Chamber music in Cleveland

I'm back in Ohio after five wonderful, exciting months in London. Sorry for no blogging: too much to do with students, museums, etc. Hard life!

Thrilled to be back on ClevelandClassical.com, reviewing the great concerts we have in NE Ohio (shameless self-promotion).

The latest: opening night of Frank and Diana Cohen's ChamberFest Cleveland 2014, third year of a two-week festival.

Here's my review:  http://clevelandclassical.wordpress.com/2014/06/23/8811/

Kevin Puts' wonderful trio for Marimba, clarinet, and violin. You might see it in another performance here.

And: the plum of the evening, Faure's great c minor piano quartet!

Here is Gilels, Kogan, Barshai, and Rostropovich from 1958 playing the Faure. Check it out! 

A modernist look for Peter Grimes

Operas are servants of two masters: the plot and the music. That is, the plot often belongs to one period and the music comes from another. Where the two can cross purposes is in the visual design: if the plot is Renaissance, say (think Gianni Schicchi, Don Carlo, or Rigoletto) but the music is opera-house Italian, someone has to make a choice about what kind of costumes or set we are going to see -- doublets or frock-coats? or maybe T-shirts?

Renaissance costume: Don Carlo, Met 2010

19th-century costumes: Glyndebourne, 2004

T-shirts, etc: Bavarian State Opera, 2012

It gets particularly problematic when an opera depends on an essentially realistic source story. So with Benjamin Britten's Peter Grimes, based on a gritty, naturalist story (albeit written by a poet, George Crabbe, in the Romantic period, whom Byron called "nature's sternest painter"): a gloomy man eking out a subsistence living as a fisherman on the Suffolk coast, whose depression lashes out in violence on his apprentice boys, abusing and eventually killing them in fits of anger. He's driven to these fits in part by his own depressive personality, and in part by the prying, gossiping, judgmental provincial town he lives in (Britten and Crabbe's home town of Aldeburgh).

San Franciso Opera 1976

This is material that in many ways depends on its location in time and place. The obvious choice, then, is to set the opera in early 19th-century coastal England.

But there's Britten's amazingly modernist music to take into account. It's edgy, abrupt, bitterly ironic. Having Britten in the pit seems to demand something other than realism: not Zola but Auden (or even Ted Hughes?) would be the literary equivalent. 

The current Grimes at the English National Opera takes Britten's modernism as the cue for an amazing set, as angular and occasionally nasty as the score. Walls that tilt sharply; tables that are thrust up at horrible angles, on which the singers have to balance; sharp, eerie shadows cast by characters, as if their souls were lurking on the back wall of the set; a bilious and claustrophic lighting, out of Hopper's Night Cafe.

The only video I can find of the production is the ENO trailer, clearly a promotional collage. But its snippets capture some of the asymmetrical, jagged energy of this remarkable modernist production:



The great success of this tragic opera is that it takes this nasty tale about a terrible man and makes it beautiful; even Peter Grimes himself, like Macbeth, shows a soul of beauty. Here, to end with, is Stuart Skelton, who sings Grimes at the ENO (though he was sick the night I heard it, and his understudy did a great job), singing the amazing first-act aria, "The Great Bear."

The text:

Now the great Bear and Pleiades
where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds
of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher
In storm or starlight
The written character
of a friendly fate –
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's
bewildering
Like a flashing turmoil
of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again? 

Canterbury sounds

Canterbury Cathedral is not only dazzling complex and beautiful to the eye -- the long reach of the nave, the high Gothic arches with their leaping secondary columns, the light pouring in the nave in the intervals of low winter sunshine -- but also to the ear.

The impact of sound, music really, in this cathedral makes me realize that those builders had it in their minds to create acoustic spaces that would thrill and exalt.

In the picture, you can see a big group of people -- well, colorful dots in the picture -- at the end of the nave. They are just in front of the point where the level of the floor abruptly rises some 16 or 20 feet to the level of the quire. (Further to the east, to add to the topographical complexity, the floor rises again to the high altar, and then again to the shrine of St. Thomas -- Becket, that is).

We heard the dress rehearsal of Messiah with the Canterbury Chorus (a town group, quite good) and the London Handel orchestra, on period instruments. It isn't music designed for this space, and so at times the fugues got muddy, swirling around at random in the vast and intricately reflective spaces.

But parts of it were stunning: particularly the countertenor, Robin Blaze -- who found perfectly the resonance of the space. Here's his performance of "But who may abide" with Tafelmusik...


We did not come back for the concert that evening, beautiful as this rehearsal was. We did, though, stay for evensong, and that was startlingly different. To begin with, the group was much smaller -- a choir of 16 -- and sang, not in the nave, but in the "quire" -- a much narrower, more intimate space, the wooden seats where the monks used to chant eight times a day.

By Vespers, the sun had set, and the nave was in darkness. And then, it was different, too, in that the skies had not only gone dark, but a storm had blown in with thunder, lightning, and hail beating on the roof and the vast, dark windows.

And then, different in that this was liturgical music, service music, sung as part of a meditative event, what we would call worship if we were "churched."

Messiah is Christian in origin and ideology, and sacred in intent, but is not worshipful: educational, theatrical, virtuosic, it is Enlightenment concert-music. The service music of the evensong Vespers is, by contrast, deliberately worshipful, contemplative of what it might mean to be in the presence of God: the Magnificat (Mary amazed by what has happened to her in becoming pregnant with God); and the song (Nunc dimittis) of Simeon, the old priest who sees the child Jesus in the temple and can finally let go his own hold on this life. Even the anthem was contemplative, Vaughan Williams' beautiful and simple setting of George Herbert's poem "Come, My Way, My Truth, My Life."


And again, a difference: while for some 1500 years, all the liturgical music in Canterbury Cathedral has been sung by men (yes, all-- at least as far as I can tell), this Vespers was sung by 16 girls. The cathedral staff seemed delighted that this was happening, finally. I gather the church has to be careful not to offend more conservative parts of the Anglican communion, but this church itself had initiated this change, trained the girls, and welcomed them warmly.

And the acoustic space of Canterbury's quire accepted the sound, as well: the psalms and the other service music resonated quite as richly as the boys' sound would have.

As we walked around the cathedral earlier that day, we heard the church's sound in yet another way: the bells. It was a peal of 8 bells, first at a slowish tempo, and then in what seemed to us a fiercely demanding allegro. Imagine pulling those ropes at just the right time to get your bell in rhythm with seven others!

I made a recording of about two minutes of this exhilarating peal, the sounds pouring out of the cathedral tower into the open air and across the old town.

London as fabric

Walking around the streets of London is a time "warp" in more than the Star Trek meaning (is that the source?): it is as if the streets are warp and weft of a colorful fabric, maybe a batik, that wonderful Indonesian cloth where the threads are laid down, painted or dyed, and then rewoven (I think).

Townhouses (early 19th century?) on Harley Street

What I mean about the fabric is that just as the streets weave in and out of each other, blending, mysteriously changing name and direction, so does the history that each one indicates. Here where we live, north of Oxford Street, it's the late nineteenth-century, the time of the radical writers Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes, and of University College London with its non-denominational, radically practical and empirical education.

But go a bit south (we just walked this, home from dinner), and we're in the eighteenth-century: Leicester Square and Covent Garden, the operas, the late night stage parties, toffs in sedan-chairs and actresses in ... well...

Go east to the city, and the world of Christopher Wren and the seventeenth-century is what you find: St. Paul's, and all the other churches with their intricate spires.

Go west to Westminster, and you're in the middle ages: an abbey, after all! and that wonderful pseudo-medieval Parliament building with its impossibly cranky offices, a place you can hardly imagine any work getting done.

But back to the weaving: although these sound like separate sections as I describe them, but in all of them, a bit of each of them can be found. It's in the texture: an ancient watering fountain by a Georgian house; the home of a radical philosopher by a church with an Anglo-Saxon foundation.

The London eye, the Houses of Parliament, and a northern sunset.

And of course, all around are the often desperately grandiose buildings of the late twentieth-century, sometimes like blots of ketchup on this delicately patterned batik! At least the London Eye is graceful!