The Opera Queen

sky, autumn, September, colours, himmel, farben, natur

September Songs: Change, Relevance, Artistry, Loss

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On September 3, 2023

In Berlin, Canada, Europe, London, music, new music, opera, production, programming, remembrance, teaching, theatre, voice, writing

September has arrived though, at least in my part of the world, related cooler temperatures have yet to appear. Still, there is a marked change when it comes to the formal end of summer holidays. The “most wonderful time of the year” for parents is also the big inhalation for those of us working in the education system; the feelings I remember as a child at this time (dread; excitement; anxiety) have, in adulthood, whittled down to something leaner if no less energetic (anticipation; impatience). The return of structure and its first cousin, predictability, are pluses, though they’re hardly immobile; schedules, due dates, and outlines bump against individual and collective needs, abilities, and personalities, as well they must. Being an Adjunct Professor means not so much juggling as knitting – in new patterns, constantly, never quite sure what you’re making or to what end, at least until the conclusion of term. Here’s hoping the blanket (or whatever it is) proves useful to more than a few.

September also marks the start of the arts season, a time when the choices announced many months ago are realized and suddenly take on harder, thicker edges. Programming and concomitant production are more interlinked than ever, but understanding that link is proving more and more difficult. Just weeks after American magazine Opera News announced its imminent closure, prestigious German classical publication Fono Forum sent a note to its contributors indicating its final edition will be in January 2024. As I wrote with regards to ON last month: I am not surprised, particularly given the current state of media, and arts-dedicated media in particular. Publishing is pricy, audiences are splintered; algorithms and related ROI lead many away from niche publishing and toward the sort of output that tends to clash with the things culture (at least some of it) might perhaps inspire: slowing down; abstract thought; careful evaluation. Finding people willing to pay to read things at all is the toughest task for media in the 21st century; finding people willing to pay for things which might further inspire such focus is even harder; finding people willing to pay for coverage of a very niche interest is triply difficult. Classical does not (for the most part) inspire sexy clicks; the question is, should it, and can it? Are there people who don’t mind? Can those who make faces afford to keep making faces? I do think there are, and will be, other means and methods; whether they will have any quick and sexy ROI is another matter. It’s going to take time and that thing Axl sang about; to quote Hamlet (again), ’tis true ’tis pity, and pity ’tis ’tis true.

In Berlin

Also true: Komische Oper Berlin (KOB) is opening its new season with a very coverage-worthy event. The company’s first production away from its usual Behrenstraße locale is being done with a big (possibly literal) splash. Hans Werner Henze’s oratorio Das Floß der Medusa is being staged in an old airport hangar at Templehof, with seating located around a huge body of water designed especially for the production. Director Tobias Kratzer, notable for his work at a range of houses, including Deutsche Oper Berlin, Bayreuth , and Opéra de Paris, here leads a cast featuring Gloria Rehm, Idunnu Münch, Günter Papendell, 83 musicians, and over 100 choristers, all under the baton of conductor Titus Engel.

The work is based on real history: the wreck of French naval ship Méduse ran off the coast of western African in 1816. While the ship’s captains saved themselves and escaped, over 150 others took to a raft, which they stayed on (or tried to stay on when they weren’t gouging each others’ eyes out or committing suicide) for thirteen days; only fifteen people would survive the disaster. Théodore Géricault famously depicted the wreck in his monumental painting a scant three years after the event, interviewing Méduse’s survivors and examining the flesh of cadavers as he worked. Henze’s 1968 oratorio is a kind of veiled (or not-so-veiled) political statement on the issues which sit foremost within the tragedy. Its premiere inspired clashes between protestors (some pro-communist; some anarchist), the RIAS choir, and police who had come to break up the scuffles; Ernst Schnabel, who wrote the text, was among those arrested. Henze revised  the score in 1990, and the work has been presented, in concert and full production formats many times since. Its relevance, particularly for this time in history, is unmissable. As Opera Today’s Anne Ozorio wrote in her masterful review of a 2018 presentation by Dutch National Opera:

… Géricault was painting when the wreck of the Medusa was still raw political scandal. The rich had left the poor to die. What Géricault depicted was not lost on audiences at the time. The real horror is that modern audiences refuse to connect, even though we’re surrounded by images or war, destruction and refugees drowning at sea. Even if the press don’t know Henze, which is bad enough, surely some might have the humanity to think ?

The new KOB production was slated for five performances but a sixth was added out of sheer demand. Get thee to Templehof.

Also in Berlin

The European premiere of Chief Hijangua – A Namibian Opera in Four Acts by composer/conductor/baritone Eslon Hindundu takes place this month. The work features a libretto by Nikolaus Frei and will enjoy a semi-staged presentation by Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB). The multitalented Hindundu has performed and conducted in numerous events and festivals (including Swakopmunder Musikwoche, an annual music event held in Swakopmund, Namibia, and Germany’s annual autumn Immling Festival), and led the Namibian National Symphony Orchestra (as the organization’s Music Director) in the opera’s world premiere at the National Theatre of Namibia, Windhoek in 2022. The upcoming Berlin presentation will be directed by Kim Mira Meyer (who often works with Munich’s Gärtnerplatztheater) and will feature the vocal talents of Berlin-based Cantus Domus and Vox Vitae Musica (a choral group founded by Hindundu); the opera utilizes both German and Otjiherero, one of the languages spoken by Namibians. The work is a clear reference to Germany’s brutal colonization of Namibia in the late 19th-early 20th centuries, in which (according to a report from DW) roughly 100,000 people were killed and numerous atrocities committed. The opera itself tells a personal story, with its theme (the search for identity) sewn into its depiction detailing the quest of a young prince.

Chief Hijangua is being presented at a pivotal point within the classical world, as calls rise for greater social relevance in an art form frequently derided for being out of touch with real-world concerns and lived experiences. Opera warhorses (and related old productions) are frequently programmed now to get covid-scared audiences back into the auditorium; in places where government funding is scant, that is a reality that can’t be ignored. But as The Met itself noted, box office (at least in New York) is being made with precisely with, and not despite, new works. Maybe classical organizations need to be slightly braver with their choices? Maybe a little more trust in audiences would be a good thing? Might this be more than a mere trend? Perhaps Chief Hijangua will receive further productions in international venues? It seems the RSB, along with showcasing Hindundu’s considerable talents, is celebrating their 100th birthday with a powerful symbol of creativity whilst simultaneously throwing down a gauntlet to the greater opera world. Chief Hijuanga runs for three performances at Berlin’s Haus des Rundfunks, and is being done in partnership with Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

In London

History, literature, music, and theatre all mix at the Barbican Centre in London this month with King Stakh’s Wild Hunt. Based on the popular 1964 novel by Belarusian writer Uladzimir Karatkievich, the work mixes folk mythology and pointed social commentary related to ongoing political repression in Belarus. Co-director Nicolai Khalezin calls it a story that “combines mysticism and reality, love and hatred, nobility and cowardice, history and modernity.” The work is being presented by Belarus Free Theatre (BFT),  an underground theatre group who were forced into exile in 2021, and who count actors Kim Cattrall and Jeremy Irons, rock musician David Gilmour, and playwright Tom stoppard among their supporters. King Stakh features a score by Olga Podgaiskaya, a composer and active member of Belarusian avant-garde chamber group Five-Storey Ensemble, who will be performing as part of the production.

Conductor Vitali Alekseenok, who leads the musical side, is currently Artistic Director of the annual Kharkiv Music Fest in Ukraine, and wrote about his experience there earlier this summer. In London he leads a troupe which will feature Ukrainian singers Andrei Bondarenko and Tamara Kalinkina, and is being helmed by co-founding BFT Artistic Directors Khalezin and Natalia Kaliada. The latter’s own father recorded the novel in 2009 for an audio book (portions of which will be used in the production). She notes that her father had urged her to stage the novel for years, “not just because it’s one of the greatest Belarusian novels of the last century, but because he deeply understood its relevance.” The work, she continues, “reminds us that the past is not dead, it’s here in Europe today”. Kaliada’s father is unfortunately no longer alive to see the fruits of his daughter’s labour, but its realization is a strong sign of hope, and needed ongoing resistance to Belarusian repressions. King Stakh has its world premiere at the Barbican and will run for four performances.

Remembering…

Loss seems like a subtext through many upcoming presentations, and indeed it felt much closer this weekend. On Saturday it was announced that Canadian architect Raymond Moriyama has passed away at the age of 93. The Japanese artist, who survived a horrendous wartime internment on the west coast of Canada, was responsible for many famous landmarks in the country, including the Canadian War Museum, the Japanese-Canadian Centre (now called the Noor Cultural Centre), Science North, the Ontario Science Centre, as well as the Canadian Embassy in Tokyo. In 2003 Moriyama was made a member of the Japanese Order of the Rising Sun (4th class), an award conferred in recognition of his services to Japanese culture in Canada. In 2009 he was the recipient of a Canadian Governor-General’s Award for Visual and Media Arts in 2009. The awards were just two of the numerous honors the architect collected during his lifetime. I’ve always found Moriyama’s work to be musical, possessing its own distinct resonance; as a child I used to visit the Scarborough Civic Centre and look up and around in awe.

Growing older I visited other locales (mentioned above), and would silently wonder at his use of texture, shape, light, and structure. He created a smart, daringly (for the time and place) spiritual balance of notable contrasts (rich/stark; old/new; dark/light), providing a full experience of form that reaches well past the visual. I hear Stravinsky’s 1930 work Symphony of Psalms whenever I look at his work now. This 2020 documentary by Ontario public broadcaster TVO clearly shows why Moriyama and his work will always be a treasure. (Note: some may need a VPN to view this, but it’s definitely worth it).

Finally: I learned of the untimely passing of Maxim Paster yesterday morning, and spend a good chunk of the day (and night) listening to and watching a range of performances by the Kharkiv-born tenor. His repertoire was immensely wide (Puccini; Tchaikovsky; Bizet; Berg; Prokofiev; Strauss –Richard and Johann; Rimsky-Korsakov; Donizetti; Verdi; Mussorgsky) but barely captured his talent. Making his Bolshoi debut in 2003, Paster would perform with many prestigious institutions indeed – Opéra de Paris, Bayerische Staatsoper, The Metropolitan Opera, Semperoper Dresden, Teatro Alla Scala, the Salzburg Festival. He was rightly famous for his Shuisky in Boris Godunov, performing in a variety productions on an assortment of stages, including the Bolshoi, Opéra Bastille (Paris), The Met, and Teatro Comunale (Bologna). Paster’s commitment to music possessed an innate humility; this was an artist who very clearly humbled himself before whatever was in front of him, placing his entire self into the service of the text and music, and of rendering them as one. In so doing he gave us something personal, not performative – emotional, not sentimental – thus making the music immediate and very real. Witness his care with the words of Sergei Yesenin in this 2019 performance of Rostislav Boyko’s “Moon Above The Window”:

That voice, flinty and flexible, went hand-in-hand with a deep theatrical understanding. Paster understood, so well, the large value of small gestures. A turn of a torso; a cock of a head; the lift of a hand; slow, deliberate inhalations and exhalations, visible for all to see – such combinations, when done with such elegant economy as what Paster employed, quietly opened doors of perception and understanding, and made one hungry for more. There are very few artists who are so knowing in their creative choices, and whose vocal expression is so utterly attuned with a composer’s imagination – and that of an audience. Paster embodied an artistic authenticity as rare as it is remarkable. He died at the age of 47, still with so much left to offer to music, art, the world.

News of Paster’s passing made for a grim start to September, a month of change, and perhaps some needed reflection on that imminent change. “One hasn’t got time for the waiting game,” to quote Weill’s famous song, with words by Maxwell Anderson. “September Song”, interestingly, made its entry into the world on September 26, 1938 as part of the trial run of the musical Knickerbocker Holiday in Hartford, Connecticut. The “waiting game” need only be played out a few more days before my much-promised feature interview with BSO Recordings Managing Director Guido Gärtner is published. Until then, watch, listen, read, attend… think, rethink, evaluate… slowly.

Top photo: Mine. Please obtain written permission for reuse.
field, grass, daisies, green, nature, wild, summer

Endings, Beginnings, August

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On August 20, 2023

In classical, COVID19, education, Europe, music, new music, opera, preview, production, programming, remembrance, writing

August is a month of abundance, but also, at least in the Northern Hemisphere, a time of acknowledging the inevitability of endings, and preparing for the uncertainty of new beginnings. A distinctly Augustian mix occurred within the opera world this year: many premieres, and many conclusions.

The end of June saw an announcement from Tulsa Opera of the cancellation of its two mainstage productions for the 2023-2024 season, and the resignation of its General Director. Earlier this week The Metropolitan Opera Guild announced it will be streamlining operations; its educational initiatives (which include programs allowing roughly 12,000 students to attend dress rehearsals every season) will fall under the auspices of The Met itself. Related publication Opera News, which had been a monthly glossy since 2008 and had a circulation of 43,000 (I was an occasional freelance contributor) will be incorporated into British magazine Opera following its final print edition in November. In related news, Takt1, the Dortmund-based classical streaming portal who operate in cooperation with a number of classical organizations (including the London Symphony Orchestra, the Gewandhausorchester and the Wiener Konzerthaus), announced that as of September 1, 2023, they will be discontinuing their subscription platform.

I have lately been asked for my opinion about this spate of bad news, with many making those requests quite aware of what I’ll say: education; media; resources; will. The long-term solutions related to social policy usually require a resilience which is anathema to the ROI and sexy (if very easy to fake) analytics espoused within digital circles and by their (mysteriously) heralded personalities. There is no guaranteed Land of Oz at the end of the rainbow – that isn’t how opera (or culture, or investment in culture, cultural education, and a broader non-utilitarian approach to learning) works, least of all in a capitalist-led consumer culture where generous government support for either arts or education is nearly non-existent. Opera is also an expensive art form with a (mostly, not entirely) limited appeal; its cost means that long-term investment in the things that make it actually work are unsettling for any organization (public or private) to support, and triply so when that art form is not, as in some locales, embedded within socio-cultural norms and traditions, and sewn into the daily fabric of living, learning, and regular live-experiencing – at cheap prices, in casual wear, outside or in large halls at that.

There has been a lot of bad news, but a lot of inspiring work as well. Rather than contradiction, I do see balance –however tenuous it may be – in the form of bold programming, choices from which I hope some organizations will draw inspiration. Of course there are vast differences between the North American and European classical worlds (it is a topic I have explored more than once) but there are ideas related to education, access, and awareness which cross borders and demand non-nationalistic airtime. In her final column for Takt1, music writer Charlotte Gardner notes that ever-entrenching perceptions of classical (along the lines of: it’s fancy-irrelevant-elitist) are being exacerbated “by classical music getting less and less print space and airtime from our national journalism providers. Essentially, classical music is currently engaged in an almighty fight for “establishment” acceptance (the irony…), and it doesn’t look as though it’s going to be over any time soon.” That goes triple for North America; anyone in the arts who has studied and contemplated the precipitous drops in education and media funding (i.e. me; I work in both) couldn’t have been terribly surprised by the Opera News update. Terrible, yes, and terribly inevitable, given the state of… everything. Thankfully, Gardner pinpoints the needed hope: “(I)f you talk about classical music with love, knowledge, and a clear desire to communicate, and if you offer a variety of formats in which to experience it, you will earn respect and curiosity, and people will give you a go.”

Salzburg, moon, spire, Osterreich, night, dark

Moon over Salzburg. (Photo: mine; please obtain written permission for reuse.)

And so in that spirit: I will try to continue to communicate my own love of the classical world as best I can at this website, for as long as I am able, and sharing a variety of formats in which to experience it. One thing which is relevant to this, and inseparable from my own love of the art form really, is the role of new (or more precisely, newish) things. The role of new work within the classical ecosystem is paramount; it is a truth, if not quite universally acknowledged, then perhaps on its way to a wider embrace. The first Salzburg Festival presentation of Bohuslav Martinů’s 1957 opera The Greek Passion happened last Sunday (13 August). A new production helmed by Simon Stone featured a host of vocal talent (Sebastian Kohlhepp, Sara Jakubiak, Gábor Bretz) under the baton of Maxime Pascal. Based on the 1954 novel Christ Recrucified by Nikos Kazantzakis, The Greek Passion is, as Opera North described it in their own 2019 production, “a passion play within a passion play” and concerns a group of villagers suddenly faced with taking in a group of refugees – or not. In his review for Merkur Online, critic Markus Thiel described the production as “Eine knapp zweistündige Gratwanderung ist das zwischen realer Brutalität und surrealem Spiel” (“This is a tightrope walk of almost two hours between real brutality and surreal play.”) Medici.tv will broadcast the The Greek Passion from Salzburg this Wednesday (22 August) at 8pm CET / 2pm EST.

The British premiere of György Kurtág’s’s Fin de partie also took place this week in London, with Ryan Wigglesworth conducting a razor-responsive BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at Royal Albert Hall, part of this year’s edition of the BBC Proms. The opera, based on Samuel Beckett’s surreal 1957 comically macabre play Endgame, opened in 2018 at Teatro alla Scala, and has been presented in Amsterdam and Paris. As The Guardian‘s Tim Ashley wisely noted in his recent review, “This is not, in essence, the bleak comedy we often find, but a work of pervasive sadness that continues to haunt us after its final notes have died away.” I found myself contemplating that sadness (so much my habit lately) at the opera’s close when the words of Brindley Sherratt came floating to mind; I had interviewed the bass together with tenor John Daszak in autumn 2020, when the pair were in a high-tech production of Boris Godunov in Zurich. Sherratt had said at one point, amidst pandemic bleakness, that “you want to shout, ‘Opera’s not dead!’” Kurtág’s opera is a brilliant and very needed reminder of just that sentiment at this time and place in classical history. BBC Sounds features the Proms performance until 9 October.

A fascinating Q&A with acclaimed psychotherapist Esther Perel at Vanity Fair (published at the end of June) has implications relevant to the classical industry and its current challenges. Perel says that owing to the widespread mainstreaming of the language of psychotherapy and its concomitant divorce from contextualized study and practice, there has occurred a distinct shift from “we” to “me”, a trend only exacerbated by echo chamber-like nature of social media. Added to this, she says, is self-diagnosis and related self-labelling:

[…] On one hand, there is an importance in gaining clarity when you name certain things. On the other hand, there is a danger that you lose all nuance, that you’re basically trying to elevate your personal comments and personal experience by invoking the higher authority of psychobabble. What you call therapy-speak, we used to call psychobabble—it’s a new word for an old concept.

In the past, you could have said, “I think this, and so does the rest of the community.” So does the family, so does the church. Today you say, “I think this, and so does the DSM-5.” I don’t like what you do, so I say you’re gaslighting me. You have a different opinion, and I bring in a term that makes it impossible for you to even enter into a conversation with me. Labeling enables me to not have to deal with you.

But in the end, it creates more and more isolation and fragmentation. That is not necessarily a good thing for the community and for the social good. (Vanity Fair, June 26, 2023)

Fragmentation is something I think many classical programmers are contemplating, along with notions around language and the perceived impenetrability (for Anglophone audiences) of anything that isn’t in English. Interviewer Delia Cai asks the multilingual Perel about working in English. “Every language makes you think differently,” she says, citing the myriad of words and phrases for “friend” in French. Experiencing the nuanced realities within those different languages allows  for different understandings – of self, relationships, and community.

Opera has a concentration of Eurocentric languages indeed, but that doesn’t close the possibility of enjoying it in a host of other languages, so long as the will exists, and the funding to match it. Canadian company Against the Grain exercised that will with a very unique vision of Handel’s famous Messiah in 2020, directed by Joel Ivany. Called Messiah/Complex, a project was sung in Arabic, Dene, English, French, Inuktitut, and Southern Tutchone. There is possibility to expand horizons, but the will has to exist before any click-friendly digital strategizing – not the other way around. Perel’s final thought speaks to just this: “Expertise has very little to do with experience sometimes, and a lot to do with marketing. That’s capitalism with therapy-speak combined.” Or in this case, opera-speak. Ay, there’s the rub.

Finally: Renata Scotto never held back her passions – or her intelligence, wit, studiousness, and deep understanding of the art form. The soprano passed away earlier this week at the age of 89.

Her influence as much as her ideas and glorious recordings live on, and it’s been heartening to re-experience her work across so many media– at such moments the internet is a blessing. The above clip, from a 1980 television special (I have foggy memories of watching this as a small child), is a perfect demonstration of what made Scotto so special: the control; the drama; the attention to detail… magic. Since the announcement of her passing there have been outpourings of tributes by colleagues who worked with her as well as those she taught and mentored. Her influence across generations was (is) immense, her passion as palpable off the stage as much as on it. In a 2017 interview with Classic Talk TV the soprano discusses her training and the relationship between composer and libretto, and also shares her suspicions around contemporary opera-business casting practises:

 Today they look at the figure – it’s how you look. I don’t like that, because it’s not the looking, it’s what you give me. You communicate with your body to me, and not, ‘You have a beautiful face, you’re tall, you’re slender’ […] This is not the way to begin. (Classic Talk: Renata Scotto Part 1, February 24, 2017)

Vocal talent does have to be extant in the first place, she explains, but once that talent is acknowledged, it must be shaped: “I’m not interested in a big voice, I’m interested in a beautiful sound that gives some special colour.” That notion of vocal colour in the opera world is highly overused but re-listening to so much of Scotto’s work this week was a good reminder of its essence. Scotto’s artistic approach, combined with her sharp-eyed observations, speak firmly to the present, and help give shape to an abundance which can hopefully be part of opera’s future.

A quick reminder: my interview with Bayerische Staatsoper Recordings Managing Director Guido Gärtner is posting soon. For now, here’s to the end of almost-end of August, and to endings, beginnings, and whatever possible abundance might be in store. Opera is not dead – but does require and demand will, a commitment to education, media resources, money (as ever), and many breaths of fresh air. Let’s hope for a cool breeze or two as autumn draws closer.

Top photo: mine. Please obtain written permission for reuse.
trees, nature, path

August 2023: What I’ve Been Reading, Watching, Listening To, Contemplating, & Cooking

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On August 15, 2023

In announcement, classical, COVID19, Europe, inspiration, music, opera, personal, preview, writing

The lazy, hazy days of summer continue and seem endless, more hazy than lazy for many, and far worse than anything one could have imagined at this time last year. One feels helpless in the face of so much tragedy – and highly discouraged in continuing any form of creative pursuit.

After hours (days, weeks) spent negotiating with various forms of sadness, I’ve found solace, usually temporary if no less rewarding, in old favorites: reading, listening, watching, and lots of cooking. My deep freeze has never been so consistently full, my head similarly filled with novels, names, images, events, ideas, places, and oddly (or not) a renewed sense of creative inspiration. One has to give thanks for these things, and very often, make time for them, as much as for the good people who have spent time and energy in conversation, often over meals, enduring my meandering conversation and offering their own insights, “You need to move” being unquestionably the best.

Sometimes simple things pull one through challenging times, though of course there’s always the risk of those things clearing the ground for more pondering, furrowing of brows, (over)thinking. Perhaps Prince Orlofsky has the best response here…

Striking summer things for me have been wide-ranging and not always joyous (shock shock) but sometimes, just sometimes, they are that, and validating too. A fascinating study published in July 2023 points up the essentially visceral nature of the live experience. Babies between the ages of six and fourteen months were studied in order to examine the effects of music in live and controlled environments. Three groups (one presented with a live show; one with a playback of the show in the same environment; the last with playback at home) were shown an excerpt from The Music Box (a baby opera by artist Bryna Berezowska) at the McMaster University LIVELab, a research facility/concert hall  located in Hamilton, Ontario.

The study found that the babies who experienced the live version were far more engaged, with their heart rates even synchronizing. Study co-author Laura Cirelli, Assistant Professor at the University of Toronto’s department of psychology, noted that “If there’s something happening that we collectively are engaging with, we’re also connecting with each other. It speaks to the shared experience.” Cirelli also noted that the study reinforced ideas related to socialization. “An itsy bitsy audience: Live performance facilitates infants’ attention and heart rate synchronization” was conducted by researchers at the University of Toronto Scarborough, the Department of Settlement & Community Services (Toronto), Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, and Bucknell University (Lewisburg, Pennsylvania). This study makes me feel a bit less ridiculous about the amount of frustrated arm-waving I did during the first eighteen months or so of the coronavirus pandemic. “Whither will?!” I kept shouting (and writing) at anyone who would listen (read), “Don’t you know the live experience is so very vital to our being human?” It’s nice to see this sense has been confirmed in actual science, although I’m not confident the results will inspire a more intelligent and humane approach to the arts in certain sectors, especially given the precipitous rise of AI technologies.

Technology is only one aspect of the harrowing and thought-provoking article “The Perils and Promises of Penis Enlargement Surgery” by Ava Kofman, a collaboration between The New Yorker and Propublica and published in the former’s July 3, 2023 print edition. Along with admiration for the writer’s professionalism and thoroughness, the work also inspired a contemplation of operas which revolve around body parts – namely Poulenc’s Les Mamelles de Tirésias and Shostakovich’s The Nose, itself is based on the short story by Nikolai Gogol. Quite often these operas are staged for laughs even as some – the best ones – feature serious subtexts. An appendage taking on a life of its own is comically surreal (as Barrie Kosky’s Royal Opera House 2016 staging of The Nose emphasized) but, as Kofman’s piece highlights, is just as much a lived reality for those who have undergone the procedure(s) she explores (and in one instance, directly observes). I wonder if an opera will ever be written that tackles the modern fixation around bigger-longer-thicker-stronger and the underlying culture of shame (not to mention social media-driven anxiety) fuelling that fixation. It’s certainly a topic rich in possibility, for writing as much as for staging, though one hopes it wouldn’t stray too far into comedic territory but keep (as Kofman does) a needed tension between the epic and the intimate.

Both the epic and the intimate come together nicely in Presto Music’s new podcast episode (released August 6, 2023) with writer Fiona Maddocks discussing her new book, Goodbye Russia: Rachmaninoff In Exile (Faber), published in June 2023. Maddocks experienced her own loss in writing this, the death of her husband, artist Tom Phillips. I especially appreciate how, through her discussion with host Paul Thomas, Maddocks emphasizes how Rachmaninoff’s predilection for melodicism and its resultant popular appeal inspired a sniffy attitude toward the composer in some quarters. Heaven forbid people write things that other people can sing, hum, get earworms from – oh, mon Dieu. I plan on reading this book soon and hope to write about it, and more broadly, about the composer and his exile.

2023 marks Rachmaninoff’s 150th birthday, and there are certainly no lack of events to mark the occasion. Conductor Kirill Karabits featured Rachmaninoff in a programme that also included music by his Ukrainian father, the composer Ivan Karabits. The works were on the bill of the first of two BBC Proms concerts presented by the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra at the start of August. Karabits Sr’s Concerto for Orchestra No. 1, ‘A Musical Gift to Kyiv’ (written in 1981 to mark 1500 years since the founding of Ukraine’s capital) opened a concert that also featured Mozart’s Horn Concerto  No.4 and Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony. BBC Radio has the audio from that concert as well as the third movement (‘Allegro con feroce’) of Ukrainian composer Borys Lyatoshynsky’s immense Symphony No. 3; it will be accessible for the next little while. Recommended; these are musical gems.

Also jewel-like: Nothing Like A Dame, the acclaimed 2018 documentary by Roger Michell featuring four talented, titled artists – Maggie Smith, Judi Dench, Eileen Atkins, and Joan Plowright. I recently viewed this a second time and was quite struck by the tension between the public and private selves which each artist was clearly trying to negotiate as the cameras rolled. One positively cheers when one of them (it may have been Dench) blurts out, “oh fuck off, Roger” in complete exasperation. The prodding to say Very Deep Actressy Things is pointed up when Smith says to an unseen figure, toward the end of the doc, “They’ve told you how old we are, yes? We’re tired…” – even several decades Smith’s junior, the sentiment felt oddly familiar. For all the film’s brilliance at allowing moments of true poignancy to emerge from the many lively conversations, there was a point (perhaps several) where the women clearly wanted the cameras off, and for the performance (such was it was) to end. The expectation of female creatives of all stripes to always be “on” for the public, in whatever fashion and context, can be exhilarating, daunting and yes, tiring. There may be truth to an adage oft-repeated that by a certain age one simply ceases to care what others think – but Nothing Like A Dame was a reminder of the paradoxical nature of that not-caring when one has spent decades on the stage, in front of the camera, negotiating the realities of “small people”, agents, partners, heartbreak, career frustration and immense success. The doc brought to mind the work of writer Jessica DeFino, whose work I have linked here in the past, specifically her brilliant piece, published in May 2023, about Martha Stewart’s Sports Illustrated cover. I have complex and rather conflicting feelings about this myself; I find myself relating to the ‘Dames’ at times, but oh, how I want to manifest Martha’s hot-lady magic (and the money that paid for it) if and when I reach 80.

Quite on another planet, and magically so, is Voyager, by the Munich Opera Horns, released on the Bayerische Staatsorchester Recordings label in July 2023. The 65-minute work offers an array of fascinating and very poetic sounds, with works by contemporary composers (Hans-Jürg Sommer, Konstantia Gourzi, Urs Vierlinger) alongside those of Anton Reicha, Oscar Franz, Pierre-Max Dubois, and Richard Strauss, whose own father Franz Strauss was a virtuoso horn player and principle horn with the Bavarian Court Opera (Bayerische Staatsoper). The album was selected as Gramophone magazine’s September 2023 Editor’s Choice. I recently interviewed the man behind the BSO label, Guido Gärtner, about the whys and wherefores of running an independent label, how it came to be, the benefits of being an independent, recent and not-so-recent DVDs (including Andrea Chenier and Die Tote Stadt, both featuring tenor Jonas Kaufmann), and the label’s unique aesthetic – which, with their  vibrant tones and large silvery typeface, resemble nothing so much as gem-like, collector’s-edition books. My feature with Guido Gärtner will be published to coincide with the launch of the BSO’s massive European tour, at the beginning of September.

Keeping with the gem-like theme: this recipe for chana masala is delicious, but is also beautiful to look at! Wonderful, easy, filling, and freezes very well indeed, it has become a kind of go-to. I have improvised at various times since first trying this months ago, adding chunks of yellow-fleshed potato, chopped peppers, even (gasp) butter beans, as well as freshly-chopped coriander at the end. The fragrant herbal shards gleamed like little emeralds against the lovely orange, even (hurrah) at defrosting. Ooof, now I am working up an appetite…

… so before I run off to the kitchen, a word of clarity, and of gratitude: this website will be continuing for a little while yet. Thank you to those who have reached out or told me in-person how much you’ve enjoyed the work here and have found some measure of value in what it’s tried to accomplish. The encouragement has had a good (and arguably needed) effect, spurring on a continuance of work, one which may lack the regularity of years past but will makes up for that (I hope) with a palpable commitment to the passion and curiosity which inspired its creation back in 2017. Many heartfelt thanks for your readership – and remember: the “c” word is context.  🙂

Top photo: mine. Please obtain written permission for reuse.
Giordano Bellincampi, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, APO, music, classical, opera, performing arts, culture, New Zealand, Auckland Town Hall

Giordano Bellincampi: “We Have A Lot Of Operas About Death But We Don’t Have Many About Grief”

By

On July 1, 2023

In classical, COVID19, interviews, music, opera

Negotiating the realities of a pandemic, war, and continuing loss of life, grief can become impersonal. One develops callouses to horror; quick reaction followed by indifference keeps the algorithms humming. Recent cultural examinations of grief and loss (in its various aspects) feel more needed than ever. Korngold’s early 20th century opera Die tote Stadt occupies a very real, very warmly human place for some of us opera fans; it feels like so much more than a disembodied stage work from a century ago, but functions as an extension of the grieving self, a phantom limb that still aches on rainy days. The work will be receiving its New Zealand premier July 8th, with an in-concert performance by the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) led by conductor and APO Music Director Giordano Bellincampi. For the Italian-Danish conductor, the work is an important expression of a topic too rarely explored onstage.

The timing of its world premiere seems especially profound. Die tote Stadt was first presented in December 1920, opening simultaneously at Stadttheater Hamburg and Oper Köln. Based on the 1892 symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach, Korngold began composition in 1916, but had to leave off his work for a year while participating in World War One military service. The plot revolves around a man (Paul) who has spent years mourning his dead wife (Marie), and keeps a room of keepsakes related to her; he subsequently meets a woman (Marietta) who bears a strong resemblance to his wife; this inspires a series of horrendous hallucinations which eventually resolve into a quietly powerful conclusion. The opera was a huge hit, its themes resonating strongly within post-war Europe – though the Nazis would go on to ban it in 1938 on account of Korngold’s Jewish ancestry. The composer had moved to Hollywood by that time, and would go on to compose numerous film scores, and the opera fell into a decades-long obscurity within the post-war cultural landscape, although there were revivals in Vienna, London, San Francisco, and Bonn. The opera’s French premiere, an in-concert performance, took place at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1982, with a fully-staged performance taking place in Strasbourg in 2001. More premieres, in the U.K. (1996 in-concert; 2009 staged), Latin America (1999), and Australia (2012), took place, along with a highly-acclaimed 2019 production at Bayerische Staatsoper featuring Jonas Kaufmann (as Paul) and Marlis Petersen (Marie/Marietta) and conducted by Kirill Petrenko.

In my recent exchange with conductor Giordano Bellincampi I got the real sense, in hearing him speak about his experiences in Aarhus and more recently his negotiating of pandemic realities, that he views Korngold’s opera as less a study in obsession (specifically male obsession) and more as a metaphorical process examining the delicate and often difficult stages of grief. In June 2020 Bellincampi led a concert in commemoration of the victims of covid, but clearly, notions of loss have occupied his thoughts for much longer. His ideas relating to Korngold’s work are (as you’ll read) sensitive and insightful, and reveal an approach which is just as attuned to the spheres of human feeling as to the details of scoring.

Music Director of the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) since 2016, the Rome-born, Copenhagen-educated Bellincampi began his musical career as a trombonist before moving on to conducting. He has held a number of esteemed positions – Chief Conductor of the Copenhagen Philharmonic Orchestra (2000-2006); General Music Director of the Duisburg Philharmonic (2012-2017); Chief Conductor of the Kristiansand Symphony Orchestra (2013-2018 – and has been a guest conductor with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, I Pomeriggi Musicali (Milan), KBS Symphony Orchestra (Seoul) the Moscow State Symphony Orchestra and Saint Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, and Canada’s Victoria Symphony and Toronto Symphony Orchestra.

With a particular gift for Central European, Italian and Scandinavian symphonic repertoire, one might be led to believe opera is a faraway world for the conductor – but nothing could be further from the truth. Bellincampi was General Music Director of the Danish National Opera in Aarhus for almost a decade (2005-2013), and during that time led performances of numerous Puccini and Verdi works, plus those by Strauss (Der Rosenkavalier), Wagner (Der Fliegende Holländer, Tristan und Isolde), and Mozart (Don Giovanni and Die Zauberflöte). Aarhus also allowed for collaborations with a range of singers (Angela Gheorghiu; Joseph Calleja; Bryn Terfel) and soloists (Sarah Chang and Grigory Sokolov). In Germany Bellincampi worked with Deutsche Oper am Rhein, leading performances of Luisa Miller, Norma, Cavalleria Rusticana/I Pagliacci, and La bohème (to name a few), and led numerous Italian works at the Royal Opera in Copenhagen, including a new production of Aida in 2005 which opened the company’s new theatre.

This focus on opera has continued in New Zealand. Bellincampi has led the Auckland Philharmonia through in-concert performances of Aida (2018), Don Giovanni (2019), Fidelio (2021), and Il trovatore (2022) But Die tote Stadt is, as you may guess, a thing apart, not only for its complex orchestration and very demanding vocal lines, but for a personal connection related to Bellincampi’s Aarhus days. In August 2023 he leads the APO in a programme featuring the music of Mahler, Brahms, and the world premiere of Symphony No.7 by celebrated Kiwi composer Ross Harris, and with that in mind, we began our conversation discussing the role of  New Zealand artists within APO’s programming, and how Bellincampi finds balance between old and new sounds.

Did the pandemic affect your plans and programming choices with the APO?

Honestly we were really lucky in New Zealand because what happened was they closed the country down completely for most of 2020 – so while everyone else in the world was distancing and wearing face masks and shut down, we were playing as normal and there was no covid, though of course we couldn’t fly in guest soloists or guest conductors. But we did continue!

How has the relationship with the orchestra developed since 2016?

I’ve had orchestras in Copenhagen, Dusseldorf, in the Essen area too, which are all more traditionally you could say, classical – especially in Germany, because there it was very easy: we had 95% of the hall filled with subscribers; the basic culture of the symphonic concert idea was strong. Of course New Zealand is slightly different and rightly so; it’s much more diverse and there are many cultural opportunities, all of which I find to be great. And when I started with the APO, they already had a very loyal and good audience in the Town Hall, so I think I just built on what already was there. There’s a good loyalty toward the orchestra. Continuing that is important, even as I sometimes offer something challenging once in a while, but also giving them what they like. Personally I do love Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn, Brahms – all that kind of repertoire – which helps, because it’s the repertoire the audience loves also, so it makes the connection very easy.

I’m curious how you tie that to respective socio-cultural values; there are a lot of questions around the role of European classical culture in 21st century presentation, particularly in places with colonial histories. How do you find balance at the APO?

This is a really good question, and I’m glad you asked it. First of all in a way I’m very idealistic, because I do believe every person can sense if what is transmitted from the stage has a strong emotional and intellectual depth – for instance, even if people don’t know Beethoven’s music at all, they can sense the power, just as when I go to a concert or a Maori event, although you don’t really understand the specific cultural codes, you sense the meaning and the depth. The idea of really performing music with conviction and great passion is paramount.

There is a need for balance as well, and that’s why we do New Zealand-commissioned music, some of it with original folkloric instruments. But I also have to be honest and say, we are a symphony orchestra – and a symphonic orchestra plays symphonies. We will never be a Maori orchestra; that isn’t possible. I do think it’s important the government and city support Maori music, 100%, and of course we can connect with the audience for those sounds, and with that community in every way we can, but it’s important we are loyal to what our core music is. That’s a difficult balance, but I think we’re handling it quite well. Honestly, we have good audiences and they are curious and they like the big classical hits, but they also are curious for new things.

In a 2017 interview you noted that “programs that challenge us and our audience is an important part of being a Music Director” – but classical organizations seem averse to anything new and/or pushing their audiences right now.

I would say we’ve approached it differently by making a conscious effort to keep the level of ambition up, consistently. During lockdowns we could sit at home and enjoy streaming of really good concerts, sure, but what people have actually missed is the live experience, and that’s something driven by our urge to perform and share music. If we want to survive as artists we need to keep on going; if we are just defensive in our programming choices, the audience will sense that, and it won’t work on any level, especially musically.

In 2021 we were planning opera where the country was completely shut down; what I said at the time was, “Okay, which New Zealand opera singers do we have here?” And we found the best singers we had and found the titles we could play with them, like Simon O’Neill who lives in Auckland. He was available, so I said, “Okay let’s do Fidelio; we have a Florestan.” That way we kept the artistic vision up, and it was so much better than doing some opera gala or what-have-you. We are taking the same approach for the first New Zealand performance of Die tote Stadt – it is extremely risky, on a few levels, and yet!

When was Die tote Stadt planned?

The decision came probably about two years ago. We are not that far ahead in planning as many other organizations, who normally plan four to five years out. I remember being in Germany, where things were always planned extremely far ahead, which meant you could secure the best artists and you know what you’re going to do, but it’s not a very agile as a system – you can’t change things easily. But New Zealand organizations are extremely dependent on the commitment of the people who want to travel and perform with us. We’re planning a bit differently these days, and very much together with the Australian orchestras, so we can share artists as much and as often as possible.

How much does that force you to strengthen community ties with local artists?

I believe very much that every institution – it was the same when I ran the opera company in Denmark – every institution has its place in the habitat we work in. And I also think that if you are a relatively big organization you have an obligation not to kill the things underneath you. So we kind of try to find our place. We do support the best local artists, both the ones that are in New Zealand and many Kiwi artists who live in the UK, Germany, and the US, but basically we are part of the international orchestra world, and that’s where we try to stay. There’s space for other organizations, like chamber organizations, and they can have their own seasons – we shouldn’t kill them just because we are bigger. That’s my ambition really, to keep all the various organizations, there has to be space for everyone.

So an ecosystem… ?

Exactly.

On the APO website Alastair McKean’s essay explores Korngold’s time in Hollywood and how that may have impacted how he’s perceived; it ends with a call to “ignore the snobs” and quotes Korngold himself.  Where does his work fit in terms of your opera rep?

I’ve loved this opera for twenty-odd years. When I was running the opera company in Aarhus, I decided to program this opera. It was the first performance in Denmark ever, but I didn’t conduct it. At the time I was extremely busy with a lot of other projects and running the company, and I knew it was a difficult score and I just didn’t have the four to five months needed to be secluded with the score and to properly study it. We did the first performance in Denmark with a colleague leading it who had done it in Prague previously, and it was beautiful, although I remember my marketing department at the time saying, “We will never be able to sell tickets for something called THE DEAD CITY! People won’t like it!” – but it was an enormous success. I’ve loved it for so long, and waited for a new opportunity to program it, and now I have finally found an outlet! The big issue with this opera is the tenor role, which is so absolutely super-challenging, but we have a great Paul (Aleš Briscein) who’s done it many times before, and I’m looking forward to the experience.

What is it you love about Die tote Stadt?

Most of my opera work has been Puccini and Wagner, although I’ve also done Der Rosenkavalier and other Strauss, but I think that this extremely modern way of approaching musical theatre (in Die tote Stadt) is very close to what Puccini explores in for instance, La fanciulla del West and Turandot – his later operas are film-score-esque. Now when we talk about the music of Korngold it seems like a cliché to call his work ‘cinematic’ but there is very much, in this opera, a very strong way of communicating in that way, via the music. And of course the orchestra colours are absolutely incredible, the instrumentation is beyond… it’s just immense.

But what I also like is the drama itself: we have a lot of operas about death – in the sense of revenge and power – but we don’t have many about grief, how it is when people actually die. I think Korngold’s way of dealing with the feelings of this person, and his way of coping with the nightmare and the visions and the feelings that overwhelm him in this situation, is very strong and very modern, and it appeals to me because it’s something we’re not very good at expressing in the theatre. And I think this is quite a unique work as a result.

I had an incredible experience with it in Aarhus – there were a lot of fantastic reviews, great singers. A few months after its presentation, an older gentleman came to the opera office with a bottle of wine, knocked on the door, and introduced himself. He said, “I just wanted to tell you that I lost my wife five years ago, and after seeing that opera, I went back home and was thinking and thinking – and I decided to start living again.” And… that’s what we make opera for. He knew nothing about this work. But seeing this kind of… incredible grief, like what Paul experiences, is something I think a lot of people who have lost someone can relate to, and again, I think we don’t see it very often in the theatre. So I hope that (the APO performance) will touch someone.

Giordano Bellincampi, Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, APO, music, classical, opera, performing arts, culture, New Zealand, Auckland Town Hall

Conductor Giordano Bellincampi leads the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in a 2022 in-concert presentation of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at Auckland Town Hall. Photo: Adrian Malloch

What do you think might be good sonic preparation?

New Zealand audiences will know Korngold because we play his work, including his great violin concerto, regularly; we played several other pieces of his last season. There’s nothing strange about the sound in and of itself – it’s not like doing Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre or something! – people can definitely recognize the Korngold sound. But I’m curious as to how this will be received. We do have a semi-staged concept for Die tote Stadt, so there are no sets but we do have some action and surtitles.

Operas presented in-concert are becoming real staples within orchestral programming in some areas; how do these presentations differ from a full production for you creatively?

For many years (APO) have done one every year – we’ve done Don Giovanni and Il trovatore in past seasons, for instance – and though I think those are great, overall I’m very ambiguous, because basically I’m a theatre person. I love being in the pit and I do think opera ultimately belongs in a theatre; that said, there is also something incredibly beautiful about being able to perform these works in an acoustically ideal room for sound. Most theatres are super-dry, so being in a concert hall gives a completely different impression of the sounds. That’s one aesthetic thing.

The other is that some operas, like Die tote Stadt, have a lot of interludes, and so the activity within the orchestra itself is enormous. I think it’s very exciting for the audience to see all of what happens right there, not hidden in a pit. We’ll be performing, hopefully, the complete score which is almost never done nowadays. It’s going to be fully all three acts we do, with two intermissions, and there are long interludes when the orchestra plays. Nothing happens onstage at those times, and in most stagings you have to invent something as a result, but here it will be a very strong experience for the audience to simply to listen. There will be a livestream – my mother in Italy always says, ‘I have to get up so early to watch them!’ – but I really think this will be something unique for both musicians and audiences alike.

Top photo: Conductor Giordano Bellincampi leads the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in a 2022 in-concert presentation of Verdi’s Il Trovatore at Auckland Town Hall. Photo: Adrian Malloch
Gabriele Schnaut, Klytämnestra, Elektra, Bayerische Staatsoper, opera, classical, live, performance, arts, culture, stage

Things to watch, listen to, read (and a lot of Hamlet)

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On June 25, 2023

In broadcasting, classical, Europe, history, interviews, libretto, music, new music, opera, production, voice, war

First things first: the Substack newsletter I’d planned is on hold, for many reasons, including technological. If and when things change, I will make an announcement here. Secondly (and related to first): I’ve been busy with professional work, which includes numerous reviews for The Globe & Mail.

Importantly:

Thank you, readers new and old, for standing by me and supporting my work, especially through these last three-plus years, which has been a largely difficult and painful time. I confess that I am slowly winding down my work here, though I may post a few occasional interviews related to artists and events in the future – things that catch my interest and equally speak to our current socio-political epoch with regards to creativity, geography, and ambition.

In that vein: my next interview is with conductor Giordano Bellincampi, who next month leads the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra (APO) in the New Zealand premiere of Die Tote Stadt. Bellincampi, who is also the Music Director of the APO, shares his thoughts around music-making with the orchestra through the pandemic, the necessity of risk, and why Korngold’s opera is so important, especially right now. (There’s also a very moving story that comes with that.) Look out for it next weekend.

A few things have caught my attention the last little while, one of them being the immense traffic my 2022 essay on war and cancel culture continues to garner. I still believe the co-opting of algorithmically-driven language by sectors within the arts community (and arts journalism) is fascinating if frustrating. Nuance, complexity, context, whatever; they don’t generate ad-friendly clicks fomented by white-hot outrage. Pffft. Patience, time, attention, intelligence – very unsexy indeed. To hell with nuance! (I can’t do it; maybe you can.)

All of which is to say: I was very happy to note the Kharkiv Music Festival went ahead this year. Conductor Vitali Alekseenok, who has been the Festival’s Artistic Director since 2021, led a closing-night gala which featured an inspiring mix of opera arias, Ukrainian music, and symphonic works, including Alekseenok’s own arrangement of “Hymn” by Valentin Silvetrov. The conductor, who published a book in 2021 chronicling the protest movement in his native Belarus and following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 drove van-fulls of aid supplies from Berlin to the Polish-Ukrainian border, was named this week as Chief Conductor of Deutsche Oper am Rhein starting in the 2024-2025 season. In March 2022 he told Van Musik’s Hartmut Welscher about what he had observed with regards to his Russian contacts:

 I realize how hard it is to do anything in Russia, especially with the new laws that passed (…). But you have to do everything you can. You don’t necessarily need to take to the streets, but you must find some way of taking a stand and speaking out. Better small actions than no action at all. Silence is the most dangerous thing, but of course most people opt for that; or they keep their eyes closed.

Keeping in that vein: this is a very good documentary.

https://youtu.be/gep4147pJrQ

Much (not all) of the footage in this nearly hour-long work was filmed covertly. It is especially useful in illuminating the rise of Yevgeny Prigozhin and the Wagner Group, and his/their recent “march for justice.”

Alekseenok’s work, together with recent events, and a re-examination of various texts, had me thinking a lot about opera, specifically Russian opera, and the ways in which various works have depicted and dealt with power, on stage as much as off of it. I worried this initial quote-tweet yesterday, based off of European Resilience Initiative Center founder Sergej Sumlenny, came off too glib, especially considering the gravity of the then-unfolding drama, so, to paraphrase Byron, I suddenly felt anxious to explain my explanation. Maybe I am context-obsessed, or maybe, as my mother often used to tell me, I’m being too sensitive.

tweet, opera, Russian, coup, Wagner Group, Mussorgsky, power

In this thread I also highlighted Staatstheater Nürnberg’s excellent in-concert presentation of Anton Rubinstein’s rarely-performed 1875 opera The Demon, a work which largely revolves around notions of nuance, balance, perceptions, faith, and ultimately, redemption. Baritone Jochen Kupfer gave a deeply moving portrait of the titular character, with a beautiful burnished tone and crystalline diction. The Demon gets one more outing this season, on July 8th, with the recent performance broadcast (and accessible) via BR Klassik.

Tomorrow (Monday, 26 June) the Bavarian broadcaster will be busy simulcasting the opening of Hamlet by composer Brett Dean at the Bayerische Staatsoper in Munich. The presentation follows on Dean’s new piece”Nocturnes and Night Rides” written for the 500th anniversary of the Bayerische Staatsorchester, which was presented by the organization earlier this year.

I reviewed Hamlet the opera when it made its world premiere in 2017 – my observation that it’s an important addition to the opera canon made the headline, which is amusing in retrospect, considering the extent to which that’s indeed become true! To say this work had a big effect is putting things mildly.

In the introduction to my interview with Hamlet librettist Matthew Jocelyn in 2019, I wrote that his and Dean’s work, “(t)he theme of vulnerability – Hamlet’s, Ophelia’s Gertrude’s, even that of Claudius –runs through this 2017 work like a trickle of blood on stone.” At the time Jocelyn was directing the opera’s German premiere at Oper Köln. He discussed the differences between English and German-speaking audiences, his work with conductor Duncan Ward, the uses of language (“the French say “dégustation”) and his collaboration with Dean in the work’s creation (“he more radical the decision, the more great the appetite with which Brett jumped on it”).

Allan Clayton, John Tomlinson, Bayerische Staatsoper, Hamlet, Brett Dean, Matthew Jocelyn, Bayerische Staatsorchester, Neil Armfield, Bavarian State Opera, Shakespeare

John Tomlinson and Allan Clayton in a scene from the 2023 Bayerische Staatsoper presentation of Hamlet. Photographer: Wilfried Hösl.

That collaborative spirit was echoed by tenor Allan Clayton when we spoke in early 2020. Clayton sang the lead in the world premiere of Hamlet in 2017, and performed the Met’s production of the opera last year; he’ll rejoin some of the original cast (including Rod Gilfry and Sir John Tomlinson) and crew (director Neil Armfield and conductor Vladimir Jurowski) for the presentation in Munich.  Clayton recalled working on the first Hamlet production in Glyndebourne and how “every department was being collaborative, from Matthew and Brett’s first jotting down which scenes they wanted to include, to the first night. Everybody was giving everything.”

Speaking of giving: Gabriele Schnaut (pictured in the top photo) knew a thing or two about giving all onstage, and through all kinds of projects. The soprano passed away this week at the age of 72. As well as being one of the great singers of dramatic opera repertoire (Wagner, Strauss, Janáček), Schnaut was also open to working with contemporary composers, including Wolfgang Rihm. In 1987 she performed as Ophelia in Rihm’s Die Hamletmaschine, a work based on Heiner Müller’s 1977 play of the same name and a highly abstract reading of Shakespeare’s play. Throughout her career Schnaut was hailed for her forceful stage performances and visceral interpretations; she made her Bayreuth debut in 1977, and in the coming two-plus decades, gave more than 100 performances there. This, in addition to singing at major houses (New York, London, Milan, Paris, Vienna, to name a brief few), and, from 2005 to 2014, a professor of voice at the University of Performing Arts in Berlin.

Schnaut was especially associated with her work at Bayerische Staatsoper, and in 1997 she graced its stage as the lead in Herbert Wernicke’s then-new (and still-revived) production of Elektra. Almost two decades later, she was in the opera again, this time as Klytämnestra. Her bows from that time, caught on video here, are particularly moving, as were the many tributes and expressions of grief at the news of her death.

Until next time… keep your cultural antennae out, and remember the c-word (it’s context).

Top photo by Wilfried Hösl.
Stefano La Colla, Sinéad Campbell-Wallace, Tosca, Paul Curran, Canadian Opera Company, Puccini, Cavaradossi

What Tosca And Metal Share (More Than You Think)

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On May 9, 2023

In Canada, classical, guest contribution, music, opera, personal, production, voice

One of my strongest childhood summer memories involves the great indoors. The intense humidity and rain of one Southern Ontario July forced in-house activities, so my mother decided to enjoy the fruits of still-new VCR technology and watch some of the items within an immensely arts-leaning library. It used to be such an occasion to pop a tape in and watch something one had recorded weeks or even months before; the act of rewatching a program, of having easy access to that piece of news or entertainment, of being able to fast-forward through commercials, or rewind and re-view something, or pause on a favorite spot – it was all a big deal, and a unique form of techno-social adhesion.

Many of the tapes in my mother’s growing collection were recordings of Metropolitan Opera productions, broadcast regularly on PBS. I imagine this is how more than a few people (kids included) came to opera, through such broadcasts and through the use of VCRs. The rainy summers became more bearable, and introduced a host of young friends to what, for me, was just a normal part of everyday life.  Puccini’s 1900 opera Tosca was a favorite; the characters, the setting, the music – it was all very intriguing to a young mind. I wore out the videotape of the celebrated 1985 Franco Zeffirelli production with Hildegard Behrens in the lead, Placido Domingo as her devoted lover Cavaradossi, and Cornell MacNeil as a very scary Scarpia. One rainy afternoon the mother of one of my friends who had been visiting came by to collect her child, and then stood, open-mouthed, in our doorway. I had turned around, between bites of an ice cream float, and looked at Mrs. So-and-so. How was this so weird? What was she stunned over? My friend was as taken as I was over this intense, passionate, violent, crazy work with amazing music; why the surprise? My mother offered her most elegant smile.

“It’s almost over; can you wait a few minutes?”

“Sure,” said shocked mum. “I just never expected my daughter to be so interested in… opera!”

My mother laughed over dinner later in our tiny, dimly-lit kitchen.

“She just couldn’t believe her eyes…”

I made a face.

“Not everyone likes classical music, you know. Especially opera.”

Well they should, I said, leaning over and scooping up the cat, humming the Dah-DAH! notes of Scarpia’s scary musical motif.

“Put the cat down when you’re at the table.”

DahDAAAHHHH!

My mother rolled her eyes.

“Let’s watch something else tonight, okay?”

It’s easy (and certainly fashionable) to make faces and roll eyes and pronounce Puccini’s work too vulgar, too loud, too big, too (heaven forbid) emotional; to write off Tosca as a “shabby little shocker” (musicologist Joseph Kerman’s infamous 1952 pronouncement) and to wave it off as not-serious art and not-real opera. I’m not sure how to feel about this line of thinking; indeed, it isn’t The Ring, but so what? Should all opera be precisely the same? What’s so wrong with emotion? Intelligence is elevated but empathy is far more rare, and Tosca reminds me of its importance, in art and in life. Yes, the opera is clearly a part of my childhood nostalgia, but I hear bits of the score and still get chills at how evocative it is, in terms of conveying both outer and inner realities, and the ways it deftly combines art, sex, religion, and politics. Scarpia’s attempted rape of the title character in the Second Act lands very differently as an adult; there is a stomach-churning familiarity. It is uncomfortable but the scene renders his murder by the would-be victim that much more powerful, and his ultimate revenge on her that much more horrific. Such immediacy matters in art and gains more meaning as the years go by.

This close-to-the-bone quality is one writer Tori Wanzama picks up on beautifully in her essay below. The Communications student, who previously contributed to this website with an excellent essay on her first opera experience at Carmen this past autumn, recently attended the current Canadian Opera Company staging (a remount of its 2008 production) and offers some wonderfully singular insights involving theatre, drama, and… heavy metal? Read on.

Canadian Opera Company, Paul Curran, Tosca, Roland Wood, Puccini, Scarpia, cross, Te Deum, scene

Roland Wood as Scarpia (downstage left) in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Tosca, 2023.

Tosca: Love, Hate, And A Twisted Triangle

Last October I had the privilege of attending the Canadian Opera Company’s presentation of Carmen at the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto, and to detail the excitement of my first opera experience. I enjoyed the show thoroughly, though it didn’t spark the classical-leaning revolution in my musical taste the way I had anticipated.

Admittedly I do return to the famous “Habanera” from time to time, and it, like Bizet’s opera, remains just as hypnotic as the first time I heard it. But metal has dominated my listening habits lately, making screaming and “shredding” the standard for me. While I consider my music taste eclectic and all-encompassing, my affinity for metal has given me a critical ear toward other genres. I enjoy them all, but still feel most lack a vital ingredient: drama. I find myself longing for the ferocity of intense instrumentals and booming vocals that demand virtuosity from artists. It is the same quality which is alive and nurtured at the opera, and that I found especially present in Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, which I was fortunate enough to attend in Toronto last week.

In Rome, 1800, a twisted love triangle begins amidst the French Revolutionary Wars. The union of opera singer Tosca (Sinéad Campbell-Wallace) and painter Cavaradossi (Stefano La Colla) is challenged when the latter hides escaped political prisoner Angelotti (Christian Pursell). The painter’s crime is discovered by the cruel chief of police Scarpia (Roland Wood) who plans to execute both men; the chief’s enthusiasm for execution is matched only by his lust for Tosca whom he propositions, offering her lover’s freedom in exchange for her submission to him. Tosca seemingly concedes, but once Scarpia signs a letter of safe conduct she is quick to kill him. Victoriously, Tosca reunites with Cavaradossi to deliver her good news, but the couple’s happiness is short-lived when Cavaradossi’s execution is still carried out; in despair Tosca ends her life. This third act betrayal is played as a shock but the tragic end reveals itself far earlier, in Act 1, when the three leads reveal their true natures; with every passing aria their terrible trajectory becomes plain to see.

In the Toronto presentation (running to May 27th), La Colla’s Cavaradossi is sung with pure conviction. When he sings of his love for Tosca in “Dammi i colori” his passion for her is tangible, with a vocal tenderness difficult to describe. I can only stress to see it live it if you can; I quite literally swooned in my seat as he sang his admiration of Tosca’s brown eyes, and I find I am yet haunted by his delivery, even several days after experiencing it; his commitment is clear, as is his loyalty to Angelotti, the friend he helps to hide. “E’buona la mia” is delivered with genuine urgency as he promises his help, and curses Scarpia with a hypnotic cadence that is reminiscent of a priest delivering blessings to ward off evil. Cavaradossi is dedicated to those whom he cares for, but it is this devotion that is his demise when faced with cruel competition.

The same can be said of Tosca, whose love for Cavaradossi is demonstrated in her possessiveness. Despite her jealous ways, it is clear why the role is so famous as Campbell-Wallace takes the stage to offer a Tosca who is both cunning and cute. Campbell-Wallace brings such charisma to the character that even Tosca’s jealousy is endearing, especially in the scenes with her bickering back and forth with Cavaradossi in their love duet. Campbell-Wallace and La Colla’s vocals are heavenly in harmony, and there is a seamless chemistry between the performers that makes the exchange especially charming; I could see the years behind this couple, just as clearly as I could see the end of their days. Their devastating love for one another creates a malaise that lingers and peaks in act two with “Vissi d’arte”. Your heart breaks as Tosca mourns her tragic circumstance and sings with beautiful horror at Scarpia’s advances. Her audible desperation underscores her determination to protect Cavaradossi no matter the cost.

Roland Wood, Sinéad Campbell-Wallace, Tosca, Canadian Opera Company, Paul Curran, Puccini

Roland Wood as Scarpia and Sinéad Campbell-Wallace as Tosca in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Tosca, 2023. Photo: Michael Cooper

This ruthless resolve is matched by Cavaradossi’s competition, Scarpia, who is driven by lust rather than love. Roland Wood embodies Scarpia perfectly, with a booming baritone befitting of such a cruel character. The “Te Deum” is an absolutely chilling number conveying the chief of police’s corruption to superb effect. Scarpia is explicit about his evil intentions as he revels in his manipulation of Tosca with the Cardinal’s procession as his chorus. The chief explains the pleasures of romantic conquest with such perverted pride that makes his performance both uncomfortable and enticing to watch.

The First Act sets a foreboding tone with each performer conveying emotions which make individual motivations clear, and with such conviction coming from each character that there is no other end but disaster. We can only await the sequential calamity as the loyalty of the lovers is tested against Scarpia’s ruthlessness. The small cast creates a palpable intimacy, bringing the audience closer to each character, surely an aim of the verismo tradition; the operatic genre contrasts contained, realistic story writing with a florid and declamatory vocal style that emphasizes emotion. This cast delivers with awe-inspiring vocals that soar above even the bombastic orchestra led by conductor Giuliano Carella.

I left Tosca both impressed and unsettled; the show is unmistakably “metal” in its presentation of beautiful brutality. In his director’s note, Paul Curran noted that “opera is about sex, religion, and politics” and immediately I thought metal is much the same. The two genres also share an unflinching gaze, not only at death, but at human anguish. Researching this shared affinity for agony led me to Aristotle’s concept of catharsis in which the ancient philosopher states in observing tragedy that evokes fear and pity, “the human soul…is purged of its excessive passions”. Across both genres, artists explore the aforementioned ideas to their extremes, creating a unique release for respective audiences; despair becomes delight amidst the throes of musical virtuosos, and metal and opera alike offer an essence that cannot be found anywhere else.

Top photo: Stefano La Colla as Cavaradossi and Sinéad Campbell-Wallace as Tosca in the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Tosca, 2023. Photo: Michael Cooper
Christian Immler, opera, singer, performer, artist, vocal, classical

Christian Immler: Balancing New Projects & Old Favorites

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On March 25, 2023

In classical, COVID19, interviews, music, new music, opera, symphony, voice

Since our last conversation in early 2021, bass baritone Christian Immler has been busy. As was the case with many artists, the bass baritone’s schedule changed dramatically as a result of pandemic-related lockdowns; his approach to music, as you’ll read in our recent conversation below, didn’t change but intensified and expanded, particularly within the realms of score study, synergy with colleagues, and active public engagement.

In December 2022 Immler performed with the Czech Philharmonic and conductor Semyon Bychkov in the lauded world premiere of Prager Symphony, Lyric Fragments after Franz Kafka (Symphony No. 4) by contemporary German composer Detlev Glanert. Based directly on the work of Franz Kafka (including his letters, short stories, novels, and fragments from his notebooks) the work is an immense, daring exploration of the lyric symphonic form, with scoring for orchestra and two voices (bass baritone and mezzo), spread over twelve sections. As the composer told Bachtrack just prior to the premiere, the work is “a psychological landscape, where two people tell us something about ourselves: a story of life from the very beginning to the end, plus all human circumstances you can imagine: being witty, the pain of violence, happiness, and so on.” Prager Symphony will be presented again later this year, with Bychkov and Immler – in June, with the Concertgebouw and Gewandhaus respectively, and the UK premiere happening in November with the BBC Symphony.

Along with learning and performing the Glanert work, the bass baritone also released the album Das heiße Herz (Alpha Classics) with pianist Andreas Frese, featuring the music of Robert Schumann and contemporary German composer Jörg Widmann. Released in mid-2022, the work features songs from Schumann’s 1849 cycle Lieder und Gesänge aus ‘Wilhelm Meister’ (text by Goethe) as well as the composer’s 1850 cycle ‘6 Gedichte von N. Lenau und Requiem’; the world-premiere recording of Widmann’s Heisse Herz (The Burning Heart) comprises the album’s second half, with Immler conveying a stunning (and stunningly controlled) level of musicality, sometimes utilizing sprechstimme to exude the emotional intensity Widmann’s writing necessitates. A review in Opera News early this year (which singled the album out for its monthly Critics Choice designation) noted the degree to which Immler “shows a performance artist’s mastery of the work’s considerable demands, as does the fearless (pianist) Frese, who thunders, tremolos and occasionally slams the keyboard or strums the inside, in addition to playing with great tenderness when called upon.”

Our recent conversation began by my asking Immler about his fascinating exploration of the little-known music of Wilhelm Grosz (1984-1939) and Robert Gund (also spelled Gound; 1865-1927) which use texts by a range of celebrated European writers, including Eduard Mörike (1804-1875), Joseph von Eichendorff (1788-1857), and Clemens Brentano (1778-1842). The album, set for release in early 2025 on Alpha Classics, sees Immler reunite with pianist Helmut Deutsch, with whom he previously collaborated on a gorgeous 2021 album showcasing the largely unknown music of Hans Gál. The thought of Immler and the pianist reuniting for a project featuring music few know well (or are aware of at all) is a needed bit of hope amidst a still-difficult classical environment.

Immler is just embarking on an extensive Northern European tour, performing the work of another composer whose works he knows well; St. Matthew Passion is being presented by famed Bach conductor Masato Suzuki and the Netherlands Bach Society in twelve different locales between March 25th and April 8th. Before the tour began Immler took time to offer thoughts on everything from covid-related cancellations to the earthy writing of both Bach and contemporary composers. Immler is always inspiring to speak with, whether he’s discussing the finer points of scores, sharing the realities of singing works of rarely-heard composers, or how the simple act of breathing informs and influences musicianship; our recent midwinter exchange was, quite simply, a joy.

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

Christian Immler and Helmut Deutsch. Photo: Marcus Boman

How’s your work with Helmut Deutsch coming along?

It’s great! We both love this repertoire. There are cases where something will seem like a good idea and then you work with someone, in a duo, and it’s one person pulling the other – but not with Helmut, not at all. We both pull in one direction. With this repertoire, it is really a total discovery. I’m not unused to reading through unfamiliar repertoire but this time there is the added thrill of manuscripts – that’s all there is  – so we had to transfer them into Sibelius, all these songs composed as lieder. We did a test run for an audience of around ten people, and had to preface it with, “this is most likely the very first performance of this song cycle!”

What has your process been so far?

Helmut has been cursing me – playfully – for introducing him to this repertoire. The Grosz is very difficult to play; there are so many things are happening at the same time in the piano lines, and he says he needs a few more fingers. Nobody realizes how difficult it is, again, because this repertoire is so unknown. We don’t talk very much, a couple of times we verbalize what we want but the rest is push-pull, and listening.

Listening seems vital, whether it’s for a duo project or for larger performances, like Glanert’s Prager Symphony.

A lot of people can listen if they don’t do anything else, but if you have to do your work, playing and singing, and listen at the same time – that’s a special skill set, because you need to do what you do, and intrinsically listen to the other person at the same time. Helmut knows the text, and I know his piano part very well; sometimes I’ll look more down to what he’s doing and not only to my singer’s part. You have to process a lot at the same time. Also, we need to breathe – everybody knows that – but you wouldn’t believe how many conductors ultimately have no idea what that means; Semyon does. He and Helmut both use their breath as a means of expressivity, and it makes all the difference. When they intuitively run out of breath, they renew themselves. So it’s natural, we both do it. If you have well-written repertoire that breath comes very naturally anyway, but if it’s mediocre writing, and the phrases are really long, you think, “okay, I have to take an odd breath here” but it doesn’t usually happen with good composers.

That synergy is interesting given your recent projects use texts by authors who are long dead and/or did not write specifically for singers. 

It is known that Kafka, although he did not have an aversion to music, did not want some of his texts set to music..

… and yet!

… yes, Max Brod didn’t quite comply there! He didn’t burn the papers Kafka had written after his death. Glanert and Widmann have both said that at a certain point, they have to let their work go. Both are very experienced, so it means at one point they realize it’s no longer controlled by them, and they accept performers might have a slightly different viewpoint or approach, and I think there is a wisdom in this. They’re both great at letting things go. Glanert was present during rehearsals with the Czech Phil and took notes, and when there were moments of difficulty, instruments groups were too soft or loud or whatever, he, without running to the stage and making a fuss, would take notes, and Semyon would come and they’d communicate about it. The process was super-fluid in terms of it being a true work-in-progress situation. We didn’t have many rehearsals of that, either.

The subsequent performances of it this year may have more rehearsals, then?

I have a huge advantage now because I know the piece, but for orchestras, it’s different. Mind you, those other orchestras – the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the Leipzig Gewandhaus – are super-orchestras, even with their different approaches. And I have to say also: the Czech Phil is stunning, just… top.

To what extent do you think these songs, and Kafka’s texts, have acquired a new relevance?

It’s funny, that work, as well as the songs I’m doing with Helmut and the theme of my doctoral research, it’s all on work done roughly 100 years ago – yet these poems, at this very moment, in my opinion, have an incredible modernity and relevance. You read some of them, and … well, so I read The Guardian in the mornings, and you see these terrible things about the war in Ukraine, and you see these works, and they resonate as a part of our time, right now.

How does this work and the Widmann speak to that time? And how much do you think listening as a result of that time changed?

Both Widmann and Glanert have a lot of experience in the operatic field and a high level of awareness. They won’t waste opportunities in sound; if they want a big turmoil they know how to create it, and likewise they can create the absence of sound and the power of pauses and stillness. They totally understand – it’s quite unsettling in the Glanert, you think, holy! You could hear a needle drop. It only happens if the ear is preconditioned in the writing, and both of them can do this very well.

For me, and so many who experienced an unprecedented level of isolation and loneliness, and a lack of outside distraction if you will, there was a total feeling of insecurity of what is going to happen. Nobody knew. I find in a lot in these poems, especially in the Kafka texts, there is a sense of basically trying to come out of that situation by saying, “Okay, let’s state we are lonely, and the only way we can kind of overcome this is by stating it first of all and being aware of it, and then sticking together.” This first Kafka text, if you read it, it’s so strong, it states: we are lonely yet we are interconnected by a network of invisible threads, and it’s bad enough if they loosen, but it’s terrible if one of them falls. That, to a certain degree, is what we all experienced in early 2020.

But somehow there is a hope through humanity, and that sounds grand, but these songs don’t leave you feeling dark, they leave you with a sense of… hope is not enough… but that there’s a chance for humanity. And it’s an important balance to what I read in the newspaper.

That seems more rooted in reality. 

Yes and I do like that these composers don’t go into the religious sphere or some form of theism, or into any kind of metaphysical sphere at all – everything stays deeply human, earthy and rooted, and thus very approachable. The subtext of them is: you don’t have to be a believer to come out of this darkness.

That’s exactly where they reminded me of Bach, which is perhaps odd…

It’s not odd!

Bach is associated with deep religiosity, but in St. Matthew Passion, for instance, the writing is blood-and-guts human, and it’s the embrace of that messiness which opens the door to the divine. The line between Bach and these modern works is not that long, is it?

It really isn’t It’s funny, I was standing in the Liszt Academy in Budapest recently – which is a total dream building, by the way – I was in a corridor and remembered being there one-and-a-half years ago, being tested with the orchestra, and at 5 in the afternoon the performance was cancelled; the entire bass section had covid. It was like a sudden rain-shower but you don’t know what to do; we are not programmed as artists to know what to do. When I get up on a performance day I am geared to that one thing in the evening when I am meant to deliver. It’s a lot of energy… this very earthy, a very sharply human experience…

How has that time influenced you in terms of singing both contemporary music like Widmann and Baroque?

In terms of the Widmann, it’s the most difficult thing I’ve ever learned, and if you don’t hear that I take it as a compliment. The scoring is very detailed! He is a total musician; he wants to define it as well as possible, but then you have to have it in your system. The actual level of preparation was intense; there is so much information coming your way, you can’t ignore it, and say, “Oh I feel it this way” – that isn’t possible. You have to prepare it to that level of detail and then know it subconsciously. It was an incredible amount of preparation, apart from pitching and rhythm, and the extended vocal techniques; he would write things in the direction like, ‘Dangerously Through Your Teeth’ or ‘Psychedelically Sung’ for certain passages, but it always makes sense. And, this may sound banal, but it could be Widmann or Monteverdi or Bach or Glanert, but look at it and I’ll think, “This is just top-class writing!”

Do you think preparing for something like the Widmann works would have been different in 2019?

I would say no …

So the pandemic didn’t change your approach that much… ?

It changed how people got together, via Zoom or not at all. The loneliness of preparation, overall, was strong for everything. Just after musicians here were allowed to come together again I did the Beethoven/Leonore with René Jacobs, it was just a piano rehearsal with the cast, and everybody started crying. It was such a release of… like, you can practice and vocalize, but it’s a profession which has to be done in community, and with a third ingredient in this: the public. The feeling of being together was unbelievable. For this experience we were grateful to have that return, to know we weren’t alone.

So yes, I stayed faithful to preparing well and being detailed, but, like the first time I sang the St. Matthew Passion, you come out of the pandemic experience a different person, obviously. It changes your whole perception of music and life. You can prepare the piece but the effect it leaves when you present it live… you cannot prepare for that.

Top Photo: Marco Borggreve
sea shore rocks sky blue scene clouds

Things I’ve Been Reading ( & watching, writing, pondering)

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On March 12, 2023

In announcement, art, classical, education, film, history, movies, music, Non-Classical Writing, philosophy, popular culture, teaching, voice, war, writing

More than any other, Sundays have always been reading days. As a child I would spread newspapers over the few stairs which led to the bedrooms in the tiny split-level where I grew up. The family cat would often come and plonk herself down in the very middle of those papers, glaring expectantly with her saucer-eyes, and I would gently scoop her up. Poogie (that was her actual name) would settle in the crook of my arm, happily purring, before I would be allowed to continue my study – of the arts section, yes, but the business, life, politics, and sports ones too.

Reading about a variety of topics is good; being curious about a variety of things is very good. Such curiosity is something I try to continually impress upon students, with varying degrees of success. “When preparing for an interview,” I found myself saying recently, “don’t just study the person; read absolutely everything you can about the whole world around them.” I could practically hear their groans. “Yes it’s work,” I continued, “but it’s also logic. And reading – learning – is good!” In retrospect I certainly sounded very PollyAnna Prissy, but the despair over unconscious predilection to remain in tidy boxes grows daily. There’s a big reason I love radio and cable television: the element of the random, and its related exercise of curiosity, is inescapable.

So until I get the newsletter I alluded to in my previous post up and running, these updates, of things read, watched, listened to, pondered over, will (I hope) continue. Right now these pursuits feel logical, stimulating, important, pleasurable, challenging – sometimes at once.

In light of this week’s terrible news about the end of the historic BBC Singers, bass Brindley Sherratt has written a thoughtful piece (published in The Guardian) reflecting on his time with the group. His words offer a vivid portrait of the realities of young operatic careers and highlight the varied repertoire of the group throughout its history. “In one week,” he writes, “we would sing a couple of hymns for Radio 4’s Daily Service (live, early and terrifying), rehearse and record the most complex score of Luciano Berio or Ligeti and then bang out There is Nothin’ like a Dame on Friday Night Is Music Night.” His writing highlights the importance of there existing good opportunities for young singers while giving lie to the idea that such groups aren’t populist in their appeal and therefore deserve no public funding. This is a depressingly common current of thought in much of North America (sigh). The axing of the BBC Singers makes one wonder if the broadcaster is aiming at a more NA-style (i.e. highly corporate, ROI-driven) system with relation to their classical groups and output. The direct experience of singers like Sherratt should be considered here, along with good models of arts education, funding for which has been woefully dwindling for decades.

Speaking of experience, I finally watched The Big Lebowski, on March 6th – the day of its original release in 1998 and the related “Day Of The Dude” created to recognize the slouchy central character played by Jeff Bridges. Birthed at a time when the (Western) optimism of the early 90s had been turned inside out (the death of Princess Diana, the scandals of the Clinton presidency, the rampant corruption within the former Eastern bloc) and the digital world still in infancy, it’s a very surreal ride into not-unfamiliar terrain. It is tough to say whether or not filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen could have seen Zerograd, a 1988 film by Karen Shakhnazarov (which details the visit of an engineer to a small town), or Mark Zakharov’s equally-surreal To Kill A Dragon (based on the play of Evgeny Schwartz about a man who sets out to kill a dictator), which is also from 1988 (a pivotal moment in Eastern European history) – but they share many elements, from their portrayals of social collapse and untrustworthy leadership, to a pervasive atmosphere of dread, not to mention central male figures who suddenly faced with responsibilities they don’t want. Also, it’s worth noting the Day Of The Dude falls directly after the death-day of Stalin (and composer Sergei Prokofiev), March 5th. (Add to this: the Dude’s favorite cocktail.) However unintentionally, Lebowski, Zerograd, and Dragon make for a thoughtful cinematic trinity in 2023.

Keeping in the film zone, the annual Academy Awards are tonight, and for the first time they feature a best animated feature category. Among the nominees is The Sea Beast by Chris Williams, who worked on number of famed animated films (Mulan and Frozen among them) pre-Beast. Voice work was done via Zoom amidst the worst of pandemic lockdowns, with its cast  (Jared Harris, Karl Urban, Zaris-Angel Hator, Marianne Jean-Baptiste) scattered across the globe. Along with touching voice performances, I enjoyed the film’s the subtext, which smacks at a common (if tiresome) element within current cultural discourse, that of “wokeism”‘s supposed cultural ruinousness. The Sea Beast, superficially a scary-monsters-of-the-deep tale, works in large part because of the ways it integrates diversity into a satisfying thematic whole. Its main female character, Maisie, is a Black British orphan; the crew of the ship she stows away on features diverse and gender-fluid members; the story (by Williams and co-writer Nell Benjamin) uses various elements to convey the idea that historical narratives which elevate and glorify mindless violence are… well, bullshit. The fact this work comes from an outlet (Netflix) and a larger digital culture (streaming) that of course elevates such elements for profit gives the film a currency I’m not sure was intended, and yet.

Sea tales must have been in my algorithm because a Youtube suggestion for a documentary about the Mariana Trench popped up recently. This wonderful David Attenborough-hosted NHK work documents the efforts of various researchers to reach the very bottom of the earth; yes it’s exciting and informative at once, but it’s also, in this case, incredibly atmospheric. Watching it is akin to watching an edge-of-your-seat thriller; will they or won’t they see a sign of life? Will the equipment break? Will they see a… sea monster? An intense claustrophobia pervades many of the scenes, not only those captured (incredibly) in the trench itself but within the little floating rooms filled with anxious-looking researchers. I literally jumped off the sofa when one of the specially-built machines (made to withstand the immense oceanic pressure) hit the bottom with a loud THONK; I sighed heavily at the capture of a Mariana snail fish (yes it’s important for study, but my God, it’s so cute and graceful as it swims! Just look at it!). Another big part of my childhood, aside from reading Sunday papers, involved watching an assortment of nature documentaries, and this was a lovely reminder if also an incredible update on my nostalgia, blending cinematic sense with dramatic tension, and science folded within – in other words, one of the best things.

Another best thing is learning about forgotten (ignored, under-represented) writers. The philosophy of John Locke is well-known; that of Damaris Masham, less so. Yet the two are inextricably linked, as Regan Penaluna so ably shows in her moving Aeon essay published earlier this month. Shining a light on a late 17th century figure who explored women’s lives and experiences through two sole books, Penaluna also shares her own history with a contemporary (if unnamed) Locke-like figure who provided similar encouragement, someone “to whom I frequently looked for validation.” This is a common experience for women who enter largely male-dominated fields, and it’s refreshing to see a philosopher mixing the epic and intimate in ways Masham herself did in her writing. As well as examining ideas surrounding the nature and exercise of power and intimacy, Penaluna takes issue with Masham’s insistence on “women’s superior capacity for care”, noting how such a position “further entrenches patriarchal views”. This portion of the essay brought to mind a popularly-held view that “mothers understand the giving of life and if they ran the world we wouldn’t have so many wars” (a handy derivative of “if women ran the world we would have peace”) – there is a world of history, past and present, repudiating such (frankly narrow and rather sexist) views; viciousness – and nurturing – are not confined to any capacity for reproduction, individually or as a whole. Masham’s view, that “with the right conditions, women could make significant contributions to philosophy, on a par with men”, has real-life (if perhaps uncomfortable, for some) corollaries. Also, it must be said: the intertwined lives of Locke and Masham is the stuff of plays or movies – one or both should really exist. Were either to be realized one might anticipate more body than body-of-work depictions, a pity given the breadth of Masham’s ideas and work, only reprinted in (gasp!) 2005, and alas, no longer in print.

Masham might find more than a bit of interest in the words and music of Marko Halanevych, a member of the Ukrainian “ethno-chaos” band DakhaBrakha: “Art is not outside of politics; it is a factor within politics itself.” Halanevych distills the complex if innately linked relationships between art, history, and politics in a way that points up the connection with power and historically-received narratives; there is no hint of music being somehow magically “above” the fray of war but a key component within it. Culture is a longtime tool used in the wielding authority, particularly via the subtle, soft power methods used before the Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last February. “Between Two Fires: Truth, Ambition, and compromise in Putin’s Russia” (Granta, 2020) by Joshua Yaffa, is a useful reference for Halanevych’s responses, and more broadly, to DakhaBrakha’s artistic output, including their 2017 live-performance soundtrack to Ukrainian filmmaker Oleksander Dovzehnko’s at-the-time controversial 1930 film Earth. Perceived within a larger framework of cultural history, one is struck by the continuing influences of the prisposoblenets Yaffa highlights, and a Soviet nostalgia (referenced so memorably in Zerograd), and the various ways each continue to shape current creative responses to the tragedy in Ukraine.

Notions of choice and circumstance do a strange, uncomfortable dance throughout Yaffa’s book – but such dances are, in 2023, coming to be the norm, and perhaps it’s wise to simply accept the discomfort. Hopefully such dances don’t signal the end of cultural appetite, discovery, and curiosity, but some kind of new beginning. 

Top photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.

 

 

 

 

Parma, Teatro Regio di Parma, opera, opera house, Italy, Nuovo Teatro Ducale, music, culture, history, Europe, interior

Readings illuminate a new path (maybe)

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On February 26, 2023

In announcement, art, classical, education, Europe, history, music, new music, opera, personal, theatre, war, work, writing

It’s been a very busy few months.

Along with teaching commitments, I’ve been writing classical and theatre-related pieces for Canadian media outlet The Globe & Mail, and I have a cover story (about Cree composer Andrew Balfour) for the Winter 2023 edition of La Scena Musicale magazine. You can find all the links (to interviews, features, and reviews) here.

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about Jessica DeFino’s excellent, thoughtful essay posted at her website (The Unpublishable) which relates ephemerally to the recent chatter about Madonna’s face, but more directly, confronts issues around beauty, aging, perceptions, and the “fluffy feminism” that so colours modern discourse. De Fino forces her reader to confront their own (mostly subconscious, I suspect) ideas relating to aging and desirability; one of the things that jumps out (to me) is the extent to which social media has created a sense of performative intimacy around the experience of these things, and an encouragement of projection and identification, largely with people who hold great wealth and power. Such figures (and their respective teams) use that position of privilege to (try to) erase the effects of the aforementioned issues which women who don’t have access to that kind of wealth and power are forced to confront and negotiate.

Today I also came across a powerful piece by Olha Poliukhovych (for Prospect magazine) which examines cultural identity within a vital historical context. Is it Mykola Hohol or Nikolai Gogol? Poliukhovych’s writing has implications far beyond the work (and life) of one 19th century writer, and got me thinking about the romanticizing that (even or especially now) continues around Russian and (especially) Soviet histories, and the ways hard reality interrupts (resets, rethinks, sets afire) such pastel-tinged nostalgia. It’s something I tried to capture last year with my series of essays relating to Ukraine, Russia, and classical culture, and it’s something to ponder throughout Margarita Liutova’s exchange with sociologist Grigory Yudin for Meduza (abridged translation by Emily Laskin). His points relating to resentment have socio-cultural tentacles, and  reading it brought to mind the strong Russian backlash to the #MeToo movement, and subsequently to the persistent complaints of “cancel culture” at work in European and American cultural institutions. But is it really that (shouts of “cancellation” seem to smack of the resentment Yudin identifies), or a more contextualized and wholly overdue sensitivity and awareness, things which Poliukhovych highlights so eloquently?

Speaking of intelligent contextualizing, Opernhaus Zürich has published a very good exchange with German director Tatjana Gürbaca in which she examines the notion that opera is anti-woman – or at least, that a disproportionate number of women in opera die/suffer/are victimized/traumatized. Gürbaca notes that not all opera deaths are the same (“Und nicht jeder Frauen tod sieht gleich aus”) and uses contextualized examples. Donizetti’s Lucia, for instance, doesn’t merely die but goes insane and in her famous “mad scene” aria has more power than of the other characters combined, that “with her coloratura (Lucia) takes space and reclaims her freedom. She also becomes a perpetrator, just like Tosca.” (“mit ihren Koloraturen nimmt sie sich Raum und erobert ihre Freiheit zurück. Ausserdem wird sie zur Täterin, genau wie Tosca.”). The director notes it isn’t just the opera world that has to grapple with issues around diversity, patriarchy, and cultural appropriation, either. “Ver altetes Denken nistet nicht nur im Repertoire der Opernhäuser, sondern auch in Banken, Universitäten, Fernsehanstalten, Krankenhäusern und Supermärkten. Überall.” (“Outdated thinking nests not only in the repertoire of opera houses, but also in banks, universities, television stations, hospitals and supermarkets. Everywhere.”)

Still with readings (even if it isn’t fully finished just yet): a new interview is coming to The Opera Queen with bass-baritone Christian Immler, whom I last spoke with in 2021. That exchange focused on the work of Hans Gál (and a little bit on Johann Sebastian Bach); our most recent one revolved around that of Jorg Widmann and Detlev Glanert. The two contemporary German composers have done some very compelling writing lately, for chamber and orchestra respectively, and Immler and I explored their works within the context of a cultural landscape grappling with the realities of war, politics, and lingering health concerns. That conversation will be posting in March 2023.

Also: more The Globe & Mail work is coming. Links will be posted at my Professional Work page.

Finally: I am considering starting a monthly newsletter. The idea has been inspired by the various works and writers mentioned in this post. The newsletter would replace the unpredictable postings of the past, and would consist of either an interview or a short essay. More than ever I realize I need to follow new paths, although I am still working out details (though I am clear on some: old material = accessible; new writing, get out your wallets). Maybe? Updates forthcoming.

Until then, to borrow a phrase from the weekly newsletter of music writer Axel Brüggemann, “Halten Sie die Ohren steif!”

Top photo: the interior of Teatro Regio di Parma. Photo: mine. Please do not reproduce without express written permission.
trees, forest, wald, baum, nature, winter, still

Essay: Thoughts On Sound, & An Announcement

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On December 27, 2022

In announcement, classical, COVID19, education, Europe, music, opera, programming, voice, work, writing

Sound in and of itself is neither good or bad; it simply is. But more than ever, sound, and the way it is delivered and experienced, is tied up in commerce. The various sources of revenue and concomitant connections to money within the classical world often provides silent framing of a vast and under-discussed reality. Recently The Metropolitan Opera announced they would be performing 10% fewer works next season, drawing on their endowment, and focusing on new works for next season. This year’s new works – Kevin Puts’ The Hours and Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones – drew near-capacity audiences, while old chestnuts (like the Italian version of Verdi’s epic Don Carlos) barely filled the immense auditorium by half. Similar challenges with audiences in post-pandemic life resound internationally, and organizations need to rethink their over-reliance on both starry names and ossified presentational styles. The challenges are less related to “rubbing people’s noses” in current issues (as a famous tenor recently mused) than to organizations attenuating to ever-unfolding realities (including pandemic) within a media ecosystem ever more reliant on the machinery of hype and ad tech which polarizes audience experience (/ inexperience) and expectation, often screwing in unconsciously-held cliches around opera in the process in a breathless bid to please sponsors and conservative board members. Whither sound? Does it matter when there are no camels in Aida?

Exposure, education, and cultural curiosity have everything to do with receptivity of sounds, and in building the critical thinking structures needed for reception of their live realization. More than once this year I have written about (and linked to) the precipitous drops in educational standards, particularly across North America. If Europeans groan at hearing the word “privilege” and roll eyes at the mention of culture wars, it is worth remembering the basic cost of things across the ocean. (Various American contacts of mine living in Europe are aghast at the sheer cost of groceries in visits home for the holidays, as one immediate example.) This seems an issue worth shouting about, repeatedly, even if people want to stick fingers in ears and continue rolling eyes. The Met is not The Royal Opera Covent Garden is not Bayerische Staatsoper is not Oper Zurich is not Opera de Paris is not the COC is not ENO (alas…). Different strokes; different horses. As I discussed with Mark Williams (the new CEO of the Toronto Symphony) this autumn, one city cannot simply be grafted onto another. One culture cannot be grafted onto another. One educational system cannot be grafted onto another; one set of ideas and living experiences cannot be grafted onto another. We cannot wish x was like more y; x may be devolving back to m but it is its own m, in its own place, and this is worth remembering. Blithely accepting what various levels of government cut or mete out or hype without a peep of protest, pause, or media scrutiny does not make for a healthy arts ecosystem, or for healthy artists.

Thus do the educational systems in various locales – along with social safety nets, levels of (non-corporate) funding, culture, history, infrastructure – contribute to respective classical atmospheres and moreover to the perceptions of sounds, and their direct experience within specific environments. In classical within a North American idiom, some of those sounds are treated as a decimal in the equation of style, performance, and digital bragging rights. Marketing departments often dictate programming choices; risky sounds are placed straight in the bin unless those departments are very sure they can create an online buzz that directly translates to ticket sales – the unicorn goal of classical marketing rarely achieved with any reliable consistency. Of course sound is, at its core, represented by dots on a page, but sound is much more than dots, symbols many people can’t read, let alone hear in their heads. It matters how/where/when/within what circumstance one experiences them, or does not experience them, where and how one learns them, from whom, in what atmosphere. Absence is as importance as presence, something musicians of all genres know. Contributor Tori Wanzama experienced Bizet’s Carmen for the first time this past autumn – in a highly individualized way and certainly different to those who grew up hearing the music throughout childhood. Context is everything, and it ought not – especially now in a war that so affects cultural arenas – to be ignored in favour of romantic notions which do not contextualize (let alone acknowledge) the role of privilege in the listening/live/learning-about experience.

Sounds are, or can be, loaded; they often carry the heavy ammunition of intertwined histories – personal, professional, political, and beyond. Recently I came upon a unique performance of a German-language version of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin led by Michail Jurowski, who passed away in March of this year. Recorded at Semperoper Dresden in 1991, this Onegin demonstrates clearly, how sound is not only sound but can be much more. Yes, this is recognizably Tchaikovsky; no, it is not the recognizable Onegin, at least not for those who are solely familiar with the opera in its original language. The famous “Letter Scene”, for instance, features Czech soprano Zora Jehličková performing Tatyana’s passionate declaration in an excited if highly knowing manner – she sounds worldly, as if she is about to set Valhalla on fire. The reading of the score has transformed to reflect the vagaries of the language in which it is being sung. Use all the Teutonic-music cliches you wish (see above) – they apply to Jurowski’s reading, but they don’t quite capture the singularity of this particular sound at this particular juncture. How could they? Think about what was happening in Germany at the time, and you hear it in this reading; the swift tempi, the jaunty phrasing, the acid tone of the strings against the excitable blares of the horns, the way in which the orchestra swells around certain syllables – and how much it all contrasts with various Russian recordings. These divides in sonorities aren’t solely down to the differences between maestros (though that’s a factor) – but time, place, language, people – context.

Sound embodies so many things,  if only we would listen. Semperoper is not The Met is not La Scala is not Mariinsky is not Kyiv Opera is not… we are not you; you are not me; one but not the same, and sounds are bigger than both of us, together or apart –the biggest question, the smallest decimal; the hard sell, the soft touch; sound draws in the most tiny details and simultaneously reveals a far broader picture. It is difficult to define because its experience differs so greatly between people and changes through time, privilege, history, locale, and family. This website has tried to reflect such concerns since its founding in 2017, and the past twelve months in particular have brought a reassessment of its purpose. I always resisted definitions for what this website is, or could be, though I was always quite sure of what it was not. I always wanted my work to be more than hyperbolic PR – to be a meaningful (and yes, critical) engagement with an art form I love in all its facets. I aimed to share authentic, unedited (mostly) conversations with people whose work genuinely inspires curiosity, and in so doing provide a forum for the sorts of exchanges mainstream media has neither the bucks nor the bandwidth for. I aimed to float somewhere between the heady and the populist, the intellectual and the everyday, and to firmly keep my own voice intact, as someone who floats in that netherworld herself, and probably always will. This is, at least, what I had hoped. Have I achieved these aims? Have I contributed anything of worth to conversations around classical music? Should I worry about legacy brand media, and which writers and artists love, hate, or share my work?

2022 has been a year of learning to live with and accept open questions that may never have answers, and to stop worrying about the ones that really don’t matter. This website will exist in the short term; there will be occasional feature interviews – as ever, with people and things not being given the attention or quality of time and detail, let alone the uniqueness of perspective, in mainstream media coverage. But just as practical priorities (paid writing opportunities; teaching) call, so does the living of life, remade from what it was in March 2020. Returning is different, which is just as it should be; it is not returning at all, but remaking. Just as locales cannot be grafted onto one another, neither can experiences, ideas, or notions of normal. I want to have meaningful real-life conversations that won’t be shared online, and I want to experience sounds, live, with people I call friends, and note how those sounds are different now that everything else – that magical context – is too. There are voices, and sights, and (thank goodness) sounds, and all they carry – quietly, loudly, beautifully; the readiness, to quote Hamlet, is all. 

nature, snow, wald, forest, footprints, trees, Fußspuren, quiet, winter

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

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