PROM

21/8/10, Royal Albert Hall

2hrs 15 mins. Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra under Yannick Nezet-Seguin. Wagner's Tannhauser overture, Mahler's Ruckert-Lieder and Beethoven's Third Symphony (the Eroica).

The Wagner stirring at the start but lacked the frisson at the end. Perhaps he took it a bit too slowly. Perhaps the brass (three trombones, three trumpets, tuba) just weren't loud enough. But wonderful stuff nonetheless. I always feel guilty liking Wagner: it's like listening to chocolate ice cream. He makes it all too easy...

The singer in the Mahler was baritone Simon Keenlyside, in white tie like the band (M Nezet-Seguin, on the other hand, was in a suit with a black T-shirt). We didn't know these songs and foolishly didn't buy a programme until the interval so we were a trifle at sea. Settings of poems by Friederich Ruckert (b 1788), whose portrait in the programme (shoulder length dark curls, open-collared white shirt, firm chin, dark eyes under darker brows) positively shrieks "Romantic poet". He also wrote the Kindertotenlieder.

Five songs, not written as a sequence and in one case not even orchestrated by Mahler himself, who left just a piano setting. In the order we heard them the first two were broadly positive: one is about the fragrance of lime, the other, "Blicke mir nick in die Lieder" or "Look not at my songs", is a coy little number about not looking over the poet's shoulder until he's finished. The best was the third, "Um mitternach", which was also the longest and for the most part scored just for the voice and the woodwind, except that at the end the brass come in (the only one of the songs in which they do), until a coda for the strings in which the whole thing fades beautifully away to a silence. Just before it did some philistine coughed loudly.

Both the Wagner and the Mahler started very quietly and Nezet-Seguin gave us plenty of time to settle. The Beethoven starts with a pair of emphatic notes from virtually the entire orchestra and they were playing the moment he was on the podium and before the applause fell away (D was leaning over to me and had just started to whisper something). Commendable urgency, but it couldn't keep me awake. It's been a very tiring couple of weeks. It's familiar stuff, very splendid, and must have been staggering when first composed, but it's 50 minutes long and I did feel, especially in the first movement, that he goes on a bit. The audience of course loved it.

MARK MORRIS

30/10/09 and 31/10/09, Sadlers Wells

I was knackered. Flew back for the first of these from a week's holiday driving round Bavaria. Kept drifting off after the interval which was infuriating because this was Morris at his charming, witty, fluid best.

The first night we saw a new work called Visitation set to a Beethoven cello sonata (played live), about which I recall nothing except that I liked it very much. Then Going Away Party, set to the (prerecorded) music of Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys: I saw it years ago in Edinburgh, good ole country music with naive lyrics and plangent guitar accompaniment for which Morris has devised a succession of dances in which seven dancers in cowboy boots and fancy shirts group and regroup, pairing up, swapping partners and generally having a high old time. Camp as cowboy coffee.

In the second half we had Three Preludes to the music of Gershwin, for a solo male dancer dressed in black with white gloves and shoes. This too I saw years ago in Edinburgh danced by Norris himself; Brandon McDonald is slimmer and lighter on his feet. We're in Marcel Marceau territory, the arms windmilling, the hands opening palms outward in a "Mammy" gesture.
Finally (the one I fell asleep in) Visitation, also seen before. The dancers skip in fours diagonally across the stage; they finish powerfully in a circle, stamping.

Here is a review:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/oct/30/mark-morris-programme-2-review

The next night we saw Empire Garden, to music by Charles Ives for violin, cello and piano; Bedtime, set to three Schubert songs including Erlkonig; and V, a new piece set to a Schumann piano quintet.

I can remember even less of this, though ostensibly I was less tired. All I can remember is that V began and ended with the dancers in a V. And that once again I enjoyed it greatly.

More reviews:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/oct/28/mark-morris-dance-company-review

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/nov/01/mark-morris-dance-company-jennings

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/mark-morris-dance-group-sadlers-wells-londonbrthe-sleeping-beauty-royal-opera-house-london-1812612.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/6461576/Mark-Morris-at-Sadlers-Wells-review.html

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/7cb3acf4-c4e3-11de-8d54-00144feab49a.html

BEJUN MEHTA, JULIUS DRAKE

19/8/09, Queen's Hall (Edinburgh Festival)

American counter-tenor and highly accomplished Brit accompanist in a programme of (mainly) English song, plus some Haydn settings of English words and a Beethoven cycle. Mehta has a lovely voice, though some of the Purcell at the start seemed to lie a little low for him. I was grateful for the words in the programme, not just for the translation from the German but also for the English since he's not hot on letting you hear the words.

Leider used to be one of the two things I automatically turned off when it came on Radio 3 (the other was jazz) but I'm starting to get the picture. Listen with sufficient care (and with the words to hand) and the whole thing becomes engrossing: the combination of musical effects and poetry, the singer's interpretation. A lot of the words, frankly, are pretty rubbish. But the Haydn included a positively brilliant setting of Shakespeare's "She never told her love" (which includes the phrases "worm in the bud" and "like Patience on a monument") from Twelfth Night: how odd that a comedy, in the hands of a composer like Haydn, should produce something so dramatic and dark and moving. On the other hand the words to Beethoven's "Auf dem Hugel sitz ich, spahend", by someone called Alois Jeitteles, seemed like the worst sort of derivative, self-indulgent romantic rubbish, though that didn't stop Ludwig producing something of great dramatic force and seductiveness.

The 20th century composers tended to choose lyrics of considerable quality in their own right. I'm not sure Vaughan Williams's Linden Lea qualifies (words by William Barnes, though English'd from the original dreadful Dorset dialect) but Lennox Berkeley's setting of de la Mare's The Horseman fits the description; so does Stanford's setting (also electrifyingly dramatic) of Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci; and Ivor Gurney's of Yeats's Down by the Salley Gardens.

There were a couple of very fast Peter Warlocks which I didn't "get"; and Vaughan Williams's Silent Noon (lyric by Dante Rossetti) which left me cold.

Otherwise it was a stunner.

Observations. Mobile phones are a curse: one rang out during the Gurney; and then again during Silent Noon which followed it, and Mehta stopped and started again, not unreasonably. The Queen's Hall audience is very elderly: we were about the youngest there. And though respectful and almost as quiet as the Wigmore Hall tribe, they are going deaf: the coughs started before the last dying note of Linden Lea had faded away; ditto the page turning after Herbert Howells' The Widow Bird. Whoever printed the programme had decided to transpose two lines in La Belle Dame... "She took me to her elfin grot, And there she wept, and sigh'd full sore. And there I shut her wild wild eyes And made sweet moan" it read: it should be "With kisses four", with "And made sweet moan" at the end of an earlier stanza, but you can see why they did it.