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Richard Bratby

~ Classical music writer, critic and consultant

Richard Bratby

Tag Archives: Andris Nelsons

Forward

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Andris Nelsons, Birmingham, CBSO, Forward, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Sakari Oramo, Simon Rattle

Cover Image

Forward: 100 Years of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra is published by Elliott and Thompson on 29 November 2019, and is available from the CBSO website on 14 November 2019.

It’s been a while since I wrote here, and the only real excuse I can offer is that in January 2018 I was commissioned by Stephen Maddock and Abby Corfan of the CBSO to write a new illustrated history of the orchestra to celebrate its centenary in 2020. It was a thrilling commission to receive, but also an overwhelming one. With a copy deadline of Christmas 2018 – and no relaxation in my usual working schedule – that meant devoting almost all of my free time in 2018 to research in the CBSO Archive, reading some 61 books on the general subject, conducting interviews with over 30 living witnesses of the CBSO story (including Sir Simon Rattle, Andris Nelsons, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, Sakari Oramo and Simon Halsey), and then untangling various (often conflicting) narratives to write the story – trying all the while to make it both historically rigorous and an entertaining read. The aim was to create a sort of ‘100th birthday gift’ from the CBSO to its supporters: something that they could genuinely enjoy.

And then, after submitting the manuscript, there was almost as much work to be done again: proofreading, rewriting and discussing the design with my brilliantly sympathetic and patient editor Olivia at Elliott and Thompson; then seeking out around 100 historical images and obtaining the necessary legal permissions – a task in which I was helped, with enormous patience, imagination and enthusiasm, by my old CBSO colleague Maria Howes. The CBSO Archive is full of rarely-seen treasures; the aim was to get a few of them out there for people to enjoy. This sort of thing, for example:

Harold Gray grimace

CBSO associate conductor Harold Gray rehearses a group of management and music staff in Haydn’s ‘Toy Symphony’ some time in the 1970s – percussionist Annie Oakley (left) assists.

You wouldn’t imagine how much legwork is involved – even obtaining the necessary permissions for the cover image, Concerto by Alexander Walker, took us about two months of research. Who owns the intellectual property of a deceased Catholic monk, who had taken a vow of poverty? This was exactly the sort of thing I didn’t expect to learn when I started out on this project, and which kept me, Maria, Abby, and Olivia and her team busy right through until the end of last month (Even the index required weeks of work). Whereupon we all breathed an enormous sigh of relief and I, for one, cleared off on holiday to look at more Austro-Hungarian relics in Transylvania.

 

1664.jpg

Even the title took some thought and a few drafts. Forward is the motto of the City of Birmingham, and the book is about the city as much as its orchestra. The two cannot be separated and both share the same ambitious, forward-looking, sometimes impatient outlook – a subject that I’ve written on before now.

Anyway, it’s with the printers now – and rather to my surprise I feel distinctly nervous. It feels a bit like waiting to go onstage; there’s already been some press and part of me is terrified to see what glitches and howlers we missed (there are always some), just as an equal, if quieter, part of me is excited to see how people react. Above all, I hope that readers enjoy it, and that it deepens their enjoyment of and appreciation of the CBSO. It’s on sale from the CBSO website from 14 November and from Amazon and all good real-world bookstores from 28 November 2019. I may well be talking about it again…

Flashback (Good) Friday

14 Friday Apr 2017

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Andris Nelsons, CBSO, Parsifal, Wagner

Paul_von_Joukowsky_-_Bühnenbild_Parsifal_-_Gralstempel

That Friday Feeling

Something seasonally appropriate: a sort of beginner’s guide to Parsifal that I wrote in 2015 for the CBSO’s in-house magazine, ahead of Andris Nelsons’s concert performance.


Cards on the table: if you’re a regular orchestral concert-goer, there’s a fair chance that you’re a bit suspicious of opera. If you’re a normal sort of opera fan, it’s more than possible that you’re a little intimidated by Wagner. And even if you snapped up tickets for Andris Nelsons’ CBSO concert performances of Lohengrin, The Flying Dutchman and Tristan und Isolde, you might still view Parsifal with a mixture of awe and trepidation. Because this is the big one: Wagner’s crowning achievement. It makes the Ring seem down-to-earth, and The Flying Dutchman sound like The Pirates of Penzance. Read much of the vast literature about Parsifal and you’ll quickly find yourself lost in an impenetrable thicket of medieval mythology, political theorising and the worst kind of musicology. Meanwhile, try and explain the plot to a modern English-speaking listener and it’s hard not to be reminded of Monty Python. I’m here to tell you that none of that matters. Anyone can listen to Parsifal, anyone can understand it, and anyone can be moved by it. No prior experience is required: in fact, Parsifal might even be the ideal entry point into Wagner’s world. But, without question, it’ll tell you a powerful and timeless story in some of the most heartfelt, involving and transcendently lovely music ever written. And if all that’s stopping you from having that experience are a few questions – well, here’s an attempt at a few answers.

What’s the story?

In the castle of Monsalvat an order of knights guards the Grail, a sacred relic with the power to renew life itself. They’re supposed to be pure of heart; but their king, Amfortas, has succumbed to worldly temptation, fallen into a trap laid by the demonic Klingsor, and is now incurably wounded. The order is ailing with him, until the arrival of an outsider – Parsifal, a naïve young man. Initially baffled by the knights and their rituals, Parsifal seems like easy prey for Klingsor, but – being truly pure of heart – he resists even the temptations of Klingsor’s unwilling slave-seductress Kundry, and in doing so, starts to understand Amfortas’ suffering. He defeats Klingsor and returns to Monsalvat on Good Friday to restore life and hope to the keepers of the Grail.

Isn’t it complicated?

That’s the thing with opera plots – explain them on paper and they sound ridiculous (It’s not only opera: try summarising Game of Thrones. Or, for that matter, The Archers). And it’s true, there’s more to Parsifal than the outline above: infinitely more. Wagner thought about this opera for nearly 40 years before its premiere in 1882. The Christian imagery of resurrection and the Grail, the philosophy of Schopenhauer, plus Buddhism, with its ethos of renunciation: they’re all encoded in Parsifal, and you can take them at face value, or dig as deep as you like. But like so many great stories, it all feels – somehow – familiar. The story of the Knights of the Grail comes from the legends of King Arthur (where Parsifal is Sir Percival); Kundry is the eternal femme fatale and the wounded king appears in both Celtic myth and Star Wars. Terry Gilliam retold the tale with Robin Williams in The Fisher King; Shakespeare, Tolkien and CS Lewis knew it too (we’ll pass over Monty Python for now). Elements of Parsifal keep popping up in western culture, sometimes startlingly close to home. An ancient artefact known as the Nanteos Cup was stolen from a house in Herefordshire last July – it’s believed to have healing powers and had been loaned by its current owners to a sick friend. “Village pub raided by police in hunt for Holy Grail” was the headline in The Daily Telegraph.

Wagner uses powerful symbols and characters, but after five decades working in theatre, he knew how to tell a story too. His libretto (he wrote his own) explains everything necessary, at a comprehensible pace. And it’s supported by truly miraculous music.

Is the music loud?

Ah, the old prejudice about Wagner, born from years of hearing only edited fragments like The Ride of the Valkyries and the Meistersinger prelude. Yes, Parsifal is thrillingly loud – when it needs to be. But for long stretches – most famously, the ecstatic “Good Friday Music” in Act Three, where a spring meadow blossoms with hope – it’s blissfully quiet and tender. Wagner travelled in Italy while writing the music for Parsifal; his set-designer travelled with him, and the Grail Temple of Monsalvat is modelled on Siena cathedral. Klingsor’s magic kingdom was inspired by a lush sub-tropical garden at Ravello, near Amalfi.

This isn’t the stormy Nordic world of The Flying Dutchman or the dark German forest of Siegfried. Parsifal is Wagner’s Italian opera, and it sounds it: long, singing melodies, distant bells, and warm, glowing orchestral colours. There’s a reason why David Hockney loves this music. Books have been written on the orchestration alone – Debussy famously described it as “lit from behind”. But the important thing is that it serves the story, gently, persuasively taking you where Wagner leads, and quietly gathering power as it goes. Before you know it you’re on that Good Friday meadow – don’t be surprised if you find yourself in tears. And if Wagner’s story still hasn’t won you over? Never mind: at least you’ve heard what Debussy called “one of the most beautiful monuments of sound ever raised to the eternal glory of music”.

But Wagner wasn’t a very nice man, was he?

Not especially. Artists are often a nightmare to deal with: the personal lives of John Lennon, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky and Charles Dickens (to choose a few names at random) don’t bear very close inspection either. Yet even Wagner’s bitterest enemies seem to have revered him. After Wagner had stolen his wife, the conductor Hans von Bülow called him a “glorious, unique man”. Friedrich Nietzsche – after publishing a series of vicious anti-Wagner polemics – still described him as “the greatest benefactor of my life”. Wagner’s personal prejudices are a matter of record; the ends to which Hitler (who wasn’t even born until six years after Wagner’s death) twisted Wagner’s artistic legacy have been well-documented. Interestingly, although the Nazi hierarchy enthusiastically patronised the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth, no performances of Parsifal were given there during the war years. However readily the Nazis were able to misrepresent Wagner’s other works, Parsifal eluded them. Its compassionate vison is entirely true to itself, and at odds with any political agenda. D H Lawrence – a devoted Wagnerite – summed up the issue with typical bluntness. “An artist is usually a damned liar but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth”.

Isn’t it long?

With intervals, it’s a little over five hours long. “The first act of the three occupied two hours” quipped Mark Twain, when he saw Parsifal at Bayreuth in 1891 “and I enjoyed that in spite of the singing”. That’s just the scale on which Wagner operates. It’s still only the length of two DVDs (basically half a series of Mad Men).

 And I promise you this: you won’t notice. “Here, time becomes space” comments the knight Gurnemanz in Act One, and once the music starts and Wagner begins to cast his spell you’re simply drawn in. There’s no experience in all music so compelling, so immersive, so moving and consistently, ravishingly beautiful. “Absorbed in this unique soundworld” writes the critic Jessica Duchen, “we become someone else. We blend our spirits, and Parsifal shows us how.”

A bit much? People do get like that after hearing Parsifal. There’s only one way to find out if you’re one of them. And with Andris Nelsons conducting, odds are that when, five hours later, you finally leave Monsalvat, you’ll want to go straight back in and hear it all over again.

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”.


West and East

22 Monday Jun 2015

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Amati Magazine, Andris Nelsons, CBSO, Ella Fitzgerald, Longborough Opera, Newark Violin School, Simon Rattle, Tristan und Isolde

Cotswold Bayreuth

Cotswold Bayreuth

I’ve been covering some fairly substantial mileage, both physically and in terms of repertoire, over the last seven days. Here, slightly delayed, is my review of Longborough Festival Opera’s Tristan und Isolde: another superb show whose musical glory wasn’t quite matched by directorial vision.

Newark Violin School

Newark Violin School

Then on Friday I was off to the far side of Nottinghamshire to visit the remarkable Newark Violin School, where I was made to feel extremely welcome. It’s a wonderful institution: you feel as if you’ve wandered into a modern-day medieval guild. Part of me simply wished I could just throw everything in and enrol myself. Maybe I will some day! That was another assignment courtesy of Jessica Duchen (whom I was delighted to see at Longborough – an island of sanity amidst all the black ties, vintage cars and popping champagne corks of country house opera: still a very disconcerting experience for me) for The Amati Magazine. Watch this space for the full report, probably next week.

Newark Violin School

Newark Violin School

Meanwhile – I’ve been writing sleeve notes for Warner Classics’ forthcoming 50-CD box of Simon Rattle‘s recordings with the CBSO. It was bittersweet, to say the least, to be writing those in the week when my former colleagues were marking the departure of Andris Nelsons – and a timely reminder that it takes more than just great conducting to make a great music director. And then, programme notes for the CBSO’s forthcoming Ella Fitzgerald tribute night. Talk about a  labour of love…Ella’s Rodgers and Hart Songbook was one of those albums that entered my life at the exact moment when it could strike deepest; she’s one of the only non-classical artists whose name on a CD sleeve will make me buy it on sight. I still can’t listen to A Ship Without a Sail without feeling crushed inside. Anyway, it’s an absolutely gorgeous programme…maybe someone will ask me to review it..?

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