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Twitter: @spower_steph, Wales, United Kingdom
composer, poet, critic, essayist

Thursday 23 May 2013

Dreaming Wagner: Welsh National Opera

Yesterday was exactly two hundred years since the birth of Richard Wagner in Leipzig on 22 May 1813. Wagner is by no means the only composer to have triggered seismic shifts in Western culture by revolutionising the musical world; his predecessor, Beethoven, is perhaps the most obvious of other such examples. But Wagner’s genius remains the most musically and socio-politically divisive, and his bicentenary has re-ignited passionate debate about the man, his art and his legacy.

Central to the celebrations - a delicious feast for some and a nauseating excess for others - is, of course, a plethora of competing performances; at the Proms alone, seven of Wagner’s operas, including the mighty der Ring des Nibelungen in its four-opera entirety, will be performed in concert. Welsh National Opera’s response to the occasion is, however, more boldly imaginative than most and offers the opportunity for perhaps a different kind of Wagner reappraisal.

Today, 23 May, WNO opens a new production of Lohengrin at Cardiff’s Wales Millennium Centre, directed by the award-winning Antony McDonald and conducted by Music Director Lothar Koenigs (whose performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg was ecstatically received in 2010). Then, on 6 June, WNO will present the first fully-staged UK production of a contemporary British opera in which Wagner himself is the main character and which draws on the lesser-known spiritual and compositional concerns of his latter years; Wagner Dream by the late Jonathan Harvey (director Pierre Audi, conductor Nicholas Collon).

This brings together two completely contrasting operas by composers temperamentally and aesthetically poles apart. Nonetheless, the works are related in thought-provoking ways and provide an opportunity to re-examine the nature of opera itself as an art-form in the light of Wagner’s undoubtedly towering, if problematic, genius. In conversation, WNO Artistic Director and CEO David Pountney remarked that the company is aiming to offer - in addition to the self-standing experiences of the operas themselves - for those that want it, ‘a very stimulating experience of seeing two completely different visions of what opera might be like, but somehow very closely linked around the same subject and the same composer.’ That subject is divinity and the human aspiration to it, of which Lohengrin is, for Wagner, a nascent and in some ways crudely drawn, yet multi-layered, early expression. Many of the philosophical and religious themes Wagner went on to develop in later operas are present through, for example, references to ancient Teutonic myth within a strongly quasi-Christian pantheon, symbolised by the descent from heaven of a Knight of the Holy Grail (although we don’t discover Lohengrin’s identity until the work’s conclusion).

Indeed, for Pountney, Lohengrin is the first opera in which Wagner attempted to ‘find a musical language for a kind of transcendental state ... and, of course, that music of transcendence is something which Jonathan Harvey spent a whole lifetime trying to find.’ In Harvey’s music, the search revolved around his beloved Buddhism but admitted wisdom from many faiths and found expression in a technological unfolding of an extraordinary orchestral and vocal palette inherited in large part from Wagner, through the kinds of other-worldly, electronically-realised sounds that so enrich Wagner Dream.

It may surprise some to learn that Wagner was attracted to Buddhism upon reading Schopenhauer in the 1850s, and had been planning an opera on a Buddhist subject, Die Sieger (The Victors) for many years. But he died without realising the project and Harvey’s opera depicts an imagined struggle in Wagner’s mind at the moment of his death as he is encouraged by the Buddha, Vairochana, to renounce his artistic ego and surrender to cosmic reality beyond the illusion of the self. Most poignantly, concerning Harvey’s own death last year, WNO are presenting Wagner Dream in a new translation (agreed by Harvey and written by Professor Richard Gombrich, Founder-President of the Oxford Centre for Buddhist Studies, with WNO Head of Music Russell Moreton) of Jean-Claude Carrière’s original, English libretto into a more culturally appropriate German and Pali; a 2000 year-old language which was spoken by the Buddha himself.

Both Harvey and Wagner were composers of ideas. Whatever one’s position within the Wagner debate, WNO’s summer season makes for a fascinating prospect. As Pountney says, ‘if we are going to go to all the effort and expense of having an opera company, it should be putting out material into society which is a stimulating subject of discourse.’ No doubt Harvey, at least, would relish the opportunity for dialogue along intriguing lines as we are, in effect, offered the chance to consider - or ‘dream’ - his thoughts about Wagner’s thoughts and, hence, to reflect upon our own. 

Friday 17 May 2013

Welsh National Opera Orchestra: Wagner / Stravinsky

St David’s Hall, Cardiff, 26th April 2013

Wagner - Parsifal: Prelude
              - Götterdämerung: Siegfried’s Funeral March and Brünnhilde’s Immolation
Stravinsky - The Rite of Spring

Conductor: Lothar Koenigs



In his youth - and contrary to later disavowal - Stravinsky was a keen admirer of Wagner. With his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov, he attended a performance of Siegfried in the winter/spring of 1908 and, during the first interval, shared with the diarist Vasily Yastrebtsev his ‘delight in the first act of that opera, a work of genius’. However, just four years later, Stravinsky went to see Parsifal at Bayreuth whilst working on the Rite of Spring and reacted with a vehement disdain that was to characterise his subsequent pronouncements on the revolutionary German, writing that the ‘unsatisfactory and blasphemous interpretation of art as religion and of the theatre as a temple should be stopped once and for all. The absurdity of this pitiable aesthetic can easily be demonstrated.’ Ironically perhaps, it may have been the tumultuous early reception of Stravinsky’s own proto-religious and self-described ‘solemn pagan rite’ which sealed his antipathy to Wagner; for, as Richard Taruskin has noted, a year after the notorious debacle of the Rite of Spring’s première at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in 1913, Stravinsky triumphed at last when concert performances of the ballet were received with acclaim, only to have his star rudely eclipsed within weeks by the Paris première of Parsifal in June 1914.  

Aesthetically, the two composers are polar opposites but stand as titans of their respective ages and ours - which latter says a good deal about the pluralism, as well as the obsession with the past, of today’s musical culture. This concert, conducted by Music Director Lothar Koenigs, was an opener for Welsh National Opera’s forthcoming summer season, in which Lohengrin will be imaginatively twinned with a contemporary opera, Jonathan Harvey’s Wagner Dream. It was conceived as a pre-emptive showcase of Wagner’s sound-world in contrast to Stravinsky’s Rite, and to celebrate two important anniversaries: Wagner’s bicentenary (1813-83) and the one hundredth anniversary of that very 1913 debacle from which Stravinsky recovered, eventually to be hailed as (probably) the greatest and most influential composer of the twentieth century.

There are drawbacks to the programming of bits of Wagner operas in concert - either with singers or without, as here tonight in Cardiff. The inevitable ‘greatest hits’ or ‘medley’ connotation is hard to avoid, however well the music is performed, and raises the question: ‘why’? Moreover, who is such a programme for? Is it really helpful - or even desirable - to bathe in extracts of Wagner’s semantically loaded music out of context; without recourse to the work’s unfolding as music-drama and, hence, without the development of those ideas and philosophies which give rise to and underpin the music itself within his notion of Gesamtkunstwerk or all-embracing art-form? For me at least, the answer is no - perhaps especially in this year of reappraisal, as well as celebration, of Wagner’s undoubtedly towering but problematic genius.

The lack-lustre  performances on this occasion did little to persuade me otherwise. Indeed, the enlarged orchestra sounded curiously muted at times and gave few hints of the sheer significance of the famous oft-called ‘Grail’ and ‘Communion’ Leitmotifs, for example, from the opening Prelude to Parsifal. Then again, without the rest of the opera (the previously advertised Good Friday Music unaccountably absent from tonight’s schedule), it was difficult to hear this extract nor, indeed, the following extracts from Götterdämerung - itself the last of four extremely long operas comprising Wagner’s mighty Ring cycle - as anything more than a species of highly Romanticised chromatic reverie; a difficulty which only serves to assist those Wagner detractors who point with distaste to the indulgently mesmeric quality of his music. Despite some fine moments - notably the dignified climax of Siegfried’s Funeral March - and some excellent brass playing in particular - the orchestra struggled at times with ensemble and intonation and seemed reluctant to rise to the challenge of Wagner’s heightened passion and epic scale, which presupposes absolute commitment whether on the platform or in the pit; a shame, because, at its best, the WNO Orchestra is more than equal to the extreme demands of Wagner’s emotional landscape.

In the second half, the Stravinsky offered redemptive power to some degree in its savage, primitivist depiction of seasonal renewal through sacrifice. But the orchestra seemed to be in alien territory with this score; a pounding exposition of orchestral virtuosity so familiar to purely concert ensembles. In any case, the performance felt roughly pulled together and only in places showed real drive or energy; a situation not helped by some uncertain rhythmic syncopation - and some ploddingly slow tempi from Koenigs, especially at the start of Part II, the Sacrificial Dance. Throughout, there were differing approaches to phrasing and articulation across the orchestra, which resulted in a lack of that single-minded, brutal relentlessness which can so electrify great performances of the Rite. Koenigs did succeed in opening some valuable and intriguing textural perspectives upon this kaleidoscopic work, but that is simply not enough when it really could - or even should - have been a spellbinding experience with players of this calibre.

The music of the Rite of Spring was composed to underpin a dance of merciless, erotic barbarism. The fact that it can work so brilliantly as a concert piece, and not just as a ballet score, is itself indicative of the diametric opposition of Stravinsky’s art to Wagnerian theories of Gesamtkunstwerk, which the Russian considered to have ‘inflicted a terrible blow upon music itself’. Nonetheless, certain themes can be seen to have preoccupied both composers in opposing ways, an idea which tonight’s concert also set out to explore, but which does not, as the programme notes suggested, mean that the pieces on the programme can realistically be ‘unified’. Nor should we necessarily look or wish for unifying theories; for what it’s worth, the Rite clearly has a sacrificial theme in that a female dancer is singled out to dance herself to death for the collective good, whilst Parsifal, Siegfried and Brünnhilde all perform important multi-layered sacrificial functions in Wagner’s quasi-Christian pantheon. But, as Stravinsky himself so succinctly put it: ‘There are simply no regions for soul-searching in the Rite of Spring’.

Wagner and Stravinsky (at least, in this, early ‘Russian’, phase of his career) shared other characteristics too in their preoccupation with myth, exploration of folk memory and, on a musical level, a particular - if radically differing - concern with time as an intrinsic part of the compositional process. On a personal level, both were certainly adept at poetic licence and self-mythologising - and Stravinsky too, was hardly innocent of the anti-Semitic poison for which Wagner remains notorious. But there is a more ironically entertaining fact which ‘unites’ these composers, should we choose to pursue the point; for they both managed to upset the hugely influential critical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, who accused them of a  ‘fetishization’ of musical means and expression. Indeed, according to Adorno, ‘in so returning to the past, to the realm of the pre-ego, to the control of regression through ritual, Stravinsky goes Wagner one step better’; which is bitterly to mean: towards the debasement of art. Regardless of whether one agrees with Adorno here (and I for one do not), it remains hard not to see some truth in his better-known warnings against the commodification of art, when Wagner, for example, is so frequently dished up in concert gobbets designed to allure and tantalise as here in Cardiff tonight. Thankfully, on the other hand, a great benefit of today’s musical pluralism is that audiences like tonight’s do get the opportunity to decide directly for themselves whether or not they might agree.






Published in Wales Arts Review 2:12: http://www.walesartsreview.org/welsh-national-opera-orchestra-wagner-stravinsky/

BBC National Orchestra of Wales: Rachmaninoff / Nielsen

St David’s Hall, Cardiff, 12 April 2013

Sergei Rachmaninoff - Piano concerto No. 3

Carl Nielsen - Symphony No. 5

Conductor: Thomas Søndergård
Piano: Llŷr Williams



The piano concertos of Sergei Rachmaninoff - or, at least, the first three - have come to embody a flamboyant and distinctly Russian form of late-Romanticism. Each work pitches a lone, mesmerically brilliant virtuoso against the titanic forces of a full orchestra in a battle of epic emotional sweep and physical endurance, the two sides finally emerging united in an affirmation of life through adversity. For regular audiences, the battle takes on a quasi-ritual significance in which the pianist is ultimately embraced anew as culture hero following a super-human display of technical and artistic prowess against the odds. In the case of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (1909) - which saw a surge in popularity over the hitherto better-liked Concerto No. 2 - the ritual took on mythic proportions in an ironic twist following the 1996 movie Shine, which enacted a concert pianist’s battle against internal demons and mental illness through the piece itself; the questionable suggestion (expressing a surprisingly pervasive belief) being that the practice of ‘art’ is tantamount to courting madness. Thankfully, tonight’s more subtle performance by soloist Llŷr Williams and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales (conducted by Thomas Søndergård) bore no trace of the dubious cultural assumptions and downright sentimentality from which such nonsense arises.

In pairing the Rachmaninoff with Carl Nielsen’s Symphony No. 5 (1921-2), BBC NOW offered instead a robust and thought-provoking - not to mention exhilarating and emotionally-charged - insight into two wholly contrasting composers who each chose a highly individual path at a time of social and artistic upheaval. Whilst Rachmaninoff’s music has largely been snubbed by scholars for its supposed stylistic anachronism (and associations with that very sentimentality), Nielsen’s music has more or less been ignored by those outside his native Scandinavia (bar important work by Robert Simpson and Daniel Grimley amongst others) as a perceived idiosyncratic sideline to a main narrative of music-historical ‘progress’; a narrative which is at last now being challenged as more scholars question the notion of musical ‘progress’ and, in particular, what constituted modernism in the early twentieth century. It turns out that Nielsen is one of the greatest and most original symphonists, not just of the last century but - I would argue - of any century; a bold claim perhaps, but one to which I hold true in the light of Søndergård’s enthralling performance of this most challenging and elusive work.

Both pieces on the programme were performed with commitment, passion and, at times, hair-raising energy, and it was a joy to experience Søndergård’s emerging rapport with the orchestra. Interestingly, it was the tenderness of the Rachmaninoff rather than its grandiosity that stood out, as Williams played to his strengths as a pianist of intimate, poetic warmth rather than outright physical power. The outer movements in particular of this Concerto can often seem to rush from climax to climax on waves of pianistic glitter, but here, melodic lyricism led the way - not just in the solo part but throughout the orchestra, with some beautifully dovetailed phrasing from the woodwind, for example. Indeed, the interplay between Williams and the orchestra was superb and, facilitated by Søndergård’s responsive baton, was undoubtedly helped in places by the pianist’s renowned sensitivity as an accompanist. He and Søndergård gave us a reading that was full of playful touches as well as a cinematic colouring which did not neglect the many darker hues of this mercurial piece. Needless to say - as Williams is now long established as a culture hero in his own right for Welsh audiences - the packed auditorium was ecstatic and listened to his generous encore of Chopin’s Waltz in A minor with rapt attention.

If the Rachmaninoff was excellent, the Nielsen was outstanding. In his Symphony No. 5, Nielsen takes the idea of battle to an altogether more rigorous, grimly sardonic level and, although he was clear in stating that the piece has no direct programme, he nevertheless described it as ‘the division between dark and light, the battle between evil and good’ and further spoke of nationhood as a ‘spiritual syphilis’, showing how deep-seated his natural pessimism had become in the aftermath of the Great War. The symphony is incredibly difficult to play, with lengthy passages of repeated rhythms for the strings and exposed, astringent writing for the woodwind (hats off to Tim Lines for his whirlwind first clarinet) - as well, of course, as the famously oppressive snare drum which dominates the first movement; perfectly judged on this occasion by the unflappable Chris Stock. But the triumph was Søndergård’s overall, as he turned total engagement from the orchestra into music-making of the highest calibre in a performance which yielded claustrophobic compression and breathtaking expansiveness in equal, requisite measure.

The power of this music is underlined by a reviewer’s description of a performance of the 5th Symphony in Stockholm, 1924, which spoke of ‘genuine panic’ in parts of the audience; around a quarter of whom ‘dashed towards the exits with horror and rage painted across their faces ... [and so Nielsen’s] description of modern life with all its confusion, brutality and struggle, all the uncontrolled cries of pain and ignorance - and behind it all, the hard rhythm of the side drum as the only discipline - gained, as the audience fled, a touch of almost diabolical humour.’

That ‘diabolical humour’ - as well as sheer rage and passages of eerie stasis, notably at the end of the first movement - drove Søndergård’s performance in a way which the composer would surely have appreciated from his fellow Dane. Nielsen was a troubled figure and had an ambivalent relationship to European musical developments (in a 1925 essay ‘Words, Music and Programme Music’, for example, he tartly referred to Germany as a ‘breeding ground for metaphysicians’). But his music had more in common with the modernism gaining ground in Central Europe than might at first appear, setting aside the obvious difference that Nielsen never eschewed tonal harmony; for he too was looking forwards and backwards at the same time in seeking ways to tackle problems of continuity and rupture in musical form and language. In the Symphony No. 5, that searching found apotheosis in a unique exploration of contrast and opposition which, for all the confusion at early performances, was quickly appreciated by Scandinavian audiences as well as critics. Hopefully, tonight’s justified acclaim from BBC NOW’s Cardiff audience is a sign that more listeners in the UK are appreciating the full scope of Nielsen’s achievement.

Published by Wales Arts Review 2:11: http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc-national-orchestra-of-wales-rachmaninoff-nielsen/