She was a real Angel in life, who took care of everybody who, she met. This Angel has always guided us to be more human, better and more true. This Angel’s entire life- and artwork is in every note of Gyorgy Kurtág’s music. This couple’s Life was their Art and their Art was their Life. Márta is the inspirational Angel of Kurtág’s music, who made it possible for this art to bloom. Her inimitable, true and simple piano playing will remain with us eternally, and we can hear and feel this invisible Angel in the immortal art of György and Márta Kurtág.
photo: Judit Marai
The first reviews of English National Opera’s revival of Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus are discouraging.
The Telegraph signals that ‘for the average audience, this is a physical and mental ordeal’.
Rupert Christiansen begins: ‘Over three hours long, often fiercely cacophonous, with a preposterously arcane text lacking any narrative coherence, The Mask of Orpheus makes no effort to be loved….’
The Guardian’s headline is ‘travesty of a production is nothing to laugh about.’ Andrew Clements writes:
The production is the work of ENO’s departing artistic director Daniel Kramer, and let’s hope it is the last of his shows to be seen there. For this is a wilful parade of self-indulgence, with set designs by Lizzie Clachan translating the action to a sleek modern apartment, and costumes by Daniel Lismore that might be more appropriate in a Rio carnival procession or on the Mexican Day of the Dead. It’s a gaudy display, which does nothing to tease out the complexities of a work that presents the Orpheus story as a bundle of contradictory myths where events are repeated and linear time abandoned, and in which the three main protagonists, Orpheus, Euridice and Aristaeus, are each represented on stage by two singers and a mime, representing the person, the myth and the hero. Instead, Kramer simply adds business of his own, cluttering the stage with irrelevancies. Rather than austere, penetrating ritual, all we get is camp and bling, combined with an apparent insistence on adding comedy to the action, so that the judges of the dead and the furies become a troupe of vaudeville caricatures.
David Nice on theartsdesk.com: …the big botch is the crucial second act, where Orpheus faces the 17 arches of Hades and is supposed to lose Eurydice again and again. Peter Zinovieff’s text is loose, but not lazy. (Daniel) Kramer takes the sound and fury to signify whatever you want them to, and while the outlines of a real face sometimes emerge in the score – the smokiness of a rare saxophone solo in amongst the wind, brass and percussion, the ghost of a real dance, the desolate calm after the storm – they’re not to be found onstage.
There has long been a Sunday lunchtime concert series in the magnificent Gallery 3 at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.
Some 20 years ago Christopher Hogwood raised money to purchase a top quality Steinway for use in Gallery 3. This piano is now under threat because the Museum’s director, Luke Syson, has declared the instrument ‘unaesthetic’ and has declined to house it in Gallery 3 or adjacent spaces.
The music faculty are unhappy as they put forward undergraduate instrumental award holders to perform one concert each term.
Among performers next term is Rob Burton (sax, 2018 Young Musician woodwind finalist) with Konya Kanneh-Mason (piano). Rob attributes his first love of sax to hearing a player at one of the Fitz Sunday concerts.
Tamar Melzer tried playing it in the Dead Sea.
Fact is, you just can’t keep a good Irish tune down.
Tamar teaches flute at the Givatayim Conservatoire in Israel.
A challenge from San Francisco Symphony organist Jonathan Dimmock:
It was 1856 and Clara Schumann was newly widowed. She hadn’t seen her husband, Robert, for several years; his ragings, during his institutionalization, specifically made clear that he did not wish to see her. But as a new, and young, widow, still with many of their nine children at home to feed, she needed to display some degree of cleverness in order to continue the lifestyle she was accustomed to. So she decided to return to her former love, the piano. Robert had snatched her away from the promise of a career as a concert pianist; now she would return to it. But she was no longer a child prodigy, and the competition to be noticed as a pianist was fierce. She decided to do something that, in the end, would change the nature of solo performing for the foreseeable future. She decided to perform from memory.
The critics were outraged! That she, a woman!, would have the audacity to do something as bold as that was surely to be condemned. But the male pianists of the day saw it differently. They knew that their prowess, even their male virility, was at stake; they could not allow a female to show them up! And so the cult of piano memorization was born….
