Mendelssohn

Without really planning to I have heard quite a lot of Mendelssohn in the last couple of weeks.    I caught a performance of the overture Der Schonen Melusine on the radio on the way to work - I don't recall ever hearing it before and I was particularly taken by the delicacy of the opening.  And yesterday I listened to the whole of the incidental music to A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Elijah is my mother's favourite choral work and I grew up with the Malcolm Sargent recording as an ever present background.  Yet somehow Mendelssohn is always an overlooked figure when it comes to evaluating the great masters.   He is in many ways the least "flashy" of the great 19th century composers and doesn't have that sense of excitement and daring of many of his contemporaries.  And somehow the comfortable circumstances of his personal life and his association with Queen Victoria don't fit with what we expect of a romantic composer.

Yet he produced at least half a dozen masterpieces which are worthy of comparison with anything else in the repertory.   A good case can be made for saying that the violin concerto is the greatest of all concertos for the instrument and the Octet is one of the masterpieces of the repertoire.   Add to these the Italian symphony, Fingals Cave and the music to A Midsummer Night's Dream (not just the overture) and Mendelssohn's place in the pantheon of the musical gods is secure.

The one piece I have problems with is the Scottish Symphony.  I've played it several time but have never really got to understand it - it always seems a bit heavy and turgid in comparison with the Italian.  And I am afraid that I regard the end - where a wholly new theme is introduced - as one of the two great miscalculation in the symphonic repertory (I"ll leave you guessing what the other one might be until a later post!).  I have a recording of the symphony by Klemperer and he obviously had the same thought because he scrapped Mendelssohn's ending in favour of a new ending of his own composition!  Outrageous of course and the musicologist in me could't possibly approve! - but I think that it works very well.


I remember at University discussing with my tutor which composers were the best orchestrators.  I remember coming up with the obvious names - Berlioz, Wagner, Strauss - and was very surprised when he suggested that I should add Mendelssohn to the list.  But of course he was right.   Being  a great orchestrator is not the same as being the most outrageous or eccentric in the use of the orchestra.  Mendelssohn gives another perspective - the command of the orchestra is so complete that the orchestration does not draw attention to itself - is simply fits the music like a glove.

There is still a  lot of Mendelssohn for me to get my teeth into - I'm gradually discovering the string quartets but I hardly know the other chamber music , the songs or the choral works beyond Elijah.

Favourite historic recordings; Sir Charles Santley The Vicar of Bray

This takes us almost as far back into operatic history as possible.   Charles Santley was a pillar of the British musical establishment for most of the second half of the 19th century.  He took part in the first staged performance of a Wagner opera in England and Gounod was so impressed by his performance as Valentin in Faust that he wrote an additional aria for him.  



Santley gave up the operatic stage relatively early in his career and concentrated on oratorio and ballad singing - in those days it was perfectly possible for a "serious" singer to perform ballads - indeed the ballad concert was a very important past of Victorian music life.



Santley made a number of recordings at the end of his career, mostly of the ballad repertory.  This is my favourite - the Vicar of Bray, recorded in1904.  Santley was born in 1834 so he was 70 when he recorded this.

Clearly this is the voice on an old man and you can hear the wear and tear in the voice. But what I love is the way that he projects the words so vividly.  The relish with which he delivers the last line of each verse "I'll be the vicar of Bray sir!" always makes me smile.

We really are linked a long way back through this recording.  In his memoirs Santley recalls a performance of Elijah in his youth (he was singing in the chorus) and talks about the difficulties of rehearsal because "this was a comparatively recent work"  .   Santley was a Garcia pupil, and Garcia's father was the creator of important tenor roles, most notably the count in Rossini's Barber of Seville.

The past is not as far away as we sometimes think!

Favourite historic recordings: Reynaldo Hahn L'île heureuse (1909)

My link to the Mapleson cylinders on my Meyerbeer post has got be thinking about historic recordings so I though that I would start a series of my favourite historic recordings.

This first brings together two of my current enthusiasms - Chabrier and Hahn. Like most people my early experience of Chabrier was Espana, which is in my view unparallelled as a single movement orchestral showpiece. And of course a great piece for a bassoonist to play. It is comparatively recently that I have got to know more of Chabrier's music and every discovery increases my admiration for his distinctive voice. If you want to experiment try the introduction to the unfinished opera Briséïs or the completely mad Duo de l’ouvreuse de l’Opéra Comique et l’employé du Bon Marché which has to be heard to be believed (anybody for a yodel!)

Raynaldo Hahn is a recent discovery - I heard a extract from the Susan Graham Hahn recital and was completely hooked. His melodic invention and evocative mood is captivating.

Hahn was a great musical all rounder - he was a composer, musical administrator and conductor but most importantly for my present purposes a singer. Judged purely on beauty of tone he can't be said to be up there with the greats, but what makes his recordings so memorable is their sense of style and total immersion in the idiom. 

 
Take this recording of what is probably Chabrier's greatest song. A modern performance, such as that of a singer like Felicity Lott with a professional accompanist like Graham Johnson is on a purely technical level more secure and accomplished. But nobody quite gets to the heart of the style like Hahn. Pinning down what makes it special is not easy, but I think that it has a lot to do with the very subtle rubato all through the vocal line. Hahn is essentially moulding the words and the vocal line into one seamless whole. And this is self accompanied. Again judged on purely technical grounds this has some problems - not least a few wrong notes - but again who cares when it is delivered with such panache. 

 
This was recorded in 1909 - not that long after Chabrier's death. I don't know for certain whether Chabrier ever heard Hahn sing it, but I would have thought that this was quite likely, because they certainly were part of the same musical circles.

The recording quality is pretty good for the time and you soon get used to filtering out the surface noise.

Antony Hopkins - RIP

The Guardian is reporting this evening the death of Antony Hopkins

Guardian obituary


I remember with great affection his series talking about music which was a fixture of the radio schedules when I was at school and university.  I mean no disrespect to my teachers and lecturers when I say that I probably learnt as much about music from listening to his talks on the radio as I did from any other person.

His narrative approach to musical analysis is now very out of fashion but to a young learner it gave me exactly what I wanted.   In the short time since I read the obituary I have been remembering the music that I got to know through his talks.  Three that come to mind - still on my favourites list are

• Tippett string quartet no 2
• Britten violin concerto
• Schumann violin concerto

I also remember a couple of talks on pieces I knew well.  First of all Scheherazade, where he was totally un-snobbish about a piece of popular repertory and was very illuminating about Rimsky managed to tell a story in musical terms.   Secondly a programme about Beethoven 5.  This was the days before historically informed performances but he played a version conducted by Hermann Scherchen, which at the time was one of the very few performances which didn't introduce a massive ritardando before the recapitulation of the opening motive.   I remember thinking that that was exactly the right way to do it.

I can't imagine that on the current radio 4 (or even radio 3) schedule such broadcasts could ever find a place, which is a great pity.  Hopkins was a broadcaster of real distinction.

Hopkins was a Norfolk man like me, and I think that he once acted as an adjudicator in a music festival I was playing in.  But I was only 8 or 9 at the time so I can't be sure.  

  

Ten composers -Ten operas. 3:Les Huguenots

It is hard now to think that Les Huguenots was once a mainstay of the operatic repertory(the Paris Opera reached its 100th performance of the work in 1906).  Indeed had you turned up at random at any opera house between 1850 and 1900 the chances that you would be seeing Les Huguenots or Faust must have been very high.



Yet now Les Huguenots is a beached whale of an opera - its aesthetic far removed from what we expect an opera to be like.



It is easy to point out what is lacking in Meyerbeer.   Sometimes his harmony can be astonishing crude (I remember at university listening to a recording of Robert le Diable and seeing one of my fellow listeners - now a distinguished composer - literally wince at the gauche chord progression in the opening bars and I could see him thinking -"how many hours of this have I got to listen to!").  Equally he could never be regarded as master of transition: some of the links between numbers are perfunctory in the extreme.





But that is only one side.  On his own terms the operas work!   The big moments in Les Huguenots - such as the consecration of the swords, are thrilling - he certainly knew how to use a chorus, soloists and orchestra together to great effect, and there rage of colours and moods is extraordinary. The bathing scene in act 2 may have been put into please the men in the audience whose reasons for attendance may not have been entirely musical, but the colour in the music and the charm of the melody are still hugely affective  (as a bassoon player I would love to have a chance to play this).

But there is some genuinely great music here.  The big duet at the end of Act 4 has a melody to die for (literally as it turns out) and Verdi must have heard echoes of it when he came to write the end of Aida.  But there is much to admire elsewhere.  It was a tradition for many years to end the opera with Act 4 - this seems very odd indeed given that there is so much interesting music in Act 5, particularly the extraordinary recitative and trio with accompaniment by solo bass clarinet and the use of the offstage voices singing the chorale melody.  Wagner, for all his jibes about Meyerbeer, must have absorbed this scene into his musical DNA.


Les Huguenots will surely never return to the operatic repertoire other than as an occasional curiosity - tastes have changed.  But that it is pity.  So much of the later 19th century operatic repertory would have been very different without this opera - indeed part of my enjoyment when listening is identifying the pre-echoes of later works. I've already mentioned Wagner and Verdi, but you can also hear glimpses of composers as diverse as Sullivan and Mussorgsky.   And there are not that many other things linking those two.


It is remarkable that aural evidence of the great tradition of Meyerbeer performances still exists.  This is one of the famous Mapleson cylinders, recorded live from the stage of the Met in the early years of the last century.  If you have never heard one of the cylinders before you will need to get used to the very heavy surface noise, but if you persist you will be able to hear a surprising amount of the performance.  This is the end of the Queen's aria in Act 2 - one of the great show stoppers of the repertory.  Controversy still remains over whether or not this singer is Melba, or the less well known Susan Adams, but whoever she is she was on blistering form.     Surely this is what the 19th century operatic experience was all about

Ten composers - Ten operas. 2:Don Pasquale

Several of my 10 operas are comic opera of one sort or another - and I start with one of the best - Donizetti's Don Pasquale.  I would't call myself a Donizetti enthusiast - indeed I only really know the famous bits from the other opera - but I've always loved Don Pasquale.  I am pretty certain that what introduced me to the opera was one of the superb Geraint Evans master classes in the 1970s but maybe time has played tricks with me: but I have certainly known it from an early age and it was of the first operas I purchased on LP  (there was a shop selling second hand classical LPs in Norwich in my youth and I built up a good collection on the cheap from there).













Don Pasquale has it all. Moments of high comedy, pathos, and drama.  There are arias a plenty, but it is the ensembles which really stand out. Two of the many highlights to note. First of all the big E major ensemble at the end of Act two when Don Pasquale realises what married life to Norina will actually be like.  The superb wide-ranging melody must have left its mark on Verdi when it came to the ensembles in Falstaff (more of that later).  And then by contrast the great buffo duet between Pasquale and Matalesta which never fails to bring the house down and always make me laugh out loud.  Here is Geraint Evans in fine form.

But there is another reason for my choosing Don Pasquale - it was my route into historic recordings.  I purchased an ultra cheap LP of excerpts from the opera not really realising that it was of historic recordings.  But I was hooked.  It was my first encounter with Caruso among others, but what really grabbed my attention was the famous old recording of the patter duet with de Luca and Corratetti.  Of course the two of them ham it up shamelessly and as pure singing it doesn't compare with the Geraint Evans version.  But who cares.  Scratchy the sound may be and the piano accompaniment is crude but the character and the fun just leap out of the loudspeaker.

Its sobering to think that this recording is now much closer to Donizetti's time than it is to ours.






Don Pasquale is sometimes seen as cruel, and I expect audiences of the time were probably very happy to see Don Pasquale humiliated and a figure of fun, whereas nowadays we see him more sympathetically.  But however you look at it, this is a marvellous comic opera which comes up fresh as a daisy in every performance.

Ten composers - Ten operas. 1:Peter Grimes

How on earth did Britten do it?

That's always what occurs to me when I listen to Peter Grimes.  

My rhetorical question has two limbs

The first is how a composer growing up in the inter-war years could find such a strong individual operatic voice.  There were of course operas by English composers before 1945 but nothing in them could possibly have been seen to lead up to Grimes.  I think that now, from an early 21st century perspective we can see that there are elements of that extraordinary melting pot of early 20th century opera - Stravinsky, Shostakovich, Puccini, Janacek, Berg and others - threaded through the language of Grimes, but in 1945 most of this would have been completely outside English musical discourse.   It remains a miracle that an Englishman could have absorbed all of this, fused it within an native tradition and produced a masterpiece that holds the stage all over the world.

But the second limb is more personal - where did Britten the man find the means to produce such a score.  I've never believed the "happy composer writes happy music - sad composer writers sad music" school of thought, but there has to be some link between the man and the music.

One of the most fascinating recordings I know is the rehearsal tape (secretly recorded, much to Britten's annoyance) of the Decca recording of the War Requiem.  Britten comes across as an affable, slightly effete prep school master directing a group of talented but inexperienced pupils.    Over the years I have played in ad hoc performances conducted by such individuals.  They tend to produce enthusiastic, if rough and ready performances without much in the way in excitement or energy.  So listening blind to Britten rehearsing one might expect something similar - and then you get this extraordinary energy and intensity, in some cases savagery of the music.  It really is hard to connect the one with the other.

It is the same with Grimes.   How could that elegant , softly spoken, reserved man have conjured up the terrifying choral outbursts as the crown hunts down Peter Grimes.  The roots of creativity and inspiration are truly incomprehensible.

Grimes is not I think a perfect masterpiece.  Britten himself is supposed to have said that it was full of howlers - though I shudder to think how this notoriously thin skinned man would have reacted if somebody had pointed out one of them!  Some of the music for the minor characters , such as Mrs Sedley and Hobson, can be tedious and there are times when things drag, but these are small matters. Time and time again Britten's inspiration is red hot.    I've already mentioned the hounding of Grimes.  Those chorus shouts of "Peter Grimes" are in a good performance among the most thrilling, and terrifying moment in the operatic repertoire, but perhaps even more notable is the mad scheme, with the offstage choir now reduced to a whisper and the low moaning of the tuba in the distance.  To reduce the texture at the most critical point of the opera was a extremely courageous step, but it works!

Finally a personal recollection.  I attended a concert in the Norwich festival in the early 1970s.  I went to hear Stravinsky's Firebird and Symphony of Psalms, but sandwiched between them Peter Pears sang the Britten Nocturne.   Britten was in the audience and stood up to acknowledge the applause.  But shamed as I am to admit it now, not much of the applause was from me!  I'd come to hear the Stravinsky and I found the Britten very hard going and uninspiring.  I know better now.  But at least I did see Britten in person.

 There are wonderful moments elsewhere in Britten's operas - the end of A Midsummer Night's Dream  is my favourite - but I don't think that he ever quite achieved the level of consistent inspiration that he achieved in Grimes......and all in his early 30s.