‘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.
![Florian Boesch [Photo by Wiener Konzerthaus | Lukas Beck courtesy of machreich artists management gmbh]](http://www.operatoday.com/boesch.gif)
Florian Boesch is singing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin at the Oxford Lieder Festival on Sunday 14th October. This won’t be routine. Radically challenging conventional interpretation, Boesch says “I don’t believe it ends in suicide”
”Through performing, I’ve come to understand Die Schöne Müllerin in a different way”. A young miller follows a brook which leads him to a mill. There’s nothing sinister in that per se, for millstreams lead to mills and the miller is looking for work. The miller falls in love with the millers daughter, but she falls in love with a huntsman. The last song Des Baches Wiegenlied is a lullaby, and it’s often assumed that the references to sleep and nightfall mean death.
“It’s a much stronger than that”, says Boesch. “The miller is not schizophrenic, he’s articulate and has a sophisticated inner consciousness. The Wiegenlied is not romantic simple-mindedness. It’s much more profound than a love dream. I believe it is a sensitive human being’s way of connecting with his inner self”.
“We know about Wilhelm Müller and we understand what an intelligent man he was”. Although Müller is known today for Schubert’s setting of his poems, in his own time he was known for much more. He fought in the battles of the Prussian Resistance to Napoleon and passionately supported the Greek wars of independence from the Turks. Romanticism involved more than escapist dreams : it embraced action, freedom and progressive ideas.
Boesch refers to the work of Erwin Ringel, the Austrian psychoanalyst who studied suicide. Ringel’s theory on Presuicidal Syndrome involved three phases : constriction caused by situations in life, aggression channeled inward towards the self, and fantasies about suicide as a form of action. But not all who think about suicide actually follow through. “In that sense” says Boesch, “we can interpret Die schöne Müllerin as a psychological dialogue. The miller is thinking about the situation he is in and is trying to imagine how to resolve it. Thoughtful people are always considering the possibilities before them. The miller doesn’t have to be talking to a real brook. The brook is another aspect of his own personality, guiding him to make the right choices.”
“So,” says Boesch, “consider the text”. At times of stress, the miller reflects by projecting his feelings. “In Der Müller und der Bach the dialogue is clear. The man speaks of angels singing to rest the soul. But the Brook says ‘Ein Sternlein, ein neues, Am Himmel erblinkt’ (a little star, a new one, shining in the heavens)”. Then will rise three roses ‘Die welken nicht wieder, aus Dornenreis’. (From the thorns, new growth that will never wilt). “And then”, says Boesch, the image of ‘die Engelein schneiden, Die Flügel sich ab und gehn alle Morgen zur Erde hinab’, What is an angel without wings? A new woman, who will always return. The brook is the more mature, positive side of the miller’s mind. It’s telling him that no matter how bad he feels now there will be new mornings and faithful women in the future. The brook is always moving forward, it does not stand still”.
Significantly, Wilhelm Müller had a bad love affair but later married happily. Although Schubert wrote the cycle around the time he learned he had syphilis, it isn’t necessarily autobiographical. “Consider Winterreise“ says Boesch. “Again, the man does not have to die or go mad.”
Boesch’s rationale is far more sophisticated. “InDas Wirtshaus, the man visits the cemetery. ‘Allhier will ich einkehren, hab’ ich bei mir gedacht ‘ (here I’ll settle, I thought). But he rejects death. ‘Nun weiter denn, nur weiter, mein treuer Wanderstab!’” The walking stick leads him on, just like the brook keeps flowing. The man has many chances to stop and die but he chooses to brave the wild weather and struggle on. “Even in the beginning, there’s that phrase ‘Die Liebe liebt das Wandern, Gott hat sie so gemacht, von einem zu dem andern’. God is not willing death, but Wandern”.
“The word Wunder occurs three times in the cycle at critical points” says Boesch. “it means something strange, like Zauberhaft.So Der Leiermann is ‘wunderlicher Alter’. ‘Soll ich mit dir geh’n? Willst zu meinen Liedern Deine Leier dreh’n?’ .(should I go with you ? Do you want to play my songs on your hurdy-gurdy? ). The dogs that howl in Gute Nacht appear again in Der Leiermann, who struggles forward, still trying to play although his fingers are frozen. “So I believe in an inner psychological meaning inWinterreise too”.
“When I was 12 years old, my grandfather gave me an LP of recited ballads by Goethe and Schiller”, adds Boesch. “Two weeks after Christmas, I knew them all by heart. I was fascinated. I studied violoncello for many years, but I realized that I would not be that kind of musician. My music is the text”, he says decisively “I love the music of language, and expressing the meaning of words in music.”
“A performance involves two people, the pianist and the singer”, adds Boesch. “Malcolm Martineau is wonderful, because he’s very quick to pick up on what I’m singing, and he’s very fast to adjust. Although I have a clear understanding of what I want to do, in performance spontaneous ideas can develop”. Sometimes Boesch feels like he’s accompanying the pianist. “I like working with pianists like Martineau, Roger Vignoles and Justus Zeyen, because they can adjust so well to spontaneity”.
Anne Ozorio