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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Monthly Archives: July 2015

And relax…

29 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Birmingham Post, Bliss, Elgar, Handel, Hereford, Longborough Opera, The Arts Desk, Three Choirs Festival

Wagner, Verdi and Mozart at Longborough.

Wagner, Verdi and Mozart at Longborough.

Well, not exactly; I’m working on a range of projects this month including programme notes for the Wigmore Hall, a feature on Mahler for the LPO, new orchestral biographies for the CBSO, and laying plans for an exciting new project for Amati Magazine (watch this space).

But things do generally get quieter on the concert scene in August, unless you’re in London or Edinburgh, and after a frantically busy 10 days, my last two long-range review missions will be my last for a couple of weeks, at any rate.

Longborough: dinner is served.

Longborough: dinner is served.

First was Longborough’s final show of the season: Handel’s Xerxes. It takes a lot to make me enjoy a Handel opera but this was…well, read my Birmingham Post review and see for yourself. Taken as a whole, I think it may even have been the most completely successful Longborough production (on all fronts) of the three I’ve seen this year. Longborough is like a little corner of operatic Eden: I’m going to miss that place (and not just for the people-watching and the picnics!)

Longborough - last night of the season.

Longborough – last night of the season.

And then on Monday, to Hereford, for the 300th Three Choirs Festival and a performance of Arthur Bliss’s choral symphony / war requiem Morning Heroes. A rarity like this makes a 180 mile round trip worth while; especially when the work is itself so noble, and the performance so committed. My review for The Arts Desk is here.

Elgar in Hereford.

Elgar in Hereford.

Out in the Cathedral close, Sir Edward Elgar had been suitably garlanded for the Festival week – he looked rather overwhelmed by the sudden attention, I thought.

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It was good to catch up briefly with colleagues Chris Morley  and Clare Stevens (the Festival’s phenomenal one-woman Press & PR team) at the Cathedral. But these long-range reviews can be lonely affairs, so I’d taken Bliss’s memoirs As I Remember along with me for the trip. And as well as giving me an extra level of insight into the strange, dignified but deeply emotional neglected masterpiece that is Morning Heroes itself, this meant that I had the company of Sir Arthur himself over lunch in Ludlow and my late-night pizza in Hereford before the drive north. Did you know he’d received fan-mail from Webern, was a friend of James Joyce, bashed through the sketches of the Symphony in 3 Movements with Stravinsky, and played tennis with Schoenberg? Well, now you do.

In love with “Louise”

24 Friday Jul 2015

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Buxton Festival, Buxton Opera House, Donizetti, Gustave Charpentier, Louise, Reviews, The Arts Desk, Verdi

Buxton Opera House in Festival time

For three successive days this week, I’ve driven the lovely road from Lichfield across the Derbyshire border to Ashbourne and then along the roof of England through the High Peak, to Buxton, and its annual Festival. Its a trip I’ve long wanted to make (impossible before acquiring a car), and it was well rewarded – and not just because it’s a town full of antique and book shops,  faded Edwardian spa facilities and unpretentious Regency architecture. I was there to review three of the Festival’s opera productions: a better-than-expected Verdi Giovanna d’Arco, a disappointing Donizetti Lucia di Lammermoor and…and…Louise, lovely Louise.

Louise: poster for the original 1900 production.

I’ve hankered after seeing this mouthwatering great slice of verismo a la Francaise since the day I read the description in (of all things) Gerhard von Westermann’s Opera Guide. Saki used it as a punchline in his own short story Louise – proof of just how popular it was in the years before the Great War. I had a feeling that Gustave Charpentier’s heroine and I would hit it off when I finally encountered her live (the last UK staging was in 1981, when, aged 8, I don’t think my 15p weekly pocket money would have run to a ticket) and here at last she was. OK, admittedly it was a concert performance (and how I wish they’d ditched the Donizetti – I mean, this’ll be my 4th different Donizetti production this year – and staged this instead), but as any music lover knows, the difference between listening to a CD and hearing anything live is that between splashing in a paddling-pool and swimming in the sea.

The result: I’m now obsessed. I’ve a brand new special-favourite opera. By ‘eck, it’s gorgeous. Any critic who says otherwise (and especially if they’ve recently bent over backwards to insist that some freshly-exhumed bel canto turkey is a neglected masterpiece) is just wrong. Entitled to their opinion, but wrong. So there.

Possibly my enthusiasm coloured my review of the Buxton Festival for The Arts Desk: you tell me.

Throwback Thursday: 300 years of the Three Choirs Festival

23 Thursday Jul 2015

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Bliss, Elgar, Hereford Cathedral, Saint-Saens, Sibelius, Three Choirs Festival

Hereford Cathedral

The Three Choirs Festival celebrates its 300th anniversary this year, and on Monday next week I’ll be celebrating by fulfilling a long-held ambition and attending my first ever Three Choirs concert as an audience member – a rare chance to hear Bliss’s wonderful choral symphony Morning Heroes. The 300th Festival, as it happens, takes place in Hereford, and I’m actually quite looking forward to the westward drive out over the Malverns as well.

Like much that happens outside the magic circle of the M25, the Three Choirs is much misunderstood in some quarters – to read some coverage you’d think that it was nothing more than an Elgar-obsessed rural nostalgia-fest. That’s nonsense, of course – when I took the CBSO Youth Orchestra to the Festival in 2008 (Worcester that year) they didn’t bat so much as an eyelid at our programme of Arvo Part and Ligeti. The Festival has a list of major premieres (dating from long before, and long after, Sir Edward) that puts Aldeburgh and Cheltenham to shame. Here’s a short article I wrote for the CBSO about one of the more remarkable instances, in 1913.


1913: Luonnotar in Gloucester

When Elgar commented that “the living centre of music in Great Britain is not London, but somewhere further north” he was stating a generally acknowledged fact. No-one in September 1913 would have considered it remarkable that the world premiere of Sibelius’s Luonnotar should be given in the Shire Hall, Gloucester during the Three Choirs Festival; or that the conductor should be the cathedral organist, Herbert Brewer.

Brewer’s commitment to new music was widely-known. A composer himself, he was on friendly terms with Elgar and Parry, and at one point had both Ivor Gurney and Herbert Howells in his choir. For the 1910 Festival, Brewer had commissioned Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia. And as early as 1909, he’d asked Sibelius – through their mutual friend (and later co-founder of the CBSO) Granville Bantock – to write something for the Festival.

So the premiere attracted attention across the UK. It was “probably [Sibelius’s] very latest work” reported The Times; “at any rate, when asked for the score and parts a fortnight ago, he replied to the Festival authorities that it was ‘still in his head’”. In fact, Sibelius had rehearsed Luonnotar with its dedicatee Aino Ackté before her departure for England. Billed as “New scena for soprano and orchestra”, Luonnotar was premiered on the evening of 10th September. Ackté received six curtain calls.

But the biggest ovation that night went to the Festival’s guest of honour: the 78-year old Camille Saint-Säens, who’d gamely agreed to perform a Mozart piano concerto. By all accounts, Saint-Säens was in ebullient mood, regaling colleagues with his celebrated impression of Cosima Wagner and posing for photographs with Elgar. He was up early the next morning to conduct the premiere of his oratorio The Promised Land, part of a marathon concert that also included new choral works by Stanford and Parry, and Elgar’s Symphony No.2 – then barely two years old.

Parry took the Frenchman to one side, quietly warning him not to expect unreserved enthusiasm from an English cathedral audience. And seated on chilly pews before their breakfast kedgeree had settled, the Gloucester audience might understandably have been a little subdued. But their willingness to turn out on a September morning to hear three solid hours of contemporary music shows that regional English audiences, then as now, took their music intensely seriously. Elgar had a point.

CBSO and Andris Nelsons at the Proms

20 Monday Jul 2015

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Andris Nelsons, BBC Proms, CBSO

View from my seat, hastily taken on a shaky camera-phone!

View from my seat, hastily taken on a shaky camera-phone!

After a long weekend in Budapest, it was a bit of a slog to travel straight from Lichfield to London for the CBSO’s final appearance with Andris Nelsons as music director, at the BBC Proms. London-based colleagues tend to assume that everyone cheerfully dips in and out of the Proms all summer. What? – you missed the late night Prom on Wednesday? But you are going on Friday, surely? But it’s so affordable! I find it harder to choose which ones not to go to!

Of course, if you live anywhere beyond Zone 5, an evening concert at the RAH probably means an overnight hotel stay or a hot, breathless and frantic sprint to Euston the minute the applause starts, a ticket for one of the expensive trains (the cheap ones all finishing at about 8pm) and an exhausted 2am return home. I went for the latter option, and for once I’m glad I did, even with the Royal Albert Hall’s life-sapping acoustic. It was one of those occasions where personal emotion takes precedence over critical detachment – something you’ll only really understand if you’ve been in Birmingham for the last 8 years. I’m not a fan of Beethoven’s Ninth: last night, though, I heard it say something new, surprising and very moving.

There’s absolutely no sense that the CBSO / Nelsons relationship has run its natural course – I’ve never seen an orchestra and conductor have so lengthy a honeymoon, and last night’s performance made it sound as if the relationship is only now reaching its artistic peak. The loss of Nelsons is bitterly felt in Birmingham. It’s untimely, to say the least, which made last night a doubly poignant occasion. Here’s my Birmingham Post review.

Throwback Wednesday: Hugo von Hofmannsthal

15 Wednesday Jul 2015

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Andris Nelsons, CBSO, Der Rosenkavalier, Hofmannsthal, Richard Strauss, Vienna

Today is the anniversary of the death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in 1929. As a writer of sorts myself, I’ve always had a special sympathy for the writer in the Strauss / Hofmannsthal partnership, and get fairly indignant when the composer is billed as sole creator of their joint operas (or – worse – when his name is mis-spelled: musicians are particularly bad at this).

Given the level of interest in fin-de-siècle Vienna I’m always surprised that there isn’t more interest in his writing in the English-speaking world – to say nothing of his role in the creation of the Salzburg Festival. Anyway, when I wrote a programme note for Andris Nelsons’ and the CBSO’s Rosenkavalier last year I did my best to make sure Hofmannsthal got his due. Here’s what I wrote.


Hofmannsthal

Curious music lovers who open the score of Der Rosenkavalier for the first time are sometimes surprised by what they see on the title page: Comedy for Music by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. Music by Richard Strauss.

The order of the wording is significant. Strauss may have written the score, but the characters and plot of Der Rosenkavalier were created by Hofmannsthal, and his vivid, wonderfully evocative words gave them life. Hofmannsthal (1874-1929) was arguably the greatest natural talent in fin de siècle Austrian literature, a poet and playwright of international repute whose influence on European culture can still be felt today. That’s why it’s wrong to talk about “Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier” – or to describe Hofmannsthal as no more than a librettist.

Not that he shunned the description – in fact, he embraced it. He never viewed his six libretti for Strauss – Elektra (1909), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1911-16), Die Frau ohne Schatten (1917), Die Aegyptische Helena (1928) and Arabella (1929) – as hack-work; indeed, as he told Strauss, their collaboration was “something great and at the same time necessary to my life”. Hofmannsthal had begun his literary career at the age of 17, when, under the pseudonym “Loris”, his astonishingly mature lyrical poetry amazed Viennese café society. “We had never heard verses of such perfection, such flawless fluidity, such intense musical feeling from a living person – indeed, had hardly thought it possible since Goethe” recalled the playwright Arthur Schnitzler.

Prodigies rarely enter adulthood unscathed, and Hofmannsthal’s crisis came at the turn of the century in a sudden loss of creative confidence. In his Lord Chandos Letter (1902) he described how words themselves “disintegrated in my mouth like rotten mushrooms”. Turning from poetry, he began to look for new ways in which to bridge the gap between language and emotion. He looked to theatre, to ritual, and to antiquity, producing new adaptations of Sophocles: Elektra (1904) and Ödipus und die Sphinx (1906). Then he looked to music.

And while he accepted that in opera music inevitably dominates words, he was emphatic that this was a partnership of artistic equals. “I know the worth of my work” he wrote to Strauss during a particularly fraught discussion about Ariadne auf Naxos. “I know that for many generations past, no poet of the rank with which I may credit myself amongst the living has committed himself willingly and devotedly to the task of working for a musician”. Hofmannsthal’s example would inspire writers of the calibre of Bertolt Brecht, Jean Cocteau and W H Auden to work with major composers.

World War One affected Hofmannsthal profoundly, and after the collapse of the Habsburg monarchy he devoted the last decade of his life to rescuing and renewing what he could of European culture. With the theatre director Max Reinhardt, he founded the Salzburg Festival in the hope that “we might do in a new way, in ancient, beautiful and meaningful places, what was always done there”. An open-air performance of his mystery-play Jedermann is still an annual Salzburg tradition. Hofmannsthal was working on Arabella when, in July 1929, his son Franz committed suicide. Devastated, he collapsed and died on the day of Franz’s funeral.

Thousands attended Hofmannsthal’s own funeral, though he never read Strauss’s final telegram complimenting him on the first act of Arabella. But he’d spoken frankly to Strauss about their partnership in 1924, on the composer’s 60th birthday, and the nature of their relationship was such that it wouldn’t have needed repeating: “You have rewarded me as richly as any artist can reward another. The rest, our works did for themselves, and I believe that they, not all, but nearly all of them, with their inseparable fusion of poetry and music, will continue to live and give pleasure”.


Seven days, seven reviews.

13 Monday Jul 2015

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Amati Magazine, Birmingham Post, CBSO, David Matthews, David Nice, Donizetti, Ex Cathedra, Gavin Plumley, Jessica Duchen, Lichfield Festival, Longborough Opera, Newark, Salzburg Festival, The Arts Desk

It’s been a busy week, but gratifyingly, a lot of my reviews seem to have gone up nice and promptly. Here’s everything I haven’t already posted up here:

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My debut feature for The Arts Desk: and what a pleasant surprise when my colleague (and recent travelling companion in Denmark) David Nice and his husband Jeremy arrived unexpectedly in Lichfield on Saturday for an impromptu visit in which (I’d like to think, anyway) this article may have had some hand…

The CBSO and Lahav Shani play Beethoven, Mendelssohn and David Matthews. Let’s just pray no-one’s seriously trying to line this chap up to follow in the footsteps of Andris Nelsons (at least not for a few years yet, anyway).

Ex Cathedra at Lichfield Festival – it takes something fairly special to get me this enthusiastic about a capella choral music.

Longborough

Don Pasquale at Longborough – god, I love Longborough, where a picnic can cost £60 a head and still taste delicious.

Purfling Powerhouse

And my visit to the wonderful Newark School of Violin Making is up on Amati Magazine: my thanks, again, to Jessica Duchen for entrusting me with such a fascinating assignment and Ben Schindler at the School for making me so welcome.

Now, one more Salzburg Festival programme note to polish off – Mozart’s Symphony No.1 K.16 (Salzburg’s commissioning editor, Gavin Plumley, has an uncanny knack for spotting the bits of repertoire that only I could fall in love with) – and then we’re off to stay at the Gellert Hotel, Budapest: four nights of operetta (Kalman’s Die Csardasfurstin), art nouveau spas, goose liver, Tokaj and general Habsburg-era fun.

And I don’t have to write a single word about it! (Though I probably shall…)

Review: Lichfield Festival – The Juliet Letters

09 Thursday Jul 2015

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Birmingham Post, Elvis Costello, Jon Boden, Lichfield Festival, Reviews, Sacconi Quartet, The Arts Desk

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The Lichfield Festival is in full swing – and living just five minutes from the Cathedral, it’s hard not to feel you’re in the middle of something special even when you’re just walking to the shops! I’ll be producing a full round-up for The Arts Desk tomorrow, but meanwhile, since The Birmingham Post is experiencing difficulties posting my reviews of individual concerts to its website, I’ll be posting them here while the Festival is still under way. Even critics like to feel as if they’re part of something, after all…

(NB: No star ratings here –  editors and PRs love ’em but critics hate them, and I’m no exception. If you really do need to attach a score to an artistic performance like it’s a spelling test or something, they can be seen in the print edition of The Birmingham Post, available now).


Is it really 22 years since The Juliet Letters? In 1993, we mistook it for crossover: there was a lot of it about back then. Elvis Costello’s song cycle with the Brodsky Quartet seemed to follow in the tradition of George Martin’s quartet arrangements for the Beatles, or Sinatra’s recordings with the Hollywood Quartet. But crucially, The Juliet Letters comprised entirely original music: the joint product of Costello’s art as a songwriter and the creative instincts of the individual Brodskys. The result?

Well, as we discovered in this late night Lichfield Festival concert with Jon Boden and the Sacconi Quartet the result was something that, two decades on, requires neither Costello nor the Brodskys in order to make a powerful impact. Inevitably, there were glitches: microphones never sit easily with chamber groups. Costello aficionados hoping to hear a slick reproduction of the studio album will have been disappointed.

For the rest of us, though, the rough edges made this music speak more directly – more passionately – than ever. Not that Boden’s light, softly-shaded tenor wasn’t ideally suited to the Sondheim-esque wit of numbers like Romeo’s Seance and This Offer is Unrepeatable.

But Boden and the Sacconis played off each other, seeming to find a shared intensity in the searching, Berg-like Dear Sweet Filthy World, making tone-colour match curdling harmonies, and transforming I Thought I’d Write To Juliet into a miniature music-drama. Boden’s expression as Robin Ashwell’s viola solo in Last Post sobbed out into the vast space of the darkened cathedral said it all: this was chamber music of a high order.

Review: Lichfield Festival – The Magic Flute

09 Thursday Jul 2015

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Birmingham Post, Lichfield Cathedral, Lichfield Festival, Reviews, The Arts Desk, The Magic Flute

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The Lichfield Festival is in full swing – and living just five minutes from the Cathedral, it’s hard not to feel you’re in the middle of something special even when you’re merely walking to the shops! I’ll be producing a full round-up for The Arts Desk tomorrow, but meanwhile, since The Birmingham Post is experiencing difficulties posting my reviews of individual concerts to its website, I’ll be posting them here while the Festival is still under way. Even critics like to feel as if they’re part of something, after all…

(NB: No star ratings here –  editors and PRs love ’em but critics hate them, and I’m no exception. If you really do need to attach a score to an artistic performance like it’s a spelling test or something, they can be seen in the print edition of The Birmingham Post, available now).


There’ve been times since 2010 when we’ve despaired of the Lichfield Festival. Now there’s a new artistic director, Sonia Stevenson and, on the basis of this opening concert performance of The Magic Flute, every reason to hope that things are back on course.

The sheer ambition was inspiring, even if the end result had a distinctly improvised, “let’s do the show right here” sort of feeling. There was no orchestra (Anthony Kraus and Ian Ryan played a re-working of Zemlinsky’s piano reduction), no chorus, and the sole gesture towards costume was Papageno’s pair of denim shorts.

But the singing was truly impressive – Kate Valentine as the First Lady was real luxury casting. Anna Dennis stole the show: her nuanced voice and understated intensity made Pamina a tragic figure, never more poignant than in her quartet with the Three Boys, sung with wonderful freshness and ensemble by ex-Cathedral choristers Jemima Richardson-Jones, Amber Jordan and Alice Windsor.

Alexander Sprague (Tamino) made up in tone for what he might have lacked in ardour. Richard Wiegold (Sarastro) had a voice of black velvet and Samantha Hay was a Queen of the Night of laser-like ferocity and focus. Adrian Thompson played Monostatos as a sleazy bank-manager, while as a long-suffering Papageno, you sensed that Jonathan Gunthorpe was fighting the urge to give a bigger, funnier performance than this staging allowed.

That was the single biggest problem: the spoken dialogue had been entirely cut and replaced with a hit-and-miss narration by Janice Galloway, spoken by Guy Henry. The Flute is not a long opera, and without the dialogue that Mozart expected, his characters are only half-complete. So it’s a tribute to the musical quality of this performance that we left with smiles on our faces – and a sense that the Festival’s heart is finally back in the right place.


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