Searching out lost musicals of yesteryear is rather like reading The Da Vinci Code. The long slog through banal lines and plod plotting is never rewarded by the ultimate revelation.
This does not stop theatres from dusting off hits of the past, usually to pointless effect and occasionally to the point of self-implosion, as English National Opera discovered when it set Kismet in post-Saddam Baghdad. Anyone for car-bombs?
Most musical theatre is, of its nature nostalgic. To restage old musicals is to evoke nostalgia about nostalgia, an appropriate post-modern detachment, but one that is unlikely to illuminate much about the human condition in recessional mood.
It was with these reservations that I went to see Richard Jones’s seasonal hit of Annie Get Your Gun at the Young Vic, only to come out with a song on my lips and a renewed faith in the power of well-made escapism.
Irving Berlin wrote the music and the show stormed Broadway in 1946 with Ethel Merman as the original pistol-popping mama. Nothing about it rings true. What’s a nice Jewish boy from the shtetl writing about a circus with sharpshooters, and who the hell’s gonna care whether Annie can shoot sharper than that wuss of a Frank? The sexual stereotyping was barely acceptable in 1946, when women had just worked their way through a second World War, and the characters are thinner than a weight-watcher’s wafer.
Richard Jones, who decorated his Covent Garden Ring cycle with all manner of irrelevant clutter, opens in a 1950s diner and moves on to a 1930s transatlantic liner. Continuity was never his strong point. What gives the show its kick is a kind of high-wire refusal to look down at the way people react when they are caught in a ridiculous situation. We do not care much whether Annie gets Frank or goes into a nunnery, but when she sings Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Better she transcends gender rivalry and confronts us with an everyday work situation. If it’s him or me, and we’re still going to be sharing an office afterwards, how do we deal with this problem?
Jane Horrocks is a rollicking Annie, Julian Ovenden a bit of a tailor’s dummy in the thankless role of Frank. Both are pitch-perfect and able to sing softly, when required, to a clattery four-piano accompaniment. The decor is a sickly green last favoured in Gerard Mortier’s Salzburg era, but the eye is engaged as much as the ear and, if the heart never flutters, the mind has more to conjure with than I expected. The show has been extended into January, by evident demand, and may well run and run in a larger house. It is trivial without being silly. I wish some of our politicians could manage that feat.
http://www.youngvic.org/ticketing
While everyone else is brushing up their best-of-09 lists, I’m shipping out the junk.
Although not a vintage year for awful classical recordings, it has been bad enough to yield ten of the worst. I exclude from the top ten all crossover execrescences and self-puff start-ups. These are just ten of the worst that came my way from recognised commercial labels:
1 England, my England
http://www.emiclassics.com/releasedetails.php?rid=47771
From EMI Classics, in a summer when the racist British National Party won two seats to the European Parliament, came a relase from King’s College Choir Cambridge, decked in the cross of St George and a wreath of jingoistic fervour. Bad taste? Bad timing? The intonation wasn’t up to much, either.
Bad Mahler – we were spoiled for choice:
2 Alan Gilbert’s stodgy ninth from Stockholm (Bis)
3 Valery Gergiev’s wobble-voiced 2nd (LSO Live)
4 and, dreary to a fault, Christoph Eschenbach’s stillborn Philadelphia Resurrection (Ondine)
http://www.amazon.com/Mahler-Symphony-No-2-Resurrection/dp/B001Q3Q24I
5 Bad Boys
Bryn Terfel’s villainy hits the pits on DG.
http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/DG/4778091
6 Sharon Isbin: A Voyage in Song (Sony)
Just when you thought it was safe to revisit the English renaissance without tripping over Sting, up pops Ms Isbin with her numbing guitar transcriptions of Tudor lute works.
7 Edin Karamazov, The Lute is a Song (Decca)
Gone away? No, here’s Sting gasping again with his fave lutenist. Renee Fleming’s here too with the least affecting Dido’s Lament you’ll ever hear.
8 Simon Rattle, Brahms’ second symphony (EMI)
Did the earth move for you in the second? Me neither.
9 John Adams Doctor Atomic Symphony (Nonesuch)
He may have won Last Composer Standing, but this is a deadly, pointless spin-off from an epochal opera.
http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Nonesuch/7559799328
10 West Side Story meets Tristan und Isolde (Warner)
Kooky programming from Barenboim’s Chicago years
http://www.prestoclassical.co.uk/r/Nonesuch/7559799328
You can find fuller reviews of these releases on the Lebrecht Report and compare them to the all-time worst in my history of classical recording here.
Feel free to add your own (dis)recommendations and lists in the space below. Voting closes midnight December 18. Results to be announced the following week. Let’s see who makes the real Christmas Number One of 2009.
I was sorry to read this morning of the death of Otto, Count Lambsdorff, the former German economics minister. I met him briefly last summer at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, where he turned out, in visible discomfort, to share memories of his heady days in office.
He had been summoned into government in the summer of 1977 after one of the executives at the bank he directed was kidnapped and murdered by the Baader-Meinhoff terrorist gang. He recounted the events of that summer dispassionately – the late-night phone calls from Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, the handshake at a funeral, the urgent measures to curb radical violence and restore economic stability.
Lambsdorff was forced to resign in 1984 after his Free Democrats party was found to have taken undeclared donations from the Flick industries, but he remained a central figure in German life, negotiating the final phase of compensation to victims of the Nazi era.
What struck me about the man, apart from his beautiful suit and silver-topped cane, was the simplicity of his story, which he told as if it could have happened to anyone. There was nothing imposing or arrogant about him, though he was plainly not a shy man nor one to be trifled with. He seemed to regard his role in German history as incidental, something that just happened to him and left him feeling smaller in the scale of events rather than larger.
I didn’t get the impression that he was a humble man, but his acceptance of human limitations was distinctive and dignified in present times, when politicians presume and pretend to control everything. He understood music. Perhaps that helped him realise that all we can hope for in life is small islands of order in an ocean of chaos.
One lunchtime last week as I masticated a lonely calory, BBC Radio 4 announced a discussion on the role of the critic. Ears pricked and finger on the button (they usually have game shows at this time), I attended with the appropriate acuity – only to find that the lineup consisted of a non-specialist critic, a book blogger and a tenured academic. I’d heard enough in ten minutes to switch off, walk upstairs and finish a book.
I’m past getting angry with the triviality of public media and would have forgotten the matter entirely had a facebook friend, a published author, not popped up later that day with a plug for the prog, triggering a discussion that drew in several well-scarred professionals. You may catch the programme here.
OK, let’s separate some issues:
1 The crisis in criticism is not a simple equation of pro vs am. Bloggers have not usurped the role of print critic; at best – and some are pretty good – they have forced the professionals to work harder at their craft, which is no bad thing.
2 The crisis in criticism is a function of identity confusion. Who are critics? What are their standards? What should we expect of them? These criteria are rarely analysed, either in media or academia, and the result is that the critics we appoint in newspapers is often the one with the best one-liner.
3 In a shrinking media industry, critics are under increased pressures to see more, do more, think less. The resultant superficiality accelerates the existing crisis.
4 The internet demands ever-faster responses. That, too, is bad for reasoned criticism.
5 Pay for critics had dwindled to a pittance. Two UK national pay as little as £40 ($60) for a concert review. The correlation between remuneration and simians holds true.
What is needed in these circumstances is more public converasation and a great deal more clarity about the role of the professional critic. I have just kicked off a week of this kind of debate in Australia, which you can read here.
There is an inbuilt media reluctance to engage in navel gazing, a refusal to self-reflect which we justify by saying readers won’t be interested. But unless we strengthen and reinvent the critical function, an important check and balance on creative progress will be killed off and the arts future will be homogenised.
Have your say now, or lose another strand of freedom.
Contrary to a slew of press reviews that called it ‘trashy’ and ‘pointless’, I found Rupert Goold’s production of Turandot at English National Opera apt and often exhilarating.
Goold, 37, is the latest in a parade of youngish theatre and film directors who have been hired to bring an alternative perspective and a different, younger audience into London’s second opera company.
The best thing he does in Turandot is shift its frame from introspect to retrospect. Before the curtain rises, we see an English journalist of the old school scribbling away in his notebook. Throughout the opera, he is the silent observer, adding a wry, laconic, utterly believable dimension to a ridiculous plot.
Turandot was Puccini’s last shot. Bewildered by world war, the rise of fascism and a cancer in his throat, the composer cast around desperately for a plot and finally settled on one that was as far from his trademark realism as he could get.
The story of a Chinese princess who beheads suitors who cannot answer three riddles would not hold the attention nowadays of a kindergarten class. By recasting it as an exercise in western misapprehensions of China, Goold goves the opera credence and involvement. I attended with two guests from Shanghai. They were enthralled.
Staged in a gigantic Chinese restaurant, the crowd scenes are eclectically post-modern, with three Elvis lookalikes, two amateur golfers, a Chassidic Jew, a reform rabbi, a New York cop and other exotica raising the occasional laugh. But the drama is real and the characters strong, the role of slave-girl Liu (Amanda Echalaz) overwhelming the stonefaced presence of Turandot (Kirsten Blanck) and the pompous aspirations of her suitor Calaf (Gwyn Hughes Jones). Turning the torturers Ping, Pang and Pong into drug-crazed celebrity chefs with cleavers and devil’s caps is a Goold masterstroke.
The singing is one rung below international quality and Nessun Dorma never works when sung in English, but the spectacle as a whole is vivid and enthralling, even as the story wimps out in Alfano’s pathetic ending.
Turandot is not, and never will be, a work that tears your heart to shreds. All that Goold has done is to approach it from a different angle, one that can resonate with the sceptical tone of our times while never releasing its grip on the incredulous eye. Miriam Buether’s designs have that kind of arresting immediacy.
Any failure of perception belongs to some of the old-school critics on shrinking newspapers who cannot grasp that opera, like other economic entities, simply must move on. ENO’s strategy seems to be working. The Coliseum audience is becoming more age-diverse, less opera-centric. Maybe the critical approach needs retuning.
Duke Bluebeard’s Castle was never one for the squeamish, but English National Opera’s production tips Bela Bartok’s masterpiece into an abyss of atrocity. Originally staged during the First World War, it retells the fable of a Transylvanian count who keeps his wives in a dungeon as a Freudian parable of female sexual curiosity and impotent male vengeance.
With only two singers on stage, the orchestra gets many of the best lines and an hour can pass very quickly in a live concert performance, as Valery Gergiev demonstrated earlier this year with the London Symphony Orchestra (released and downloadable on LSO Live). Any opera production risks overstating the obvious, but ENO’s commitment to contemporary ideas promised a venture into a post-Freudian landscape, at once tantalising and repellent.
Daniel Kramer, the young American director who added ten degrees of chill to Harrison Birtwistle’s Punch and Judy at the Young Vic, places Bluebeard in a world of sexual abduction and child abuse – the world of Fred and Rose West who buried victims in the foundations of their Gloucester home, of the Belgian paedophile rings and, most explicitly, in the warped world of Josef Fritzl, the Austrian building materials salesman who raped his daughter and kept her family imprisoned in the basement of his Amstetten home.
Kramer’s references to these monstrosities are visually unmistakable and by no means unenlightening. Much of what Freud perceived as infant sexual fantasies concealed dreadful realities of child rape. Bartok’s deep score lends itself to exposing the unmentionable and the seven doors that Judith opens before she is prepared to have sex with the Duke are an escalating scale of musical horror, unsparingly revealed.
But in order for the audience to be involved, there has to be a credible obssessive relationship between Judith and the Duke. Kramer obviates that connection by depicting the Duke (Clive Bayly) as an unreconstructed aristocrat with erectile dysfunction issues and Judith (Michaela Martens) as a nympho vamp who reads too many tabloids. Both sing with lustrous vehemence, but they are working against the stereotypes of a director who has not quite got the psychological measure of the piece.
What ought to be a moment of heart-stopping horror – a bridal night evisceration – deteriorates into rank bad taste as Bluebeard/Fritzl’s little rape children gather around the scene. The misjudgement is evident in the sound of spectators shifting in their seats all around the theatre, and in their glazed expressions in the interval lobby.
That scene will have to be reconsidered in any future revival, along with Bluebeard’s stuttering strut and Judith’s somnabulist nightgown. Few of the director’s devices added much to the plot. It was the orchestra, under music director Edward Gardner, that claimed the biggest kudos.
H C Robbins Landon – who did for Haydn what Alexander Wheelock Thayer, a fellow-American, once did for Beethoven – has died at his home in France, aged 83.
A jovial fellow who liked to frolic naked in his pool with research assistants and guests (or so he told the press), Robbie got on the Haydn trail in Austria as an occupying US soldier and spent the rest of his life digging out manuscripts from disused monasteries and seeing them through to performance at the Musikverireinsaal and Carnegie Hall. He once hoaxed the BBC with a Haydn fake, but that’s another story…
All Haydn works carry H numbers, after an obssessive Dutch collector, Antony van Hoboken. I propose we change those to H C numbers.
First report here. Pictures here.
Grounded in Detroit on a Spirit aircraft with a cockpit problem, I got chatting to my very close row-mates, an academic humanist lawyer and an Orthodox rabbi. Both had the same topic uppermost in mind. They had just seen the Coen Brothers’ movie A Serious Man and were deeply troubled both by its content and by its critical reception.
The film is about a man’s midlife crisis in a mainstream Jewish community in the Midwest, set in 1967 when society was on the cusp of change and institutions were stuck in the past. The hero suffers marital breakdown, workplace stress, debt issues and other commonplaces of the modern era. The rabbis he consults lack the certainties of the East European shtetl from which his ancestors stem and where the film enigmatically begins. He is, in a word, lost.
The film, reviewed as ‘black comedy’, was received by my companions as documentary realism, a situation that felt painfully familiar. ‘Is it good for the Jews?’ fretted the rabbi. ‘Is it good for the rabbis?’ worried the atheist.
I did not read any reviews until after I saw the film, and those I saw split split straight down the middle. Some acclaimed the film as a masterpiece of wit and social observation, others missed the jokes and were bored out of their critical minds. A Serious Man succeeds in dividing serious opinion. They either got it, or they didn’t.
One of the most perceptive reviewers, Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian, found a moral and theological dimension in the finale. Chris Tookey in the Daily Mail called the film ultra-sadistic and cynical. A O Scott in the New York Times regarded it as a retelling of the Bibilical Job story. Jonathan Foreman in the Jewish Chronicle repeated the Job parallel while decrying the film for its ‘mercilessly … unattractive’ depiction of Jews.
Where did these responses come from? Let me share a little trade secret. Film critics lead a dark and sheltered existence. Many need to cover 12 or 15 movies a week, most of them teenaged dross. Keeping track is no easy matter.
That’s where the pass notes come in. Entering a review studio, the critic is handed a sheaf of notes, along with a drink and snacks. The notes, detailed and hyperbolic, add deep background to what the critic is about to see on screen. Much of the notes go into the reviews. Every review I have read about A Serious Man refers to the ‘Polish’ stetl scene that opens the film. Nothing in the film confirm that location. It’s all in the notes.
The best critics, who are also the ones that review the fewest films, form their opinions after digesting the notes. The rest crib like mad and often get trapped in a corridor of doubt between what they read in the notes and what they saw on screen. That’s where perceptions falter, criticism fails and judgement splits to extremes.
A Serious Man is not black comedy. That was just a convenient handle, probably taken from the notes, and pinned to an original and disturbing film for want of a better cliché. The critics who regurgitated that handle were working under pressure. But they were also conspiring in the spiralling destruction of newspaper arts criticism. When a critic repeats information derived from a film studio’s marketing department, the line between free thought and mass propaganda is erased. If film criticism is to survive, it will require tougher criteria.
Like all forms of art commentary, it is now in a critical condition.
As debate continues in several languages over who will still be heard 50 years from now, several readers have asked how accurate our forecasting can be.
Well, let’s go back to 1959 and ask which living composers, in the view of listeners at that time, would be likely to endure.
Shostakovich, for sure – he was the flagship musician of the Soviet Union, and everyone thought the USSR was forever.
Stravinsky had just produced Threni.
Britten was receiving more opera stagings than any of his contemporaries.
Bernstein and Copland were universally renowned, if only for West Side Story and Appalachian Spring.
Samuel Barber had just opened the new Met with Vanessa; Rodgers and Hammerstein were reaching apotheosis with the Sound of Music.
None of these selections would have appeared contentious or doubtful. Hindemith, still alive, would have seemed a dead cert. Kodaly, likewise.
The last one might have been a modernist – Berio, Boulez or Stockhausen – but who could have forseen the importance of Cage and Feldman, the emergence of Ligeti and Sondheim, the birth of the Beatles?
If anyone had put it to the test, Khachaturian and Menotti might have made it into the top ten.
Please don’t attempt to cast a retro vote, but I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.
Simon Mawer’s reflective novel The Glass Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and one of my reads of the year, digresses midway into a sub-story about a shortlived composer.
Vitezlava Kapralova, born in 1915 in Janacek’s town, Brno, was a star pupil of the conductor Vaclav Talich and, in Paris, of the composer Bohuslav Martinu, whose lover she became (Martinu, though married, had two or three long-term liaisons, but that’s another story).
In 1937, Kapralova conducted the Czech Philharmonic and, a year later, the BBC Symphony Orchestra in her own Military Sinfonietta. She married Jiri Mucha, the Jugendstil painter’s son in April 1940 and, forced to flee Paris after the German invasion, died of tuberculosis in Montpellier two months later, aged 25.
Her music, edgy and mildly adventurous, fell into disuse. You can hear samples (and see a picture of her) here. The only CD recording appeared last year on Koch.
There is, however, a rare chance to hear her Partita for piano and string orchestra live in Marylebone, London, tomorrow night (Helios Chamber Orchestra), and her string quartet in Gateshead next week (Skampa Quartet). The first is a UK premiere and free Czech beer is promised to those attending. Details here.
Kapralova’s is a singular voice, precocious and secure. If you admired Mawer’s novel as much as I did you will want to investigate its unofficial soundtrack.
Late extra: Victor Eskenasy has just sent me a picture of the spot where Martinu met Kapralova. I shall try to upload it here.
Of 3,200 people who read or engaged with the debate here, on twitter and on facebook, as well as an uncounted readership on radio and newspaper sites, just over 100 eligible ballots were received. Some ticked one composer for posterity, others voted for the full ten options.
The results of the poll are not in any way scientific or universal. There is a bias towards US and UK composers – understandable since the debate is conducted in English – as well as a slight tendency towards certain composers who have current or recent performances.
Nevertheless, there are conclusions to be drawn and I shall attempt to lay them out for discussion below. First, though, the results of the popular vote.
Last Composer Standing
1 John Adams
2 Arvo Pärt
3 Steve Reich
4 Philip Glass
5 Pierre Boulez
5= George Crumb
5= Henri Dutilleux
8 Osvaldo Golijov
9 Thomas Ades
10 Henry Mikolai Gorecki
Since the next three are bunched pretty close behind, I shall add them to the bench as first-change substitutes:
11 Einojuhani Rautavaara
11= Stephen Sondheim
13 Harrison Birtwistle
This poll started with a claim of mine that Gavin Bryars would last the test of time. A three-way discussion ensued with experienced colleagues – Tim Page in California and Andrew Patner in Chicago – yielding a short list of five whom we thought we certs for the future. So what have we discovered?
– Minimalism is here to stay. It will still be heard in 2059.
– Few who voted for Glass also chose Reich, and vice-versa. There is a minimalist schism.
– John Adams has as many strong detractors as he has passionate fans. He provokes contention, always a good sign in a composer.
– Meredith Monk and Kaija Saariaho were the highest ranked women composers.
– While Dutilleux has benefitted from prolonged exposure in Boston, similar promotion in LA and London has not worked for Magnus Lindberg. Will New York do the trick?
– Is the music of Boulez appreciated more widely as a result of his popularity as a conductor?
This debate is all about the qualities we perceive in living composers and whether they will pass the test of time. Some correspondents regard the criterion of durability as irrelevant to art, and they may well have a point. But how we in 2009 judge the value of living composers is not an insignificant factor and I shall make a mental note to take another straw poll a year from now to see if our opinions have changed.
In the meantime, discuss, dispute, gnash teeth and celebrate in the comment space below. Thank you all for taking part, and thank you also to many bloggers and tweeters who helped to spread the word.
Congratulations to John Adams, the Last Composer Standing.
In light of technical and security difficulties – think Afghan election – polls for the most durable composer will remain open until 1800 EST (2300 GMT) Monday Nov 16. The response has been far heavier than expected and the spin-off discussions will run and run.
Early returns show Pärt leading by a tiny margin from Reich and Adams, with Glass and Golijov strongly in pursuit.
There is a heavy weighting towards US composers of a minimalist/anti-modernist tendency.
It’s not too late to change the result. I’ve been surprised by the absence of, for instance, Tan Dun, Magnus Lindberg (the New York Phil’s resident), Kalevi Aho, Michael Nyman, Michel van der Aa, Wolgang Rihm (just one vote so far) and Penderecki (though two other Poles are, as it were, polling well).
Vote now for the composers most likely to be heard in 2059. Vote here, or tweet @NLebrecht
