To our great regret, we have to announce that the Festival Oude Music Utrecht 2020 cannot continue due to the corona crisis.
For the first time in the history of the festival we have to cancel an edition. That hurts, but public health is the most important thing right now. The safety of our visitors, musicians, volunteers and employees is the first one. In the context of the corona crisis, this decision was unfortunately inevitable.
At the moment, we are looking at the feasible to move the festival program to 2021 (August 27 to September 5).
24 musicians from Valencia perform part of Verklärte Nacht.
Very brave.
An inspirational duet between two of the greatest Hispanic musicians:
Symphony No 6, ‘Pastoral’, opus 68 (1808) (part 1)
When I was around ten years old, the Pastoral was the only symphony I heard around the house. It was played by my stepmother on her one-piece gramophone and the recording was the one made by the aged Bruno Walter in 1958 with a pick-up group of Hollywood musicians known as the Columbia Symphony Orchestra, after the label which produced it.
I grew to hate this recording with a passion that fused many elements. My stepmother was a Hitler refugee with emotional disturbances. She had grown up in Munich, taught to revere Bruno Walter as the greatest living conductor, member of a cultural superclass that included his neighbour the novelist Thomas Mann, the composer Hans Pfitzner and the Archbishop of Bavaria, the future Pope Pius XII. Needless to say, I loathed the lot of them with a venom that increased as she played the record time and again until the scratches that crackled through the feeble speakers were louder than the music. Come to think of it, I may even have bought her this odious record for her birthday.
My stepmother’s other obsession was going on country rambles, taking me along in unsuitable shoes. The Pastoral Symphony is all about a country walk in which the heavens open and everyone gets soaked. It was imprinted in my psyche with the worst torments of my late childhood and it resides within that cabinet of personal horrors that I rarely choose to revisit.
Rediscovering symphonic music in my 20s, I attended the Pastoral in performances by other conductors, many as different as could be from the egregious Bruno Walter. I heard Otto Klemperer declare on television ‘Dr Walter is a moralist, I am an immoralist’. Solti, Haitink, Kempe, Boult, each brought redeeming aspects to the performance of a work that I came first grudgingly to admire, then to love.
Later still, as I immersed myself in Gustav Mahler researches, I uncovered some of the less appealing aspects of Walter: that, far from being a moral paragon, he was a furtive Lothario with several mistresses and a fetid home life; that he tried to reach an accommodation with the Nazis before being forced into exile; that, after the War, he exonerated unregenerate Nazis for whom he retained a personal affection. Walter, in other words, was far from being a perfect human being, let alone a shining light.
At the same time he was, with Klemperer, one of the two musicians who were closest to Mahler and I needed to analyse what it was about him that appealed to his mentor. I began listening to Walter’s performances for clues to how Mahler might have conducted. Rather than being conflicted, I found myself becoming gradually reconciled to the all-too-human Walter and respectful of his musical gifts. It was not his fault that my boyhood was blighted by his bloody rain-soaked Pastoral Symphony.
There are three extant recordings of the work by Walter, each set apart from the others. The first, dated Vienna 1936, took me by surprise with wiry pacing, almost breathless in the first movement where the country walk starts. Although the orchestra is the Vienna Philharmonic, with Mahler’s brother-in-law Arnold Rosé in the concertmaster’s seat, there is none of the smarmy soupiness that so often infects its strings, rather an athletic spring to its step. Even the lazy scene by the brook movement has a nervous energy, an intimation of the looming storm. And the nightingale that pops up in the finale anticipates the one who sings in Mahler’s first symphony. In this same year Walter made the first recording of Das Lied von der Erde with the Vienna Philharmonic, in which no Austrian singer would take part for fear of incurring Nazi sanctions.
Walter recorded the symphony a second time in 1946 in the Academy of Music in Philadephia with an orchestra capable of great beauty but unresponsive on the whole to his shimmying shifts of tempo and dynamics. The storm breaks like a Disney cartoon and the finale motors along like a Cadillac on a multi-lane highway. The absence of struggle is a disturbing feature in this reading; perhaps it reflected Walter’s post-War urge to come to terms with his former German identity.
Which brings us to the third recording, the Hollywood one that shadowed my preadolescence and which many critics still mark as their first choice. On my panel, Richard Bratby acknowledges the ‘deep warmth and compassionate, lived-in style from a conductor I find it impossible not to love. Finale has the grandeur and beauty of Parsifal, but with a sweet, lopsided smile.’ I am not sure that I could ever love it the way Richard does but I appreciate the Parsifal analogy for the finale in which Walter exemplifies that panoptic ability of Mahler’s to draw upon the entirety of musical history in the interpretation of a single symphony. This is an outstanding quality of the 1958 performance, although in comparison to Walter’s previous efforts I find it too relaxed, with hints of self-satisfaction. For me, the Vienna 1936 recording is the best of Bruno Walter, its flexibility mirroring his incurable ambiguities.
The antidote to Walter is to be found in Otto Klemperer – particularly in his epic 1957 account with the Philharmonia Orchestra, three minutes longer than Walter in the opening movement yet taut as barbed-wire. Klemperer seizes the Pastoral by the horns, herding it into his field, stripping the brook scenes of sentiment and the peasants’ dance of sentiment. The storm has the suddenness of Shakespearian (or Wagnerian) drama and the nightingale a consoling remoteness. The tension is electrifying and the return of the original theme just before the end feels positively liberating. If this is how Mahler conducted Beethoven, I will take it any day over Bruno Walter’s trademark bonhomie.
Not much else is happening in the town, so the Mozarteum flushed out an unknown letter from Mozart to his wife, Constanze, dated April 1789.
In it, Mozart tells his ‘dearest, most treasured little wife!’ that a new opera commission from Prague is ‘almost in the bag’ and that the King of Prussia wants to see him in Berlin.
Neither of these expectations were realised.
It’s not a very revealing letter.
One of the most irritating aspects of the Coronacrisis is the safety-first policy of most classical radio stations, urging listeners to relax, playing them what they already know.
….At a time when radio stations are playing familiar stuff from a crisis playlist, I try to reach out for something off the beaten track, something to take me to a different angle of contemplation. This composer took me there, and I’m glad of it. In these weeks of isolation, we need our ears to get us out of the house….
The formidable soprano Anja Silja is still out there, listening to offers of roles.
After a Vienna Opera breakthrough as Queen of the Night in 1959, she was cast by Wieland Wagner as Senta in the following summer’s Flying Dutchman at Bayreuth and was itsw shing star in the early 1960s. ‘When Wieland died,’ she once said, ‘I thought of giving up singing altogether,’ but she was only 26 and a rich life stretched ahead.
She married the conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi and had three children, divorcing in the 1980s.
She moved on from Wagner and Verdi to Janacek, singing in Czech the heartrending roles of Kostelnicka and Emilia Marty, as well as Lady Macbeth in Shostakovich’s opera.
Few female singers have enjoyed a longer, flawless career.
Happy birthday, Anja.
The young British baritone Jake Muffett can not only sing The Vagabond, by Ralph Vaughan Williams. He also accompanies himself in all the woodwind parts.
Product of a classical education.
The Vienna Opera has announced the death of staff conductor Maksimilijan Cenčić, after what is described as a long illness.
An assistant to Václav Neumann at the Czech Philharmonic and to Lovro von Matačić in Croatia, he was hired by the Vienna Opera in 1991 and worked there until 2014, while also teaching at a city conservatoire.
The daughter of Ryo Kawasaki, a pioneering Japanese jazz guitarist who lived in Estonia for 20 years, has announced his death at age 73. No cause was given.
Kawasaki invented a guitar synthesizer that was widely imitated in contemporary jazz.
Milly Forrest, a soprano who graduated this year from the Royal College of Music, volunteered as a poster at her local hospital as soon as the virus crisis began. This is her second dispatch to Slipped Disc:
I’ve been asked to give you a quick update about what has been happening in the hospital. The most surprising change seems to be we are no longer being asked to wear long-sleeved protective gowns around positive patients unless we are working continuously on an isolation ward. We are still wearing masks, gloves, goggles and disposable aprons but this has lead to a lot of confusion amongst the porters, cooks and cleaners because the risk doesn’t seem to have gone down. I have been at home for 3 days because of a slightly sore throat (no cough or fever so far) and so the guidance might have changed again in my absence. I will have to wait and see what happens when I return to work.
My shift pattern for the past ten days has been 2-10pm. The workload drops after 8pm and so I’ve started learning Italian to fill any pauses in between jobs. I’ve plucked up the courage to do a little bit of singing; once to the porters on my shift and once on a ward. Most of the patients fell straight to sleep but the staff in particular seemed to enjoy it. One nurse said to me “it’s so hard working here at the moment and you’ve really lifted my spirits.” That to me is what music is about. My amazing friend and fellow singer Bethany Horak-Hallet has just started working as a porter at NHS Nightingale. She is doing 12 hour shifts, all the time dressed head to toe in PPE. She is one brave woman!
Apart from temporarily running low on oxygen one afternoon, the hospital is chugging along brilliantly. Since the start of lockdown the number of very poorly people coming into A&E seems to have been going down. One of the best moments was when I took an elderly man who had been discharged to the main entrance to meet his son. He was over 90 and was well enough to return home. We will beat this virus and before we know it things will start to look much brighter!
Listen to Milly on her website https://www.millyforrest.com/
Just in from Bavarian Opera:
By order of the Bavarian Ministry of Science and Art, the 2020 Munich Opera Festival will not be able to take place. Likewise, all remaining performances will be cancelled until the end of June 2020, thus ending the 2019/20 season of the Bayerische Staatsoper. “The cancellation of the remaining season and of the Munich Opera Festival is naturally very painful for the entire house and for me personally,” says General Manager Nikolaus Bachler. “A theatre without an audience, without artists to enliven the stage and orchestra pit is nothing more than a dead shell. In recent weeks, we have gone through several scenarios for the realisation of the festival, which were primarily intended to ensure the safety and health of staff, artists and audiences. However, none of the options proved to be practicable and satisfactory. Therefore, we are now examining under high pressure which premieres can take place at a later date and which activities can be possible online and through streams”.
