Sinfonia Cymru: Unease

First published in Wales Arts Review, December 2014

Offsite at a secret location in Cardiff

Sinfonia Cymru string ensemble
Composer: Tom Raybould
Video artist: John Collingswood
Theatre director: Gerald Tyler
Immersive experience producer: Alison John

Unease
Photo Courtesy of Kirsten McTernan

Sinfonia Cymru is a vibrant chamber orchestra comprised of young professionals rightly determined to expand our notions of ‘classical’ music: what it is, where it happens, and how we might experience it live. In 2013, they launched the ongoing ‘Unbuttoned’ series with screen composer Tom Raybould, in which broadly familiar repertoire pieces are performed in informal settings with interactive audio-visuals. This year, the creative team has been expanded to include a video artist, theatre director and producer with the idea of taking us further out of our comfort zone – indeed to explore the very nature of ‘Unease’.

The resulting event was designed to be far from the usual classical music concert. Part multimedia, part site-specific installation, part immersive experience, the idea was for the audience to allow the Sinfonia Cymru team to ‘colour the dark space around you’ with their ‘collections of uneasy sound, image and memory.’ Further ominous publicity warned, ‘you are right to be afraid of the dark; of being alone and of things you don’t understand. Fear is a good thing. Fear is your guide.’
The venue was kept under wraps until ticket holders finally learned it would take place at Jacob’s Market near Cardiff Central Station. Upon arrival, we milled around the stuffed animals and vintage bric-a-brac, musing upon this oasis of arty eccentricity in a desert of newly-developed office blocks, before being invited up fairy-lit stairs to the first of three, linked performance spaces.

Actually, first stop for most of the audience was the bar, wherein Dutch courage was available if desired. From there we were herded (in a manner not unusual these days for site-specific performances) into a brightly-lit room, bare but for a row of chairs, overhung with one light each. The chairs turned out to be for a Sinfonia Cymru chamber string ensemble, whose individual lights were switched on and off via trigger, depending where the audience stood. One by one the musicians entered, sat, and played a short, easy to listen to repetitive phrase whilst their light shone, falling silent when it went off. The effect was to create a collective audio-visual texture which waxed and waned in a minimalist fashion according to a simple interactive process.

Unease
Photo Courtesy of Kirsten McTernan

So far so curiosity inspiring – but hardly prompting of unease. And thus the performance continued, with the sense that this was very much a work-in-progress. After a few, brief minutes, and a final tutti signalled by a robust ‘3, 4…’ from the lead violinist, it was time for room number 2. Here we were plunged into the threatened darkness, but not for long. Soon, we were lit by bright strobic flashes, timed to coincide with stabbing, 4-beats-to-a-bar interjections from the re-sited ensemble, this time with a gathering crescendo of background rumbling electronica… which prepared us for room 3, where the main – or at least the lengthiest – multimedia event took place.

Room 3 was a bare, grey-lit area – a gallery, in effect. The ensemble sat flanked by mixing desks and speaker cabs, through which Raybould and team pumped various pulsing riffs and electronically treated narration against a scrolling video backdrop of words and shapes. Gradually, a hypnotic wash of live strings emerged which, after looping around a melancholic chord sequence, moved into boppier, drum ‘n’ bass-inspired territory to a mixed soundtrack of pizzicato effects and grinding beats, complete with drops. Within the texture circled an anonymous voice, intoning snatches of sentences about fear: most notably the repeated question, ‘what is fear?’

The whole thing seemed to be aspiring to a kind of retro/futurist dystopian chic; in principle with excellent ideas, ripe for development, but in practice, needing to be further realised. There was certainly more surface than depth. Of a projected hour-long event, the actual performance lasted less than forty minutes. Shorter than the average concept album, let alone enough time to create an immersive experience – unless really setting out to deliver something short, sharp and shocking. But then ‘unease’ is not really about extremes. It’s rather about a lack of comfort, say; a worry or an anxiety. Even ‘fear’ seems to me stronger than ‘unease’, and I think the team didn’t quite manage to focus on what exactly they were setting out to do, nor why.

Unease
Photo Courtesy of Kirsten McTernan

Indeed, I found the music of Room 3 to be the opposite of unease-inducing but rather comfortingly trance-like – and frankly reminiscent of the kind of backing track any decent pop session string band would be expected to sightread. The video and voice-over, too, were pretty basic in concept and execution. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of that, and the various moods and atmospheres surely had potential. But the pre-event blurb promised far, far more.

Perhaps it’s partly about a kind of artistic courage of conviction; for instance, had this very material been stretched into something which lasted several hours rather than several minutes, then I imagine a genuine unease – sensory and otherwise – would build between the creators, performers and audience. But whether the team actually wish to create unease as opposed to simply express it seems a key question yet to be addressed. I look forward to further development of the project.

Welsh Camerata: Karuṇā – an Oratorio by Andrew Wilson-Dickson

First published in Wales Arts Review, December 2014

Dora Stoutzker Hall, Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama, Cardiff, November 8 2014

Karuṇā
An oratorio by Andrew Wilson-Dickson

Welsh Camerata choir and orchestra
Conducted by the composer
Soloists: Emma Kirkby / Ian Yemm / Paul Carey Jones

Andrew Wilson-Dickson

Andrew Wilson-Dickson has been making an important contribution to musical life in Wales for many years. Not only is he a composer of repute, but he is a teacher (including at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama for over two decades until 2005), author* and performer, as well as the founder director/conductor of the Welsh Baroque Orchestra and Welsh Camerata. The latter is a 25-strong chamber choir specialising in renaissance and baroque music, but who have never before sung contemporary repertoire. So it was with admirable spirit of adventure that the Camerata commissioned a new work by their conductor to celebrate their tenth anniversary year, 2014.

In the event, Karuṇā was two years in the writing, and is ambitious on a scale which might have overwhelmed the choir but for their enthusiasm under Wilson-Dickson’s vigorous guidance, with solid yet agile support from the Camerata orchestra and three impressive solo singers. At around 80 minutes long, the work is an ardent and sometimes fierce call for compassion – the broad meaning of the Sanskrit title – in a world rife with injustice and atrocities of all kinds. Wilson-Dickson explores the nature of compassion as a simple, human response to others’ adversity, but also draws on the word’s Buddhist sense as a rigorous path of non-selfish devotion to the alleviation of suffering in all its forms. He dedicated the world premiere to those working in charities, hospitals, foodbanks and battlefronts everywhere without whom, and without ‘those who are moved to gestures of compassion, there would indeed be no hope.’

The piece bears an affinity in both sentiment and structure with Britten’s War Requiem and especially Tippett’s oratorios, A Child of our Time and The Mask of Time; landmarks of a British pacifist musical tradition, if you will, to which Wilson-Dickson has now added his own, impassioned voice. Indeed, Karuṇā proved both thought-provoking and humbling in its reminder of the many secular and religious voices who have spoken up on humanity’s behalf through the ages. Its premiere was also timely, coming on the eve of Remembrance Sunday in the 100th anniversary year of the outbreak of World War I.

Cast in fourteen sections, the oratorio is as wide-ranging musically as it is textually in drawing on many cultures past and present. From the 13th century Arab Sufi writer Ibn ‘Arabi, to Martin Luther King and contemporary performance poet Judyth Hill, each section explores compassionate responses in the face of man’s equally unending capacity for inhumanity to man. The piece is unequivocal in its cry for greater self-understanding and, hence, for change. Pain is juxtaposed with joy throughout; not just as emotional and spiritual extremes, but as dialectical opposites. Wilson-Dickson depicts them musically as contrasting but ultimately unifying motifs around which is woven a profusion of thematic material in a variety of styles, incorporating his trademark quotations from other people’s music.

The composer is refreshingly proud to wear his influences on his sleeve. Most effectively to my ears, these include an orchestral sound and an approach to canonic choral writing which show striking traces of Schoenberg (Moses und Aron, for instance, in No. 5, ‘Litany’). There are many other, more direct references – plainchant, Ravel, Holst, Billie Holiday and so on – within a narrative structure also reminiscent of collage pieces from the ‘60s and ‘70s (Berio’s Sinfonia of 1968-9 being an obvious example). However, each style and quote serves in some way to reinforce the over-arching twin, bitter-sweet motifs which are entirely Wilson-Dickson’s own. He employs them here in search of the heart of the ‘I’ without which true empathy cannot exist; an enormous musical and emotional undertaking which was tackled with verve and stamina by the assembled forces.

Overall, the Camerata succeeded in bringing it off, to the enthusiastic response of an evidently moved audience. Wilson-Dickson judged the balance well in the main, with the more complex, contrapuntal textures not surprisingly proving most tricky to realise. In No. 2, ‘Refugee Blues’, for instance, there were some lovely touches with slipping and sliding trombones within a dislocated, neo-classical – and suitably Stravinsky-esque – setting of WH Auden’s 1939 poem. But the pointillist fragmentation at the section’s end was less convincing. Such coming in and out of focus, as it were, proved almost inevitable throughout this challenging work, which nevertheless had moments of real power and beauty, and proved convincing over the span.

A clear highlight was the incorporation of the vocal soloists within the orchestral and choral tapestry, which itself had some lovely writing; yes, in more dissonant sections, but also in the tonal serenity, for example, of No. 10, ‘Is there a place?’ (from The Book of Forgiving by Desmond Tutu and his daughter Mpho). Soprano Emma Kirkby, tenor Ian Yemm and baritone Paul Carey Jones each brought their unique vocal colour and temperament to the work. Carey Jones’ rendition of Kathleen Sutton’s ‘Dirge’ on the subject of slavery (No. 4 ‘Southern Trees’) had a chilling potency, whilst Ian Yemm’s ensuing ‘Litany’ was desperately yearning – both were superbly sung. The legendary Emma Kirkby was occasionally overwhelmed in volume by the orchestra and choir, but she sang with heart, and the unaccompanied, penultimate ‘The Elephant’ (No. 13, a poem by Rumi) showed marvellous control and characterisation.

This is a hugely difficult work to perform – even for choirs fully conversant with complex modern idioms – not least because of its scope and intensity. But it was wonderful to hear such an ambitious piece undertaken with integrity in a musical world so often prone to ephemeral sound bites. The Camerata deserves warm congratulations – and so too does Wilson-Dickson; not just for successfully galvanising his performers, but for having the heart to compose the piece in the first place. I hope we get to hear it again – and soon.


* The Story of Christian Music (Lion, 1992, revised and published in paperback as A Brief History of Christian Music in 1997)

Cuts and Culture: Some Thoughts on Opera, Classical Music and Beyond in Wales 2014

Original illustration by Dean Lewis: David Pountney and HK Gruber

Published by Wales Arts Review, December 2014

First, the gloom. As 2014 draws to a close, the many people in Wales who love opera, classical music and other ‘minority’ artforms could be forgiven for feeling pessimistic about the future. This year has witnessed a seemingly unending stream of dire news about cuts in public funding to the arts and essential services, including music education, across the country. Alas, while the Arts Council of Wales and some regional bodies have done incredibly well thus far to maintain provision with reduced resources, the prospect of real and lasting damage to the arts looms large. In October, the Welsh Government announced a 3% cut to the ACW budget for 2015/16; a further £700,000 on top of the £250,000 cuts originally planned – and following cuts of £1 million already made in 2014/15.

Earlier in the year, Cardiff Council approved cuts of a scandalous £50 million to their 2014/15 arts budget, having already cut provision for peripatetic instrumental tuition for school pupils, resulting in a stark drop – 10% already by January 2014 – in the take-up of lessons. The councils of Rhondda Cynon Taf and Denbighshire have now followed suit in music education; both proposing swingeing cuts in their provision, and joining a regional hall of shame which includes Powys, where there has been no publicly-funded provision of instrumental tuition whatsoever for some years. In Denbighshire, the timing of the announcement to withdraw £103,000 in funding to the William Mathias Music Service could not be more ironic, coming in what would have been the 80th birthday year of the man whose name the service bears; not only one of Wales’s most internationally distinguished composers, but a passionate educator who was devoted to community music-making.

If implemented, these cuts will have desperate social and cultural consequences across the board, as fewer children from ordinary, never mind lower income, homes will have access to music education. This situation will only be exacerbated by additional cutbacks to, and closures of, public libraries (without which I for one would never have encountered the music that inspired me to want to become a musician). Moreover, as ensembles, projects and concert venues everywhere come increasingly under threat, fewer people of any age will stand to have the opportunity to experience or participate in live music, either locally or nationally.

Sadly, as the ACW attests, funding towards the arts in Wales is in any case less than 0.23% of total government spending. In the short term, the appalling effect of budgetary cuts will be out of all proportion to the paltry ‘savings’ gained. In the longer term, however, the impact threatens to be worse still, jeopardising Wales’s very future by sabotaging a proven area of success, prosperity and burgeoning growth. No-one in their right mind would dispute that bodies like the National Health Service have urgent fiscal needs in this time of ‘austerity’. But it is a myth that the arts are not essential – and if we accept the neo-liberals’ either/or scenario, based on who might be deemed most ‘deserving’ of crumbs from the fiscal table, then the battle is already lost.

For there is a larger irony here – and with it comes the positive, though it is one that our current crop of politicians and civil servants appear to have neither the wit nor will to understand. And that is that the arts are a leading area of excellence, innovation and opportunity in our post-industrial Wales. Of course, the arts already contribute a huge amount to society, but they stand to offer so much more with the right kind of investment; not just on their own terms – and it’s a no-brainer that audiences and other visitors bring financial benefits to the economy – but in terms of wider cultural enrichment and regeneration, by encouraging the kind of creative vision and expansive, critical thinking that any culture needs in order to thrive in the age of information technology.

2014 has seen a great deal more excitement and sheer creative achievement in classical music and opera than one might think from the predictable wheeling out of popular figures like Bryn Terfel and the ghastly ‘crossover artist’ Katherine Jenkins – as UK mainstream media are wont to do whenever Welsh culture is discussed. Of course, coverage of the arts in Wales was swamped this year by the birth centenary of Dylan Thomas. But the focus on the great poet – however veering to monomania – reaped musical rewards in the form of opportunities to hear Welsh composers past and present.
From Presteigne to Gregynog, Swansea to Bangor, festivals, venues and ensembles across the land celebrated Thomas in different musical ways. There were performances of symphonies by his close friend, the underrated Daniel Jones (by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales in Cardiff and Bangor, for instance), but there were also commissions and premières from living composers both Welsh and otherwise, and as diverse in character as Andrew Lewis, Mervyn Burtch and John Corigliano, to name only orchestral contributors.

A thought-provoking highlight was John Metcalf’s brilliantly written Under Milk Wood: an Opera, which premièred to great acclaim at Swansea’s Taliesin Arts Centre in April before touring, after which the composer enjoyed a successful 2014 Vale of Glamorgan Festival (in May, as Artistic Director), with a packed ten days of concerts across a customarily impressive range of platforms. Under Milk Wood has recently been issued on CD by the enterprising new label, Tŷ Cerdd Records. Indeed, the resurgence of Tŷ Cerdd, Music Information Centre of Wales, was itself a cause for celebration in 2014. The record label and other projects bode well for the future – including in the areas of music education and community work in Wales, as well as the forging of international partnerships for Welsh and Wales-based musicians.

Of course, there were other anniversaries besides Thomas’s noted throughout the year – although Birtwistle’s and Maxwell Davies’s 80th birthdays seem to have passed Wales by for the most part. The composer Andrzej Panufnik was born in Poland in 1914, but spent the greater part of his life in exile in London until his death in 1991. His centenary was celebrated at the Presteigne Festival, where artistic director and conductor George Vass also seized the opportunity to programme several pieces by living Polish composers, including a world and UK première by Paweł Łukaszewski and Maciej Zieliński respectively. Łukaszewski’s Requiem is a substantial and deeply felt work which will doubtless be much performed world-wide. It was a real coup for a festival which annually punches well above its weight in contemporary music terms. Zieliński’s Concello, aptly named for cello and strings, also proved to be passionately intense but with a more explosive dissonance, powerfully conveyed by soloist Gemma Rosefield and Festival Orchestra.

Vass also paid important tribute at short notice to Peter Sculthorpe, who sadly died in August, with the UK première of his final work. This was a short, exquisitely shimmering Salve Regina for soprano (Rachel Nicholls) and strings. Sculthorpe attended the Festival on several occasions and will be sorely missed here as elsewhere, far beyond his native Australia.

But it was death and destruction on an unthinkably vast and violent scale that proved the sobering common thread between Presteigne and so many concerts and festivals this year, with the commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I. Presteigne presented an opera double-bill which included Cecilia McDowalls’s Airborne; a tale of wartime love and loss which drew attention to burgeoning warfare in the skies as a phenomenon no less horrifying than the trenches. Albeit with an oddly stylised production by director Richard Williams, the work had a poignant integrity, with doomed lovers well-matched in Donna Lennard and Henry Manning, and superbly supported by the Festival ensemble under Vass.

Before that, in June, the Gregynog Festival also paid its respects to the millions of dead and injured from both sides of the conflict. As part of several days devoted to commemoration, we heard an excellent concert from the Flemish Radio Choir with a programme based on research by curator Dr Rhian Davies into the Belgian musicians who sought wartime refuge in Wales.

Franz Kafka may not have been a ‘war writer’ in any usual sense, but his unfinished novella The Trial (1914-15) encapsulated key, chilling aspects of the age, as well as proving uncannily prescient of horrifying darkness in the century to come. And it inspired one of the key highlights for me of 2014. For, in his operatic setting for Music Theatre Wales (in a remarkably faithful adaptation by librettist Christopher Hampton), Philip Glass triumphantly brought his own post-modernist perspective to bear on this most iconic of modernist works.

Perhaps one of the points which may emerge over the next four years of WWI commemoration is that modernism never actually ended, but rather morphed into different modernisms. At any rate, Glass’s music proved a natural complement to Kafka’s text, in a production which was enormously successful for the entire creative team. Glass may be known for his trademark oscillating arpeggios and scalic patterns, but here there is less chugging repetition than through-composed narrative development; indeed, the composer quite literally presents a ‘Prozess’ (The Trial’s original, German title), suffused with a brilliantly realised detached irony and black humour.

With Glass’s instrumentation subtly redolent of Weimar cabaret, director Michael McCarthy further hinted, in his production, at a kind of intriguing 21st-century Neue Sachlichkeit: objective, functional, witty and yet devastating in its portrayal of the powerlessness of the individual against the dehumanising ‘logic’ of the bureaucratic State. The MTW 8-strong cast and 12-piece ensemble under conductor Michael Rafferty were terrific in performance at Aberystwyth Arts Centre in October, with baritone Johnny Herford outstanding as Joseph K.

Further anniversaries in 2014 included ten-year celebrations apiece for the Welsh Camerata, Newport’s Riverside Arts Centre and Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre (which won a UK Theatre Award amongst others, as friendliest venue nation-wide), with thirty years each of the BBC National Chorus of Wales and Brecon Jazz Festival. Staying with that market town, CPE Bach’s tercentenary was an inspired focus of the Brecon Baroque Festival (which, incidentally, with Rachel Podger at the helm, does a huge amount in music education terms year-round for the children of Powys).

Based in, but decidedly not restricted to, Powys, the excellent Mid Wales Opera celebrated 25 years of touring productions to audiences that would otherwise never get to see opera. Often travelling to far-flung rural venues, MWO’s work is rightly acclaimed for its professionalism and imagination, making the very most of the tightest of budgets. I had some quibbles with director Jonathan Miller’s approach in last season’s Carmen, but composer Stephen McNeff’s specially-commissioned chamber scoring was fantastically imaginative (McNeff also happened to be a further, strong composer-in-residence at the Presteigne Festival, with an array of performances and premières, including an opera based on the life of Shelley, Prometheus Drown’d).

Across Wales, and throughout the year, the highlights were many on both large and small scales, staged and unstaged. In February, the BBC NOW gave a richly expressive performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 under Principal Conductor Thomas Søndergård at St David’s Hall in Cardiff (the news that the orchestra is set to remain orchestra-in-residence at this major venue is welcome indeed). Continuing the orchestral theme, Sinfonia Cymru’s ‘Small Nations Big Sounds’ Festival, too (October), was a resounding success for the enterprising chamber orchestra, who are exploring some truly innovative ideas and programmes.

March saw the Bangor New Music Festival and INTER/actions present an excellent – and rare – performance of Stockhausen’s Mantra (1970) for two pianos doubling percussion, and live electronics. The BNMF also featured an extraordinary ‘Portrait of Natasha Barrett’, with several acousmatic works by this leading – indeed, genuinely cutting edge – composer, who hails from Britain but who has been based in Norway since 1998. Her works are a masterclass in subtle and sophisticated sonic art, which, in concert here, gave new meaning to the term ‘moving image’; Barrett’s expert sound diffusion, with her ultra-fine nuances of perceptual distance and spatial transformation, demonstrated how acousmatic music at its best is a truly performative medium.

There were further, sad events in 2014, however, including the sudden, premature death of one of the nation’s most loved and respected contributors to the arts, Aidan Plender. Among his many roles, Plender was a former general manager of St David’s Hall and founder/leader of the first postgraduate course in arts management at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama – as well as Chairman of the Board at Sound Affairs and far, far more. He is a great loss and missed by many, personally and professionally.

Welsh National Opera too, is coming to terms with a shocking recent loss; here with the sudden death of the wonderful designer, Johan Engels, whose work we saw in 2013’s award-winning Lulu, as well as forthcoming in productions in 2015 (here is my review of director David Pountney’s breathtaking Magic Flute in Bregenz, for which Engels’ designs were out of this world in more ways than one). His loss is a huge one for the opera world.

On a happier note, WNO have had a fantastic 2014 all told, with many striking productions both new and in revival (and including their fantastic youth and community arms). Indeed, it is WNO to whom I turn for my overall 2014 highlight of the year. Yet again, we have seen highly imaginative and entertaining themed programming from CEO and Artistic Director Pountney, with his own, twin Rossini productions (of Moses in Egypt and William Tell) offering outstanding music-dramatic experiences to audiences across Wales and beyond. Pountney is a vigorous champion of exciting directors and productions from far and wide, and the combination of director Mariusz Trélinski’s elegant, noir production and Lothar Koenig’s ravishing orchestra made for a powerful rendition of Henze’s Boulevard Solitude as part of the spring ‘fallen women’ season.

But my overall highlight of 2014 was WNO’s production, by directors Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito, of Schoenberg’s epic masterpiece Moses und Aron. The sheer scale of the undertaking for WNO is not to be underestimated, and this most complex, challenging of operas would simply not have been possible for the company to stage either financially or logistically, were it not for the inspired solution that these directors offered – nor Pountney’s quick grasping of the opportunity to import the production from Stuttgart Opera. That solution involved neither grand dramatic gestures nor spectacular effects – and, for some critics, this strayed too far from the visual ambition that Schoenberg himself held for the piece (complete with quasi-literal Golden Calfs, miracles, orgies and running through fires). In the real world of tightening fiscal belts, however, it was a masterstroke which not only enabled the first UK production of the opera since 1965, but which held an aesthetic integrity on its own terms.

With subtle metaphysics, the directors set the opera in a modern-day assembly room stripped of inessentials and ripe for political ferment. Theirs was an ingenious, highly suggestive effecting of Schoenberg’s Exodus multilayers, as the Golden Calf became a film, unseen by us but imagined through the reactions of the chorus; Schoenberg, of course, yearned to compose for film and knew its propaganda power. Here it was the music rather than visual image – appropriately enough from Moses’s point of view – which packed the visceral punch, from mob rule to fracturing self-doubt. Vocally, John Tomlinson was a superlative Moses, whose anguished Sprechstimme contrasted with Aron’s eloquent bel canto – a fantastic last minute Mark Le Brocq at the press night performance (covering for illness). Koenigs’ WNO Orchestra was brilliantly sinewy and translucent, but the crowning glory was the WNO Chorus, in an astonishingly virtuosic portrayal of both the desperate Israelites and their perplexing deity.

If ever a company demonstrated the enormous value of investment in the arts, WNO is surely it. On a budget far less generous than many big-name competitors elsewhere in the UK, the company – as it happens, like the smaller-scale Music Theatre Wales – is consistently producing work of the highest artistic standards that is both fresh, vital and alive. Let’s hope that they and the many other fantastic companies and ensembles working across Wales can continue with gathering strength and zest in the years to come, despite the undoubted financial and other challenges which are bound to come their way.

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Brecon Baroque Festival: ‘In the Name of Bach’ with Bojan Cicic and Mahan Esfahani

First published in Wales Arts Review, November 2014

 

Christ College, Brecon, October 26 2014
 
Bojan Čičić – violin / viola d’amore
Mahan Esfahani – harpsichord

Franz Benda: Somata for Violin in A major
CPE Bach: Harpsichord Sonata in F sharp minor Wq 52
CPE Bach: Sonata for violin in B minor Wq 76
Franz Benda: Sonata for viola d’amore and basso continuo in D major
JG Graun: Sonata for violin and basso continuo in G minor
CPE Bach: Sonata for violin in C major Wq 73

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CPE Bach has long and unjustly languished in his father’s shadow. However, in his day, it was he rather than JS who was known as the ‘great Bach’. Indeed, it was CPE, not Bach senior, about whom Mozart made his own, famous ‘papa’ comment: ‘Bach is the father, we are the children’. The evening of October 26 offered a treat indeed with a recital by Brecon Baroque’s second violinist, the extremely capable Bojan Čičić, and Mahan Esfahani – who is not just one of the world’s leading harpsichordists, but one of the most brilliant and profoundly musical instrumentalists I have ever had the pleasure to hear.* After a first half which was slow-burning for the violinist, yet still hugely satisfying – and dramatically interrupted by the collapse of an audience member – Čičić rose to join him in music-making of the highest order.

Mahan Esfahani. Photo Courtesy of Marco Borggreve

Under the theme ‘In the Name of Bach’, the programme pivoted enticingly around sonatas by CPE Bach (whose birth tercentenary falls this year), and his lesser-known Czech and German colleagues from Frederick the Great’s court, Franz Benda and Johann Gottlieb Graun (also, respectively, sometime violin student and teacher). The concert opened with a largely fluid and dynamic performance of Emanuel Bach’s Sonata for Violin Wq 76. Dating from the early 1760s, the work is far from being just a pretty galant, so to speak, but is thoroughly soaked in Empfindsamer Stil.

Very broadly speaking, the galant had come about in response to the complex, ‘strict and learned’ style of earlier baroque composers – especially JS Bach – and sought to combine elegant lightness with immediate appeal. Empfindsamer Stil, or ‘sensitive style’, took that immediacy in all sorts of unpredictable directions for the sake of the authentic expression of emotion; hence, the music twists and turns harmonically, with sudden explosive gestures and odd modulations and phrasing, often – like here at Brecon’s Christ College, in the hands of this splendid duo at their height – to fantastic and dizzying effect.

The crazy-paving alternate delicacy, attack and florid lyricism of the keyboard part of the opening duet was taken to another level by Esfahani in the harpsichord sonata Wq 52 which followed. Of course, Emanuel Bach’s musical drama is never less than rooted in actual humanity, but the response of Esfahani when a woman fainted in the front row showed like nothing else his special human qualities. Not many soloists would have the presence of mind to jump to someone’s aid in the way he did mid-phrase, before calmly resuming where he’d left off when it was eventually established that she would be fine. His sheer care and generosity, if anything, drew in an already intimate audience even further.

Čičić then picked up Esfahani’s informative baton to introduce us to Benda who, having joined the court at Potsdam in 1732, remained there for a long fifty-two years until his death in 1786, specialising in the performance of violin concertos. The composer’s sonata in A major proved full of rapid scale and arpeggio interplay (with the violin often accompanying the harpsichord), delightful tunes and strong-weak articulation, with Čičić growing in both tone and stature as the piece progressed.

But it was Čičić’s second half turn to the viola d’amore which really seemed to shake the violinist loose, with a rollicking performance of Benda’s D major sonata for this rare and beautiful instrument and continuo. Benda’s distinctive, Slavic harmonic swerves, coupled with the rich resonance of the sympathetic strings and an elastic, extrovert harpsichord were a magical combination. The performers had found their special rapport. And the experience carried over into JG Graun’s Sonata for violin and basso continuo in G minor – dripping with ornament, strange intervallic leaps and unexpected syncopations.

The final work, Emanuel Bach’s Sonata for violin Wq 73, took us back to an earlier period of the composer’s: 1745 to be exact; the same time around which he had composed the harpsichord sonata of the first half. Čičić opined that this music was somewhat ‘less weird’ than the composer’s later works – but Esfahani disagreed, saying that the keyboard part, at least, was full of bizarre and delicious things. I suspect they are both right in the sense that there is a singing quality to this music which seems to speak more of classical-era equilibrium than of Sturm und Drang (‘storm and stress’) – both stylistic turns, as it were waiting in the wings when the piece was composed. But still, there are teasing flourishes and fast switchings aplenty in this substantial and intriguing work. And it was played with enormous flair and vitality, with some fantastic interplay between the performers – who only seemed to excel themselves further in an exquisite encore of the slow movement from Emanuel Bach’s B minor sonata, heard in the first half; the first time, it turned out, the duo had played the work in public. Surely, if CPE Bach were alive to-day, he would be thrilled – however deserving – to have such stunning champions of his music.


* Esfahani is also active in performing and commissioning new music for the harpsichord; a very exciting endeavour.

Brecon Baroque Festival: ‘A Musical Offering’ with Rachel Podger and Brecon Baroque

First published in Wales Arts Review, November 2014

Theatr Brecheiniog, Brecon, October 25 2014

Brecon Baroque
Directed by Rachel Podger

JS Bach: (selection from) The Musical Offering
JS Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 6 in Bb major BWV 1051
WF Bach: Adagio and Fugue F.65
JS Bach: Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major BWV 1048

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Of composers, the nickname ‘Papa’ is most popularly associated with Haydn; a beloved father figure to other musicians during his lifetime as well as epoch-forming in his development of the symphony and the string quartet. But JS Bach before him could also lay claim to that moniker – quite literally, as he fathered an entire dynasty of composers and musicians. The far-reaching impact of the ‘House of Bach’ upon German baroque music and beyond has yet to be fully appreciated by wider audiences. But this year’s Brecon Baroque Festival – the ninth since its establishment in 2007 by international violinist extraordinaire and Brecon local, Rachel Podger – did its vigorous best to spark enthusiasm in that direction, taking its cue from the birth tercentenary of the most significant and innovative of JS’ sons: Carl Phillip Emmanuel (1714-1788).

Rachel Podger. Photo Courtesy of Jonas Sacks

In his later years, the increasingly unfashionable JS had come to be known – albeit with respect – as ‘Old Sebastian’ or ‘Old Bach’. And it was in that spirit of appreciation for a venerable but slightly fusty older figure that CPE’s then employer, Frederick the Great, invited his court musician’s father to attend him at Potsdam in 1747. The occasion has become the stuff of legend, for it led to the composition, three years before his death, of one of JS Bach’s most extraordinary feats of contrapuntal genius, the Musikalisches Opfer or ‘Musical Offering’. And it was this high baroque pinnacle of intellectual delight that Podger’s ensemble, Brecon Baroque, performed with impressive clarity and poise in the first half of their concert at Theatr Brecheiniog on October 25.

The Musical Offering is actually a collection of pieces. Here we heard artfully persuasive renditions of the most ‘chunky’, as Podger put it, in various captivating instrumental combinations, comprising five of the ten canons, together with the two ricercars and the four-movement trio sonata. The latter piece is scored for flute – the instrument Frederick played – violin and basso continuo (cello and harpsichord), but Bach gave the rest no fixed instrumentation, nor any specific order for performance, and the story of the work’s genesis is fascinating:

Frederick had invited JS primarily in order to test the composer’s mastery of improvisation; a skill all musicians were expected to possess, but for which Bach was famous. The monarch was determined to show off his collection of new (and new-fangled) Gottfried Silbermann fortepianos, and challenged Bach to create a three-part fugue on a particularly cussed theme he had provided, the so-called King’s Theme. When Bach duly obliged, Frederick upped the ante to six parts; a test in quite another league, and which would surely have landed any other composer but Bach senior in ‘another fine mess’. However, JS calmly took the challenge away to work on, and answered it emphatically with his astonishing 6-part Ricercar, which closed the half here in Brecon in a sonically rich combination of flute, oboe and viola, with viola da gamba joining cello and harpsichord.*

Clearly (and despite a brief miscommunication between Podger and cellist at one point), the musicians were comfortably at home with Bach’s dense polyphony, and they navigated it with aplomb for their appreciative audience. My only wish was to have heard the Offering in its entirety, ideally in an acoustic more beguiling for this repertoire (oh for a late night, candle-lit performance in Brecon Cathedral!). However, judging by the cheers which greeted the bouncier, more crowd-pleasing works in the programme, I suspect that Podger – clearly a generous and inspirational leader – has a keen sense for gauging  her Brecon audience.

The second half was flanked by breezy performances of JS Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos Nos. 6 and 3 – less demanding of listener concentration, and better suited to Brecheiniog’s dryer sound in their ebullient, bright and dancy swish. For me, however, the middle item was not only more rare, but more alluringly played: the Adagio and Fugue F.65, by Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann; arguably the most underachieving of his talented offspring. The work forms part of a sometime Symphony in D, and it was performed as if with half an eye on the sadness of such a gifted composer experiencing so troubled a life and impoverished a death as did WF Bach. The Adagio had a deeply felt, elegiac quality, whilst the mischievous Fugue which followed brimmed with a syncopated wit and invention pre-echoing no less a figure than Mozart.**


* Wholly beside the point, but I can’t resist drawing attention to Anton Webern’s exquisite Klangfarbenmelodie orchestration of the 6-part Ricercar, published 1935 [Bach Fuge (Ricercata, no. 2 a 6 voci) aus dem Musikalischen Opfer für Orchester gesetzt]. Highly recommended if you don’t know it.

** As it happens, Mozart transcribed another of WF Bach’s fugues – that in F minor from the Eight Fugues for harpsichord, F.31 – to form the 6th and final fugue to his Preludes and Fugues for String Trio, K. 404a.

Mariinsky Opera and Chorus: Prokofiev’s ‘Betrothal in a Monastery’: Rachmaninov’s ‘Vespers’

First published in Wales Arts Review, November 2014.

Betrothal in a Monastery

Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff, November 2 2014
 
Music: Sergey Prokofiev
Libretto: by the composer and Mira Mendelson after Sheridan’s The Duenna.
Mariinsky Opera: a concert performance
Conductor: Valery Gergiev
Principal Chorus Master: Andrey Petrenko
Cast includes: Evgeny Akimov / Sergey Aleksashkin / Roman Burdenko / Dmitry Voropaev / Anastasia Kalagina / Larisa Diadkova / Yulia Matochkina

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Vespers (All-Night Vigil)

Llandaff Cathedral, Cardiff, November 6 2014
 
Sergey Rachmaninov
Mariinsky Opera Chorus
Director: Andrey Petrenko
Soloists: Maria Shuklina / Alexey Velikanov
 _________________________________________________________________________________

The Wales Millennium Centre directors must have breathed a collective sigh of relief that there was no repetition in Cardiff of the protests that have attended some recent appearances in London and New York of conductor Valery Gergiev.* In the event, joint celebrations for the venue’s 10th anniversary and UK-Russia Year of Culture 2014 got off to an uninterrupted flying start with a superb concert performance by Gergiev and the Mariinsky Opera of Sergey Prokofiev’s Betrothal in a Monastery. And that was followed – even capped – by a stunning rendition of Rachmaninov’s Vespers at Llandaff Cathedral by the Mariinsky Chorus under director Andrey Petrenko a few days later.

Interestingly, apropos music and politics, both pieces bear indirect witness to their oft-fraught but unavoidable commingling – and Russia in the first half of the 20th century was notably precarious for composers, as for so many others. In 1940-41, Prokofiev found himself in dicey situations on twin fronts, trying to negotiate the minefields of Soviet public, and his own self-sabotaged domestic, life. Betrothal in a Monastery – a romantic satire on Sheridan’s The Duenna, stuffed with neo-classical wit and ironic restraint – was written whilst Prokofiev was in the process of abandoning his wife Lina for the opera’s far younger co-librettist, Mira Mendelson. Moreover, it stands in many ways as an example of the composer’s famously artful political dodging; surely an irony that would not be lost on sceptical Gergiev observers today. One would never guess from the opera that a war had been on (Germany was shortly to break the Nazi-Soviet Pact and commence bombing Russian cities) – never mind the terror lurking behind the recent disappearance of Prokofiev’s friend, the director Vsevolod Meyerhold (whom he later learned had been shot) and the lukewarm official reception of the opera they happened to have been working on at the time, Semyon Kotko.

Nonetheless, Prokofiev had only to wait until 1946 for a successful première of Betrothal in Russia. And it proved a hit here in Cardiff, with Gergiev fielding a crack team of soloists, chorus and orchestra in passionate advocacy of the work. In setting the Sheridan, Prokofiev once wrote, ‘I had first to decide which element to stress in the music: the comic or the romantic. I chose the second.’ Well, maybe – and there is some delightfully lyrical, even touching, writing in the portrayal of the various ardent lovers. But it was the comedy which most impressed in this performance, with striking vocal and gestural characterisation, together with an imaginative use of the available space, and a perfectly judged faux-serious interaction between the cast and stage-mounted orchestral players: all delivered with conspiratorial glee and exceptional singing and musicianship.

Prokofiev’s quicksilver score was performed with light-hearted colour and zest. Helped, it must be said, by the surtitles, the cast conveyed to a tee the plot’s myriad, fast-moving machinations, confusions of identity and romantic tangles à la Mozart’s, and especially Rossini’s, opere buffe. Convincing character pairings are crucial to this opera’s success, whether staged or no, and they were largely superb here. There was some stiffness between Louisa and Antonio (Anastasia Kalagina and Dmitry Voropaev), which should have been the romantic pinnacle of the piece, such as it is. Ultimately, it’s all silly nonsense of course, but in any case, the romance was outshone; initially by the ignominious comic duo of father, Don Jerome, and fish merchant, Mendoza (respectively, the brilliant Evgeny Akimov and Sergey Aleksashkin), both hoping to gain from the latter’s marriage to daughter Louisa. But it was Mendoza in tandem with the Duenna herself, Larisa Diadkova, who stole the show; the mezzo with her rich, deep voice and splendidly comic, seductive wiles proving triumphant over all.

The plot hinges on the pompous patriarchy and deluded vanity of Don Jerome and Mendoza. Both men are greedy and stupid, and get their comeuppance only to find that things have turned out alright after all, as each lover finds their rightful partner. So indeed there is politics here in terms of gender, class and age – plus hints of anti-Semitism to modern eyes in the mocking of the Jewish Mendoza, which Prokofiev toned down from the original play. But at least the women and servants appear to give as good as they get, in an opera that’s otherwise steeped in droll cleverness and musical jokes. At the time, the exotic Seville setting and sozzled monks (here wonderfully sung by soloists and chorus alike) must have felt like welcome distractions to Prokofiev, who succeeded in navigating his way through a dangerous period – though at who knows what cost to himself and others.

                                                                                *****

 

Back in the 1910s, at the birth of Soviet Russia, and at the height of an earlier conflagration in World War I, Rachmaninov too had found himself in a political minefield. In his case, however, the only course of action was to leave the country – and fast. His sacred choral masterpiece, the Vespers (Op. 37) – more properly entitled All-Night Vigil – had been premièred to great acclaim in 1915 and widely performed thereafter, only to be banned after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Religious music was outlawed but, more urgently, Rachmaninov was a bourgeois. And so he and his wife Natalia fled the country later that year, eventually arriving in the USA, where he would later die in 1943 after a life of exile there and in Europe.

Curiously, the first ever recording of the Vespers was made in the Soviet Union, in 1965 by the State Academic Choir of the USSR. But this was strictly for export and private study only. There is further irony in that, in the West, Rachmaninov was often – and still occasionally remains – dismissed by his critics as a composer of post-Romantic, sentimental schmaltz. Perhaps a superficial stylistic reading of his more popular works for piano and orchestra might lead to such a conclusion, but surely a single hearing of the magnificent Vespers blows it out of the water. The piece is a marvel of Russian Orthodox liturgical devotion, and the Mariinsky Opera Chorus performed it with breathtaking grandeur and eloquence in the brimful hush of Cardiff’s Llandaff Cathedral.

Rachmaninov had actually stopped attending church services by the time he wrote the piece, which nonetheless communicates an awed contemplation of the divine, as well as the composer’s deep saturation in Russian Orthodox plainchant filtered through his love of Tchaikovsky. The composer John Tavener once spoke about wanting to create an ‘icon in sound’. It seems to me that this is precisely – and authentically – what Rachmaninov achieves here, in his necessarily a cappella setting of fifteen canticles (instruments are traditionally forbidden in the Russian Orthodox Church, as today’s courageous political protesters, Pussy Riot, would bear witness).

The work comprises texts familiar to Westerners, such as the Nunc dimittis and Magnificat (Nos. 5 and 11), with further ancient Russian prayers and chants bringing together the services of Vespers – the evening service – Matins – the nocturnal first service of the day – and the First Hour: these three elements, when celebrated monastically in full, comprise the All-Night Vigil. From the pianissimo subterranean rumbles of the low-Bb basso-profundi to the more outwardly ecstatic ‘allelujias’, Rachmaninov weaves a compelling tapestry of sound; not contrapuntally – which would be deemed too personal for traditional liturgy – but revolving harmonically around the melodic line or single notes. The voices divide into as many as eleven parts at times, but here the Chorus never once lost their sense of pitch, nor direction under Petrenko’s firm but understated guidance.

Mezzo Maria Shuklina and tenor Alexey Velikanov were both exquisite soloists, their voices emerging in turn from the texture as if in haunting plea before subsiding once more into the whole. But for me, the sheer sound of the Russian voices en masse proved the most profound experience, in their distinctly non-Western, collectively thrilling resonance and deep timbral sweep; not ‘perfect’ (not all entry consonances were uttered entirely in tandem, for instance), but raw and yet fluid and controlled. The tempi and dynamic phrasing were faultlessly judged, allowing seemingly effortless, tender, floating and impassioned appeals to surge one into another within each canticle; right from Blagoslovi, dushe moya, gospoda (No. 2) to the final prayer, Vzbrannoy voyevode (No. 15).

It seemed appropriate that the ringing sonority of this final piece should have died away to the peal of the cathedral bells far above our heads marking the half hour. For Rachmaninov had loved the sound of Russian church bells from childhood; so much so, that he named his greatest secular choral work The Bells (Op. 35), just two years before he composed this sacred piece. In later years, he would cite both works as those he was most proud to have written, and he requested that his favourite canticle from the Vespers (the Nunc dimittis) be sung at his funeral. Perhaps it is high time that his ‘schmaltzy’ image became history.


* The issues were, and remain (aside from resurgent Russian imperialism – of which the UK is hardly innocent in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in recent years), the increasing persecution of LGBT people and repression of their rights in Russia: the extent to which President Putin’s internationally renowned close personal supporters – like Gergiev – bear a responsibility to speak out against such ugly illiberalism. For what it’s worth, I believe they do.

The Trial: Michael McCarthy Discusses Philip Glass’s Opera for Music Theatre Wales

The following interview was first published in Wales Arts Review, October 2014.

‘Iconic’ is an over-used word, but it is surely apt to describe Kafka’s novel The Trial. Written in 1914-15, but not completed and only published in 1925 after his death, this extraordinary work has come to be seen as the definitive tale of existential angst in the face of a pitiless, meaningless bureaucratic machine. Of course, the novel also contains much more besides; there have been many different readings of it, and many adaptations have been made by other writers, artists and film-makers from Orson Welles to Steven Berkoff (and including opera adaptations by Gottfried von Einem and Poul Ruders*
Tonight, Friday October 10th, composer Philip Glass will add to the conversation with the world premiere of his opera The Trial at London’s Royal Opera House, Linbury Studio Theatre, to a libretto by Christopher Hampton. Himself now an iconic figure, Glass has long desired to set The Trial to music. So it is surely an accolade which Music Theatre Wales will treasure amongst their many plaudits and awards to have been offered the first ever production.

Mid-way through rehearsals in Cardiff, MTW co-Artistic Director Michael McCarthy spoke with Steph Power about the exciting opportunity of this further collaboration with Glass – the third opera of the composer’s to be presented by the company. He spoke about Kafka and the novel itself, about Glass and Hampton’s setting of it, and about how he intended to go about staging the opera.

First rehearsal: Philip Glass,
Christopher Hampton
& Michael McCarthy

Steph Power: The Trial has been over four years in the making. That seems a long time but perhaps it isn’t in real terms?
 
Michael McCarthy: No, that’s about normal. Originally we thought we were going to premiere it last year when Glass offered the opera to us, and then it was apparent that that wasn’t going to be realistic, which was fine, we were able to postpone. As you would with a project like this! But of course it’s a lot of time in terms of anticipation and so it is a relief now to be at the final stage. It is the last bit of the race and for me it’s the start of the physical realisation of the production itself – you know I’ve had all these ideas, we’ve designed it. We had to finish the design before we had very much of the music. In fact, most of the design process happened before we had a completed libretto!

That’s an unusual way round isn’t it – design before libretto and music?

Yes! But that was just the nature of the beast, and fortunately we had had lots of meetings with Philip and Christopher who had talked about the structure and how we would do it. So we knew what they were planning. Their intention was always to be as faithful as possible to the book because they both love it and think Kafka’s writing is remarkable – Glass has talked about how extraordinary and way ahead of his time Kafka’s thinking is.

And Glass has set Kafka before of course – Music Theatre Wales staged In the Penal Colony in 2010 with great success.

Penal Colony absolutely, and one of the real privileges for us and joyous confidence in The Trial was that Philip said he’d been wanting to write an opera based on the novel since he read it as a teenager. That’s a little while ago as Philip’s first to admit! I thought, well, that’s fascinating because Philip was reading this book when it was still quite new literature actually; it had only been published in English in the year Philip was born [1937]. To him it was a real discovery. Whereas we now take Kafka for granted in a way – and we have this word ‘Kafkaesque’ in our vocabulary.

Like ‘Orwellian’ – he’s one of the few writers who has become a well-known term.

Absolutely! And sometimes it’s too narrow an understanding – you know the baggage that comes with Kafka is all about the paranoia and the lone man, and people talk about it in terms of predicting the Holocaust, predicting the surveillance state and totalitarian societies and all the rest. Well you can interpret it like that for sure.

You’re saying that’s one layer perhaps?

Yes it’s one layer, but it’s the layer of hindsight. When you think about it from Kafka’s point of view, he was looking at the individual in the world and the world itself. He had his own very personal take on the world and it made life very difficult for him.

It seems to me that The Trial is also about ‘code’ – or rather a lack of code. It’s about the giving out of ‘facts’ and ‘messages’ but without the requisite code – in a semiotic sense – to understand them. Hence the absurdity.

Yes. And I think, funnily enough, the only code that K seems to understand – and in fact that Kafka himself understood – was hierarchy. You were someone’s boss and someone else was always your boss, and what you did most of all was to try and make your way up the ladder – so there are certain codes there. But the behaviour codes around his existence – those are classic and also timeless. We all have that consideration now – how should we behave?

l-r: Johnny Herford (Josef K), Nicholas Folwell (Guard Willem)
Photo: Clive Barda

Kafka seems to suggest that, actually, the code is: there is no code. The message is: there is no message. There is no meaning as everything ‘certain’ gets undermined. There might be a chair and a table in the room – and those are really beautiful! [points to the furniture on the set] –

– yes they are!

– but what do they mean? The rug gets pulled out from beneath even the simplest of physical objects as their context shifts with no apparent logic.

Well the rug does get continually pulled out from under K’s feet in the production, that’s part of the idea.

Can you say how you do that? How do you deal with the locations, for instance?

We’ve put K in an abstract world. It’s a room but it’s not a ‘real’ room and there are several windows and doorways – places where people can watch. Because a big part of the book, and a big part of the sense of being K, is his continually being watched. It starts right in the first scene, where he’s being arrested; there’s a group in the window in the apartment over the street that’s watching him. We’ve got a big window here in the set where people will watch him and he’ll try and shoo them away.

And of course there’ll be an audience looking on!

Yes! And it also builds up into another potential theatrical language which I’ve brought in; we’ve now developed this ‘watching’ so that everybody’s playing a joke on K. It all happens to him. He never knows where he is from one moment to another. He’ll be distracted at one minute, then suddenly discover that everything’s moved around him and – oh! I thought I was in my office and – oh! I thought my bedroom was here but it seems to be over there now. The world is constantly shifting – including the furniture. Every time he’s ‘got’ a place he’s very definite about it in the way that K is, but it’s always ‘apparently definite’. Everything is ‘apparently real’. He thinks he’s in this conversation or he thinks he’s got the solution. And yet everybody else seems to have a solution. Or at least everybody else seems to know.

That brings me to a wider question about the relationship of Glass to Kafka – actually isn’t it interesting that it’s an unfinished novel?! –

Yes! Or is it? [Laughs]

Indeed! Or could it ever be truly ‘finished’? There’s something about that notion of ‘completion’ in my question here: is there any equivalence between Kafka’s writing being a kind of ‘unclear clarity’ if you will, and Glass’s music being a kind of ‘unstable stability’?

I think there is that.

I recently heard HK Gruber’s new opera Tales from the Vienna Woods, and it struck me that he was the perfect composer to set Horváth’s play. I wonder if that’s also true – albeit in a different way – with Glass setting Kafka?

Yes, I think he’s the perfect composer to set it. I would start from the place of Glass being the person who opens up the windows if you like to the psychology of characters, and particularly the paranoia and angst, the darkness and insecurity. Because there’s something about the way his music allows you to go there – it encourages you to think beyond, and so the fact that there is lots of enigmatic stuff in Kafka is perfect for Glass. Because he does enigmatic, you can think what you like. I was playing a trick on myself recently as I was preparing for this, looking at a particular photo which had a particular mood and playing different bits of Philip Glass against it. And they all worked – in really different ways. The music just makes you think differently, whatever it is, and that’s an extraordinary place to come from.

But actually there’s another element: with this piece I found that Glass’s music is more changeable, it shifts more frequently and more rapidly than previous works we’ve done. He has this rhythmic energy, this engine on which everything sits, which moves the drama inexorably forward. You know where you’re going, even if the music is apparently static. ‘Apparently’ again – but it really isn’t. And there are very few repetition marks in this score. He’s really working it through the text and has thought about the mood of each scene, and I think what’s going to be really interesting for us – as it is with any new opera – is just to see, ok how does this all fit together as a single sequence? Where does that go?

Glass’s music plays with the notion of closure it seems to me. It literally revolves around continually repeated cadences; around and around –

– which don’t close!

Exactly – so Glass’s sound-world seems curiously apropos Kafka here. And how ironic perhaps that Kafka is seen as a titan of modernism, whilst Glass is often assumed to be a great post-modernist. Perhaps that shows the danger or limits of such categorising?

Well I think that’s right! And if you’re creating opera, it’s about finding the right material for the composer and for the writer, and Philip was very fond of what we had done with his Edgar Allan Poe opera The Fall of the House of Usher – he liked where we’d gone with In the Penal Colony – so he saw this definitely as the third one. He teased us about doing all three at one point!

Well now, that’s a thought!

It would be an extraordinary thing to do and it’s a remarkable thing for us to have this trilogy. Actually I think it would also be fascinating to study the progression from Usher – which was premiered in America in ’87 – we gave the European premiere in ’89. There is definitely a journey, and The Trial is a much more complex piece than Usher because of the nature of the story, all of the characters in it and the way that it works, whereas actually in Usher it’s all about the house. The house is the primary character, affecting everybody in it. So I have reflected a bit on that in this production, in terms of theatricalising the world in which K exists. We’ve done that through creating a gallery of rogues who play multiple characters, who at any point can come on and move a stick of furniture, who can look through the window and stare strangely and enigmatically at what K is doing, and who exchange glances now and then.

As if K’s in a nightmare, the people change around him and suddenly he finds it’s all changed, and they’re not real at all. I will be very overt about the same people playing different characters. And in fact there’s a bit of poor theatre about it in that they’re not going to have huge costume changes. The costumes will be variations on the same kind of thing – you know, obvious false beards – and yet K has to stand in the middle and believe every single moment of it. I’m building the production in layers.

l-r: Johnny Herford (Josef K), Paul Curievici (Titorelli). In doorway top-bottom: Amanda Forbes, Michael Bennett, Rowan Hellier, (Watchers).
Photo: Clive Barda

So how do you interlock the characterisation, music and narrative? Or do you?

Well the narrative is episodic of course, and the only centre to the narrative is K. It changes a bit as we go on. The end of Act 1 is where we meet the Uncle, and then the Uncle takes us to the Lawyer in Act 2, so there’s a little bit more character continuity as the piece develops. But in Act 1 it’s just one character, one situation after another to leave poor old K utterly bewildered and confused. And Act 1 finishes with this fantastic flogging scene and that should be a surprise to people whether or not they’ve remembered the book – it is just bizarre.

Yes, that lumber room scene is completely surreal. And then K goes back and opens the door 24 hours or something later and it’s still happening, the same scene –

– and yet later on it’s gone – no explanation. Christopher Hampton’s really captured something very nicely. We’ve got the flogging scene – so that happens in the opera. Then we close the door on that, and then an assistant comes along and says ‘what’s that noise?’ And K says, oh nothing just the sound of a dog. ‘Like a dog’: those are his very last words as he’s killed ‘like a dog’.

The book is highly pictorial isn’t it?

Yes, it’s full of pictures and images, personalities, places, locations. I mean the Orson Welles film of The Trial is quite good there.

Did you draw on that film at all?

No – if you tried to draw on that it would be too strong and it’s a very cinematic world. I was excited to see it and I enjoyed it but it’s also a very strong Wellesian adaptation and it’s interesting that Christopher Hampton in particular said he didn’t want to do that kind of adaptation – he didn’t want to do a version, he wanted to do it. And the skill that Hampton has is remarkable – it’s incredible how he has distilled that complex, dense text into an opera libretto, which, by definition, has to be far less than dense. It’s still quite a lot of words for an opera and inevitably there are lots of dialogue scenes – and that’s a challenge in opera. We’re trying to work out we play that, and that’s where the idea of theatrical counterpoint and the watchers can help perhaps highlight moments, and continue to motivate scenes – and continue to play with the audience’s understanding of what’s happening in the scene. That’s an element I’ve yet to find. K is trapped in his own dream. So it’s interior – it’s people peering into the inside, into a dreamscape.

There’s a quote from Albert Camus, where he says ‘there is nothing more difficult to understand than a symbolic work of art.’ Perhaps in a sense he’s inviting us not to try to ‘understand’ but to experience?

Yes! And in a funny way, that’s what happening to K as well. And alongside that, if you don’t work at it, then it’s irrelevant – so with K, he must continue the fight. Because so long as you maintain your sense of who you are, or your independence, or your sense of innocence, or your desire, that’s ok. But when you give up, there’s nothing left, it’s over. Gone.

In the book, the characters K pulls on are the ones he sees acting. He shies away from those others he thinks are not doing things.

Restless pursuit. Yes, it’s interesting finding K – and indeed theatricalising him – because you have to find a way to – as we’re doing – just very slightly stylise it. K is the one consistent character all the way through of course, but he is a strange chap and he sees the world differently. One of the first conversations I had with Johnny Herford, who’s playing the role, was: put yourself back into your teenage days, where you’re just so awkward about everything and you’re constantly walking around going, what do they think of me? You know, ‘oh God, do I look like that? – Argh!’ ‘Should I be thinking this?’ And you know, that’s kinda K!

Again, in terms of a potential correlation between Kafka and Glass, I wonder whether there’s something about the way Glass plays with structure on large and small levels, whereby he creates an almost interiorised world where things move in circles but at the same time are through-composed?

Yes, I think that’s true and I think that plays on this interiority, and indeed on the Kafka itself in the sense that apparently everything moves forward, but actually nothing gets done. K gets nowhere with his case. Nobody does. The people K meets in all these corridors have been fighting their case for years and years – the other defendant, Block, who we meet in Act 2, has spent all his time and all his money now employing more and more lawyers in the knowledge that none of them are doing anything.

It’s a kind of pre-existentialist existentialism isn’t it? In the book, you even get the literal ‘nausea’ [the title of a novel by Jean-Paul Sartre published in 1938], which K feels at key moments. There’s a phrase ‘existential crisis’ which seems there in the book but in a very particular, distilled way.

It is, very distilled – but I wonder if it is crisis? He sort of avoids crisis because it’s just about being.

Well, it’s not experienced as an emotional crisis.

No – there isn’t that kind of ‘crisis’ as such. It’s all a crisis, except when he gives up – which you would have thought would be the ‘moment’ of crisis – except it’s just gone. K just sort of accepts it. And again, I’ve been looking at Kafka himself, and Kafka talked about having dreams where he saw himself being sliced up like a piece of meat. And that’s precisely what happens to Joseph K – he’s taken to a quarry and sliced up.

The torture trope is very strong too. In the Penal Colony is very obviously about torture, and there’s another kind of torture at work in The Trial.

There is – the primary torture is mental.

The arrest is a kind of metaphysical arrest.

Yes, and the torture is largely psychological – in a way the death is brutal but it is ‘just’ a death. But – and here we come to another aspect of the opera – Philip and Christopher’s take on the book, and indeed where I need to take the production – is the comedy of it.

That very black, surreal comedy! It’s there throughout isn’t it?

It’s a really important element, and I think it’s a relatively modern reading of Kafka. We need to get away from just the paranoia, just the existentialism, the angst and misery, and predicting the terrible future. We know that Kafka read his stories out loud to his friends and they all split their sides laughing. Kafka found it all very funny, and so you have to think about that. It is absurd and it is very funny – a quirky sense of humour. One of the guards in Scene 1 says to K, ‘oh – nice linen! When you’re arrested can we have your underwear? We’d like to keep it!’ It’s just really bizarre! The first line of the opera is not, ‘Who are you? What’s going on here?’, it is ‘Where’s my breakfast?’ Fantastic! What a great start to an opera! – and this thing goes on all the time. So even K’s death – we talk about him being taken out to a quarry, a dark space, where, interestingly in Kafka – and indeed someone in this production – is watching from a distant window – the two guards take him out there and – we don’t know how to do this yet, we haven’t got to this part yet – they sort of pass the knife between them, slightly Tweedledee and Tweedledum, slightly Marx Brother-ish you know? ‘OK, well, what are we going to do with this one? Who’s going to do it?’ And it’s not about torture at all – it’s the absurdity of the situation.

Yes the book has that element very strongly. It has constant pairs of characters – whether it’s the bank clerks or the policemen, say – who come along as a kind of blackly comic Laurel and Hardy double-act, where they’re playing off each other and having this kind of ridiculous conversation over K’s head while he looks from one to the other.

Absolutely – and we have our moments doing that – and it all happens to K – it’s all back to that; it’s a cruel joke that’s played on K. Milan Kundera talks about that in relation to Kafka – the cruelty of the humour. Eveyone’s playing this terrible joke on one character and everyone finds it all terribly funny apart from the poor bugger in the middle, who has no idea it’s a joke.

It occurs to me from what you’re saying that, in an audience today, there’d probably be quite a few people who’d enjoy the idea of a banker being taken out and having their bureaucratic, hierarchical world sort of done to them!

Ha ha, yes [laughs]! For a banker with something on their conscience! Although, in all honesty, there won’t be much if anything that tells you here that K’s a banker. He’s a guy who feels his social status, who clearly has a bit of an arrogance issue, looks down on people, doesn’t like to be treated this way and yet of course we sort of need to identify with him as well – we need to feel for him too at moments – ‘don’t do that! – don’t dig yourself into that hole – why do you behave like that’ – you fool?!’ But yes, being manipulated.

Glass has often taken iconic cultural figures and revolved something around them – Satyagraha for instance, and Einstein on the Beach – even the Disney opera [The Perfect American] – but it’s not about their politics or even what they’ve done as such. Which creates an interesting distance, if you like, between the political and social, and the aesthetic.

A cultural figure, an individual, a mind, an influence, yes. I think with The Trial it all comes back to Philip and Christopher saying from the beginning that they’re not trying to create a version – a 21st century ‘take’. They’re trying to do the book as an opera. I think they’re basically saying they trust the audience to watch it in that way, and to think about what it might signify or what it might mean –  they’re interested in the human, individual aspect. I’ve referred to this piece as a social experiment on an unsuspecting and rather unfortunate individual who has all the wrong facets, if you like, as a personality, and therefore all the right ones for it to happen to!

So does K = Kafka = everyman?

Yes, and I’m sure that’s what interests Philip and Christopher. We’re being invited into an existential question I suppose – Why are we here? How do we function? – is fundamental to it. Hence the need for the social experiment, to prod and poke and provoke and cajole and then occasionally treat, and see what happens to the poor guy in the middle.

How he’s stuck in the machine?

Yes – and the question, do you give your soul up to the machine? Which is very Penal Colony – because the machine is it and yet destroys. If you accept and become a part of the bureaucracy – perhaps that’s the totalitarian state warning – well what’s the point of that? Because you’ve lost your identity, you’ve lost your individuality.

In fact, all the characters are lost in The Trial. The focus is on K, but all the characters are lost in that perpetual spiral.

Yes definitely. Never getting anywhere. And what you don’t know is whether you could ever have got anywhere.

Or even where ‘anywhere’ is?!

Yes! As Christopher Hampton says, a whole lot happens, except nothing happens!


* the latter touched on by conductor Thomas Søndergård here.