and literal body), is chubby, gross, vulgar. She was a “model” in the definition that still largely fuels the definition of Very Beautiful today. “You didn’t get those from me,” she’d say, staring at my chest. Shorter, fleshier women have a history of being placed into the tiresome bin labelled “curvaceous” (or the like), one that is wholly fantasy-driven and easy to discredit; she always used the word “voluptuous” as a compliment, but it never felt like one. I could never (and indeed cannot) find things that properly fit. While I’d watch my thin, small-breasted school friends go off and meet decent men, I always felt I’d been left with horny ones wanting naught but masturbatory entertainment. The work world was just as bad, if not worse. An early episode of the American television sitcom Three’s Company (1977-1984) features a large-breasted if wholly unqualified woman promoted over the more small-breasted Janet by a bug-eyed man in a cheap suit who speaks in a lusty rasp. The woman later visits Janet at her apartment, resigning in a fit of shame and exasperation, and explains the realities of navigating a world in which men only see breasts (and their related sexual desires) without seeing the attached whole person. “They say things like, “why don’t you stand over me and keep the rain off, baby!”” she says, holding back tears.

These days of course, that woman would have a huge Instagram following, post pictures of herself in tiny bikinis, call herself “empowered” and many would simply seal-clap along. I’m not so sure; to borrow from Charles Laughton’s character in the 1957 film Witness For The Prosecution, that line of thinking feels “too neat, too tidy, and altogether too symmetrical…” (Note: most breasts are not, in fact, symmetrical, let alone sitting at attention when one lies on one’s back; they tend to sloppily nod off to armpits, gravity being the great downer in all senses.) Swimwear always presents a challenge; modest is realistic if boring, but finding something that fits is impossible. I don’t own a bikini, and if I did, I wouldn’t wear it publicly, let alone post pictures of myself in it. “Be proud!” shout the masses, “do your thing!” The problem is, all the male things go up whenever I reveal too much tit in public, and though i can’t control the reactions, I hate that I inspired them at all, and find myself wishing, at such moments, after a galling incident or smutty, unwished-for attention, that I had those perfect, tiny, pert, ballet-dancer breasts. The scars, the pain, the thought of going into a hospital at all right now… tell me to sit, round-shouldered, and do another round of dreary sit-ups. Apparently strong abs are helpful, but they’ve yet to relieve an ounce of the pain.

Following my second vaccination, I came home and changed into a low-backed bodysuit, one I would never wear in public – too revealing, too honest, too real. (I love it.) ‘Real breasts versus fantasy ones’ is a distinction that needs to be made (one might say this about female bodies overall) – I consciously thought this, putting that bodysuit on – but the need to recognize that distinction points more directly at a need to acknowledge real people versus fantasy figures. A 2013 production of Manon Lescaut from Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie (Brussels), directed by Mariusz Treliński and featuring Eva-Maria Westbroek in the title role, caught my attention for just this reason. How refreshing, to see the soprano floppy-haired and braless and perspiration-soaked in the last act; yes, it’s the character, and yes it’s the opera, and of course, it’s part of the setting, but this was not the highly-stylized, romantic, dewy-doe-eyed suffering so often seen on opera stages. The transformation felt real, raw, and very visceral; it dared to explode the sexy-babe mythos into a thousand pieces, and dared its audience to see what was left. I wondered about two things, concurrently, as it concluded: Westbroek’s corseting (or apparent lack thereof, which is brave, and shouldn’t be, and yet) and, what would my opera-loving, glamour-obsessed mother make of it. In her younger years she so much resembled the younger Manon, poised and smiling across numerous images in photo albums spanning many decades. One shot features her wearing a green polka-dot bikini; she used to like to tell people how much she weighed when it was taken, some ridiculously low number, hiding the actual truth of her self-starving then, her utter self-loathing in fact, dating someone who eventually threw her over, having treated her like a diversion, a bit of fantasy, a sex doll. She wasn’t “curvy”; she didn’t have large breasts. I remember meeting him years ago, before she passed, wondering at her being so reserved around him then; I don’t wonder now.

And so I look at my closet-fulls of dresses, some of them my mother’s, many of them, like my underthings, full of pins and awaiting the skilled touch of my ever-patient tailor, and I wonder if I’ll ever wear any of them again. Do I want to? Dare I? Can I be floppy-haired, braless Manon and still have any worth? Still ignite any true desire? Does it matter? Can I be busty, non-music-degree-holding Catherine and still be perceived with any seriousness? Should I feel okay with being reduced? Am I not already? Oh, how I long for a good fit. A trip to the moon, even for a few hours, would not be so bad either; my shoulders, like much else, could use the rest. Maybe this is the season to fly, to not feel small, to not shrink, but to jut chin out, pull shoulders back, and at last, to truly smile, even, as the times dictate, it will be behind a mask or two.

Graham Vick, Festival Verdi, Parma, Stiffelio, director, opera, theatre, staging, performance

Remembering Graham Vick, In His Own Words

It is difficult, if not impossible, to express anything meaningful in relation to the death of director Sir Graham Vick. Tributes are filling social media, many written by artists with whom the 67-year-old CBE-honoree worked throughout his illustrious four-decade-plus career, and amidst them, palpable veins of grief and anger, cries of “too soon” (Vick died of complications from coronavirus) and heartbreaking expressions of bewilderment. Imagining the opera landscape without Vick’s voice, literally and figuratively, is a very strange endeavour. To say he changed the centre of opera-theatrical gravity is putting things too mildly; he changed the entire universe, and many would argue, for the better.

Vick was a strident believer in opera being an art form for everyone, and was a champion of experimentation, risk, and diversity. Named director of productions for Scottish Opera in 1984, Vick went on to Glyndebourne, where he was director of productions from 1994 to 2000. He founded Birmingham Opera in 1987 and remained its artistic director. He helmed the works of Shostakovich, Britten, Wagner, Mozart, Monteverdi, Mussorgsky, Schoenberg, Rossini, and Prokofiev; he collaborated with a number of contemporary composers including Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, Ravi Shankar, Jonathan Dove, Stephen Oliver, and Georg Friedrich Haas, and had several projects planned (including production of new commissions) across the U.K. and Europe. To say he was modern is too cliched; to say he will be forgotten is impossible. The recollection of seeing – nay, experiencing – his work live now, at a time when so much of the live experience has been shuttered and is dictated by perceptions deeming opera elite, irrelevant, a frill, a fringe, a frippery, is to recall the work of a man who not only knew better, but proved it.

In 2017 I had intended to interview Vick about his award-winning production of Stiffelio at the Festival Verdi in Parma. That conversation unfortunately never took place (alas, poor timing), but I will always remember walking slowly away from the Teatro Farnese one warm night in October feeling as if I was seeing the world with entirely new eyes; the dim street lights that outlined the jumbles of boys gathered on street corners, the shouting, the darts back and forth to groups of girls, the hand-holding couples, the older woman stopping and starting along one wall, catching her breath… everything was familiar, strange, distant, immediate. Good theatre is meant to have this effect, of genuinely changing one’s perceptions and experiences of life outside of the theatre proper (I think), of cultivating curiosity and encouraging some form of empathy (or maybe “observation” is a more appropriate term here, considering Vick’s staging) – my experience of such art, of such direct and unfiltered theatrical approach, had been rather limited up to that point, and in the case of opera, I’d become inured to blithely sitting and gawking in silky finery, my senses more attuned to the orchestra and the voices; my expectations had, with very few exceptions, been unconsciously lowered around visuals and visceral understanding, an experience I only became aware of through the direct immersion (quite literally) in Vick’s production. His vision, as with so much of his oeuvre, demanded immediacy, contemplation, interaction, even (sometimes) direct engagement – with words, music, sounds, action… feelings. His stagings weren’t lessons (nor were they meant as such) but were very often challenges – to whatever baggage we may have brought, consciously and not. Stiffelio forced me to throw out that baggage, to set it alight; as the daughter of a confirmed Verdi lover, Vick’s intentionally confrontational production was not the medicine I necessarily wanted at the time, but was precisely the dosing rather desperately needed, and at some unconscious level, deeply desired.

This year’s edition of Festival Verdi will be dedicated to Vick’s memory; it opens on September 24th with a production of Un Ballo in Maschera, helmed by director Jacopo Spirei and based on an original project by Vick. The administrative and artistic teams at the Teatro Regio di Parma and Festival Verdi (including General Director/Artistic Director Ana Maria Meo and Music Director Roberto Abbado) stated in a formal release that “(t)he world of music and theatre loses an artist with a sharp eye, extraordinary sensitivity, attention to young talent, the ability to bring to light the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of our lives on the notes of scores written centuries ago, the ability to discover opera and make it loved by the broadest communities far from the world of culture, highlighting the values, feelings, and themes that bind it so closely to our contemporary world, our everyday life.”

Mille grazie, Graham, per tutto. x

Graham Vick, Festival Verdi, Parma, Stiffelio, director, opera, theatre, staging, performance

Graham Vick rehearsing Stiffelio in 2017. Photo: Roberto Ricci / Teatro Regio di Parma

From Graham Vick’s January 2021 chat with Oxford Contemporary Opera:

“The aim is to have people not be prejudiced about the word (“opera”), to not change the word… isn’t that the job, really? I mean, Luciano Berio, he called the first one I did, Un re in ascolto (A King Listening), he called it a “musical action”… (and) in the late 20th century, everybody was trying to find a new label, (everybody) was experimenting with non-narrative opera […] but there’s nothing wrong with opera. Opera has this incredibly rich, 400-year history, and the only thing wrong with the word is the prejudice.”

“I believe that opera is its own art form, and it’s a huge art form, but it’s based on singing; that’s where its expressive heart is, is in singing. And the sung word, the human voice, is the most natural. When someone is singing good and open and in touch with themselves, (it) is the most immediate conduit to the human soul.”

“Everybody wants the star delivering the material… and that is fundamentally anti-theatric. It means, in fact, they perform their brand – in modern parlance – […] and so you might begin – here I’m being very rude, but I’ll say it anyway – you might begin by thinking The New Tenor is really interesting and fascinating, then by his fourth or fifth role you’re beginning to say, “It’s a little bit stuck and mannered” and eventually you’ll think, “That’s all he’s got to offer”… but it’s saleable, it’s packageable, because it’s a groove that sells recordings, that goes with someone who’s found his public. Many people fall into this rather disappointingly narrow track. The liberation of singing, the fact it should go all the way through the whole of your persona, the whole of your physical and psychic persona… the sound should resonate through it all… the people who are capable of living and communicating through that sound are the true high priests and priestesses of the art form.”

“There’s no substitute for understanding the words.” (referring to the English translation of operas)

“You can get the chorus of La Scala to do the most phenomenal mezzo-voce/mezzo-piano in the middle register – magic, like you’ve never heard. And that’s utterly beautiful. But if you want to hear the voice of the Russian people crying in despair and anger about religion and about politics, if you hear what we do in Birmingham, it speaks an entirely different way: devoid of polish, devoid of sophistication, devoid of training, but direct from the soul, direct from the heart, and meaning being 100% what they’re doing, not meaning via technique, via beauty, via sound, via keeping-everybody-else-happy. It’s unique. And that is a different way to deliver art. Prosciutto crudo, not prosciutto cotto.”

“The mess of opera and this pandemic is, of course, enormous, because not only the pandemic but with, of course, Black Lives Matter, and what’s happened this year, and so really for the first time a lot of people are finally taking diversity as a serious issue… but not really, of course, because they’re not really doing their proper work at the moment, they’re doing small projects, (with) small audiences. So it’s quite easy to change the apparent face very quickly. The truth is, when we come out (of the pandemic), we’ve now discovered – I believe everybody has now discovered, what we’ve always known in Birmingham – which is, we should be performing for the whole city; that’s what our work is and for, but our tickets cost £17.50, for everybody […] that gives us a completely different audience. I read statements on the websites of theatres, policies about equal opportunity and so on, but I don’t think we can fool ourselves that there is any possibility of any kind of equality, any kind of cultural democracy, unless people can afford to buy a ticket. And I think that is going to be an enormous problem, because the money is tight.”

“We have to include a much broader community in what we produce, in how we produce it, in how we communicate its truths, and in who we put on our stages, in our pits, in our choruses, in who you see around you in the audience – all of this has to change in order (for opera) to have any validity. But I don’t see, at the moment, any artists leading that charge. And I think it has to be an artistic charge.”

“What happens is, gifted, talented people start(ing) off initially as angry as me get sucked into this amazing thing that is opera – this big, soupy glorious, glamorous, thrilling world – and they lose their judgement. They lose their social and political judgement, and turn their back on where they came from. So that’s the message for you all, and what I want to say: be true to yourselves. Because the world has to be changed.”

“There are many, many ways of defining the word “excellence”.”

Top photo: Graham Vick at Festival Verdi rehearsing Stiffelio in 2017. Photo: Roberto Ricci / Teatro Regio di Parma
Lisette Oropesa, Pentatone, album, soprano, singer, opera, classical, vocal, dress, fashion, Mozart, album, Ombra Compagna

Lisette Oropesa: On Mozart, Recording, And Why Opera Does Not Need Redefining

Certain sounds inspire one to sit up a little straighter, look away from the monitor, pull up the blinds, gaze out the window, and then remove the pandemic uniform of fleece loungewear and replace it with something more elegant and beautiful. Thus it is that those sounds – singers, operas, concerts, arias, and oratorios – have worked in tandem to provide a much-needed uplift over the course of the past fifteen months, aiding in a more focused, thoughtful, and elevated quality of energy than much of the classical internet, and its overdue if very often over/underwhelming digital pivot, tends to demand at any given moment in the age of Covid. Lisette Oropesa’s debut album, Ombra Compagna: Mozart Concert Arias, released via Pentatone earlier this month, provides such uplift, along with a hefty dollop of inspiration.

Recorded in August 2020 with conductor Antonello Manacorda and orchestra Il Pomo d’Oro, the album’s ten tracks showcase Oropesa’s poetic musical sense, as well as her talent for balancing the whirlwind spirals of drama with the straight-arrow trajectories of technique. Hearing such luscious sounds, one immediately adjusts one’s spine, fixes one’s hair, puts on a nice dress; it feels as if the artists, and composer too, would request nothing less, or more, in the era in which the album was recorded and released. Three tracks feature the words of Italian poet and librettist Pietro Metastasio (1698-1782): “Misera, dove son!”, (composed in 1781) “Alcandro, lo confesso – Non so d’onde viene” (1778) and the album’s closer, “Ah se in ciel, benigne stelle” (started 1778; completed 1788). The latter two arias were composed for Aloysia Weber (1760-1839), an accomplished singer whom the composer had taught and been enamoured with prior to his marrying her sister, Constanze (in 1782); the works are notable for the poignant musical ideas which fully anticipate more fulsome creative expression in Le nozze di Figaro (1786) and La clemenza di Tito (1791) . Oropesa’s handling of the aural and textual aspects of the respective arias expresses a touching emotional honesty; the knowing way in which the soprano delicately modulates her tone and breath, her studied phrasing and vivid coloration, imply a comprehension of things beneath, around, between, and beyond the words. “Alcandro, lo confesso”, for instance, is from Metastasio’s libretto for L’olimpiade (Olympiad), and was originally set to music by Antonio Caldara, who was court composer to Empress Elizabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (the work was originally meant to celebrate her birthday). As John A. Rice’s fine album notes remind us, “(t)he concert aria gave composers and performers flexibility in regard to the gender of the singer vis-a-vis the gender of the character portrayed. To be more specific: a female singer could freely portray a male character.” Such fluidity is conveyed with quiet elegance through Oropesa’s controlled if unquestionably heartfelt delivery, complemented by Manacorda’s stately tempo and dynamics:

Alcandro, lo confesso,
stupisca di me stesso. II volto, il ciglio,
la voce di costui nel cor mi desta
un palpito improvviso,
che lo risente in ogni fibra il sangue.
Fra tutti i miei pensieri
la cagion ne ricerco, e non la trovo.
Che sarà, giusti Dei, questo ch’io provo?

Non so d’onde viene
quel tenero affetto,
quel moto che ignoto
mi nasce nel petto,
quel gel, che le vene
scorrendo mi va.

Nel seno a destarmi
sì fieri contrasti
non parmi che basti
la sola pietà.

Alcandro, I confess it,
astonished by myself. His face, his
expression, his voice—they awaken
a sudden tremble in my heart
which the blood repulses through my veins.
I try to find the reason in all my thoughts,
but I can’t find it.
Good Gods, what is it that I feel?

I don’t know where this tender
feeling comes from,
this unknown emotion
that is born in my breast,
this chill that runs
through my veins.

Pity alone
is not sufficient to cause
those strongly opposed feelings
in my breast.

(English translation by Christina Gembaczka & Kate Rockett)

With a rich vocality displayed in the frequently challenging, wide-ranging works, Oropesa’s flexibility and confidence, together with her calculated blend of sass, class, and deep sensitivity, show an artist flowering in a range of colors and styles. The concert arias demand, as Oropesa writes in the album notes, “extremes of range, breath control, dynamics, and stamina” and the soprano’s versatile technique (well explored through her history with Italian repertoire, especially bel canto) is keenly studied, if easily received.

That’s the point, Lisette said when we chatted recently – the music should sound effortless, even if it’s anything but – in content, as much as in style. Having such multi-faceted awareness is, for the singer, central to understanding and expressing the depths of real, lived emotional experience within the music; even if the topics are mythological, the subtext is far more familiar.The album’s title (which translates as “companion spirit”), originates in the aria “Ah, lo previdi” (“Ah, I foresaw it”), used in a scene from Vittorio Amadeo Cigna-Santi’s libretto for Andromeda (1755); it uses the recitative form for maximal dramatic impact whilst offering a careful musical scoring that highlights aural power to convey the speaker’s grief over what she believes is her beloved’s passing. As Oropesa writes, “the most sublime music accompanies the journey between life and death, as the spirit of a loved one slips away.Though we may wish to follow them into the next life, we must stay behind. So to be an “Ombra compagna,” to be with someone in spirit”, when we say that, it is a comforting yet heartbreaking testament of love.”

Known for her work on the stages of Bayerische Staatsoper, Wiener Staatsoper, Teatro Alla Scala, Opéra national de Paris, and the Met, Oropesa is acclaimed for her performances of Italian, French, and German repertoire; she is especially known for her performances as Verdi’s Violetta (La traviata) and Donizetti’s Lucia (Lucia di Lammermoor). Zooming recently from Arizona, Oropesa was warm, funny, real, moving with ease and humour between discussing music approaches and dishing life lessons, with the same warmth and honesty as I remembered in our previous chat in 2019. Despite the challenges of the past year-plus, Oropesa’s upcoming schedule is busy, and, along with recordings and performances in Paris, Zurich, and Vienna, features concerts in California, Italy, and, in March 2022, a much-anticipated concert appearance at Teatro Real Madrid. January 2022 sees the soprano perform the title role in Bellini’s I Capuleti e I Montecchi, after being unable to perform at the season opener for the fabled house in December 2020 because of coronavirus-forced closure.

We began by discussing Ombra Compagna and how the project came to fruition amidst the numerous restrictions necessitated by the pandemic.

How did you choose material – why Mozart?

I didn’t actually pick that material! I am a big Mozart fan and I sing a couple of the concert arias; I studied them, but Pomo d’Oro wanted to record this material and they wanted me to sing it –they were the ones who reached out originally. I didn’t have a label at the time, so while I said yes to them and “it sounds great, send me a list of which arias you mean, there are so many and some are out of my realm of possibility but some are doable, I’d have to study them” – shortly thereafter Pentatone reached out. We had a meeting, and they said, “We want to offer you a package deal for six albums: three recital discs and three opera discs, and I said, would you consider this Mozart project? They said, “Yes, that would be a great first disc!” – so that’s how it happened. From there, Pomo d’Oro sent me a list of arias they were originally thinking of me doing. I chose which ones I wanted, and went on a journey; I got all this sheet music and spent a long time studying and listening to stuff, trying to find what arias were more well-known, ones that had and hadn’t been done. I did pick the arias but didn’t plan the project. In our business so much is given to you, and you either take it or you don’t; very few artists are capable of manifesting their own dreams into any reality. I had wanted a record deal for years, so I’m happy. To produce an album is akin to buying a house: to get an orchestra together, hire a conductor, order scores, find the space for recording, get in the right sound engineers… it’s a lot. So this was great, because someone else produced it. Pentatone is a label that very much cares about sound quality and specifics, and their producers have a lot of experience with orchestra and voices.

And artistically, if you offer me a Mozart project, I’ll never say no! In recording this, I had to find ways I could sing and interpret these works, because they’re all written for different individuals and that means, in a lot of ways, they’re tailored to specific voices: some might have amazing jumps, some might have great coloratura, some might have dramatic capabilities. Every aria has its own personal stamp, so I had to find my way of interpreting all of that, with the best of what I can do. I’m not a master of every single technical thing but I can do a lot of things okay enough that, I can probably pull from my experience – I can pull my flute experience here, I can pull my band experience there, I have my experience with recitative – and the fact I feel comfortable in Italian was very helpful too. The conductor (Antonello Manacorda) was a concertmaster and leads a lot of Mozart so we got on really well, and the orchestra are a great Baroque ensemble. They tuned down to 432Hz for some things; because I am not the highest-sitting a soprano right now, that made my life easy. It was fun, the whole thing. I loved it!

You really personalized the material in your approach.

You have to – really, you have to! I was telling someone the other day, with a lot of people singing Mozart, it’s like watching a gymnastics routine or an ice skating routine; we’re waiting for the jumps and flips and landings. And that’s fine, but those routines in particular, even though they’re sports, they’re also artistic: you’re looking for elegance and beauty and seamlessness of one move to the next, and the power of the gymnast who has their own way they move. In that respect, it’s like singing Mozart: you can’t just look at the technical demands and not go past that into what he is really about, which is depth of emotion. And you can’t do the emotion without the technical stuff – that’s a doorway into the realm of what I think Mozart really is, but you can’t start from that side of the door, you have to go through the technical door first. The problem is a lot of people – artists, industry people, listeners even – get very hung up on the door, but we have to get past it. It’s a tough thing to do, so I try to make the easiest-sounding door possible. Whatever technical demands there are, I try to make them sound easy, even though they’re not. But if I make it seem hard you won’t get past it.

Then all we’d hear is a door.

That’s right!

Lisette Oropesa, soprano, singer, vocal, vocalist, stage, artist, performance, performer, opera, classical, Spain, Teatro Real, Donizetti, bel canto, Artur Rucinski, blood

With Artur Rucinski in Lucia di Lammermoor at Teatro Real, 2018. Photo; Javier del Real

Your bel canto experience must have been good preparation too…

Tremendous. Bel canto helps you with learning to use recitative in a way that is emotionally effective. Mozart is a beautiful writer of recitative so I never had an issue. These arias are all accompagnati; the orchestra is playing, it’s not with just a harpsichord, which you get in his operas – so because these are concert pieces, the entire orchestra is involved, even doing recit, and you might be doing it for four pages before the aria starts. It’s odd to sing it in a way, but it’s also a dramatic part of the piece: you’re setting up the story and that’s very nice as a singer! The other thing is that being a former instrumentalist is really helpful; I learned to express music that didn’t have words, I learned how to express a musical intention, a phrase, without text. With text, sometimes it’s all singers obsess over, this “What about this consonant? What about this vowel? How should I put across all the immense poetry?” – and yes, all of that is important, but with Mozart, the text and the musical phrase are joined; the musical phrase is as vital as the text. Ideally, you marry those two things together when you perform.

Would you say they’re lieder-esque in a sense… ?

Yes, they are.

I hear a lot of Schubert and Beethoven being anticipated in these works, and especially in how you perform them, which made me consider how much I’d like to hear you doing these works in recital.

Thank you, that means a lot. I love lieder, especially the Viennese school and the German stuff; it’s some of the best rep in the world. One of the good things about the pandemic, one of the few silver linings, is that solo-singer-with-piano configurement has become much more popular; I have a massive book full of recital rep that I’m preparing for next year. It’s months’ worth of recitals – the bookers all want lieder, so honestly? Yay! I’m ready, I’m bringing it!

That echoes what Helmut Deutsch said to me earlier this year, that he feels the time has come for lieder. But of course, lots of people are still recording too.

Well yes, recording was the only thing people could do for so long, because orchestras were free and you could record, as long as you were distanced and the room was aired out, and you tested throughout the process. It was one of the only things still allowed to happen. I did three albums myself since this whole thing has happened, and realistically, I’d never be able to book them otherwise; most singers are never free, they need a week at least of just recording, and normally no one can spare the time, so (setting time aside to record) is a scheduling issue (in relation to opera houses). But this past year everybody’s been recording or rehearsing, or learning new roles.

What’s that like for you as a singer, to be taken away from audience energy but to get closer to your voice and to other musicians?

It is a chance to navel-gaze at our larynx, haha! And, not having the audience when you’re doing an album is not a problem because you’re focusing on just recording; you can rehearse, worry about the singing, you don’t have to please a director, you don’t have to wear a costume, you can wear the flat shoes, no makeup and do your thing. I never recorded with an orchestra before – this was my first taste of doing that, and even though we were distanced (so it was slightly less intimate than it would normally be), I was maskless and I could sing into the mic, start, then stop; repeat.

Now, doing performances like an opera or a concert, without an audience… that sucks. We can do it, but. What happens in rehearsal is, you’re basically rehearsing and then you run the whole show with an audience of your castmates, which is intimate and beautiful, but the next level is presenting it to the public; that is what you are preparing to do. And then to do that presentation with no public present, except on the internet – we can’t hear them, or see them – it almost feels like you’re still rehearsing somehow, like you painted something but didn’t hang it on the wall. There’s no finished feeling, and that’s odd; there is no energy back, and that’s odd. So you can sing your balls off and then you don’t hear any applause or reaction – you can’t feel what the audience’s energy is toward you – and that’s awful.

I read a piece about the LSO recently which underlined the point about the need for an audience. ”Why else are we doing this?”

That’s right, why else indeed?

But lately I feel I have to wave my arms about this; yes, you do it to fulfill an innate creative urge, but related to that, at least to my mind, is the desire for energetic feedback.

Exactly right. I mean the thing is, we, and this is what’s been hard, the public comes to us for escape in some ways. We are entertainment for many people; they come to the theatre to dream, and that’s been taken away from them, but, we as artists are expected to still perform at the same level, or a more high level, because everything is so hard now, so it’s “Please come perform on the internet for an audience you can’t see or hear!” You’re doing it for less money and for much more stress and much more risk, and the stakes are 100 times higher; as artists we’re stressed beyond belief doing this, and we still have to put that aside, and put emotions to the side. It’s hard enough when things are functioning normally – there’s enough difficulty in the business as it is – but now there’s far more; there’s world stress, there’s financial stress, there’s various forms of personal stress, and there’s still this attitude, like, “Sing for us! Entertain us! Sing under these circumstances!”

Lisette Oropesa, soprano, singer, vocal, vocalist, stage, artist, performance, performer, opera, classical, Spain, Teatro Real, Verdi

In La traviata at Teatro Real, 2020. Photo: Javier del Real

Your work as a singer is being filtered through the choices of a director as well; it must create a weird self-consciousness not only about how you sound, but how you look. 

I’ve talked about this with regards to opera in HD – you don’t get to direct what frame is on the screen at any given moment, so you might be on camera or not, doing all this great work, but no one will see it if the director doesn’t choose you. And then there will be these snap judgements – “He’s a bad actor!” – but in theatre you can pick where you want to look. The energy and electricity of performers reaches audiences in a different way live than through a camera. Cinematic awareness is something we are having to deal with more and more, yes – I made a movie in Rome of Traviata, and we did so many takes of every scene, live-sung, with the orchestra piped into a speaker. We had to follow as best we could, and I had no idea which take they ultimately took. My mother saw rough cut and said, “That director likes your back!” and a friend in film said, “Oh that’s a specific directorial thing, seeing what (Violetta) is seeing rather than presenting an outside perspective” but I was doing all these things with my face, because I have experience in theatre, and theatre is much more immediate.

It’s surprising how many don’t understand or appreciate that immediacy, implying the big digital pivot is somehow going to “save” opera and how it needs re-defining; I wonder if the real issue is better cultural education.

It is, because the art form does not need redefining – I 100% agree with you. Opera does not need redefining; it does not need watering down, it does not need censorship. It is actually more progressive than people have interpreted it as being, even though it isn’t always presented that way, but it can and should be presented in different and new ways. Opera also provides one of the very best opportunities for women to work: as a prima donna, as a lead character, as a very central if not entirely pivotal character on the stage. I mean, I’m lucky I don’t have to compete with men for my job.

The pandemic era has shown that a lot of companies definitely needed to up their digital game, but lately it feels like music is the last thing to be considered.

You’re right; it doesn’t seem like the music is that important sometimes. I feel at the moment that the focus is more on, “how many people can we reach”, “what are the numbers”, “what social message can we put out”. Some companies are trying to do innovative things, like performing in a parking garage, a racetrack, an airport… but I think, look, we’re not cars. We don’t belong in cement buildings. I know we’re trying to do the distance thing and I get the whys and wherefores of that, but an opera voice is meant to resonate in a concert hall that’s designed in a very specific way to showcase this very specific thing. It’s the same thinking as, ‘let’s put a ballerina on a cliff and make her dance’ and sure, she could, but her shoes aren’t made for that, her training isn’t made for that, it’s taking this very particular craft and sticking it in another medium it isn’t made for, and as a result it doesn’t come across the same way.

And it isn’t perceived the same way as a result; there’s pluses and minuses to thatBut to me the central issue is still one of education, or lack thereof. 

Yes, and so I’m hoping (the activities of the past year) are just a patch job and not a permanent thing. I know San Francisco Opera just built a whole outdoor theatre, a whole new one. I mean, their War Memorial War Opera House still exists…

… they might be trying to do what’s been done in other places in terms of adding to the outdoor summer festival scene. But the question of what role the music plays in all this still niggles.

Yes, I mean, where does the music go when these sorts of construction things happen? You lose a lot of the intimacy in those giant settings…

… sure, but it’s not a new thing;  Arena di Verona exists, and other spectacles have come and gone. I remember attending Aida at the local stadium as a kid, and that was really not about the music. The sound was horrendous but it looked impressive.

Some things don’t work outdoors, and some do. The problem is that (outside stages) force  singers to adopt a whole different way of interpreting the music, and Aida has a lot of intimate moments. How would you expect a soprano to sing “O patria mia” in a stadium? That’s a very internal moment, that aria, she isn’t barking  it – and sure, The Triumphal March works great, it’s 800 people and the orchestral scoring is very exciting right then – but for much of the opera, it’s just two people or one person singing on the stage. It’s a story about relationships, and you can so easily lose sight of that. It’s the same for any of these operas about individuals going through intimate experiences – in Aida or Traviata or Rigoletto. Actually, Rigoletto was staged at Circus Maximus – the stadium where the chariot race in Ben Hur was filmed – last summer; now, Rigoletto is about a father and a daughter, and a very complicated, close relationship, and … you know, in such a big space… I don’t know, it’s unusual. But somewhere like Arena di Verona, it’s an amphitheatre, it’s good acoustics, the stagings are done at night; there’s a special sort of vibe there.

Singing for the internet is a whole different thing, I’d imagine…

Oh yes – for broadcasts shown in a cinema or for the internet, you have to deal with a crappy little microphone hidden in your bosom or wig, and then try not to think about the fact that you’re singing for somebody’s crappy computer speakers. And: the majority are judging your voice. You are totally aware that the online audience are often critical and anonymous. Everybody’s a critic and has a platform to bitch and moan about not sounding good, but look, it’s not fair to watch and judge a singer’s voice on this platform; overtones don’t get picked up, color largely do not translate, subtle things you do with your voice do not translate, and there are these weird resonances. Now, a real hall has acoustics which are designed to promote those things in a proper way; at La Scala a voice bounces, as it should, and you can’t get that in speakers. I don’t know how else to explain it. When you train as a singer in school and take lessons you are not training to sing into a microphone; you are trained to sing over an orchestra and/or another instrument, playing loudly, in a hall. That is our training. If you tell me to take my training and do something else and expect me to be brilliant and get everything perfectly, there’s a problem.

And, we are not trained to act for a camera; we are trained for the theatre, our faces are meant to be open and expressive, and we are taught a certain level of exaggeration in ways that underline enunciation and presentation. You stick that on camera and it looks unflattering, over-exaggerated, not believable, silly. Then you get told, “Well tone it down for the camera” and you think, I’m supposed to be singing for 3000 people here, but apparently I should… be subtle? It becomes this whole issue, and then it goes into, “This person doesn’t look good on camera because they are old.” And they’re not old at all, they’re at a perfect age, they’re good-looking, and, yes, they sound amazing! But it’s become this new “normal” for singers, that they look “old” somehow.

Lisette Oropesa, Pentatone, album, soprano, singer, opera, classical, vocal, dress, fashion, Mozart, album, Ombra Compagna

Ombra Compagna was released via Pentatone in May 2021.

Right, we’ve discussed this Instagram issue and how tough that is for women especially – so again, the music gets left behind, because  follower numbers are more important, being sexy is more important, how it will all magically translate into ticket sales…

… exactly, “People love her, she has lots of followers, she looks hot in a bikini…”

“… and we have to attract a younger, hip audience, so…”

… “we have to attract a younger audience” is dog whistle for, “We have to get the heavy, unattractive, older people off.” Why are we trying to attract them? In Europe there are tons of young people going to classical events; if you make it cheap enough, the younger patrons will attend, and, if you don’t try to water it down into these headlines, like, “Passion! Jealousy! Opera!” That sounds like a telenovela, come on, they see through that. But the marketing to young people involves us singers now, too, so any singer with a decent following – organizations tend to use us to advertise, and that’s fine, they can do it; that’s the reality.

So much marketing adds insult to injury by implying knowledge is somehow bad, that it’s elite to educate your potential audiences. 

If people think they don’t like classical music, or that it’s elite, then ask them to turn on any movie/series/TV show, and tell me what it is they’re hearing and responding to. I’ll tell you: it’s classical instrumentation and writing. 90% of the time people are responding emotionally to a theme while something is happening. Classical is an art that deals in human emotion; it happens naturally. You can play a video game and the music is gorgeous, epic, classical music, most of the time, it’s otherworldly – so if people don’t think they’ll like it, well, they might. It shocks me sometimes, the ignorance, but classical is absolutely mainstream. And so I don’t think it’s any more elite than the Olympics. People think classical is so hoyty-toytoy – but it’s like going to a nice restaurant or a special dinner; you have certain protocols you follow. That should be something you look forward to doing, like going on a date. Do you really want to go in your PJs?

Ah, but that’s the uniform this year!

Right? Lounge-office wear is the fashion in 2021 now!

I actually took off the lounge-wear and put on a dress to listen to your album; I still do.

Oh thank you!

It felt elevating and inclusive at once, and that is an integration Mozart seems especially good at.

Mozart is not a composer who leaves people out – he’s one of the more easy-to-listen-to composers. It’s why so many of his works are known by so many people, in and out of the realm of classical music. It’s melodic, harmonic, theatrical, entertaining, not too much chromaticism, nothing people wouldn’t get, but so human. His work is a great introduction to classical music overall.

Various singers have told me they love returning to the music of Mozart because his music is a massage for the voice – is that true for you too?

It is, yes, and it can be a really great thing to get you in line vocally. If you are everywhere with your voice, Mozart is a very challenging composer. He demands you understand the door, to go back to our image from earlier; all the hinges have to be lined up, everything has to be right, and just so. Only then, yes – walk through that door; Mozart wants you to.

The Opera Queen is entirely self-funded.
If you would like to make a donation, please go here.

Waldemar Januszczak: Telling Stories Of Art “In Ways That Connect With People’s Lives”

Among the many unexpected delights of lockdown life has been the opportunity to connect with people from the worlds of media and culture, and sometimes, the two combined in one. Waldemar Januszczak is art critic for The Sunday Times as well as a documentary maker with numerous television specials to his name. Those programs, which have been produced for over two decades, reveal immense curiosity for the ever-evolving, all-encompassing universe of culture, and each is presented with humour, gusto, and incredible if equally approachable intelligence. Waldy, as he’s known online and through his entertaining podcast with art historian Bendor Grosvenor, first came to my notice in 2015; though I’d read his work for years, it was Waldy’s four-part series on the so-called Dark Ages that caught my attention. Broadcast on a local channel across four Monday evenings at the height of summer, the series (from 2012) came at a particularly challenging time that year, having lost my mother in July and endured severe illness and multiple surgeries on my own before and after that. The nagging questions, in both personal and professional spheres, of who I was without the central figure of my music-loving mum loomed extraordinarily large; I would stare at the works of Louise Bourgeois and Frida Kahlo in books and online for hours, trying to glean some sense of order (beauty seemed too far-off and impossible to hope for), some sense of understanding, to a world rendered hazy, tilted, skewed, strangely airless. I would go to my own easel and try to draw or paint; I would sit at the computer, and no words would come. Who was I, outside of being this person’s daughter? Who was I, outside of this prison of a body I felt trapped in? Who was I, with these hands, which held my mother’s as she passed away, which held pencils and brushes, which typed out so very many words-words-words that seemed to affect no one and nothing at all?

Waldy’s work – his friendly presentational style, his enthusiasm, his clear thirst for knowledge – helped provide some clues. The full  of the series (The Dark Ages: An Age Of Light) was precisely the feeling imparted through the experience of watching the series at that point in time. It was as if a great spotlight was being shone on not only early Christianity and the Middle Ages, or indeed its related iterations, forms, and expressions, but along the way I, myself, was experiencing history and related notions of darkness, light, and all manner of shade and shadow between. By showing a new way to look at the past, the series, and Waldy’s work more broadly, provided an inspiring way of perceiving present and possible futures. The approach the writer/filmmaker takes to his work (one which, as I said at the start, blends smarts, humour, knowledge, and approachability) makes him a natural storyteller. Starting out at the University of Manchester as a student in art history, Waldy went on to become art critic, and subsequently arts editor of The Guardian. He worked in a variety of capacities across the BBC, and has, according to his own (quite humorous) biography, “since popped up pretty much everywhere where a radio dial can reach.” In 1989 he became commission editor for arts at Channel 4 (a time, which, he explains, was immensely fruitful in terms of providing future inspiration to his own broadcasting pursuits), and in 1993 also was put in charge of music at the channel, and subsequently began annual broadcasts from Glyndebourne – not to mention a little festival called Glastonbury.

That same year saw him become art critic for The Sunday Times, where he has been ever since. Twice voted Critic Of The Year, he co-curated a show at the British Museum in 2008 where modern and ancient sculptures were shown side by side, inspired by his own series on sculpture from four years earlier. Making films since 1997 with his own company, ZCZ Films, Waldy’s artistic explorations have been wide-ranging and ambitious: countries (Japan, Kazakhstan, America), concepts (politics, night), artists (Picasso, Gauguin, Michelangelo), religio-historical depictions (Mary Magdalene), and eras (the Renaissance, Baroque, Rococo). Along with writing about contemporary art issues, including pieces on art collectives, the creative and spiritual meeting in abstraction (specifically the work of Hilma af Klint;  both March 2021), the Turner Prize, the symbolic power of a show focused on textiles (both May 2021), and how COVID has changed the art world (January 2021), Waldy has also written touchingly personal pieces – about the father he never knew, and about his battles with weight. Those writings are sincere and visceral, but they bear no trace of the sort of overwrought sentimentalities which so often characterize such works in the digital era; rather, they are the rich and (more than occasionally) spicy ingredients which constitute a person who is unafraid to be his own culture-loving, knowledgeable, opinionated, funny, vulnerable, unpretentious, immensely real self.

Such qualities may go a ways in explaining his presence on this website, for while Waldy does not work in opera, he embodies the very qualities so vital to the classical world, especially at this point in history. I referenced his work last year in an essay, and I’ve come to feel in the time since that his is a presence and a talent wholly needed, as various cultural worlds move away from lockdown status and toward some kind of normalcy. For while brilliance  does indeed hold a place in the classical world, authenticity, compassion – humanity – matters more, in this, our brave (and hopefully better) new world. We connected on Twitter (very brave new world indeed), over what I seem to recall was my love of the work of performance artist Ulay. (If you know of and/or like the work of Marina Abramović but have never heard of Ulay… please amend; his work holds extraordinary significance and beautifully poetic power.) Amidst the variety and ambition of Waldy’s pursuits, it seemed important to ask him, first and foremost, what he thinks of himself as: writer or broadcaster? His answer wasn’t particularly surprising, but his warmth and good humour, which carried throughout the course of our near-half-hour exchange, was a welcome and hopeful sign for post pandemic culture, and the people who love it.

You balance writing with broadcasting and documentary-making, but I’m curious what you call yourself.

An art critic, that’s what I’d like written on my grave. But right from the beginning, I’ve managed to do two things at once. When I was younger I was a student in Manchester, and I did this thing for radio, a student’s hour – I got roped into it – and someone at the BBC heard it, so I got working on the BBC doing a radio program when I was still a student, and it was out of pure luck. At the same time I was writing for Time Out; I’d do things for them and someone from The Guardian came across it and asked me to apply to them, so to cut a long story short, I’ve always done broadcasting and always done writing and the two have managed to keep going in parallel all the way through. I’m very lucky, and I made a step into television, but what I really like is looking at art and writing about it, which is what being a critic is – it’s not about being right or wrong with your opinions; you simply want to look at art, and to write about it.

Your integration of education and entertainment feels natural without being reductive.

I’ll put it simply: I’m an art lover. From my earliest memory, anything joyful involved cutting out pictures of famous paintings and pasting them, in my little cubby hole I had under the stairs – I’d paste stuff on the wall. I’ve always taken great pleasure from looking at art. I don’t understand why everyone else in the world isn’t that excited about art – it baffles me. In the UK we have these nature programs and people are happy to watch two frogs having sex or see beautiful butterflies in the air, or whatnot, for literally hours on end – millions will watch that – but put on something about a Raphael painting, which is also a thing of great beauty, or something about a sculpture by Bernini, or some great piece of architecture, and they tune out in the millions. I just don’t get it. It’s been this battle, always for me, to try and bridge that gap, to try and share this idea that art is interesting, exciting, and above all, a human achievement. It is my mission to try and tell stories of art in ways that connect with people’s lives. That’s all I ever tried to do. I don’t set out to be an original thinker necessarily, or to be necessarily different, I just set out with the firm belief that everybody should be able to talk about art in ways that involve or interest them, and that communication about it is what counts.

I like how you pull things away from being purely academic into a very direct and often sensuous relationship with art. I might be daunted by the artists and their related histories but watching your stuff, I don’t feel daunted at all.

That’s a real compliment, thank you. I’m so glad to hear that, because that is what I want to do. Many years ago now I did have a job in formal television, I was the commissioning editor for music and art programming at Channel 4. So for the eight years I was there, I commissioned other people to make art programs, and I watched what they did and how they did it. And I became more and more determined and experienced in the field myself, and determined to not do what they did. The thing I least like in any kind of writing about, or making films about art, is what you’re talking about, this sense of art being something difficult, some kind of homework, that not everybody can get or understand. A lot of the language of documentary filmmaking emphasizes that aspect, with these added tropes: the music that isn’t very cheerful or it is atonal and difficult; there is speaking about stuff in ways that don’t really mean anything – if people don’t know what they really want to say, they usually use twenty words instead of one, because it creates an illusion of knowledge, authority, and experience. So when I gave up being a manager of other people’s work and began making my own documentaries again, I made rules; there were things I knew I wanted to do, and those rules are all to do with this thing you’re talking about. I want people to learn stuff and enjoy it – I’m not there to preach or look down on them if they don’t know something. It’s been the experience of watching other people do this that has driven me to that.

But you combine this knowledge with your strong personality – I wonder how much that draws people in, so it’s not solely “Oh, a doc about the Renaissance” but “Oh, Waldy is presenting a doc on the Renaissance…” 

I think one of the things is, I’m Polish, I’m not English, as you can tell from my name, and we’re a different breed you know? Polish people are not like English people; we have a different way of speaking and expressing ourselves. And in television and the BBC especially, there’s a very specific type of person that works there, fits into that culture, and succeeds, and someone like me comes along, and I’m the other, I’m different in almost every way. One of my sins is I like eating, a lot, so I’m chunky, and in television, especially these days, you don’t see chunky people, they go for the slim, pseudo-intellectual from Cambridge, so I stuck out there, because I am different and I’m not afraid. And, I think I’m confident in my knowledge. That’s one thing I can say of myself: I love art so much I’m constantly researching it, seeing it, loving it, and if you’re confident in your knowledge there’s nothing to be afraid of. So I try to find new ways of delivering material. I’ve always wanted to do that.

What I’ve noticed is that people remember things from the films, and what they remember surprises me often. In one of the things I made years ago, about the Baroque, there’s a scene where I’m looking at a ceiling in Rome, and I decided to do the camera shot lying on my back, because that’s the only way to look at it. If you want to see it properly, you lie on your back. It was a BBC series, and all the BBC people said, “You can’t lie on your back, you have to stand up and look authoritative on television!” So there are these funny things that do tend to bother some people but they’re not done for gimmicky reasons, I do them because I want to convey my excitement and experience in looking at stuff.

But that humanizes the art in the process, and that’s what is so often needed in the culture world. But it’s questionable if that style is supported by the people in charge…

That’s the point, yes – and arts programming does not get enough support anywhere. It’s a hard graft, getting the commissioning to do stuff. You know, I can’t tell you how many programs I’d love to be making right now; we don’t get the numbers to compete with the shows like reality television or the cooking shows, we don’t get the numbers they do because partly, in the past, arts programs have presented themselves as this thing you referenced, and that put a lot of people off. That’s a hard history to shift – a lot of people remember this sense of being talked down to, boringly, and they don’t want to see that. Of course what we want is everybody dying to turn on the television to watch, but it’s a tough ask because of that history; when you say something is “arty” there’s’ an awful lot of people who turn off, immediately. That word alone puts them off, and it’s one of the battles.

But do you think that tide might change now?

I’d like to hope so. I don’t know! I’ve not had a chance to find any evidence yet, but I do think the pandemic is having and will have a profound impact on the future, and I think it will be very hard to unlearn the joy of being at home and to not be imagining things for yourself. The pleasures we’ve had from this situation – as terrible as it’s been – have been things relating to people being in the position of having the time to examine the basics. And they’ve found new outlets for their attention, whether through television or podcasts or whatever. My own podcast, we only did it initially to do something during lockdown, but loads of people have said they’ve enjoyed it, so there is hunger for art, and an opportunity to take advantage of that hunger, but whether broadcasters will help us out with that is another question; they are not interested in changing the way people think about art, they have other fish to fry. But I’m optimistic.

One good thing is that my work has reached a much wider audience and that’s not to do with Covid, but the way television has gone everywhere with the preponderance of satellite channels. It used to be the only people who recognized me in the street were people who watched the BBC, but in the time when things eased between lockdowns last year, I remember going out and there were about sixty South Korean people who came rushing toward me in the street shouting, “Hey Waldemar!” They’d seen me on television there. So the international aspect of all that (interest) was very encouraging. I have a theory that in every country there are a million people who might be interested in art who, years ago, you had no chance of speaking with, but now there’s a chance, so add a million people up in every country – and that’s a lot of people interested in art. That’s encouraging.

And you have an audience on Twitter

I love Twitter – you hear other voices there. And the best thing about it is the reactions! For all we know, no one will ever read what I write formally, but on Twitter, people get back to you, and I love a good argument; I’ll argue with anyone, anywhere, on Twitter or elsewhere for that matter. So I’ve found (social media) fruitful. Some things I’ve done have been so pleasing. During the lockdown I ran this art thing with kids; people did homeschooling when the schools were closed, and, well, what could be more homeschooling-esque than art, really? People were drawing away, and so I’d set them little tasks, and there were these fantastic responses, they were really pleasing, these kids, 8, 7, 6 years old, drawing away and sharing their work. The other day we had David Hockney on the podcast and he said something wonderful: “why would anybody not want to draw? Try telling a 3 year-old kid not to draw!” It’s a thing we all have; everybody has that instinct, and so I had this forum where kids could express that during lockdown.

I loved that series (as did many), especially as someone without kids. That series was actually the point where I lost my patience with people who dismiss social media; for some of us, that’s the only way we can see that kind of thing. It’s our window on a different world.

Well gosh, you’d be horrible not to like this kind of thing, and to just dismiss it because of where you saw it! And it’s worth remembering that so many artists have nourished themselves on memories of childhood as well, and that Twitter is a great vehicle for expressing and sharing that sort of stuff. If you’re someone who comes up with lots of ideas, it can be a great forum for expressing them, and for promoting them. I find it very alive. With all these hours of daytime we had because of the pandemic, a lot of times in the day, you’d be in the office, alone, twiddling thumbs; you’d go on Twitter and find someone to talk to. I’d see these nice people writing in from Scotland and Australia and New Zealand, and that (experience of communication) was liberating and very pleasing.

It’s how we connected too! I want to feel reading your various exchanges makes me a slightly smarter person. 

You’re pretty smart as it is, so don’t worry about that! I’m so pleased we’ve connected, and with others too, I’ve done so much during lockdown. It’s nice to talk. That’s what it’s about.

How has all this connecting online changed your approach to your work, or… has it?

I don’t know how much it’ll change my approach in terms of my bread and butter work with The Times – with that, I do what I always do: see shows and write about them. But I have made a lot of new friends. One thing that Twitter is really good at is supplying you with information: you ask a question, you get a lot of responses. I had a film about Michelangelo on Sky Arts out recently and posted something relating to obscure arguments about biblical translations – the kind of stuff no one is into except me and a few biblical scholars, or so I thought! – and got so many responses from so many people. It was such fantastic information! You have to be really in the world of bible studies to know about these things, but it was so exciting to learn these things. So it can be a fantastic forum for education, for all of us, and more broadly, I think it’s given lots of silver linings to this terrible, terrible time, which we are now hopefully coming out of.

The Opera Queen is entirely self-funded.
If you would like to make a donation, please go here.
vinyl, record, album, Mahler, Das Lied von der Erde, Klemperer, Ludwig, Wunderlich, Philharmonia, Warner

Essay: Coming Back To Live, Maybe

“There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow”, so says Hamlet, in Act 5 Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s famous play, and indeed, the phrase holds several painful truths for our times. The sad news of the passing of mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig at the weekend was met with a chorus of loving tributes and tender memories. That such an event occured amidst the hodge-podge of COVID-forced closures and reopenings inspired numerous listenings of her past work and moments of melancholy if vital contemplation.

Music, and the will toward its live presentation, has taken on a potent symbolism amidst pandemic; that will never really went away in certain places, while in others it has vanished entirely. Marketing buzzwords (“pivot” and “experience” and “reimagine”) seem to be clothing a nifty, selfie-snapping holographic Emperor I’m not sure I’m ready to applaud. As digital producer Jon Jacob highlights in a recent blog post, the way certain forms of music are perceived colors large swaths of its current presentation and much-awaited in-person iteration. The past year has forced a much closer connection to sounds and sights, simultaneously solidifying and blurring our relationships to entertainment, escapism, imagination, and immersion. Thus has music – sound as much as its visual counterpart – become far more immediate and distant, heightening consciousness of directed attention and specifically in relation to one’s perceptions of time. Neuropsychologist Marc Wittmann explores this issue in Felt Time: The Science Of How We Experience Time (The MIT Press, 2017; translation Erik Butler):

Where full attention is lacking, intensive experience is impossible. […] Presence is not simply a matter of mental focus; it also concerns the corporeality of the moment. The experience of presence occurs when body and mind, space and time, constitute a unity: here and now.”
(Chapter 3, In the Moment: Three Seconds of Presence)

Rather ironically, I have yet to see Wiener Staatsoper’s new production of Parsifal directed by Kiril Serebrennikov with Jonas Kaufmann and Elina Garanca; Wagner himself decreed that his final opera should, as Bachtrack‘s Mark Valencia succinctly put it, “be reserved exclusively for the Bayreuth Festspielhaus in order to avoid the “Entweihung” (sacrilege) of merely entertaining opera-goers.” Those of us who thrive on the experience of the live experience in all its sensual glory have been (continue to be) forced to gawk at a glassy, glowing image ready-made for entertaining diversion. The immediacy of live art is now mediated through headphones, screens, speakers. Occasionally there is the unwelcome noise pollution of traffic and neighbours seeping through thin, uninsulated walls and ventilation shafts. Pressing hands against earphones or speakers does not, in any way, fade ugly circumstances out and bring something better back in, but oh, the intention is good, and surely that must count for something.

Intention is what seems to be guiding many of us now, for good or bad, and the most seemingly simple acts are, paradoxically, sometimes the most heroic; such is oft-contradictory nature of the times. Entering a big-box store pharmacy to get my first vaccination last week, I longed to hear some kind of music that wasn’t the determinedly busy-buzzy rock-pop every store seems to broadcast. (It seemed wistful to want for the days of Muzak, and yet.) As I tried not to be alarmed at the full parking lot and number of shoppers (how is this acceptable but attending – giving –  a chamber concert, indoors or outdoors, is not?), a fashionably-attired mother-daughter team passed within inches of me, the younger member giving me a disdainful stare as I sat perched on the edge of a chair within a specially-marked area of tape around its perimeter. I stuck out my legs thereafter, feet touching tape, toes beating out a hurried, pseudo-tap “La donna è mobile”, a bit of comical suburban self-soothing. It brought to mind memories of my own mother shopping at a certain supermarket because the owner would always put on opera at her visits; she would merrily bob her head along to that very aria as she picked up the week’s supplies. Not everyone has such (supposedly) fancy tastes, I realize, but then, my mother would say that classical music isn’t fancy.

“That’s stupid,” she once observed of the propensity to label classical music as something solely for elite tastes. “Just sit there and listen.”

It wasn’t Verdi but Mahler which was floating through the brain, or rather, heart, that day of my first vaccination. The sounds of Das Lied von der Erde came floating in and out of the ears, its closing lines undulating like multicolor waves against the aisles of colorless boxes within view:

Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!
Die liebe Erde allüberall
Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt

Aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig
Blauen licht die Fernen!

Ewig… ewig… 

A picture of mezzo soprano Christa Ludwig came into mind’s eye, not of her performing this work, but from her final concert in Vienna in 1994; the poise, confidence, and grace were buoys against those long, grey aisles, and the prick of a needle behind a closer door moments later. Just sit. Just listen.

I do not recall the first time I ever heard  Ludwig’s voice, it was simply present, like oxygen – sensitive, feeling, alive. It was the famous 1964 Warner Classics recording of Das Lied von der Erde (featuring Ludwig together with Fritz Wunderlich and conductor Otto Klemperer) that led me back to a classical path I had strayed from for over a decade. In NPR’s tribute to Ludwig, music writer Anne Midgette notes that “If you want to sing German, you could do no better than to listen to Ludwig, who managed to sing German art songs with tremendous nuance and feeling, but without the sort of preciousness that even some very great people get in that repertory.” The nuance Midgette pinpoints to extends to Ludwig’s performances of  formal lieder. Ludwig’s phrasing, pauses, careful breaths, coloring, that tremendous control and modulation – there is so much technique to be found and (rightly) marvelled at, whether in opera, art song, or orchestral work – but there is also a total understanding of the material and its layered subtexts. Ludwig knew the lines well enough to know she could draw – really, really well – outside of them, and she trusted both her onstage colleagues and her audiences to follow her along on those journeys. To be confident about your choices as an artist is one thing; to be confident about showing such authenticity, as a woman and a public figure, is quite another.

In her wonderfully-titled memoir (“In My Own Voice”, Limelight, 2004), Ludwig wrote that “(c)ourage is needed to reveal one’s own feelings in interpretation and not tell the audience with raised forefinger: “The composer wanted it like this, and no other way.”” There must be room for that flow and confidence, but oh, what an uphill battle it can be for an aging woman to cultivate either (or both) of them within the confines of contemporary (especially digital) culture. Courage, to paraphrase Ludwig, has indeed been needed. I stood at my easel this past weekend, for the first time in almost a year, and rather magically, I didn’t hear the mewls of insecurity which so often (and loudly) screamed; energy goes where attention goes, and the direction of it, like surgical incision, must be precise, flow allowed without judgement. Leaving doors open means allowing a spiritual kind of lüften; thus emanating from the carefully-placed speakers on Saturday was Die Frau Ohne Schatten, Strauss’s 1919 metaphysical opera about creation, connection, choice, and unique identity. Christa Ludwig sang in the very first Met presentation of this opera back in 1966, as the Dyer’s Wife, alongside then-husband Walter Berry as Barak. My first time seeing this opera live was in 2013, a conscious if rebellious (and ultimately life-changing) decision to skip a graduate school class.

The memory of that live experience still washes over me, a wet, warm, salty blanket of timbres and textures and tones, and instead of drowning, my fins make a happy, flapping return; I’ve been swimming upstream ever since, and over the past six years, negotiating an ocean of loss. Learning to live with less (people, opportunities, money, food, space, fun, conversation, closeness, trust, touch) has meant learning to be more careful in the direction  of energy. I listen (read, watch, speak, and write, I hope) in very different ways than in early 2020, and relistening to Ludwig’s work recently, I was struck by the extent to which everything – the whirl of fans within, the din of traffic without – simply stopped. Her “ewig” is here, for us, for me, for this moment, and, somehow, feels hyper-concentrated: forever, right now, stay present, that voice entreats.

And so, reapproach, recalibrate, reimagine: buzzwords for the era of coronavirus, advice for the will to return to culture; fortitude for colouring outside the same old lines. One has to trust one’s instincts; if others choose to follow, so much the better. Defy augury, that voice continues to whisper, the readiness is all.

The Opera Queen is entirely self-funded.
If you would like to make a donation, please go here.
Top photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

Lecturing, Improvising, And Russian Piano Music: A Chat With Marina Frolova-Walker

piano, keys, keyboard, music, instrument, playing, hands, fingers, sound

Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without permission.

Toward the end of her life my mother would chide me for what she perceived as prolonged screen time. “You are always at that damn computer,” she’d sigh, “but I suppose you have to think about your audience and what they’d like to read.” What with everyone spending longer and more concentrated time in front of screens amidst the current coronavirus crisis, the lines between education, entertainment, and enlightenment can be fraught indeed. As an educator and writer, I frequently have to balance my desire to share information with a deeply-held urge to entertain, and then be able to skillfully juggle the added ball of measured impact. Those of us whose work is largely based in or around the internet (i.e. writers, artists, musicians) are at the mercy of ever-changing algorithms; we want to have our work seen, but we want to keep our voices and ideas intact. Playing to the desired young audience many classical institutions now eagerly pursue should, I suppose, be a priority, but playing to such an audience is not easy when you are no longer young yourself, not comfortable changing the nature of your work (or its presentation), and have an innate awareness that it is not desirable (or very dignified) as an aging woman with highly specialist passions and specifically artsy tastes, to attempt to compete with young/cute/sexy/etc. And yet, to note one’s work being read, shared, engaged with, and sense it is having an impact – it is gratifying. To play to the algorithm, or not to play to the algorithm; this is the question.

This juggling act can become even more complex when it is one’s modus operandi to impart what you feel is vital information whilst providing a modicum of inspiration which might (possibly, hopefully) encourage independent exploration, on and off the screen. Gresham College has been able to do all of these things, with incredible style and success, specifically through its Russian Piano Masterpieces series, featuring Professor Frolova-Walker and pianist Peter Donohoe. Introduced in September 2020, the series consists of what can only be described as lecture-conversation-concerts – in-depth, one-hour explorations of the history, structure, harmonics, and socio-economic-creative contexts of composers and their respective (if oftentimes linked) outputs. Frolova-Walker specializes in Russian music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and has published, lectured and had her work broadcast on BBC Radio 3; along with being Professor of Music History and Director of Studies in Music at Clare College, Cambridge, she is a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2015, she was recognized for her work in musicology and awarded the Edward Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association. Peter Donohoe, CBE, is a celebrated international pianist who, since his winning the 1982 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, has worked with a range of conductors, including Yevgeny Svetlanov, Gustavo Dudamel, and Sir Simon Rattle. He has appeared at the BBC Proms no less than twenty-two times, and is steeped in the music of the composers who are featured in the series, though he also has vast experience with the music of Tchaikovsky, whose music Frolova-Walker had also wanted to include as part of the series, as she explains below.

The wonderfully easy rapport between Frolova-Walker and Donohoe – their mix of playfulness, intelligence, insight, experience, and genuine love of the material – makes the series a special event amidst pandemic gloom, and their impressive viewing numbers seem to confirm this. Algorithm or not, the series has hit a nerve with numerous classical-loving, culturally starving viewers; newcomers and old hands alike have been tuning in faithfully these past six months and interacting with good-humoured ease, judging (if one dares) from the comments shared and exchanged during live broadcasts. Indeed Frolova-Walker and Donohue do have their sizeable and frequently overlapping fan bases, but it’s heartening to note the embrace with which those fans have greeted a virtual presentation, and just how welcoming the community has been to newcomers. It was something of a thrill to chat recently for thirty minutes with Professor Frolova-Walker, whose work and style I have long admired, and to discuss not only the series itself, but wider ideas about classical music’s youth appeal (or not), how and why fashion intersects with events (or not), and the steep digital learning curve experienced by educators and artists alike over the past twelve months. The next presentation in Russian Piano Masterpieces is scheduled for Thursday, March 25th (at 6pm GMT), and explores the music of Sergei Prokofiev; the following presentation (the final one in the series) is on May 20th, about Dmitri Shostakovich.

How and why did this series come about?

Good question! When I applied to Gresham College I secretly was hoping I could get Peter to collaborate with me. Gresham College has been so proactive in using a different venue they don’t usually use, because we needed a piano. About a year ago we found out they managed to secure it, and I was absolutely delighted because it’s such a wonderful venue, everything is there; of course we couldn’t imagine how it would turn out, because it was planned as a live event, always. It was *never* supposed to be online. I mean, the online presence of Gresham College lectures was always an afterthought – it’s not the main thing, so you shouldn’t imagine we planned it as an online series at all – but emotionally it started with this great feeling of despair that we could only get 15 people. The next time we couldn’t get anyone, and then we got used to it. Now we’re just grateful for the opportunity, even if it’s in an empty hall! Really, it’s been a learning curve.

I would imagine part of that curve has involved upping technological skills, as has been the case with so many in the classical world.

I’m not sure I can claim anything in that field, really! The big moment was when, a year ago exactly, I was told I would have to do my other course, my Diaghilev lecture series, online; that was really… I was in complete panic, because basically I’m a person who draws energy from the audience. About 50% of my energy comes from the audience, from improvising in front of an audience, and in seeing their reactions. And suddenly, to not have this energy… I thought, “I can’t do this; I can’t write out text and read it. That isn’t me. I can’t do it properly!” So that was I think the worst, the steepest learning curve. It was primitive what I used – I just recorded myself and it was edited by someone else, but I had to actually speak to the camera and still have it be lively.

Marina Frolova-Walker, Professor, Gresham College, lecture, musicology, portrait, Russian

Photo via Gresham College

I find you very engaging – knowledgeable, passionate, with a really good understanding of pace and structure; I wonder if that’s because you have an artist’s understanding of the role of audience already.

It’s just something that was given to me. I think it’s one of the few gifts that I *was* given. Really, it’s not a gift of speaking coherently at all! But there’s something about connecting with an audience, which I was able to do since I was 19. I did my first lecture at that age, at a college in Moscow, and there were these students completely bored; they were basically forced into this room, it was their cultural program, they had to be there, and I was talking about Bach, and something just clicked at a certain moment, and they seemed to be really enjoying it so it was an opening. And I realized, “I want to do this” – but I don’t know what I do or how. It is just something I suppose I am predisposed to doing. And I’m sure I could learn to do it better, but I wouldn’t know how.

There has been a learning curve for everyone; my own output has been transformed and I’ve had to learn to release the need to know the immediate impact of my work on others.

It has been difficult, doing a series of undergrad lectures in an empty room, and there’s no connection! The previous year I was doing them so much better because I had the power of the audience. But what can you do?

Nothing. But it’s so hard sometimes…

It is!

… but things like your series help. How did you choose these composers and which pieces of music to feature in each segment?

When I was choosing which six to feature, it was very difficult because I had at least seven I wanted, but because I knew I’d be working with Peter, I looked at what he’d recorded and would play or remember, to bring it back to mind. One that is missing is Tchaikovsky; I would’ve loved to have had the music of Tchaikovsky as well, because Peter has a wonderful recording of his Grand Sonata and it’s a very I think undervalued work – people think it’s very loud and goes on forever, and I think it’s wonderful! So yes, Tchaikovsky had to fall off, but generally you know, I had some ideas of stories I could tell about some particular works, but then very often Peter would say, “Well let’s do this instead” and though it’s not what I planned it works perfectly, because there is no audience, and it’s not a concert. So it makes more sense to break things up, I think, and show different pieces in different ways.

Part of that method involves you and Peter trading various moments; how do you and Peter decide on these trade-offs in speaking, or do you just wing it?

I think you can guess!

I want you to tell me.

I think he believes in improvisation as much as I do, and you do, probably.

I do.

Right. So there is a certain amount of preplanning, but I think the interesting thing about this, and my thought behind it was, I’ve always known the way musicologists talk about music is very different from the way performers talk about it; I discovered that very early on when I travelled with a quartet. I was supposed to give a lecture about Shostakovich’s 8th Quartet and then they’d play it; on the train (with quartet members) I was telling them my ideas and they were like, “Wow, we would’ve never thought of it in this way!” and some of them I know, like other performers, find some of these things weird. So I’m kind of… I know that some of the things musicologists say about music are completely opaque, and possibly the other way around is true as well, so these are two different approaches, and my idea was to see whether they can go together and whether people in the audience can gain a third thing which might emerge. As to what is working or not, it is not for me to judge.

Peter Donohue, pianist, performer, artist, music, classical

Photo via Gresham College

So musicologists, performers, and audience are in this interesting triangulation of musical reception and experience within the context of live experience specifically; where do you see the role of online presentation?

My idea, my vision for it, is that in principle (the series) can grab the attention of someone who is not into piano music, who is not into music at all, who doesn’t read notation or know many things about this, that they would get something out of it, maybe very different things from what what you could get out of it, or what my students would get out of it, or my colleagues would get out of it. Ideally I would like that *everyone* will get something out of it, and that’s why I think also, this series is so multilayered; those who, say, want to do a project on Shostakovich’s piano music, can watch it and stop and look at the slides, and get much more out of those slides than during the lecture itself, and download the transcript – which of course is not really the actual transcript, because I wrote it before the lecture, but it has references on things we cover. There is depth in it, and depth in varied slides. I don’t have time to address everything when we’re presenting it live, and especially when it’s an improvised performance, but I am secure the content is there, and if somebody wants to get at it in a deeper way, they’d be able to.

Do you imagine your potential audience and write to that, or… ?

You get a little bit of feedback on things, not ever, of course, as you would like, but you get a bit, and I know that some of my former students for example who work in schools, show it to their pupils, who are A-level music students. I know there are music lovers who tune in, but there are also people who are just into Gresham College lectures overall – because Gresham College lectures are amazing. I started getting into them as well, for instance, I listened to a lecture on bell-ringing and mathematical patterns, and about 25 minutes into it I was completely lost, the mathematics side stopped making sense, it was too complicated – but I could still enjoy what I got out of it. It’s still valuable as an experience. My attitude to everything, basically, is it’s better to have a part of something and not be a purist, instead of having the attitude of, “I don’t understand this at all; I won’t bother getting into it.” I think it’s the same with classical music. When you first listen to a Wagner opera you get about 5% of it, then after 30 listenings you get maybe 20% of it; I think this is very important for people who want to get into classical and feel it’s too forbidding. It’s a reminder not to be too hard on themselves.

Having things laid out clearly, with intelligence and confidence, and letting people use their imaginations as well, is a good way to introduce the classical idiom overall, I have found.

Yes, I think it’s good too – I mean, notation is such a hot topic right now, but it’s why I use it. I think even for people who’ve never seen it before, it’s like a diagram: you understand it when (the piece) goes up and when it goes down, and that’s all you need to know. The time goes like this, you have these two axes like that; just from those elements, you can get quite a lot. You can see how many notes there are, how fast it goes – roughly – so with this very basic knowledge you can get quite a lot of comprehension, just by looking at two bars of music, even if you don’t know what it sounds like.

That’s just it, and then having the immediate experience of hearing Peter play what might be shown too...

It’s amazing. I think the last lecture we did Peter sight-read a piece just straight off the screen – the whole piece! It was so funny!

When I spoke to John Daszak about singing reductions he mentioned working with Peter on the Das Lied Von Der Erde piano reduction and how he found it louder than the full orchestration, and Peter’s playing in particular to be very full-on.

People who would have been in the room to actually hear the sound… it’s *astounding*. What a loss not to hear him live. Our little group from Gresham College has been obviously privy to this, and myself, and you realize this kind of piano playing is completely on a different level; there’s nothing in common between how I play the piano and how Peter plays the piano, it’s just a different thing. First of all the range of sound, the range of pianissimo to fortissimo is six times bigger – he can be very loud but he can be very quiet too – and also the control is amazing, I don’t know to what extent… we are in the hands of the technical team, so many things can go wrong, but really, the live-ness can never be replaced.

I hear your lectures and all I want to do is hear these pieces live.

That’s nice to hear! Maybe we’ll have a CD sale at the last lecture. There’s a tiny bit of hope that by the 20th of May we’ll have an audience, but we’re not worried about this now, we’ve gotten used to it the way one gets used to chronic illness or chronic pain, but it’s not something you want to necessarily have permanently. When the restrictions are lifted I think, people will realize what they were missing.

Some, but it’s different for everybody.

I think you know this well, that what we need to realize is that there are different generations who have very different relationships with online. My son, for example, was born online and he lives online, and to him, it’s different, so I’m sure, he would enjoy things in the real world, so to speak. His attitude to online things is *very* different, and for that young audience I think the idea of a short video or something that is not actually a full-scale lecture but a short video, really well done and well presented, professionally done, expensively done, is the best possible teaching aid. And I think he would prefer those things to reading books, to having live lectures, I have a suspicion that young people think very differently about these things.

But then when you get them in the concert hall or opera house they are quite shocked at what they’re hearing –in a good way, but shocked nonetheless. “What do you mean it’s not amplified?!” etc…

Oh, it’s amazing, yes! But here we get into the ritualistic side of it, and also I found out by talking to him, for example, what would prevent him from coming into the Royal Opera – I would always demand he would put on some smart clothes. I was shocked by this. He wants to hear the music but feels there is something alienating and hostile about the audience, and you know, he feels he can’t really wear normal clothes. And that’s something we have to fight. It really was shocking for me to hear that.

I find the correlation between dressing up and elitism bizarre; I dress up because I enjoy it, but I haven’t done it every single time I’ve attended an event.

I dress up as well – because I’m Russian, we tend to dress up, it’s normal to go out of the house to the bakery dressed up, so it’s a different attitude. There’s a big long explanation for it, I am sure – Russia never had a hippie culture, for example – so the idea of casual clothing is, for us, still a bit alien. For my son, who is 18 right now, he doesn’t want to make that effort, and also I think, if I meet someone who knows me and say, “This is my son” – he hates that, so that’s another reason he won’t hear a Wagner opera. But I said to him, “You can wear what you like and be completely separate from me” – and that was the pact.

So did he go?

He‘s seen the whole Ring cycle, and he knows it’s amazing – he could feel the fire in Walküre because he was in the 2nd row! He said, “I could feel the heat… !” Really, he loved it.

If you can get young audiences exposed like that even once, they’ll get it.

Some of them will come back, I think… some. But we need this kind of thing, of just going at all; we used to have this sort of cultural exposure in Soviet Russia. We used to have concerts for children, and for teenagers, and you had to go to them with your school – you had to go to a symphony concert, it was not a choice. And for 80% it meant nothing, but there would be that 20% who’d get completely hooked.

So your series feels like the next logical step for people who are curious, young or not…

I think that’s probably why I can do this so easily with Peter – he thinks the same; he’s very open, he can talk to anyone about these things without trying to create a mystique about any of it. I mean obviously there is a sense at some point where we say, “The rest we can’t explain because it’s magic, it takes you over” – but there are lots of things you can explain in an ordinary way, with very simple language, and that’s what we try to do.

The Opera Queen is entirely self-funded.
If you would like to make a donation, please go here.

Helmut Deutsch: “You Always, Even After Fifty Years, Find New Things”

Helmut Deutsch, pianist, memoir, klavier

Photo © Shirley Suarez

“There is a way to say something,” my mother used to remark, “a way you have to learn.” The best form of written and spoken expression, that is, combines elegance and honesty. This matters greatly if you hope to have people do as you wish, in the way you want them to, while still holding your own. It is an art which is in ever-evolving states of evolution in my own life.

For Helmut Deutsch, however, such an integration is a way of being, on stage and off. One of the most acclaimed lieder pianists of our time, Deutsch combines bluntness and a distinct, and it could be argued, old-world Viennese elegance, to his approach to the art-work-life trinity, and most wonderfully expressed in Memoirs Of An Accompanist (Kahn & Averill), published in English last year. The memoir was first published in 2019, in German, as Gesang auf Händen tragen: Mein Leben als Liedbegleiter (Henschel Verlag), a perfect title for a musician who indeed has the gift of carrying song as if made, alternately, of solid iron and the most delicate glass; knowing which touch to use when is a great part of Deutsch’s mastery. In a celebrated career spanning over five decades, Deutsch has honed his reputation of being one of the most intuitive and artful of pianists, a full partner to vocalizing cohorts in manifesting the meaning of the words which ground much of the work, and the sounds between and around them which allow such works flight.

A great many things have been written about Deutsch and his work, but since our chat last month, I have found myself, like Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, stymied for such words. What could possibly be written to capture such artistry? To listen is, as ever, simultaneously instructive and daunting; one is reminded, through the poetry of words and sounds, of the value of sitting in a place where silence is the only appropriate response. Indeed, I am a fan of lieder (as my past work probably demonstrates), and I am a writer, and I am a piano player (or was, and hopefully will be again soon); it is nevertheless impossible to parse the threads of these identities in experiencing the works of Schubert, Schumann, Strauss, Wolf, Brahms, Mahler (plus that of Goethe, Müller, Heine, Heyse, Morgenstern, Bethge) so intuitively performed. Such are the moments when intellect, instinct, and rather powerfully, curiosity, all magically, quietly meet. The pandemic era has forced one to make choices relating to the conscious endowment of attention; lieder has always placed large demands in this area, but the current times of forced isolation have allowed, at least on my own part, an even greater level of received power. There are no other breathing, coughing bodies to mediate reception of the artform – for good and for ill – but this directs and controls intensity of directed attention in ways I hadn’t quite expected; it’s made me listen to lieder in ways I could have never predicted, and deepened an ardent love, if also enforced occasional (if perhaps needed) distance from the quotidian. I can no longer put on Italienisches Liederbuch, for instance, without expecting to have the rest of the day vanish.

Deutsch’s meticulous attention to phrasing, his instinctual approach with singers, and his unforced musicality render such musical experiences deeper and broader, but simultaneously closer, more intimate. To listen to his work is to feel he is playing just for you, whether in a small space like a recording studio, or the vast expanse of the Bayerische Staatsoper. Listen to the clip below with Jonas Kaufmann (from December 2020), taped at that very spot; I had to sit in silence a full fifteen minutes after hearing it for the second, third, fourth times. This is artistry which requires concentration, consideration, digestion, and calls to mind the words of George Steiner, who wrote in Real Presences (Faber & Faber, 1989):

In a wholly fundamental, pragmatic sense, the poem, the statue, the sonata are not so much read, viewed or heard as they are lived. The encounter with the aesthetic is, together with certain modes of religious and of metaphysical experience, the most ‘ingressive’, transformative summons available to human experiencing. Again, the shorthand image is that of an Annunciation, of “a terrible beauty” or gravity breaking into the small house of our cautionary being. If we have heard rightly the wing-beat and provocation of that visit, the house is no longer habitable in quite the same way as it was before.

Perhaps, I can only add, it shouldn’t be, for such a transformation might be what lieder truly asks, if not demands.

This transformative power is one that Deutsch wields in both teaching as well as performance. His dual talents, as a teacher and an interpreter of lied, are long-standing, with twelve years of instructing composition, piano, and musicology at the Vienna Music Academy, and more than two decades as Professor of Lied interpretation and performance (Professor für Liedgestaltung) at Munich’s University of Music and Performing Arts, where he still gives classes, among other locales. His extensive discography includes recordings with some of the biggest names in the history of opera, many of whom (Peter Schreier, Brigitte Fassbaender,  Angelika Kirchschlager, Grace Bumbry, Yumiko Samejima, Camilla Nylund, Bo Skovhus, Matthias Goerne, Olaf Bär, Diana Damrau, Dietrich Henschel, Michael Volle, Piotr Beczala, and Jonas Kaufmann) enjoy their very own chapters in the book. It’s not surprising Deutsch’s career is one marked by close work with singers, considering the central role singing played in his own musical development. The son of music-loving scientists who often sang at home, Deutsch had an active life as a chorister and writes that “as a child, it was the most natural thing in the world to be involved with choral singing. The children’s choir school in my area of Vienna was based in my primary school, and once a year there was a large choral festival during which about a thousand children gathered on the stage of the large hall of the Konzerthaus – a mighty experience for a little boy. Piano playing came later.”

The memoir begins with the pianist’s memories of touring with baritone Hermann Prey – the good times, the bad, and everything between – and then proceeds to move chronologically, with a myriad of observations on working with singers, the differences in audiences, the pressures (or not) of various live and teaching experiences, notable variations in performing spaces, and some timely (and timeless) advice for page turners. And, lest you think there must surely be no suitable place for conductors in a book written by a lied specialist, think again: Herbert von Karajan is given mention early on, and in a particularly endearing way, as Deutsch recounts an incident from the Salzburg Festival, when he was a chorister in the Singverein of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien (Society of Friends of Music in Vienna), an active part of Austria choral life. Karajan, as then-Music Director of the group (forebears included Gustav Mahler and Willhelm Fürtwangler), was set to conduct a performance of Haydn’s Creation at the famed summer festival in 1965; Deutsch was called to step in to play piano during rehearsals. “Knees shaking, I stepped up to the podium, shook Karajan’s hand and sat down at the piano,” he writes. “I had never played a single note of the Creation.”  The honesty with which the overly-fast-tempo incident is recounted, along with his honest reaction (and Karajan’s), may well inspire empathetic stirrings among those of us for whom the red-faced reactions of screw-ups in front of people we admire still sting.

A similar if less positive reaction is just as valid applied to those people and situations with whom we simply didn’t click, artistically, intellectually, or personally. Throughout its nearly 200 pages, Deutsch lets loose a refreshing honesty with regards to certain situations and recordings – but he is elegant in his assessments, and when he does name names (which is rare), there is a didactic spirit attached: one might learn from this thing he writes of, as a young singer, or pianist, or simply keen music lover. He also dismantles various overused cliches (“breathing as one” being but one) and approaches to material. “Striving to please and do everything ‘properly’ actually gives a boring and pale idea of both the music and oneself,” he writes. Everything, in music and in memoir, is meant for betterment – of performance, listening, overall creative experience. Richard Stokes, who is Professor of Lieder at the Royal Academy of Music, provides a sparkling English-language translation for the Kahn & Averill publication. Such linguistic lucidity beautifully captures the nuances of Deutsch’s speech patterns and mental meanderings, those thoughts when expressed by artists so often tend toward the musico-historico-narrative. Sentimentality, which could so easily sugar over the tone, is wisely avoided in favour of an umami-like pungency which reveals both firmness of intent and intense artistic commitment.

We spoke back in mid-February, as Deutsch was preparing to do a series of masterclasses in Vienna.

Helmut Deutsch, pianist, memoir, klavier, book, buche, memoirYour memoir is especially notable for its candour; that’s a refreshing quality.

I try to be polite as well, but it’s a little bit risky. So many singers are still alive and working with me. I didn’t really offend anyone, I don’t think. Perhaps you know the famous memoirs of Gerald Moore, and of course I have read this 50 years ago and I reread it a few times now, and found one thing very remarkable, that all the singers he was accompanying when he wrote the book – Dieskau, Schwarzkopf, de los Ángeles – were gods, but the others who had passed, he was not so nice to them. I thought, what I tried, is to give a real balance of not glorifying everybody who is singing with me at the moment because we are all human beings and have weak points also. I tried to make this as balanced as possible.

Something fascinating you explore is the automatic understanding that can occur between you and certain singers…

… it’s especially the case if you’ve known them a long time – for as long as I’ve known Jonas Kaufmann, for instance. After thirty years now, we are like an old couple!

You can read each others’ minds on stage?

Exactly. And what I think is very important as part of that is watching a singer’s body language. Of course I know him well, so I’m aware that he has an incredibly long breath and where I would have to speed up for other singers, he would say, “No, don’t get faster!” I’m able to know that after so many many years… although I had the opposite of this experience, with some remarkable singers who wanted to discuss every detail: “Let’s do this” and “Let’s try out that”. And this is interesting, but sometimes you lose any spontaneity you might have had; when you have figured out all these solutions and think, ‘This has to be like that all the time”… this is boring in the end.

So you feel there is a point where the studying must stop and instinct has to take over… ?

Yes, precisely.

How does that instinct relate to the study of text – on the Gál album with Christian Immler, for instance, with the texts of poets like Christian Morgenstern?

It’s interesting with him – do you know he is extremely popular in Germany and Austria, but only for his humorous poems? The dark stuff is almost unknown.

Morgenstern, poet, writer, German

Poet Christian Morgenstern (1871-1914)

Why is that?

Because he was known as a humorist, so he’s extremely popular just for that. For the generation of my parents and for mine too, they – we – knew parts of his poems by heart, they were so popular. And somehow he was… the idea of the audience is that he’s a funny guy, but he *was* dark. And you are right, Gál’s music complements it with these serious things. There are no jokes in it!

How is Gál’s music different or unique for you as a musician?

He’s certainly coming from the tradition of Johannes Brahms, although it’s amazing you would not think he was composing most of these early songs in the time of Gustav Mahler – you can’t feel any influence of that. He was very traditional. I’m sure Christian Immler told you everything about this discovery of what his daughter had, that he didn’t want these songs published. I think it was only because he got very old and these songs were written more than a half century before, so as an old man he said, “Oh I have not the feeling for this anymore” – but he’d only published five of his songs out of all this material. And it was interesting to convince his daughter that this is music to print – finally she agreed, but it took a very long time.

What’s that like to play?

Gál must have been a good pianist because, I would not say it’s easy to play, but it’s pianistically written. For comparison, you can see even in Mahler songs he was a very good writer but he was not a pianist, so some of his parts are a little bit against the piano technique – but people like Schumann and Brahms, and also Strauss and Hans Gál, certainly played piano very well, the writing is very logical.

Christian said that you and he never discussed interpretation in examining and recording Gál’s work.

That’s right, we never did – and I think we had no great discussions about such interpretation because we both fell in love with the songs when we saw the manuscripts, and we both had the same feeling that this is very good music, very precious. Christian is also one of these singers you don’t have to talk a lot with – there was not even discussions about tempo, as far as I remember, it was four, five years ago when we recorded it now, but there were no problems in terms of, “I see this different” or “I would like to do this much slower” or “This should be much faster” – no, it was chamber music on the very best level. On Modern Times we’d already done the known Hans Gál songs (then), and that was the start of this. Eva came to our concert (related to that album) in London and said, “Oh my father would have loved this” and I said, “What a pity he only wrote these five songs” and she said, “No no, there are many more!” And she invited us to see the songs, and we went through every manuscript for two days. He had good handwriting, very clear, and we are very lucky that, finally, with the help of the grandson (Simon), the whole thing worked.

Christian Immler, Helmut Deutsch, opera, classical, lieder, voice, piano, music, performance, Hans Gál

Christian Immler and Helmut Deutsch. Photo: Marcus Boman

So do you feel like an ambassador for his music?

Yes. You know the heritage of all his works is now in Vienna, and I hope they will do a little bit more for him now.

It’s interesting to think about composers like him, whose works are becoming more known, and reading about the reductions of famous works which you played when you were starting your piano journey. What, in your view, is the benefit to a young musician, of learning reductions?

I grew up with my very musical parents who were scientists, and I played a lot of four-hand music with my father. This was very important, because you learn, especially when you play the lower parts, in general your left hand is more important, and many little notes are not so important, so you must figure out the harmonies and the rhythms. And it’s totally different from learning a solo piano piece. In my young years it was still considered house music, that was still alive, because long-playing discs had just started and of course there was the radio, but it was quite usual to sit down and play Beethoven symphonies or to do a bit of sight reading – you got, in many cases, the essence of the piece much much more Later on I played, let’s say, more professional arrangements – for example, things specifically written for two pianos. Brahms wrote a lot of arrangements for two, or, one piano and four hands – all his four symphonies, the serenades, and many chamber music pieces, for instance. The symphonies I played on the piano, but in concert and really professional. It’s fascinating to do, because you think you know these famous four works almost by heart, and then you start playing and you are not… there’s the pure music, because you don’t have trombones and clarinets and strings; you have just this one instrument. It’s like seeing into a microscope; you see everything much clearer.

Of course it’s more fascinating with the orchestra, but to get to know a piece, to know it very well, to analyze it, you play it on the piano. I did an exam as an opera coach, so I studied starting with Mozart operas, Strauss and Wagner operas, and you are not, I don’t know the words… when you listen to a big orchestra you’re overwhelmed sometimes or many times by the instrumentation, by the use of instruments and their timbre – the brass or the solo flute or whatever – it doesn’t make you concentrate on the music only. But when you play on piano you get all the tones – in a good way. You are not disturbed, you are concentrating on the music and nothing else and you are not overwhelmed by that brass chord in a fortissimo or whatever. When you play rheingold on the piano, however, and I’m not a big Wagner fan, I must say, the music is very poor for many minutes and then of course comes the famous theme, and “Ah yeah, this is Siegfried’s theme!” but in-between there is not much, but Wagner was able to make everything interesting because of such great instrumentation work. On the positive side when you play Brahms symphonies you find out much more about the construction. It’s really fascinating. So I think Brahms, in his older years, said, “I’m not going to concerts anymore; I just will read the score of a Beethoven symphony and I enjoy it” – this is a little bit similar to playing on the piano only, and getting the essence and the main core of the music; you can adore it, or you can find out that, eh, it’s not everything so glorious, like in The Ring for example. But this is my very personal opinion.

Certainly there’s the opinion that certain things should not be performed in reduction, some things by Wagner, for instance; there’s a feeling we will just have to wait to hear those things live again now.

That’s right.

But that’s when the opportunity for lieder comes. You write in the book that Liederabend are not programmed so much, but, do you think now, in our pandemic era, it might be more?

I was feeling this in the last year because so many events were cancelled. I jumped in with Jonas very often – instead of Fidelio for instance, we had a recital. And somehow (the style of the music) fits or, it fits very much more with the isolation, the sense of intimacy – and I hope this will remain, even after the pandemic.

You write that Hermann Prey didn’t want people to look in the program books when he sang – ‘They will know the meaning of everything from my voice!’ – but I think it is vital to know the poetry and how the sounds relate…

Of course.

How extensively do you study texts yourself, even one you know well, before performances or recordings?

I must admit, first of all I started when I was fourteen, fifteen years old, I think. I wrote this in book, that I was a normal boy who was interested in sports and girls of course, but I was also reading a lot of poems, especially (the works of) Eichendorf and Heine and Goethe, and I fell in love with a lot of these poems; I only found out later that these are also songs: “Wow, these poems are composed of music already!” This was a shock in the best sense, in a very positive way. It was great! I must admit over the many decades I have to rethink the meaning of a poem very often and I do read, I read normally when I have a half hour before a concert and will be sitting in my dressing room; I’ll read the texts again. Also I know many of them almost by heart, but it’s the same feeling with the music, just the same: you find details in pieces like Winterreise or Dichterliebe. You always, even after fifty years, find new things, and this is very exciting. In the world of text, I am not so much at home, they are difficult texts and there are texts which seem to be very easy, very simple, but there is so much underneath and you can read and read again and again, and, “Oooh! Ah! There’s a double meaning! And there is a shift, a metaphor, that image…!”

With the great poems, sometimes I think there are great poems by Rilke, for instance, but he was not composed-to very often, it’s very difficult, the words … there’s so much music in the words already, that they don’t need music, or any kind of music doesn’t fit. Many times you have great songs written by more or less unknown poets too; if you look at Richard Strauss songs, (Julius) Bierbaum (1865-1910) for instance, is rather unknown, or mostly even forgotten. A poet like him was known in his time but not so much now, and he is survived only by these songs Strauss wrote. The quality of some of these songs with texts by more or less forgotten poets is really great, and some of them especially have a connection with the music. I didn’t really study German Literature professionally but it’s a permanent question: what did he really mean by that? And so on. When you teach twenty-something year-old (vocal) students, it’s so often the case that they didn’t think a bit about the words. They think about the voice, of course, and maybe sometimes the intonation, but you can feel from a singer very soon that he or she is thinking in terms of the meaning of a poem or single words, or that he or she wants a color which belongs to the meaning of these words, and sometimes you see there is no feeling for the material at all, and this is a permanent struggle when you teach, even with professional singers.

I was just going to say, sometimes there are singers who just churn it out, and it seems obvious they don’t really have an understanding or intimacy with the text; there’s output, and sometimes it’s impressive, but I can sense when there’s no input.

Exactly!

I appreciate your chapter in this regard where you write of your niece’s observations on Barbara Bonney in recital.

Yes, that was so interesting to see. My niece was fourteen or fifteen years old then and the reviews of the concert said, “Oh such wonderful interpretation!” But a child feels a lot. It was really impressive to hear her make such observations.

Her observations highlight the differences in listening quality between locales and contexts. Some of my musician friends have noted those differences too – they can pick it up right away, whether the audience is “with” them or not.

I totally agree, it’s very different from place to place. There are special audiences in Europe, in Wigmore Hall – that’s a very educated audience – and also in Vienna. You have people who have bought every series for forty years and are listening to sometimes the same pieces from the same (song) cycles for so long, and they are very critical. The big difference between London and Vienna in terms of audience is that the audience in the Wigmore Hall, in my experience, is rather cool when they don’t know the singer, but when it’s successful they are enthusiastic; the Viennese are not necessarily enthusiastic but they are much warmer from the beginning. It’s a case of, “Okay, you have your chance, we are happy to see a new face or hear a new voice.” But in London they are more critical. It’s amazing in the hall. It’s hundreds of recitals a year and the repertoire is much more than 50% in German – you are young, so there is time for you to learn German, Catherine!

The lessons continue…

Good, keep practising!

But, everyone has to have a starting point – for instance, I think it’s interesting you included a chapter on page-turners in the book. Why such a detail?

It’s a person who, in the best way, is not noticed; this is the ideal page turner. It’s someone the audience is not aware of as a third person. But really, I could have written fifty pages about this, because so much happens, it’s incredible. And I would say it makes a big difference if you are very close with this person. When you have the feeling she or he is criticizing, I’ve noticed… I have memories of recordings for example, I remember being in Frankfurt with a violinist, and we started with a piece which opens in a specific way, and my page-turner made a certain motion all the time. I said, “Is something wrong?” “No, what do you mean?” “You seem to dislike my tempo in this opening.” “In fact I do.” I said, “Okay, you don’t have to, but don’t show me, I’m not interested in your opinion.” And it’s not comparable to the situation between singer and pianist, but sometimes, if they are young people… they give me an atmosphere of being very interested and enthusiastic about a song or whatever, or, they can be judgemental. But of course I try to give some… humorous episodes. The importance of page-turners may disappear with tablets, maybe.

Or they may vanish because of continued performance restrictions. But perhaps now is also the perfect time for lieder, as you say, what with its mix of intimacy and intensity.

I am fully booked this year, but we are awaiting the next update from the governments in Austria and Germany. I am full with concerts in March and April and May, but we have no idea what is coming or not. It’s really frustrating, but I think we have the same situation everywhere. Master classes can happen online but I have in-person ones booked at the Vienna opera studio and in April in Munich. Inside these places everything is working, they are preparing a lot. Some places like Vienna and Paris they may only do one streamed performance and nothing else, like Carmen in Vienna and Aida in Paris – but they’re still working.

It’s heartening to observe this bit of cultural activity, however limited it is at the moment.

It is happening, and we have the possibility, especially for lieder and recitals, to go to 500 people in Munich and Vienna, maybe, depending on what the governments say. I was in Madrid recently with Jonas Kaufmann, at Teatro Real, and we had 800 people there; it’s a ⅓ of the capacity but it is still much better than nothing.

That’s a nice size for a lieder concert; the contrast between the immensity of a space and the intimacy of the music can sometimes be jarring…

… Ja, this is true, but the great singers are expensive! So (a small venue) is not practical anymore. When you think about what Schubert wrote, it was for a salon of thirty or forty people, and Schumann as well; the (trend of holding) lied recitals in big halls started very late. Now I’ve done stuff at the Met, and you can say it’s ridiculous, but on the other hand when almost 4000 people are listening to Mahler or Strauss songs… this is great. I remember going to the Musikverein at fifteen or sixteen years old, and I remember very well the recitals by Dieskau, I only had money for the very last row in the Second Gallery; I remember hearing some Schumann songs,and it being the very first time to do so, in this recital. This is almost sixty years ago now. I would say I was about eighty meters away from Dieskau, and… it worked. It was totally fascinating. So of course Dichterliebe or Winterreise were not written for a huge venue. But, on the other hand, when let’s say, famous people who must be paid, sing for, let’s say, Carnegie Hall and 2000 people, and there are five listeners there who say, “Oh, this was so exciting! I see there is in Alice Tully Hall an unknown singer but doing the same Dichterliebe; I want to go there”… well, there is progress! (Large venues) are good PR for the art form.

Kind of like live-streams; they’re not at all ideal but they’re PR for the art form, however temporary.

There is more music in private homes now – perhaps there no chance for anything live, only to put on a CD or to get concerts live-streamed… and this is better than nothing. So (the exposure) is, for this (classical) part of the world of music, a good thing. For now!

The Opera Queen is entirely self-funded.
If you would like to make a donation, please go here.

Christian Immler: “Maybe This Is The Time For The Smaller Things To Become More Known”

Christian Immer, stage, opera, music, classical, performance

Christian Immler in Der Freischütz, 2019. Photo: Julien Benhamou

One of the many unexpected if oddly welcome  blossoms from the current lockdown era has been an increase in the quality of listening. The teenaged neighbours’ shouts at a bleepy-bloop video game, the burrrrrr of a truck engine outside the window, the whirl of a fan; all tangle with the sounds emanating through my speakers at various times throughout the day. Sometimes it’s a distraction, and sometimes such noises are mere counterpoint; my quality of listening has, in any case, deepened in a way I couldn’t have foreseen twelve months ago. I want to think I will keep this heightened listening as a new normal unfolds, but I am scared of what such a gift (is it that?) might entail; the thought of returning to a live forum is both exhilarating and frightening. It’s strange to contemplate such a transformation, since I am already what could be called a close listener, and as a result, I don’t – can’t – usually play “background music” in performing most tasks, because whatever is intended to act as “background” tends to become foreground very quickly. I’ve lost count of the knife wounds to fingers and hands as a result of listening while making dinner, for instance; cooking and classical is not always a wise mix. I was a musician long before I was a writer, after all, and my love of words and music only intensified through the direct experience of being onstage in both musical and theatrical capacities.

Such elements doubtlessly have fuelled my love of lieder, an art form which demands close listening, and one I’ve written about in the past. Made famous by Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and especially Schubert, the art of song asks something quite specific of its listeners: an understanding of the text, combined with an imagination recalling theatre, and an appreciation of the role of sound. Scansion becomes (arguably is a key part of) comprehension as much as actual dictionary definitions; the feel of words in the mouth and tonal resonance of sound in the chest render an inner truth in which the sensual and the spiritual might blend. It is impossible to simply “churn it out” with such an art form. Lieder is not about immediate thrill or satisfaction, thrilling though some of it can be; rather, it is a slow burn, a stew of words, sounds, rhythms, and resonances, delivered via the simple bowl of voice and (usually) piano. There is nowhere to hide with the art form; soloists are utterly exposed, and, I would argue, so are listeners. Such vulnerability is part of lieder’s appeal. Schubert’s famous song cycle Winterreise (1828) has enthralled (and frightened) many a soloist, and is considered by many as a “Mount Everest” of the art form. The work has enjoyed multiple recordings and inspired various iterations; a “composed interpretation” by Hans Zender (1936-2019) from 1993, for instance, has been complemented with a creative choreographed version by Christian Spuck at Ballet Zürich. Lieder can be elastic, but its requirement – close listening – is still very much extant. Tenor Ian Bostridge has written in relation to Zender’s recomposed Winterreise, which could well be applied to the entire art form, that it is “a work that offers us a conversation – and sometimes a confrontation – between the past and the present.”

Hans Gál, composer, music, classical, 20th century

Hans Gál. Photo: Berthold Bing, http://www.fotorevers.eu/de/ort/Wien/1502/ – Israel National Library, Schwadron collection, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=17737088

That’s a notion wholly applicable to the work of Hans Gál (1890-1987), whose works are enjoying a deserved revival, with Hidden Treasure: Hans Gál’s unpublished Lieder (BIS Records) being part of this renewal. The album is a collection of 26 songs released this past January and featuring bass baritone Christian Immler and pianist Helmut Deutsch. Gál’s songwriting is itself a conversant with time and its passing, with touches of the past (Schumann and Brahms), the composer’s contemporary present (Zemlinsky, Strauss), and possible future (Stravinsky’s neoclassical compositions). Gál enjoyed great success as a composer in his native Austria and was awarded the Austrian Art Prize in 1915. His opera Die heilige Ente: ein Spiel mit Göttern und Menschen (The Sacred Duck: A Play With Gods And Men) was written in 1920-21 and premiered in Düsseldorf in 1923 under the baton of George Szell; it went on to enjoy productions in numerous German-language houses across Europe, and a special status as the first contemporary opera to be broadcast by Österreichischer Rundfunk (the Austrian broadcasting corporation). He became director of the Mainz Music Academy in 1929 on recommendations of both Wilhelm Furtwängler and Richard Strauss. With the Nazi rise to power, however, Gál, as a Jewish artist, faced censure. Die beiden Klaas (Rich Claus, Poor Claus), his fourth opera, was to have been staged as a double premiere (in Hamburg and Dresden) in 1933, but the piece, like many others, was cancelled. (It was only performed in 1990, in an English translation by York Opera.) Gál fled Europe in 1938, travelling to the UK; in 1940 he was interned as an “enemy alien.” He later went on to teach at the University of Edinburgh, (1945-1965) and became a respected member of the Edinburgh music community. His output was considerable: two large cantatas with orchestra, four operas, four symphonies, four string quartets, numerous piano works, and an array of orchestral and vocal works. A chamber version of Die heilige Ente was presented by Oper Köln in 2007, and a full revival at Sophiensæle Berlin in 2012.

Various listenings of Gál’s works, symphonic and vocal, have been undertaken with a far greater degree of focus and concentration than could have been imaginable in February 2020. There is a far deeper appreciation of the interplay between words and sounds, an integration I suspect was purposeful on the composer’s part. As Christian Immler remarked to me recently, Gál had “first-rate taste” in his texts. The poems Gál set to music are both timely and timeless, and contain thematic elements which hold a dualistic tension between the desire for solitude and the need for community, between the pain of isolation and the pain of congregation. In a recent article for Gramophone, Immler outlined Gál’s connection with text and describes the feeling of learning music which hasn’t been heard for over a century as “a powerful combination of curiosity, pioneer spirit and obligation. One is indeed living history!” Immler is himself a highly accomplished singer and soloist, known for his Baroque work as much as for his explorations of early 20th century repertoire. A member of the famed Tölzer Knabenchor (boys choir) in youth, Immler has worked in an array of classical idioms, including oratorio, opera, and lieder, singing the work of Monteverdi, Handel, Rameau, Steffani, Graupner, Weber, Mozart, Zemlinsky, and most especially Bach (the Passions are something of a specialty). He has worked with an array of conductors as well, including René Jacobs, William Christie, Raphaël Pichon, Marc Minkowski, Ivor Bolton, Masaaki Suzuki, Philippe Herreweghe, and Nikolaus Harnoncourt, the latter of whom he speaks about in glowing terms as part of our exchange, below.

In 2003 Immler was part of Continental Britons: The Émigré Composers (Nimbus Records), a collection of works from Jewish composers forced to flee Europe in the 1930s and 1940s. With pianist and Professor Erik Levi, Immler performed Hans Gál’s Fünf Melodien (Five Songs) for middle voice and piano, 1917-1921), Op.33, a collection which, at the time, was believed to be the composer’s only known lieder work. The cycle was recorded again for the 2011 album Modern Times (Cavi Music), featuring Immler and Helmut Deutsch. Similar to Émigré, Modern Times features the work of composers labelled “entartete” (“degenerate”) by the Nazis. It was this album which first caught my attention roughly a year ago, for its breadth of inspiring content as much as the palpable chemistry between its performers. The music (of Korngold, Eisler, Grosz, Goldschmidt, Schreker, Zemlinsky, and Gál’s collection of five songs) is performed with deep sensitivity and that unique feeling for text joined with sound; it’s as if Immler and Deutsch are reading one another’s thoughts – not “breathing together,” mind you, but with distinct visions and voices, in an energetic comprehension at once imaginative and intellectual.

Christian Immler, Helmut Deutsch, opera, classical, lieder, voice, piano, music, performance, Hans Gál

Helmut Deutsch and Christian Immler. Photo: Marcus Boman

(That “breathing as one” phrase is one, by the way, Deutsch himself writes about in his lately-released memoirs, published in English through Kahn & Averill; my interview with Helmut, about his memoirs, about Gál and working with Immler, and about much else, is coming soon. Stay tuned.)

Hidden Treasure came about through a meeting with Eva Fox-Gál, the composer’s daughter, after a live concert years ago, at which time Immler and Deutsch were made aware of the existence of the collection. Immler recalls her hesitancy to grant permission for the recording of the unpublished songs, the feeling being that her father never intended for them to be heard in public. The singer, together with Deutsch, made a recording in the pianist’s own living room of a selection of the unpublished works and sent them to her. This initiative, combined with the composer’s rising prominence in other recordings and media (including those by conductor Kenneth Woods and the English Symphony Orchestra and Royal Northern Sinfonia; Gál was also BBC Radio 3’s Composer Of The Week in 2014) convinced the family that, as Immler put it, the Lieder would be properly contextualized within the composer’s larger compositional oeuvre. The 26 songs featured on Hidden Treasure were written between 1910 and 1921, with the album including the Op.33 song cycle. The poetry of Heinrich Heine, Herman Hesse, Christian Morgenstern, Rabindranath Tagore, Richard Dehmel, Hans Bethge, Walther von der Vogelweide is given shining prominence here; already possessing a thoughtful musicality, Immler’s textual and vocal flexibility highlights his own deep listening, to both the music enveloping those words and to Deutsch’s virtuosic playing. The artists have worked to create a beautiful album, one to be slowly savoured over repeated instances, aided by the heightened listening skills the pandemic era has mysteriously (or not) endowed.

My chat with Christian Immler began by discussing writing and discovery,  and moved on to possibilities for our very own “modern times”, and if he feels like an ambassador for the music of Hans Gál.

score, Hans Gál, original, music, lieder, song, handwriting

A portion of the original score of “Lady Rosa” by Hans Gál. Photo courtesy of Christian Immler, private collection.

The lockdown seems to have provided a perfect listening opportunity for Gál’s work, and for the work on the album more specifically.

People have more time now, and I think they finally said, “Okay I have to sort my stamp collection, I have this to do and that, now I really have to sit down and understand what the opening theme in this Beethoven means” – and if not now, then when? People start to listen in new ways. My wife is also a musician and pianist, she’s’ very much into storytelling, and there are a lot of evenings she’ll just listen to various broadcasts– my mother would do and grandmother as well; they would sit and just listen.

That form of deep listening is certainly required for this collection. Is it true this album grew out of your live experience?

 My very first experience of Gál’s music was of his Opus 33 collection; I did them with Erik Levi, who is kind of the authority – he is a dear friend, extremely knowledgeable, he’s also Visiting Professor in Music at Royal Holloway College. That performance was at Wigmore Hall (in 2002). The one with Helmut Deutsch was at King’s Place (in 2010), a beautiful hall in London, and then after that, we put part of the Gál songs onto Modern Times. But Helmut and I met Eva Fox-Gál, the daughter of Hans Gál; we went to her house in York and looked through a lot of manuscripts and had a visit – there’s a beautiful garden, I remember that well. Gál’s original piano isn’t there, it is with his grandson Simon, who recorded (Hidden Treasure), but there, in the collection, are songs which might be more for a woman, it’s difficult to say, not because it talks about a woman, but in terms of style. And what was a bit difficult was finding enough variety, because also they’re quite slow songs, darkish songs, slightly melancholic songs. We were happy to find things which moved along to lighten the mood. I had a certain order in mind as I do this with all my recitals.

That’s what you did here? Ordered them as you would a recital?

That’s what we did here, but I wanted “Lady Rosa” as the opener. First of all I *love* the name, it’s just wonderful,”Lady Rosa” – you want to just say it out loud! – and this song, it sounds so simple but it has… you, the singer, must keep in this very specific way, and with the piano in rhythmic proportion; the (vocal line and instrumental line) are not *quite* coming together. It’s a wonderful song and that had to be the first one, I insisted, but other than that, we played around. We left the huge stuff to the very end, which in some recording sessions is risky.

Christian Immler, opera, singer, performer, artist, vocal, classical

Christian Immler
Photo: Marco Borggreve

That choice implies a clear narrative line. The selection of poetry is notable – for instance, the Morgenstern works are a nice microcosm of the album’s themes of dark and light. And you have a style which elucidates the text really well.

Gál had a first-rate taste in texts! That is unlike some very well known composers, I’d say, who had a very mixed success rate in doing so – just think of Brahms. I love some of his work, but some of the texts are a bit… hmmmm…. ! But with Gál, his daughter told me a few things, like for instance he helped with editing some Schubert and Brahms works with his friend and mentor, Eusebius Mandyczewski (1857-1929), who himself was a friend of Brahms. (Mandyczewski and Gál co-edited Brahms’ complete works in the early part of the 20th century.)

Now, if you transcribe stuff in front of you and you can read music, then that music is absorbed by the system of the body, and at such a young age when everything goes in like a sponge… well. I was astonished the manuscripts are super-neatly written. Remember a lot of these songs were written during war-time, so 1917 or so, and he had bursts of energy like Hugo Wolf or Robert Schumann, where he would write five songs in five days – which doesn’t sound like much, but he was a soldier then, and I find such an activity within this context highly fascinating. Those manuscripts are super-neatly written; he must’ve been a very disciplined person, and had huge integrity as a writer. I put the question to Eva, if he was ever interested in the risqué poems, like those by Richard Dehmel written twelve years earlier, which Schoenberg had set to music (Verklärte Nacht) which talks about premarital sex and two people walking alone in the night. Eva said her father was never interested in second-guessing; his audience should always know how to receive something. He didn’t want to create ambiguity…

… which is unique, considering how many of his fellow contemporary composers were. He really went against the grain. 

Well according to his contemporaries. he was very disciplined, he was a really hard worker, he had a kind of ironic sense of humour which might’ve endeared him to (the work of) Heinrich Heine, but he was quite a serious person, and could play anything by heart. You can see it in the photos; his is not a face who is up for a lot of extramarital craziness, for instance, but is very dedicated to his work – and so I think this direct writing style was enough for him. He wanted to stay true to himself and I don’t think he was… you know, there were people who were constantly on the lookout in terms of, “How can I make this more lush? Or make this even more tonally modern modern?” Gál  never went into twelve-tone music, for instance…

… which is also notable.

Yes. And with some songs (by other composers), you think, “Well, what shall I do here? Do I need to do a bit of magic here if I don’t want to put the pedal down?” And that’s not the case here (on Hidden Treasure) at all. It’s direct.

Gál’s’s music is direct and creative at once.

Yes! The harmonic changes for example, in “Vöglein Schwermut”, whoah! We performed it several times onstage and you can hear a pin drop at the end. In the concert hall there is just silence at this moment! (Gál’s writing) goes up in the piano, and when Helmut plays it, you hold your breath, literally! I’m so, so grateful for this collaboration – Helmut and I are good friends, and when I asked him first if he was interested in doing a recital I expected, you know, “Let me get back to you” but he said, “Sure, why not?” He deals with what’s in front of him and is an excellent sight-reader – I have so many scores of music here at home which at one point when I can travel again, we‘ll look through in Vienna. Luckily he’s very interested in Gál’s music – he loves doing it, and of course he loves Winterreise, but if you’ve played it five hundred, or I don’t know, a thousand times now like he has – it’s like for me and St. Matthew Passion: I love it, but if anything else comes along, that’s where my energy would go at this moment.

I wonder if the things Bach gives a singer might help with performing early 20th century music; do you think your Baroque experience helped you with Gál?

Yes and no. What certainly helped me which I will always be grateful for, is the discipline you learn in a boys’ choir – I was in the Tölzer Knabenchor, and it was there I got to know (Nikolaus) Harnoncourt, when I was nearly eleven years old. You have to get used to traveling at a very very early age and just to deliver something in the evening, nobody’s interested in your personal little worries or whatever; you learn the trade if you do it early, and by simply being there, you absorb a lot. I think that experience was helpful to learning Gál. Now, if you are in the vicinity of someone like Harnoncourt, who had this total dedication to what’s in front of him, even better. I did a St. Matthew Passion with him years later as an adult; this was a few years before he passed away. So it went full circle! I couldn’t sleep for two days afterwards, I had so much adrenaline – we did it in the Musikverein where we rehearsed. Sometimes I had to pinch myself it was really happening.

But the discipline one learns was useful, and without wanting to sound kind of arrogant… well, it’s very difficult to teach how to phrase, or how to conduct a phrase. You can show it to somebody but ultimately it has to be felt, and understood, and conceptualized, but *not* on an intellectual level. And for instance, Harnoncourt combined this enormously intellectual approach – he knew everything and would discuss everything with everybody, not a big deal – with such a level of understanding. Onstage he was 100% a musician. He knew about that sort of Baroque phrasing, where you go somewhere and come away, I think, with this sort of sensuality for phrasing, so for any vocal repertoire, especially that of Gál, it really struck me (in recording the album) that I never had to help the vocal line; it has a natural flow. It *can* be challenging in that it leads you up and you think, “Oh, I need to work!” but it always makes sense. And having Helmut is like having a carpet under you anyway. He and I didn’t actually talk about interpreting when we rehearsed these songs – we don’t really talk about it anyway, but *especially* for this. There was just one song where we had totally different tempos in mind, but that was the only thing, the only time. Gál, certainly, had the experience (in vocal writing), he had good training with a cappella ensembles wherever he was, in Vienna and in the UK; he was looking for an older idiom and he found it. In things he wrote in 1917 you can totally hear, in some of the songs, the actual piano part becoming an extended orchestral section, and when you hear this, as a singer, you know you really need to go for it then.

Did you ever feel Helmut were sonically competing at points? There are times when things don’t resolve the way we’re expecting as listeners, and it’s almost like vocals and piano are at tension.

I can confirm onstage, in the recitals I did with Helmut, there’s always an edge to him and he always makes noise when he plays – you can hear it on the recording too, he kind of does this “mmmnnnmmm” – like, “Helmut, shhh!!” But onstage, he is really negotiating and renegotiating the percussive element of the piano. He is a master in that and I simply do not want to play with pianists anymore who play works just as-is. The piano is a percussive instrument through which you can only create the illusion of line, and Helmut knows this; he sings all the time, he has this kind of forward approach, for which I’m grateful. We did Korngold (works) together, and (those of) Zemlinsky also, and if you start to become free floating in space, and take rubati whenever you want… no, it needs to come to a time from which you steal, rubato, you steal it *from* something, which is an orderly arrangement. But if you create something which is a space-floating thing, no rhythm or tempo at all, you lose out, and Helmut is breathing with this understanding; he doesn’t pull the entire structure apart. You *know* where to breathe. But it’s challenge to be onstage with him! I will not deny, he will never play against you – he always has a big ear and can adjust if you run out of breath – but he won’t make life easy. He keeps ploughing forwards, and so do I, and of course that’s when the energy comes.

Hans Gál, music, classical, lieder, album, Christian Immler, Helmut Deutsch, voice, piano, 20th centuryThat’s what this music demands – and the light/dark dualism of these songs has a corollary in the isolation/community themes which seem particularly meaningful right now.

It’s very much of its time 100 years ago. I’m not big into the “Oh, this was written as an omen!” way of thinking, but I do think often about that time and what it means for our days. We had a good time until this tragic Covid hit; things were working, although it was a bit *too* fast, the pace, for me. I’m a workaholic also, and of course now that tendency totally crashed and… you know, you have to rearrange yourself, and then you think, “How can I be of use? For my family? For what?!”

“How can I be of service?”

In a way… yes. I find this time super super-interesting, and in fact I’ve never before had enough time to pursue it but now, I’m writing my Doctorate about the the song landscape between the two Wars, the interbellum times. There is so much repertoire which Helmut and I have discovered and will play through, but right now I can do a lot from home, and it keeps me busy. Maybe this is the time for the smaller things to become more known.

I recently wrote a formal feature about reductions and am considering doing something more about how this time might or might not change the nature of listening and live experience. Small is not ideal of course but it isn’t necessarily bad either!

You should do it! I mean, I find Schoenberg’s rearrangements of the Song Cycles of Mahler to be somewhat more interesting, and more to the point – they are just fantastic. I’m working with another pianist as well, and we are thinking about doing Korngold and Zemlinsky songs for a small ensemble – I have no idea why nobody’s done it. For some of these songs it can take up to two minutes before you as a singer even open your mouth, they are *that* orchestral – and yes, you can do it in this reduced way.

But that means audiences have to readjust expectations, too, and organization need to be open to taking that risk in their programming.

It doesn’t take long to re-train the ears but it takes a few times (of doing experimental things) to get people in. And there’s a limit to doing reductions, in my opinion; some things make sense, others maybe not. But the time right now is ripe for experimenting; Schubert songs, of course, have been orchestrated by the best, but for a smaller ensemble there is something still, I think, to be done, and to bring it onstage in a more thematic way. I’m just dreaming here…

Christian Immler, Helmut Deutsch, opera, classical, lieder, voice, piano, music, performance, Hans Gál

Christian Immler and Helmut Deutsch. Photo: Marcus Boman

… and now is the time to do that, is it not? I feel like there’s a place for Gál’s music amidst all of this. Do you and Helmut feel like ambassadors?

We are! And we didn’t become ambassadors because we had nothing else to do! It happens to be the case that both of us are interested in it but we don’t have to record things which have mediocre quality which makes it much easier. Helmut and I have a little rating system which, independently, we use when we go through things; you have to be a bit careful as sometimes you miss the essence of a song the first time round. A lot of Gál’s stuff is in Vienna, at the exil.arte Centre For Banned Music – things are literally just sitting in boxes there. Helmut is already in Vienna, so one day he and I went and looked through the archive of Gál’s music. I know he’s not so keen about going into twelve-tone music, but there’s great stuff, and what I want to say is, with this experimentation, I want to do more CDs in this direction, first to take one slight step back and do things by Theodor Streicher (1874-1940; awarded the Großer Österreichischer Staatspreis in 1936) – who is a little bit like Hugo Wolf gone a bit crazy! – and then the work of Gál, which we did already, but then go one step further as well, into more tonally daring composers like Ernst Toch (1887-1964; awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1956 and the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1958). The list of composers yet to explore is endless.

So you’re an ambassador, not only for Gál but for the many composers like him.

I would think so! Helmut also has time, but we’re not allowed to travel right now, but when we are, we will hopefully plan for this – and more.

Page 3 of 15

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén