Tag: stories

New Zealand Opera: “We Want Stories That Are About Us, Now, Here In This Place”

On April 25, 2024

In business, classical, history, interviews, new music, opera

Is opera in crisis? It depends on who you ask. Directors, programmers, musicians, dramaturgs, academics, and music writers alike have been grappling with what exactly opera’s place can or should be in contemporary society. Shrinking interest; dying audiences; lack of funding sources; layoffs; closures; relocations; charges of abuse; increasingly desperate marketing and juiced-up data – outside of the small silo in which opera produced, presented, shared, and discussed the signs aren’t exactly encouraging. These issues highlight a bigger problem: the perception that opera, for all of its beauty and benefits, is simply irrelevant to a great many people.

It’s an idea – or reality, depending on your viewpoint – which has come about through decades of dramatic economic, cultural, and technological shifts, not least of which has been the precipitous cuts to arts journalism. Those cuts are frequently not acknowledged by the opera cognoscenti, though such lack of awareness (or interest) is possibly symptomatic of a larger issue facing opera, one related to community. The extent to which opera companies (and their leaders) meaningfully engage with the community, and in what spirit that engagement is conducted, are hard if important questions right now; is local engagement done for marketing and optics, or does it mean something more, something outside of affirming positional privilege? Should opera reflect the place it’s presented, and if so, how? Opera is inherently linked to context; the cultures and histories of one locale can’t (and shouldn’t) be grafted onto another one. So how should opera acknowledge context? In which formats? And what role might commissions play in all of this?

One might look to New Zealand. A new report from Arts Council New Zealand Toi Aotearoa released this past Tuesday (“New Zealanders and the Arts – Ko Aotearoa me ōna Toi“, Creative New Zealand, 23 April 2024), shows public engagement, participation, and attendance in arts events all impressively up, with increased support for Ngā Toi Māori (Māori arts) as a way of connecting with culture/identity and encouraging language skills and usage. Various aspects of accessibility stand out, however; in identifying elements that would make a difference to their regular attendance, 53% of respondents cited cheaper tickets, and 30% said feeling confident they would be welcome. Might these respondents feel welcome at the opera? New Zealand Opera (NZ Opera) certainly hopes so. The company is dedicated to presenting work which reflects the people and history of Aotearoa; that focus means the country’s rich heritage and history sits at its core – and clearly manifests in the company’s bilingual website, which acknowledges a range of cultural consultants. Among the four values on its Mission & Values page is, rather notably, “Mahitahi | Collaboration“. Presenting works in a number of cities including Wellington, Christchurch, and Auckland’s Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre (named after the famed Kiwi soprano), the company partnered with the acclaimed dance ensemble Black Grace and its founder, choreographer Neil Ieremia last September. Gluck’s 1762 opera Orfeo ed Euridice was presented in reimagined form, as (m)Orpheus, with reorchestration of Gluck’s score by New Zealand composer Gareth Farr for a ten-piece ensemble that included a string quartet, marimbas, guitar, woodwind, and brass. The production was a hit with critics and audiences alike. As well as live presentation the company has a clear commitment to education – hosting a student ambassador programme; school presentations and tours; and Tū Tamariki, characterized as “a space for Māori driven works, created specifically for tamariki and rangatahi” (children and youth). Its first opera, Te Hui Paroro by music theatre artist Rutene Spooner, incorporates various theatrical elements including text, movement, and waiata. Upcoming presentations include Rossini’s Le comte Ory (opening the end of May) and a concert version of Wagner’s epic Tristan und Isolde in August with the Auckland Philharmonia led by Giordano Bellincampi.

This past week the company hosted its inaugural New Opera Forum, or wānanga, at Waikato University, located roughly 90 minutes south of Auckland. The Māori Dictionary defines a wānanga as a “seminar, conference, forum, educational seminar” as well as “tribal knowledge, lore, learning – important traditional cultural, religious, historical, genealogical and philosophical knowledge” – a definition which complements the company’s interest in music-based and text-based storytellers. Featuring composer Jonathan Dove, librettist Alasdair Middleton, and baritone and reo Māori expert Kawiti Waetford (Ngāti Hine, Ngātiwai, Ngāti Rangi, and Ngāpuhi), the wānanga is described on the NZ Opera website as “a space for story-telling creatives in Aotearoa to gather together and consider the essential steps required before starting new opera projects.” The company’s General Director, Brad Cohen, told local arts website The Big Idea in February that the idea for the forum sprang from two questions, ones relating to support for new works’ “success and longevity“, and best ways to welcome storytellers to an art form they may perceive to be one of “exclusivity and entitlement.” (“New Forum Eager To Smash Creative Stereotypes”, The Big Idea, 15 February 2024)

Cohen has a lifelong history in music – as a conductor, administrator, and founder of the immersive music platform Tido. Raised in Australia, he began playing violin at the age of four before becoming a chorister in Sydney; as a teenager Cohen won scholarships (organ and academic) to The Kings School, Canterbury (UK) and went on to St John’s College, Oxford. Studying conducting with Sergiu Celibidache in Munich and Leonard Bernstein in Strasbourg, he eventually was awarded a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. In 1994 he won the Leeds Conductors Competition. (Other winners include Martyn Brabbins, Paul Watkins, and Alexander Shelley.) From 2015 to 2018, Cohen was Artistic Director of West Australian Opera. A fan of French and Italian repertoire, his track record with contemporary works is equally formidable; along with collaborations with composers Thomas Ades, Jonathan Dove, Georges Lentz and Ross Edwards, Cohen has directed ensemble works by Frank Zappa and worked closely with the celebrated Almeida Opera Festival in the 1990s. He has led the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Orchestras, the Philharmonia, the Stuttgarter Philharmoniker, Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, and Melbourne Symphony Orchestra to name a few, as well as conducting operas at English National Opera, New York City Opera, and Opera Australia, and recorded on the Naxos, Chandos, and Deutsche Grammophon labels.

Named as General Director of NZ Opera in April 2023, Cohen outlined his belief in opera to national broadcaster RNZ:

For me, opera is a universal resource. It uses one very simple element, the human singing voice, and it does one very simple thing with that, and that is tell stories through the power of that singing voice. This is a resource that is the first thing we as infants hear…we hear our mothers singing to us…it’s what we grow up with, it’s the only instrument everyone is born with…and it belongs to us all.

(“The new NZ Opera: progressive rather than radical“, 14 November 2023, RNZ)

In January Cohen took part in a panel called “Conversations About Opera” and admitted he was part of what he called the “apprentice and master model” and that the current opera landscape requires “more consideration in how we collaborate.” (“New Zealand Opera boss hails changing culture”, New Zealand Herald, 21 January 2024). Collaboration has a recurrent theme throughout Cohen’s work; in a 2018 blog post closing his tenure with West Australian Opera, Cohen outlined the centrality of what might be termed the three c-s of 21st century opera: community, curiosity, and confidence. Ties to my own favourite c-word (context) are obvious; they jump out of the opera silo by simply acknowledging there’s a reality (or rather, several) outside of it.

Our recent conversation took place the week before the start of the wānanga. Cohen and I began by discussing the origins of the forum before exploring the role companies might play in cultivating new commissions, a role that goes well beyond workshops and acknowledges collaboration and related community. At a time when there are calls to “burn it all down” – “it” being the opera world – Cohen takes what has he himself has termed a progressive (as opposed to radical) approach; the opera-is-fancy clichés can go; the stories and the music remain.

Photo: Andi Crown

How did the New Opera Forum come about?

The idea really began 35 years ago; I started out my career working at the Almeida Opera Festival in London in the 1990s – that was where I did the premiere of Ades’s Powder Her Face and a lot of other major work. We also developed many new commissions. The 1990s was probably the last decade of real confidence around new opera. There was a vision of a way forward then, that (new opera writing) was part of a tradition and that it was going to continue. My perception is that that confidence has really deteriorated and lessened over the last couple of decades. When I came into the role here as General Director, there were some commissions in progress and discussions around future commissions. I thought we needed an overhaul and that sent me to thinking: what would the preconditions be for new works? The forum is about exploring the best means of ensuring success for new work that we can – and by “success” I don’t mean first performance or run; I mean sustainability and revivability.

How does the forum aim to counteract the one-time-only issue for new opera works?

It goes back to process. My experience of working with experienced and less-experienced composers and librettists is that the historic pattern for many houses seems to be, “Here’s a chunk of money, we’ll see you in three years with a masterpiece.” At that stage, abject terror normally sets in for the music and/or text creators, because they don’t normally have experience in writing opera. They have no idea what the rules of the game are, if you like. They may not even be experienced in writing text or music for voices. There are basic things: how many words do you think a singer can sing a minute and be comprehensible? Do we really want a libretto that’s longer than Tristan when the brief has been for a 90 minute one-act? There’s a real potpourri of experience coming in, but also, from the opera companies, there’s often a real lack of shepherding. Companies will decide on the big name to give the commission to, and then they’ll step in with their direction in the six months before the premiere, in the form of workshops. In my view, and from my experience at the Almeida, that’s far, far too late. It’s the holding of creatives through the entire process that we are proposing as a better model.

The New Opera Forum (L-R) included NZ Opera Participation Manager Frances Moore, baritone Kawiti Waetford, and (bottom) composer Jonathan Dove. Photos supplied by NZ Opera.

“Revivable, Sustainable” New Operas

However, it does encounter a few obstacles because I think opera composition is one of the last citadels of the ivory tower. That is, there is an expectation amongst lots of creatives that they’re going to be given a chunk of money and that the success of the project is in simply getting the commission. Now for me, that emphasis is all wrong. The success of the project is the revivability of the piece. It’s not the getting of the commission. If everything’s inflated towards, “Okay, I’ve got this commission” and then “What the hell am I going to do?!” – that’s the wrong emphasis. How are we going to make these works revivable and sustainable? It’s about how the opera company, with all of our practical and pragmatic experience in putting work on, supports and educates where needed, but does not interfere with the creative process of these people who are writing these works.

What is the role of workshops? What should come before them?

Sometimes workshops have become little more than a PR exercise: “Hey, this piece is coming and here are some bits from it!” But by the time you get to that, it’s way, way too late. What about the robustness of the libretto? What about the dramaturgy? What about the structure? Is this going to work? Is this going to work on stage? Do we think this has a reasonable chance of working? Because a lot of the pieces that I get, you know, I mean, there’s some obvious question – like who wants to see this piece? Who wants to actually see this story? Do you have the authority and the knowledge to tell this story? Is it really your story? Is it your kind of story? Or are is this another form of appropriation? These are really big questions. One of the days of the forum we’ll have one hour focusing on story sovereignty. Some composers and librettists don’t even know what story sovereignty is, so there’s a lot of ground to cover.

There’s a strong element of didacticism within various new works, and it’s sometimes tied to grants and funding schemes. Where does that element fit in with your notions of new opera creation?

That’s a complex issue. I just want to consider your question of whether the existence of grants, to some degree, actually distorts the choices that are made downstream of that. If didacticism is becoming a part of this, is this because in some sense, the grants have a stipulation or a vision mission statement somewhere that suggests that didacticism would actually be welcome? I think I, like you, don’t really feel that didacticism is germane to opera, necessarily. I don’t think historically it’s played that well or successfully and I think if you want to teach and to create teachable moments there are probably far better media to do that.

Gatekeeping In Opera

In terms of our commissioning there’s a lot of dishonesty. I think a lot of people say, “Oh we’re not gatekeepers!” – but actually, I am. I’m pretty much the only gatekeeper in this little corner of the world. I am leading the only opera company here with national reach. I am pretty much the path through which all decisions about commissioning or not commissioning go – and not just commissioning work, but who directs, who produces, who sings, who is cast, all of that. I am ultimately responsible for those decisions. So it doesn’t behove me to say “Oh, you know, we don’t like to think like a gatekeeper.” You know what? We as companies are the gatekeepers; there’s no getting away from it. Someone has to say yes or no. And the biggest part of my job normally is saying no. That’s just the way it is, and I accept the responsibility, but I’m not going to be dishonest about that. Someone has to press go or no-go on all of these projects.

We are not a grant giving body; we source commissioning funds from trusts, foundations and other institutions, but we are still the conduit through which those funds come to creators. The question is, how can NZ Opera support artists better? And by “support creators better” I do not mean, “how can we give you more commissioning money?” – that’s not the point of the question. The question is, what do you expect from a national opera company in terms of their responsibility towards you? Because opera commissioning is an unavoidably expensive process. There’s some sense of adult responsibility here that we’re really keen to discuss on that final forum day; we’re adults, let’s all act like adults and have a serious discussion about what our responsibility is as the national opera company towards creatives, but also what responsibility do creatives have towards the National Opera Company, towards our narrative, towards our journey. It’s a sense of mutual obligation, ideally, and that contract, if you like, is very rarely explicitly stated.

That mutual obligation is made extremely clear on your website – how does that work in terms of the company’s diversity?

I don’t frame it around Māori and non -Māori; we frame it as, we are here to serve our community or, alternatively, communities in a multiple sense. There’s a lot of complexity here around Māori hiring, our bicultural journey going forward, and there’s a lot of complexity politically, with the new, more right-wing government. I won’t use the phrase “cultural war” but there’s an aspect of a culture war developing here right now and as the national opera company, we are right in the middle of that. We feel that we have been given a responsibility, but it’s not like we’re inside and the others are outside. In fact, in many ways, we are outside. We’re outside the main thrust of culture as opera people; we’re outside the main way that people spend their time and what they want to go and see. It’s a very parochial if very common thing to think, “We are at the seat of power and we will open our doors to these lovely creatives from various communities and let them have a chance to play” – for me, the model is exactly the reverse of that. The opera industry as a whole is holding on by our fingertips – we are on the verge of irrelevance – and everything else is either deception or self-deception. I don’t have any time for it.

Cohen (centre) in rehearsals for NZ Opera’s 2024 presentation of Mansfield Park, speaking with Principal repetiteur David Kelly (right). Photo: Jinki Cambronero

Storytelling As Foundation

So if we’re going to serve our communities, what is necessary? What I do is simplify everything to the pithiest possible message, and the only way that I really approach new work, is to see who is the best storyteller and who feels that they both have to tell them and that they have the competence to be able to articulate them. That is really where it stops and starts for me.

If you’re a composer – whether a white male composer or a female of colour – and you’re not interested in storytelling, you’re not a good match for our organisation here, because storytelling – we’ve made it very explicit – is what we believe in and we are about. We want to tell stories not only about our communities, but ones with historical awareness of this nation’s narrative. What part do we play in the narrative going forward? That’s a really big responsibility, but we try and wear it as lightly as possible, not by saying that we are The Chosen Ones and we’re going to occasionally allow a chink of light in so a diverse someone can slip through and become anointed by us – no! It’s about who has great stories to tell and if those who do have any interest in working within the operatic art form. If not, is it because they’re genuinely not interested? Or because there might be some misunderstanding about what opera is – i.e. “It’s not for me because it’s elitist, it’s exclusive” or “They wouldn’t want me anyway”? What we’re saying, really strongly, is that we want great stories – stories that are about us, now, here in this place. We have advocacy and persuasion to do; the way that opera has sold itself for the last hundred years is not the core of what it actually is.

You’ve said in many interviews that the whole “elite” cliché around opera has to go.

Yes, you’ll hear me say it again and again: opera is not about the champagne; it’s not about the black tie. Those things can be part of it, sure, but that’s not what opera is. Opera is storytelling through the human singing voice. Period. I just say that ad nauseam, because that is the most condensed form of definition of what opera is. What’s the quality of the storytelling? Does it reach the heart? Does it speak to audiences? Is it something that people want to come and see?

Photo: Andi Crown

Who decides what’s great or not then? Who decides on that definition as applied to the art form?

It’s a pretty intractable problem. You can abdicate from your responsibilities as gatekeeper and you can say, right, we’re throwing it entirely open, no one’s going to make a decision about this! Then what’s left to you? You could mount competitions too, but at the end of the day someone is always saying “go” or “no-go. ” Always. It doesn’t matter who. It could be the board; it could be the funding body; it could be the GD; there is no world in which work is entirely self -generated and rises to the surface and gains performances without someone at some stage going, “Yes, we’re going to go with this” or “No, this is not for us.” There’s no way around that. The longer-term solution is that my successor is a Māori person – that’s the obvious result of everything I’m doing, and it is my own thinking about succession. I’m not on my way out yet, but it behoves every leader to start thinking about succession immediately. The logical next step for a country who is engaging with these narratives and taking its responsibility to the whole community seriously is that it shouldn’t probably be a white, Oxford-educated male who replaces me. That’s what I am, right? It doesn’t matter how liberal I am.

“Consistent and determined”

A scene from the 2023 NZ Opera production of Mozart’s Cosi fan tutte, directed by Lindy Hume. Photo: Jinki Cambronero

Is it fair, then, to say the Forum is aimed at both creators and a larger classical ecosystem?

It’s absolutely aimed at the ecosystem – we hope that it is going to be a nourishing activity that will send tributaries out into the ecosystem – but that’s not our intent; I hope that it’s going to be a consequence. And for clarity, we are being very explicit that we are not aiming for outcomes from this one; this is a space for reflection, for safe discussion, and for erecting an intellectual superstructure around the space in which we can create new work. We’re not going to have workshops in this one; that’s not what this is about. This is really pushing the walls out to create a safe space and a way to say to people, “Hey, you might have an interesting story we want to hear.” And one of my hopes is that some of the more marginalized voices who may be attending the wānanga will go back to their networks and say, “You know, they might not be full of shit; they might actually have a little bit of understanding.” That’s the best we can hope for. We are very consistent and determined at NZ Opera about the journey we’re on, and our messaging and our communication reflects that.

“Oh, they actually mean it; this isn’t just optics.”

Yes we do mean it! I’m very passionate about it because… my big stick is, I feel like I’m a slight subversive within the establishment, and I’ve watched opera alienate its audiences for my entire life, and I love it too much to let that continue. So I’m doing what I can and encouraging subversion, not merely for subversion’s sake, but in order to refresh this art form and make it purposable going forwards – that’s my mission in life. I think it’s what the art form needs so desperately.

Top photo: A scene from the 2023 NZ Opera presentation of (m)Orpheus, a reimagining of Gluck’s 1762 work featuring dance ensemble Black Grace; directed by Neil Ieremia. Photo: Andi Crown

Daniel Hope, violin, violinist, soloist, performer, artist, host, Hope@Home, classical

Daniel Hope: “I’ve Always Tried To Tell Stories”

By Catherine Kustanczy

On July 5, 2020

In broadcasting, classical, Europe, interviews, opera, video

Whatever good may have resulted from the unfolding experience of the coronavirus pandemic lockdown, one thing is certain: the gaping holes of arts broadcasting have been wholly, and quite hideously, revealed. Violinist Daniel Hope, together with French-German broadcaster ARTE, smartly stepped up to try and fill the tremendous programming gaps existing across so many spheres of both traditional and digital broadcasting. Taking as its model the European-style salon, Hope@Home has provided a modicum of the concert-going experience while consciously avoiding any attempted replication of pre-COVID (or so-called “normal”) formats.

I initially wrote about Hope’s program at the end of April 2020. Hope@Home began its life earlier that month in the South Africa-born violinist’s living room in Berlin. Equal parts fun, thoughtful, familiar, and surprising, each episode in the series (running roughly 30 to 45 minutes) features a mix of performance and poetry through creative chamber combinations. This is a show that is simultaneously aware of both its old(ish) roots in music and its modern presentation in medium, and it is clear-eyed in its mission to provide an ancillary form of classical experience which simultaneously educates, enlightens, and entertains. Guests have included conductors Sir Simon Rattle and Donald Runnicles, pianists Kirill Gerstein, Tamara Stefanovich, and Sebastian Knauer, opera singers Thomas Hampson, Mattias Goerne, Magdalena Kožená, and Evelina Dobračeva, and actors Ulrich Tukur, Iris Berben, Katharina Thalbach, and Daniel Brühl, many of whom performed in Hope’s own parlor. “I could never have imagined in my wildest dreams that such an eclectic bevy of artists would pass through my Berlin salon, nor that we would resurrect the age-old art of the house concert,” Hope wrote in The Guardian in early May. With over sixty episodes now, Hope@Home attracts an international, ever-expanding viewership, and has thus far enjoyed over five million views. Blending old-world charm with a 21st century sensibility is no small thing, and in so doing, Hope has, if I might add a personal note, provided some wonderful moments of comfort and company over many sad months of enforced isolation.

The program has, in parallel with the easing of European lockdown restrictions, moved to a weekends-only format, and out of Hope’s house. Now called Hope@Home On Tour!, various unique and historical locales (indoor and outdoor) across central Europe have become its sets. The July 4th broadcast featured Hope’s very own Zürcher Kammerorchester (Zürich Chamber Orchestra), of which he has been Music Director since 2016, performing in a very evocative factory setting. As well as his duties with Zürich, Hope is also President of the Beethoven-Haus Bonn, Artistic Director of the Frauenkirche Dresden, and Music Director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra in San Francisco. One senses the chamber set-up is where Hope feels most keenly at home in literal and figurative senses; the inherent intimacy of the arrangement provides a route through which the violinist clearly underlines its importance within the creative experience, together with the not-inconsiderable significance of a very human presentation. This is a program that directly addresses any lingering accusations about classical music being distant, heady, or cold; Hope@Home is none of those, and while it does wear its heart firmly on sleeve at times, it does so in elegant and thoughtful ways, immeasurably aided by the creative variety it has offered up over its three-and-a-half-month lifespan. Thus is Zürcher Kammerorchester’s early July appearance at the very tip of an ever-expanding sonic iceberg, pieces of which continue to be unearthed and examined each weekend. The sounds of jazz, swing, and folk are placed beside that of Baroque, classical, and modern, with poetry and theatre hovering close by; never has such a combination felt more right or indeed suited to the nature of the times, as notions of past and present crash and collide to provide an entirely new ways forwards.

Such variety is reflective of Hope’s own interests and oeuvre. His repertoire features the work of Schumann, Brahms, Mozart, Bach, Vivaldi, Shostakovich, Schnittke, Mendelsohn, Tippett, Hindemith, Berg, Foulds, Poulenc, Messiaen, Bartok, Ravel, and Ravi Shankar (to name a few), and he has performed at many celebrated venues including Carnegie Hall, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Wigmore Hall, Alte Oper Frankfurt, and the Concertgebouw. Creative collaborators and partners have included Menahem Pressler, Anne Sofie von Otter, Sebastian Knauer, and Maxim Shostakovich, conductors Kurt Masur, Christian Thielemann, Ivan Fischer, Kent Nagano, Sir Andrew Davis, Sakari Oramo, Sir Roger Norrington, Thomas Hengelbrock, Jiří Bělohlávek , and organizations The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, Konzerthaus Kammerorchester, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra, the Beaux Arts Trio (of which he was a member from 2002 to 2008), Camerata Salzburg, and his very own Zürcher Kammerorchester. He recorded his latest, wide-ranging album, Belle Époque (Deutsche Grammophon, 2020), with the latter, and it reveals a fascinatingly wide selection of early 20th century sounds, all of which drive a certain narrative around navigating an immense precipice of change as much musical as social. The album skillfully blends the work of Schönberg, Massenet, Zemlinsky, Rachmaninoff, Strauss, Fauré, and renowned violinist and composer Fritz Kreisler, whose work Hope has frequently presented throughout Hope@Home, into a gripping and very evocative 150-minute listen.

Along with Kreisler, another violinist to whom Hope regularly pays tribute is Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999). The New York-born soloist had formidable influence throughout Hope’s childhood, an accidental if highly fortunate connection thanks to his mother, who was Menuhin’s secretary for over two decades. Hope stated in an article for The Strad in 2016 (the centenary of Menuhin’s birth) that “Menuhin was the reason I became a violinist” and shared details relating to the spontaneous nature of their performance-instruction connection; it’s this precise quality, this flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants see-if-it-sticks spirit of adventure which gave early Hope@Home episodes such unique electricity, but which, alternately, made Hope himself a calm eye in the middle of a veritable storm, a steady presence who just as easily (even now) shares stories of his days with Menuhin (and others) as he does move between works by Miklós Rózsa and Manuel de Falla, beloved tunes like “Amazing Grace”, and riffing on the folk-balladry of Berlin-based Kiwi singer Teresa Bergmann, the timbres of Hope’s violin and Bergmann’s voice twisting and turning in beautiful, hypnotizing spirals of green-gold aural splendor. Throughout its short life, Hope has also championed the works of less mainstream composers, among them Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) and Erwin Schulhoff (1894-1942). Partly pointing up the show’s blend of education and entertainment, such emphasis also reflects Hope’s discography, as well as his family history, one intimately connected with Berlin and his Jewish roots, a past he openly shares as part and parcel of his hosting duties. There is also, vitally, humour; in one episode from late April, Hope recalled knocking on Alfred Schnittke’s door and introducing himself as a keen teenager; therein developed a friendship which lasted until Schnittke’s passing in the late 1990s.

Such combinations, of personal and broad, intimate and epic, casual boldness and the yearning for inclusion, found direct contemporary expression in Hope’s decision to include homemade musical contributions by musician-viewers in early episodes of Hope@Home. Such easy integrations equally aid in the salon ambiance of live readings, initially done in an adjoining room in Hope’s house and sometimes set to live music. Robert Wilson (whose appearance on the program was, as you’ll read, a nifty bit of luck) read his own poem about the lockdown experience set to a performance of Pärt’s “Spiegel im Spiegel”; director and Komische Oper Berlin Intendant Barrie Kosky read a passage (unaccompanied) from Joseph Roth’s The Hotel Years. Before embarking on wide-ranging locales, Hope kept his touring sites in Berlin, from whence occasional broadcasts still unfold. A visit in early June to the former residence of Hope’s grandmother (where she and her family lived until 1935) featured a 1920s-style swing presentation and was enjoyed by the small crowd who had gathered in the leafy Berlin suburb. More grand if no less intimate was a more recent broadcast from at the Strauss-Villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen featuring baritone Thomas Hampson, who noted of the experience singing in Strauss’s home that “it’s an incredible honor… and I’m terrified.”

Despite its immense popularity, the focus remains on the original intimacy. The show’s visual style is kept purposely consistent, and Hope’s conversational performance style translates seamlessly into his sincere, unaffected deliver. Such naturalism could be owing to past broadcasting projects (including a radio show), but it’s also innately connected with his actively communicative musicality. During a concert with the Konzerthausorchester Berlin honoring Yehudi Menuhin in 2016, Hope and conductor Iván Fischer share a seamless, intense exchange throughout an electrifying performance of Elgar’s Concerto for violin and orchestra in A Minor, Op. 61. Hope’s artistry is one innately connected to communication with his musical partners, whether they’re a pianist, speaker, swing band, or chamber orchestra; this need for communication, and its inherent sincerity, translates palpably to Hope@Home, no small thing in an era that has come to rely more and more on digital broadcast. Hope and I had the opportunity to speak recently, just after he had completed two long-awaited post-lockdown concerts with Zürcher Kammerorchester.

Photo © Nicolas Zonvi

How did Hope@Home happen?

I had a conversation with Wolfgang Bergmann who is the German head of ARTE. (Bergmann’s official title is Managing Director, ARTE Deutschland and ARTE Coordinator of the ZDF.) I’ve known him for many years and we’ve been in touch regularly with various ideas, and we had a meeting at the beginning of March in Berlin about something else, just as things were starting to move very fast in terms of the lockdown. Once the meeting was over he said, “What will you do if a lockdown happens, if it gets serious?” I said, “I don’t know, I might turn my living room into a TV studio!” – I said it, just like that – and after about two weeks he called me up and said, “Were you serious about what you said?” I said, “I’m not sure, I might’ve been!” He said, “Let’s do it.”

And so my first question to him was: what about the sound? I’d been watching some of the (music) streams and thought, as great as they were at the beginning, they were missing really good sound quality on classical music. And he said, “How do you want to play it?” I said, “Let me speak to someone who knows about production of classical sound and we’ll see if it’s doable.” I got an engineer to come and check out if we could do it, then called Wolfgang back to let him know it was possible, but I didn’t expect him to say, “Can we start tomorrow?” That was really insane! And we threw everything together and went straight in. There was no prep, no script, no person checking – usually with these things you have a team of people writing up ideas and vetting artists and repertoire. There was nobody; there was just me. In that sense I did initiate everything, but of course with the help and the slightly mad suggestion of Mr. Bergman.

How much did that spirit of spontaneity directly influence your selections in terms of guests and repertoire?

I think partly, that very intense time was the reason behind what happened, but there were also some really wonderfully strange coincidences. I was walking with my kids around the block and bumped into Robert Wilson on the street, and was like, “What are you doing here?!” He said, “I’m in lockdown and I can’t get back to the States… and by the way, I’ve been watching your show; can I come on it?” It was just amazing! I suggested he do a reading of something, and racked my brains for things to send him. He showed up at the house an hour before the show with his own script. With Simon Rattle, I’d never met him before but got his number and texted him, and within half an hour he rang back and said, “Pick a day.” Those kinds of things would never ever have happened had there not been this severe lockdown. I would’ve never been able to reach these people and they wouldn’t have spontaneously said, “Let’s do this” – that (availability) was the key behind everything else.

And the freedom from the channel was incredible. They never said, “You can’t put a Simon and Garfunkel song next to a reading of Stefan Zweig and then play Schnittke – that’s just not possible!” I think in my mad attempt to get a show together that made sense, I thought about what kind of music I would like to hear, and then went about to see if I could draw a theme together.

The ease of movement between genres and media is refreshing; you’ve shown, however accidentally, that there is a big thirst for this kind of variety in a cultural presentation.

For a long time I read and researched a lot about the Berlin salons of the 19th century, or the French ones that hosted people like Marcel Proust, this idea, even going back to Schubert’s time, where he’d have these soirees and friends would come by and did something, anything –if they read, played, recited, danced, whatever – it was a getting-together of artistic minds and seeing what happens; that was in the back of my mind. I was sure after a couple of episodes we’d get complaints about something or the other, but because of the shutdown the structures usually in place in terms of regulating TV content were not there, so they let me run with it. One of the biggest victories was doing the whole thing in English, because it’s a German-French channel, so it would’ve normally been in German or French or both; I literally broke with all protocol and went in English, and after the first slightly irate comments from some people at the chanel, they figured out, “Oh wait, everybody speaks English…” And we went with it, because I feel most comfortable speaking English anyway. That was a big part of the success of (Hope@Home): it’s global. People can respond to it.

Noteworthy you spoke in German during your first performances with an audience at the Frauenkirche Dresden.

When we started to go outside of the house and into concert halls and started to have audiences, that was when the next big challenge came; I had an audience in front of me and the audience at home, and I think we were all a little bit anxious to see if it could work somehow, because either the people at home will feel out, or the people in the hall will feel left out, so I was juggling between them. That show in Dresden was the largest audience we’ve had to date (for Hope@Home), it was three or four hundred people, so it was important to address them in German as if it was a concert, but at the same time not to forget about the global audience at home.

https://youtu.be/6-kB3LVUkZ0

What was that like to play for a live audience after so long – was it emotional?

It was very emotional, yes. Just a couple of nights ago we played in Zürich as well, two concerts with around 450 people, approximately. It’s an extraordinary feeling, having been cut off for months, and to go to back into the hall; even if people aren’t seated next to each other and there are distances, it’s still a very different feeling when you’re communicating directly in that moment and you see and hear applause, you’re watching peoples’ faces, and you’re making music together with colleagues. Playing that chamber music repertoire was unbelievably emotional for all of us.

The experience of hearing applause from a live audience in Dresden hit me quite hard…

I bet!

… though it’s been heartening to note your being such a public champion of the work of Alfred Schnittke. I love that your program features stories like, ‘One night I just knocked on Schnittke’s door’ followed by performances of his works. You blend the personal with the so-called “high-art” of classical in a very engaging way.

Thank you for picking up on all of that. Schnittke is a huge, huge influence on me and I’ve always adored his music. After an absence of a few years I’ve really gotten back into him again. I try to tell stories; I’ve always tried to tell stories. The music is the most important story in all of that, but it’s not the only story. By connecting the dots and trying to at least illuminate the history of the pieces or the people behind them, or the dedicatees, or the messages, I think it enhances the experience. It certainly enhances my enjoyment of the music!

So it’s a gut decision really, of how much information do I want to spell out, without wishing to preach and without wishing to be sanctimonious, but trying to do a little more than, “And now I’ll play the Second Sonata in E-flat Major” – I think there’s more to it. If one knows the story of Erwin Schulhoff, for instance, I think you experience it differently; his Foxtrott, if you know this was written under a pseudonym, by a man who was close to deportation, and was forced to give up one of the greatest careers of his time – you listen differently. And listening differently, and intently, and deeper – that’s really about what we do. And that’s one of the many things I learned from Menahem Pressler in the Beaux Arts Trio, it was, dig as deep as you possibly can into the material; that musical digging is the most important, but the forensic, for me personally, is almost as interesting.

Contextualizing is so important to appreciate any sort of music, but it’s so often watered down, or presently poorly, or left off entirely.

In doing Hope@Home it was my great hope was we were not just going for classical music aficionados but would try to reach people who were locked down and who were maybe looking for culture. To get somebody to listen to an Alfred Schnittke piece who knows nothing about classical music is a challenge, and I think by telling stories and showing why we’re doing this, I wasn’t just going through a bunch of pieces or composers from A to Z, but there was a reason behind it all. A guest would come in and say, “I want this piece” or “I’ll read this text” or try to find something suited. For Rudyard Kipling’s “If” (read by actor Iris Berben), we put Manuel De Falla’s Andalusian folk songs underneath; for a Stefan Zweig reading (performed by Katja Riemann), we did Marietta’s Lied from Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt. I tried to find connections that would enhance the experience and make it accessible without wishing to, in any shape or form, take something away from the music, knowing at the end of the day we only had thirty or forty minutes to present this experience which I was hoping would reach and touch people.

https://youtu.be/ZkbZRpqNYb0

I grew up with the work of Menuhin, and that was his great gift, to contextualize these large histories in very approachable, highly enlightening ways.

Absolutely. I don’t know if you know the book he wrote, The Music Of Man…

My mother had it in her library.

Yes! It was a CBC production back in the late 1970s in which he looked at the influence of music over 500 years, which went from the Renaissance to Oscar Peterson and the people who inspired him. That kind of musical time travel is something I’ve always loved, and certainly, Menuhin’s eagerness to share that history was a great inspiration to me. I was lucky to grow up very, very close to him and to the collaborations in which he was involved. Even as a very small child, listening to him play with Ravi Shankar and Alla Rakha, the sound of those tablas and the spectacle of that giant virtuoso playing, stayed with me – but the same I can say of Carl Sagan, with whom Menuhin met in order to do this book The Music Of Man; Sagan was the man who told me about the music of the spheres when I was a kid, and that led, thirty years later, to a Spheres album (Deutsche Grammophon, 2013). So there are seeds that somehow get planted and often I come back to them, and at other times there are things, triggers – I’ll hear a radio program or an artist, or read a bit of text or a book which will start me thinking, or get me on a different journey, and sometimes those journeys can last for years before they become a project, and sometimes they happen really fast.

The interesting thing with this show is that I was thrown together with many different with artists, some of whom I’d admired for a long time but never met, and it gave me new impulses. I’d discover new pieces – I’d be feverishly looking overnight for a piece to play on the program the next day, and if it didn’t have the arrangement I needed, then I’d be getting somebody to arrange it in time. That was a creativity in overdrive, I would say.

So how has this overdrive changed you creatively then? You don’t seem to be the same artist you were back in March.

It’s a great question. I definitely feel a big change, I have to say. Those six weeks at home were some of the most intense and creative – I was literally on fire the whole time. Going from show to show, and sometimes we didn’t even know if the person was going to come, and if they did what they would do – it was fraught in that sense, but also very positive. And so I think the biggest challenge was going back to the schedule, or what’s left of it, let’s say, and trying to think, ‘Okay, there’s an inquiry to play a Mozart Concerto in four years’ time on this day; is this something you want to do?’ And I did find myself asking myself… I’m not sure if I want to do that. Because one of the greatest things about this show was and is that I’m calling up people and saying, “Can you come in two days and play?” and because they’re free they can do this – and that’s how classical music worked for centuries. If you look at the great artists at the beginning of the 20th century, the Horowitzs or Rubinsteins or even Menuhins, they’d arrive in a town, a concert would be scheduled, they’d play and wait to see the reaction, then if people liked it, they’d have another, or say, “Let’s do it again next week” – that happened with Thomas Hampson recently. I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we got him to do something?’ and I rang him up and said, “Can you come in two days’ time?” I think everything being planned three years in advance… as classical musicians we may have to lose that structure, and even security, if we’re going to survive.

The other thing is, this constant traveling, this constant being on-the-road, I think, again, there’s been a sort of reexamination of that. The fact one can actually stay at home and produce high-quality music and share it with a worldwide audience was quite a revelation to me, I have to say.

And you understood the importance of sound quality, and the value of an event in and of itself.

At the very beginning I loved the online stuff because I felt there was this giant worldwide hug – all musicians were trying to hug each other. I thought it was very uplifting. But very soon I found myself saying, ‘Well, this sounded good but this didn’t’ – and then it bothered me. Also (online streaming) became so spontaneous and so … kind of last-minute, and it lost some of the special factor of going to a concert – even just putting on a suit, you go and actually make an occasion of it. As you know we were all at home, all unable to cut our hair and able to wear what we wanted to wear – we were all forced to readjust, but for the program, I made a conscious decision. Tobias Lehmann said, “I can make the sound I know you want” and I said to Christoph (Israel), “Listen, we’re going to play concerts now; we’re not going to stream and sit there and take requests. We are making an occasion of this, and we are going to dress up because it is a concert, and we’ll see what happens.” I don’t regret that. It gave a kind of an element of escapism, which is what people were looking for, but at the same time the respect to the art form we’ve been practicing all our lives.

That’s why it was nice to see people dressed up, and it still is. And you are very natural as a host as well, there’s none of the “Daniel-is-in-his-hosting-suit-with-his-hosting-voice” routine.

I appreciate that. A lot of it was learning by doing and seeing how it would work, and trying things out, but trying to be myself, trying to be authentic. We were lucky to have the sound of Tobias, and the guests we’ve had, and lucky to have the guys on the cameras who created that look and to take the look with us when we go on the road – we take the lamps, we take the paintings. We try to give people that sense of, ‘Here we are again!’

How long will it continue?

At the moment we are pretty much sure we’re going on until the middle of August, but we’re not sure after that. At some point I will need to take a holiday, a break! It’s hard to imagine ARTE would keep this going forever, but the response has been so strong and we’re over 5 million streams. So, given the very precarious state of the world right now, as I always say, if we’re allowed to keep going, we will keep going; circumstances may change, and everybody’s talking about a second wave. Whether it will come or not, it’s in the stars right now, but if I had one wish, it would be to come to North America and do the show from there… but if it’ll happen, we just don’t know right now. I hope we will be allowed to come in at some point.