VARIOUS PROMS

25/8/09 and 1/9/09, Royal Albert Hall (Proms)

25/8/09
Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by Roger Norrington with Joyce DiDonato singing; in the second half they played Mendelssohn's Symphony No 3, the Scottish.

I failed to make proper notes at the time but I did scribble in the programme. We had Purcell's suite from the incidental music to Abdelazer, and then La DiDonato came on in a green, full-skirted strapless dress to sing Ombra mai fu from Xerxes and Ah mio cor from Alcina. The former was funereal, though she sounded gorgeous. The second was much better, faster, and there was something she did at the segue into the middle section unaccompanied when her voice soared and fell and changed key and all sorts, and we all held our breath.

And then we had Handel's Water Music, which is too familiar and I fell asleep.

And that was followed by our Joyce back for Haydn's Scena di Berenice which is a splendidly dramatic concert aria. She was great: lyrical, highly dramatic, thrillingly low at times.

The Mendelssohn contrasts light and dark in the first movement (the Scots weather?), first brassy, then flute and clarinet. There are lovely melodies in the third movement. And a bouncy finish.

G didn't like Norrington: he thinks he's a show-off, turning to the audience at the end and bouncing like a schoolboy.

1/9/09
Royal Concertgebouw with Mariss Janson doing Haydn's Symphony No 100, the Military, and Shostakovich's Symphony No 10.

I failed to make a note at the time and remember nothing of it.

The reviews below help bring some of it back, notably the four percussionists marching on at the end of the Haydn.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/6126100/BBC-Proms-Mariss-Jansons-and-the-Royal-Concertgebouw-Orchestra.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/sep/06/bbc-proms-classical-music-review-maddocks

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8b2f6ada-98aa-11de-aa1b-00144feabdc0.html

1/9/09
Late-night Prom with the Michael Nyman Band.

Initially riveting: loud, repetitive, rhythmic with a spectacular sense of impetus and drive. Think Chasing Sheep is Best Left to Shepherds, the theme tune from The Draughtsman's Contract.

The trouble is, they all sound like that: same minimalist techniques, same (amplified) instrumentation.

Alas it became boring in the end

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.

THE FAIRY QUEEN

21/7/09, Royal Albert Hall (Prom)

The Glyndebourne production of Purcell's "opera", semi-staged. The music of course was wonderful. The huge bleeding chunks of Midsummer Nights Dream, which might have worked well in a smaller theatre, got totally lost in the vastness of the Albert Hall.

I failed to make a note at the time and now, a month on, I can remember little of the detail. Desmond Barrit as Bottom was funny. Several of the other performances were intelligent, though the young lovers were colourless, as they often are, in white nighty-type things (in D's phrase).

D can't remember anything of the music either, though both of us recall that staging and music alike were witty and we laughed quite a lot. Conducted by William Christie with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, who can do no wrong.

Here are some reviews:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/jul/22/prom-7-fairy-queen-review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/proms/article6723306.ece

AFTER DIDO

17/4/09, ENO at Young Vic.

1hr 10 mins. A Katie Mitchell interpretation of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. My gob was smacked, my mind was boggled and my gast well and truly flabbered by the sheer ambition and technical achievement. But at the end of the day I was left asking "why?" and wondering what it had added to the original.

A small period band conducted by Christian Curnyn sat off to one side. Above the playing area was a large screen onto which was projected the output of at least six or eight lightweight video cameras. The playing area itself consisted of three interlocking sets: a bedsit in which a young woman, presumably jilted, prepared to commit suicide; a kitchen in which another young woman lamented the absence of her dead husband/lover; a living room in which a young man plotted to abandon his fiancee, leaving the ring on the coffee table: so three simple narratives (like the Purcell) of love, loss, abandonment. The present-day protagonists were played by actors; then there were singers, including Susan Bickley as Dido and Katherine Manley, performing the Purcell largely as written (so far as I could tell) though with some added extras, including a couple of snatches of 20th century verse and a kind of prelude in which a radio announcer introduced the Big Number, Dido's lament.

What made it utterly extraordinary is that actors and singers alike doubled as technicians: camera operators, sound effects operators (at the opposite side of the stage to the band), props handlers, rushing around moving cameras, rustling bags and turning taps on and off in time with the action on stage etc etc. Every set-up seemed to have an accompanying close-up in which the action of popping pills or doing the washing up was repeated by a second crew (often an actor or singer or technician with fake sleeves) and the big screen cut between the two... with sound effects added on top. From time to time the singers would break away to perform a solo to one of the mics scattered about the set... and sometimes the whole crew would stop to sing a chorus, often beautifully.

Not even in the heyday of live television studio drama would a director have attempted anything so insanely ambitious, even with a wholly professional studio crew, with quite so many set-ups and quite so many cut-away close-ups and without using studio natural sound. Yet they carried it off near-perfectly. Bravo. Bravissimi. But... why?

The modern-day parallels seemed to add little to the original; there was clearly a danger (though it didn't happen) that worrying about camera angles and framing and sound effects would compromise the singers' performances; and there was so much happening that it was hard to know where to look or what to marvel at -- the complexity of what was being attempted, and the often ravishing look of the thing on screen (a special mention here for the lighting designer, Philip Gladwell, and the DP, Leo Warner).

KATE ROYAL

24/1/09, Wigmore Hall.

1 hr 45 mins. Recital of songs and lieder, mainly duets, for soprano (Royal) and mezzo-soprano (Christine Rice).

Kate Royal looked like the school glamour-puss who'd brought her rather plain and dumpy friend along too, to show herself off to best advantage -- with the headmaster for company.

Ms Royal is certainly striking. Tall, posh face, slender, almost gawky if you're being unkind ("swanlike", according to the more charitable S) in a black sheath which left one of her wide swimmer's shoulders bare. There was loads of expression in the voice and face but she's a bit stiff, not a natural actress: the head girl descending from her eminence to grace the school play with a guest character appearance.

Christine Rice tries less hard but is more convincing as an actress, less impressive as a dresser: a claret off the shoulder gown with curious black Spanish lace (or so it looked) around the shoulders. She sure can sing, though.

Tinkling the ivories was the headmasterly Roger Vignoles: black jacket, grey shirt, black tie (conventional, not bow), grey hair, spectacles.

Had to work and got there late. Missed the first piece, Purcell's Sound the Trumpet, one of my favourites, which I've only ever heard a) on record or the radio and b) sung by counter-tenors, and was much looking forward to. D said it was very good.

Arrived during a set of songs by Mendelssohn, clearly audible through the double doors in the Wigmore foyer. Went in during the applause for a set of five by Brahms: a revelation. I've always thought lieder a rather bloodless form, but then I've never heard it in the flesh. A recalibration is required. It's surprisingly powerful stuff, even when you've no idea what they're singing about. It was clear one song was the comic number (Die Schwestern, it turned out, about two lovely and somewhat coquettish sisters whose relationship sours once it emerge that they love the same man); two (Love's Way 1 and 2, to words by Johann Gottfried Herder) came with the most lovely melodies. And the last was a splendidly melodramatic mother-daughter dialogue on Walpurgisnacht ("Dear mother, there's thunder over the Brocken." "Dear child, there are witches up there..." and Mum, it turns out, is one of them).

The second half had two songs by Gounod (associated with "sentimental religiosity" according to the programme note, but it was tuneful sentiment), two by Ernst Chausson, less obviously appealing, and four by Rossini -- two solos, two duets including another comic number called The Venetian Regatta which also provoked much mugging from the girls. Less than 24 hours on and I can remember nothing of the music, except that it was pleasing ("The English know nothing of music: they just like the noise it makes," as my father claims Beecham once said).

So we should go more to the Wigmore Hall, which is evidently an ideal size to appreciate this kind of stuff and is architecturally more exotic than I remember it from our one previous visit many years ago. The lobby has those wide, shallow arches much liked by English architects of the arts and crafts school. The performers sing on a stage in an apse at the end with an elaborate mosaic or fresco above it. S said it reminded her of an Edwardian loo: she felt the entrance and exit doors on either side should have "ladies" and "gents" above them.

It was a full house. We weren't quite the youngest there but it felt like it. They gave us two encores: a Brahms and a Schubert, both rather contemplative for encores; we could have done with something a little more upbeat.

The programme says Rice and Royal have been singing together occasionally since 2004, when they were Rhinemaidens in a concert performance of Rhinegold at the Proms, which we went to. But it wasn't until we saw Kate Royal at the Opera Garnier in Paris in a performance of Handel's L'Allegro, Il Penseroso and Il Moderato that she made any impression. She was brilliant, beautiful, poised: the best thing about an otherwise ghastly, lamentable staging by a South African "choreographer" who took great delight in deconstructing the whole thing.