‘A brief history of song’ is the subtitle of the 2020 Oxford Lieder Festival (10th-17th October), which will present an ambitious, diverse and imaginative programme of 40 performances and events.
‘Signor Piatti in a fantasia on themes from Beatrice di Tenda had also his triumph. Difficulties, declared to be insuperable, were vanquished by him with consummate skill and precision. He certainly is amazing, his tone magnificent, and his style excellent. His resources appear to be inexhaustible; and altogether for variety, it is the greatest specimen of violoncello playing that has been heard in this country.’
Eboracum Baroque is a flexible period instrument ensemble, comprising singers and instrumentalists, which was founded in York - as its name suggests, Eboracum being the name of the Roman fort on the site of present-day York - while artistic director Chris Parsons was at York University.
‘There could be no happier existence. Each morning he composed something beautiful and each evening he found the most enthusiastic admirers. We gathered in his room - he played and sang to us - we were enthusiastic and afterwards we went to the tavern. We hadn’t a penny but were blissfully happy.’
When soprano Eleanor Dennis was asked - by Ashok Klouda, one of the founders and co-directors of the Highgate International Chamber Music Festival - to perform some of Beethoven’s Scottish Songs Op.108 at this year’s Festival, as she leafed through the score to make her selection the first thing that struck her was the beauty of the poetry.
“At the start, one knows ‘bits’ of it,” says tenor Mark Padmore, somewhat wryly, when I meet him at the Stage Door of the Royal Opera House where the tenor has just begun rehearsals for David McVicar’s new production of Death in Venice, which in November will return Britten’s opera to the ROH stage for the first time since 1992.
“Trust me, I’m telling you stories …”
When British opera director Nina Brazier tries to telephone me from Frankfurt, where she is in the middle of rehearsals for a revival of Florentine Klepper’s 2015 production of Martinů’s Julietta, she finds herself - to my embarrassment - ‘blocked’ by my telephone preference settings. The technical hitch is soon solved; but doors, in the UK and Europe, are certainly very much wide open for Nina, who has been described by The Observer as ‘one of Britain’s leading young directors of opera’.
“We need to stop talking about ‘diversity’ and think instead about ‘inclusivity’,” says Bill Bankes-Jones, when we meet to talk about the forthcoming twelfth Tête à Tête Opera Festival which runs from 24th July to 10th August.
The young Hong Kong-born British composer Dani Howard is having quite a busy year.
For Peter Sellars, Mozart’s Idomeneo is a ‘visionary’ work, a utopian opera centred on a classic struggle between a father and a son written by an angry 25-year-old composer who wanted to show the musical establishment what a new generation could do.
“Physiognomy, psychology and technique.” These are the three things that determine the way a singer’s sound is produced, so Ken Querns-Langley explains when we meet in the genteel surroundings of the National Liberal Club, where the training programmes, open masterclasses and performances which will form part the third London Bel Canto Festival will be held from 5th-24th August.
“Sop. Page, attendant on the King.” So, reads a typical character description of the loyal page Oscar, whose actions, in Verdi’s Un ballo in maschera, unintentionally lead to his monarch’s death. He reveals the costume that King Gustavo is wearing at the masked ball, thus enabling the monarch’s secretary, Anckarstroem, to shoot him. The dying King falls into the faithful Oscar’s arms.
A mournful Princess forced by her father into an arranged marriage. A Prince who laments that no-one loves him for himself, and so exchanges places with his aide-de-camp. A melancholy dreamer who dons a deceased jester’s motley and finds himself imprisoned for impertinence.
‘Aloneness’ does not immediately seem a likely or fruitful subject for an opera. But, loneliness and isolation - an individual’s inner sphere, which no other human can truly know or enter - are at the core of Yasushi Inoue’s creative expression.
What links Wagner’s Das Rheingold, Donizetti’s Anna Bolena, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Cavalli’s La Calisto? It sounds like the sort of question Paul Gambaccini might pose to contestants on BBC Radio 4’s music quiz, Counterpoint.
Though she won praise from the literary greats of her day, including Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound and Siegfried Sassoon, the Victorian poet Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) was little-known among the contemporary reading public. When she visited the Poetry Bookshop of Harold Monro, the publisher of her first and only collection, The Farmer’s Bride (1916), she was asked, “Are you Charlotte Mew?” Her reply was characteristically diffident and self-deprecatory: “I’m sorry to say I am.”
“It lives!” So cries Victor Frankenstein in Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption: or the Fate of Frankenstein on beholding the animation of his creature for the first time. Peake might equally have been describing the novel upon which he had based his 1823 play which, staged at the English Opera House, had such a successful first run that it gave rise to fourteen further adaptations of Mary Shelley’s 1818 novella in the following three years.
It sounds like a question from a BBC Radio 4 quiz show: what links Handel’s cantata for solo contralto, La Lucrezia, Samuel Beckett’s Krapp’s Last Tape, and the post-punk band Joy Division?
The first two instalments of the Academy of Ancient Music’s ‘Purcell trilogy’ at the Barbican Hall have posed plentiful questions - creative, cultural and political.
American violinist Hilary Hahn has entered her fourth decade, having turned thirty last year, and for her eleventh disc she takes on a collaborative role, as obbligatist in a program of Bach cantata arias with soprano Christine Schäfer and baritone Matthias Goerne, accompanied by the Münchener Kammerorchester under the direction of Alexander Liebreich.
Her discography began in 1997 with a CD of the second half of the Sonatas and Partitas of Bach, and also includes a disc of Bach violin concertos with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. Except for the Bach solos, and a disc of Mozart sonatas with piano, she has appeared as a concerto soloist, so her most recent release is a radical departure. Her vocal collaborators are not known as early music specialists, but the continuo section includes three figures with extensive work in the area — Naoki Kitaya, harpsichord and organ, Rosario Conte, theorbo, and Kristin von der Goltz, violoncello (a former member of the exceptional Freiburger Barockorchester, directed by her older brother Gottfried.
We spoke by telephone on January 6, 2010.
TM: In the context of a disc of Bach arias, it seems to make sense to ask “Were you brought up Lutheran?”
HH: Yes.
TM: So this repertoire fits in with what you heard as a child.
HH: Absolutely. My dad sang in a church choir, so there was a lot of this music around the holidays. I was familiar with the vocal ensemble repertoire from an early age.
TM: I know this a project you have been thinking about for quite some time. Did you build the program around the texts of the arias, or were they chosen more for musical reasons?
HH: I wanted to leave the decision about what arias to include with the singers. I like all of it, and wanted to do what the singers were particularly excited by. It’s so rich. We began to narrow it down since there is more than could fit into one album. I became more conscious of the words as I learned the music. In this repertoire I have to make the violin match the vocal parts, but also remain true to the instrument. It doesn’t work to just copy what the vocalists are doing — it has to be translated into a violinistic context, to make it work musically without the words. It was important to learn the notes first, and then the words, and then put it all together.
TM: Bach’s musical interpretations of these fraught texts are fascinating. So many of the texts in your CD are similar in tone to that from BWV 158 [Der Friede sei mit dir] — “Welt, ade, ich bin dein müde” — “goodbye, cruel world”, to put it in modern terms. Perhaps this has to do with the way that Bach looks at the violin — a heavenly sound, in that sense. The arias are so tightly focused on death. Was that present for you, as you went through the project?
HH: I can look at it from the perspective of the words, or from the perspective of the notes. The words don’t determine everything about my interpretation. For a singer, the tone and articulation are determined by the consonants and vowels in a word. It’s less so for the violin, but I have to know that they are in order to match the singers. I was involved with interpretation from the literary, but also separated from that to go back to just the notes.
TM: You remarked in your video on the project about how singers sing, how singers phrase, and how singers relate to other musicians. Could you expand on that a little?
HH: Singers are very close to their instruments — you can’t switch your instrument — you’ve got what you’ve got. You live with that instrument and know it inside and out, it’s part of your body. It’s a different relationship with the instrument than an instrumentalist has. You can leave your instrument for a day, and go out and do something else. For singers the limitations of the human voice have much to do with how things are written for the voice, what the repertoire is, what singers take on. The voice that a singer has determines what kind of musician they become. A man can play a violin, and a woman can play a cello, but a woman can’t sing bass. On the interpretive side the singer has to think about getting the meaning of the words across, and the meaning of the notes. An instrumentalist has technical things to keep in mind as you play, but for singers you have a combination of theater and musical interpretation, theater in the sense of projecting the words in the right way. We forget how often we hear things in languages we don’t know in classical music.
Hilary Hahn [Photo by Olaf Heine courtesy of Deutsche Grammophon]
TM: Christine Schäfer remarks that Bach’s vocal lines are almost unsingable because there is no space for a breath. Do you find things that are similarly awkward in his writing for violin?
HH: Absolutely, though not something as basic as that. It is tricky to play Bach well, because it is exposed and complex — that combination can be treacherous, but at the same time it is extremely rewarding. You have a lot of options as well. You can play it any which way, as long as it is convincing for the listener. There are many different styles of performance for Bach, and they all have their place.
TM: Bach survives best from the baroque because he is so open to modern performances, much more so than his French contemporaries. There are certainly pieces where Bach is writing against the instrumentalist, as Richard Taruskin has written about. A good example can be found in the St. John Passion, where he writes two baroque flutes in unison in a difficult key, in order to show them that this is something they just can’t do. Even if they try, it will be uncomfortable. Were there moments where you found he was writing against your best intentions?
HH: There are ways of playing the arias that are easier than others, and that has to do with tempi, and bowings. Sometimes what works best for the voice doesn’t work best for the instrument, but in that case the singer should take precedence. I wanted to make sure the singers did things the way they wanted to, because I could always adjust.
There are certain passages that seem easy enough listening to them, but they are awkward — awkward at a certain speed, awkward with a certain interpretation. But it’s that way with everything. I don’t think there is a single piece I have played that just fits like a dream. You figure out how to make it work for you, how to bring it across to the audience effectively, and there is a certain amount of molding yourself to the piece that goes on. Once you do that, then you can feel comfortable with it. I feel that if it feels awkward and weird and uncomfortable, maybe it’s not there yet — maybe there is another way to work it out. It may not be a way that you do naturally, so then you have to learn it, and then you can go to the next level with it.
TM: This is perhaps what makes him German, rather than Italian. Italian music tends to be written with the instrument in mind, what it can do, what it can’t do, rather than to give it an idiom that is intrinsically difficult.
HH: I like that challenge, though, because it makes me question how I approach the instrument and the music, and it will give me references about how to approach something that might be problematic in the future. The more I am challenged, the more solutions I come up with, the more I feel I know my instrument. If everything fits that well, I wouldn’t feel like I had gone to some limit and pushed a little bit past it.
TM: You have said Bach has a spiritual effect on people.
HH: No matter where I am playing, at a school, at a Q& A session, in a concert hall, whether it’s solo, or chamber music, or a concerto, it changes the feeling in the room — everything gets really focused. The music changes people’s states of mind. There’s a meditative focus.
TM: Can you step back from the music and observe what is going on?
HH: You can tell what is happening in the room. Bach takes a lot of concentration for an architecturally sound interpretation, so there is that kind of focus, but I can tell what kind of response there is.
TM: Is there one of these arias in particular that changed your approach to Bach?
HH: It was more of a development than a series of “ah-ha!” moments. I have always thought of the Bach solo violin repertoire as vocal.
TM: Your training comes from the Russian and Franco-Belgian schools, but this repertoire has been informed by those using period instruments. Was this something that was in your ears in making the CD?
HH: I am sure — I have heard so much Bach on period instruments, and I have so much respect for that tradition, the scholarship on performance, but I haven’t been trained in it, and I am not one to jump into something with knowing what I am doing in the area. I learned a lot from the musicians on the project who come from that approach. They were amazing, and answered a lot of questions I had, and helped me with decisions on interpretation. It’s been influential for me, but I don’t play in that style because I have enough respect for not to simply jump in.
TM: Is that something you see in your future?
HH: I would have to stop and study it for a few years in order to have that knowledge. I don’t see it happening, logistically. I take what I like from what I hear, and my preferences change as I change.