Yesterday, just before my scheduled rehearsal with the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Alexandre Bloch in Newcastle, I found out that I had been in close contact 5 days earlier with someone who had tested positive for Covid-19.
Following medical advice and protocol, I cancelled the rehearsal and immediately got tested. Sam and I spent the last 24 hours awaiting the results and fortunately, I found out 5 minutes ago I am negative. Good news!
However, this means that I was obliged to miss both rehearsals and because of this, I won’t be able to play tonight. I am gutted over this knowing that so many friends and friends of family were going to be in The Sage tonight. I’m so sorry!
The wonderful German pianist Frank Dupree will be performing the beautiful Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1 in my place. Enjoy!
I am happy to say that I will be playing my recital on Sunday at The Sage as planned.
See you on Sunday and wash your hands!
From a sombre, moving op-ed today by the Toronto Symphony CEO Matthew Loden:
…Art offers a conduit for a shared experience that works beyond what conversation and words alone can provide, and it makes it easier to sit next to the different.
With concert halls, theatres and sports arenas shuttered by the COVID-19 spread, we now cannot even sit by each other without fear. No one wants it to be this way, but we are nevertheless sliding into a new reality. For a while, we will all be more alone, more isolated, more hungry for connection. Some of us will want validation of our fears, others will pine for a nostalgic ease that we used to find as patrons and fans of the arts.
Eventually we’ll move past this current challenge, and as we adapt to whatever the new world has in store for us, we’ll take stock of what happened during COVID-19. How did we respond? Many will have suffered financial hardships; others will have been sick and recovered. Some will have succumbed to the virus and left behind grieving loved ones. There will be absences we cannot fill….
The osesp foundation informs that, by guidance of the government of the state of São Paulo, in order to preserve the integrity of its public, activities planned from 14 March are suspended due to measures to prevent spread of Covid-19.
The concerts of the 2020 season, the morning series and historical meetings in São Paulo room with the Jazz Symphony Brasil are cancelled.
Today’s performance, with Paul Lewis as soloist and the orchestra conducted by Stefan Blunier is the first to be affected. Paul Lewis’s three solo recitals, scheduled for next week, and the Orchestra’s tour of 8 towns in the State of Sao Paulo will not happen either.
Special to Slipped Disc, from Ulrike Schäfer, principal cellist at Gürzenich-Orchester Köln:
What an experience : playing a “ghost-concert”.
The Kölner Philharmonie totally empty, the lights dimmed like in a real concert, making the hall somehow inhospitable and a little gloomy. We are prepared to give a concert, for an invisible audience. Of course we know to play and give our best in an empty hall, we have done many recordings in there. But this is very different. The expectation of how a concert “feels” is not being met at all. The empty hall has no “human” vibration, it’s just an empty building. The quietness, so desired especially when we play in front of a coughing audience, feels void, somehow hollow.
We are fully concentrated and determined to stay “in touch” with our invisible audience. Though everybody gives his best it’s somehow hard. I became very aware how special and precious this (now missing) resonance with an audience is. A resonance that happens on a very subtle, refined level of energy, of vibration. Something I always took for granted. Could we learn to feel more at home in such a set-up ? Is it possible to play in a 100% “concert mode” in an empty hall without this irritation ? Interestingly enough the resonance from our invisible audience was overwhelming. So much gratitude and enthusiasm came back to us. And that alone was worth the effort. But we all hope that we won’t have to make friends with these kind of “ghost-concerts”.
You must watch to the end.
Nice one, Rimbanband!
A message from the Lyric Opera in response to Coronavirus shutdowns:
…. the State and the City encouraged that community events of 250 people or more should be canceled until May 1st. This encompasses the time period of our long-planned and highly-anticipated Ring cycle. With great regret, we have no option but to cancel all three Ring cycles and the preceding two performances of Gotterdammerung…..
We are, of course, heartbroken to lose the Ring cycle. For the past six years, more than 300 artists have put their hearts and talents into the development of this event, and the excitement about bringing it to audiences from all 50 states and nearly 30 countries has been mounting since the moment the production was announced. The cycle performances themselves, and a large range of festival programming, promised to be a high point in Chicago’s cultural season.
But right now, we all recognize that our top priority must be to contain the spread of COVID-19. For the safety of our loyal patrons and the greater good of our community, we recognize that this is the only choice.
We ask for your patience as we work through this extremely difficult slate of performance cancellations. We need your support at this moment more than ever.
The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has let it be known that its music director Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, has tested positive for COVID-19. Mirga, who is pregnanet with her second child, is now in self-isolation at home.
We send her our warmest good wishes and prayers.
She is the first international conductor to test positive for COVID-19.
Here’s the CBSO statement:
Due to the ongoing Coronavirus (COVID-19) outbreak and the restrictions on large-scale events in countries right across Europe, all ten concerts on the CBSO’s European tour this month have been cancelled by the venues we were due to visit.
In line with UK government advice, there are currently no changes planned for the orchestra’s UK concerts. CBSO Centre will also remain open. We will of course continue to follow UK government, NHS and WHO advice, and will react to any changing situations as required.
We have also recently been informed that our Music Director, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, has just tested positive for COVID-19. Mirga is recovering in self-isolation at home. The CBSO are following advice from Public Health England and all staff and orchestra members have been informed. We would like to wish Mirga a speedy recovery and look forward to seeing her when she is next with us in May.
The scholar Raymond Coffer reprts that the city of Vienna has finally offered recognition to the artist Richard Gerstl, whose love-triangle with Arnold and Mathilde Schoenberg caused such ructions in the evolution of music history.
Raymond writes: 20 years after I started writing my PhD thesis and nearly 112 years since he died in 1908, Richard Gerstl has finally been recognised by the City of Vienna with his own plaque at Nussdorferstrasse 35, where he lived from 1901 until his death. My research, my thesis and three recent exhibitions may just have had a little bit to do with it!!
So much nonsense has been spouted about the origins of the Eroica Symphony that we need to get the dedication page out of the way before we can discuss the music. Back to the earliest testimony, Beethoven’s secretary Ferdinand Ries writes that he named the symphony for Napoleon, ‘but Buonaparte when he was First Consul. At that time Beethoven held him in the highest esteem and compared him to the great consuls of Ancient Rome. I, as well as other close friends, saw this symphony on his table, fully scored, with the word “Buonaparte” inscribed at the very top of the title-page and “Luigi van Beethoven” at the very bottom.’
Ries says he felt obliged to tell Beethoven that Buonaparte had declared himself Emperor, at which the composer cried, ‘a tyrant!’ Seizing the top of the title-page, he tore it in half and threw it on the floor. ‘The first page was rewritten and … the Symphony entitled Sinfonia eroica.’
The first edition reads ‘Sinfonia Eroica … composta per festeggiare il sovvenire di un grande Uomo (composed to celebrate the memory of a great man)’. Who was the great man? Could it have been the memory of Napoleon before he became a megalomaniac? Beethoven never explained. What we do know is that he received a fee for the work from an Austrian nobleman, Prince Lobkowitz, whom he could not afford to offend by mentioning a French conqueror. In changing the title, he fudged the issue. Yet it is this symphony, more than any other until the Ninth, that earned Beethoven his reputation as a romantic hero, a rebel against autocracy.
The symphony makes a martial opening statement, dissolves into a funereal second movement, quickens into a nervous scherzo and reverts to a heroic finale in which the main theme is plucked provocatively on strings. That finale theme is taken from a frivolous ballet. Beethoven is playing games with our minds, tossing out ambiguities, appealing in different ways to hearts and minds. At around 50 minutes, the symphony is daringly long, twice as long as any of Haydn’s or Mozart’s. The first performance, on April 7, 1805, at the Theater an der Wien, was received with mixed admiration and irritation. Several reviewers advised Beethoven to shorten it before the next concert.
In its recorded history, two lines are drawn in the sand – the heroic attitude, exemplified by Felix Weingartner (1936) Toscanini (1939) and others of that troubled era – and the ambivalent, most compellingly evoked in December 1944 by Wilhelm Furtwängler in Vienna, an account in which the conductor is determined not to be pinned down which side he is on. No maestro so vividly captured time and place as the wispy Furtwängler, a sensistised human barometer on two stick-like legs. His funeral movement sounds like an irreligious requiem for the whole of civilisation. Recording the symphony again eight years later in Berlin, at even more sombre tempo, he draws shafts of light and hope. Whatever Furtwängler was feeling at the time, that’s what we hear.
I am completely gripped by Oskar Fried’s 1924 recording from Berlin, starting with what sounds like a firing squad and proceeding to embrace all of Beethoven’s shifting shadows, most notably at the opening of the finale. Fried was one of Gustav Mahler’s proteges, the first to conduct the Resurrection Symphony under his guidance; there is something of Mahler in his structural security and emotional finesse. By contrast, another Mahler acquaintance, the composer Hans Pfitzner, is horribly over-explicit in his 1929 Berlin recording of the opening movement. Curiosity seekers will find more to enjoy in a courteous performance by King Frederick IX of Denmark, a capable musician by all accounts, with a very safe hand on the baton.
The music director of La Scala, Victor de Sabata, came to London in 1946 to make a Decca recording with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. His approach to the opening movement of the Eroica is so much gentler than Toscanini’s that you rub your ears in amazement that these two share the same culture and language. De Sabata’s is a highly agreeable account, so agreeable it errs on the side of neutrality.
Hermann Abendroth – Leipzig, 1949 – is magnetic in the funeral movement. One of the most skilled batons of his time, Abendroth whitewashed his Nazi past by becoming a member of the East German state assembly and a cultural ambassador for the oppressive regime. He died a national hero in 1956, unappreciated abroad.
Erich Kleiber with the Concertgebouw in 1950 is indispensable, and I don’t use that word of many recordings. If you need to teach someone how to conduct the Eroica, start here. At no time in a brisk 45 minutes do you think the symphony could be played any other way.
No less definitive are Ferenc Fricsay (Berlin, 1961), with the most finely tuned Scherzo movement of all, and Otto Klemperer (Vienna, 1963), a crusty old master who belies his image to deliver a reading of true tenderness.
No less deceptive is George Szell in Cleveland (1957), where, after a peremptory opening, the conductor allows himself to linger, Karajan-like, on transient beauties without disrupting the flow. Szell used disciplinarian methods to create a great orchestra in a smokestack city. An insecure man, he fretted over poor record sales and expected to get fired any day by CBS Records, which also had Bernstein on its books. Bernstein’s Eroica is one of his most inspired recordings, but Szell here gives a masterclass, fault-free and foolproof.
The period instrument movement of the 1980s brought a welter of alternatives, among whom Frans Brüggen and Roger Norrington shoot to the top of the pile with readings of unflashy integrity – unlike John Eliot Gardiner who just can’t get out of the Eroica fast enough. Nikolaus Harnoncourt, with a slimline Chamber Orchestra of Europe, conjures up the small confines of his noble family’s Viennese ballroom. Even more intimate is Maxim Emelyanychev and the Soloists of Nizhny Novgorod, performing in 2018 as if for a few friends in a railway station waiting room.
Among 21st century takes, Claudio Abbado, Simon Rattle, Philippe Jordan and Manfred Honeck deliver enjoyable performances that fall just short of commanding. The conductor who arrests my attention is Riccardo Chailly with Gewandhausorchester Leipzig in 2011, extremely fast at 43 minutes and combining Toscanini whiplash with the memorial solemnity of Szell and Fricsay in orchestral sound of maximal clarity.
If I could only have three Eroicas, I’d pick Furtwängler, Szell and Chailly, with Emelyanchev a very close contender. None is remotely heroic.
The German actor Kassandra Wedel, who is profoundly deaf, uses music to connect to the world.
A video she has made with Beethoven’s fifth symphony is approaching half a million views on the Deutsche Grammophon site.
