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

Sunday 4 August 2013

BBC National Orchestra of Wales: Watkins / Mahler

St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 28 June 2013

Huw Watkins - Violin concerto
Gustav Mahler - Symphony No.5

Conductor: Thomas Søndergård
Violin: Alina Ibragimova




Thomas Søndergård has remarked on several occasions that he finds it absolutely necessary to perform contemporary music, saying for instance: ‘if I don’t do contemporary music, I feel it’s strange ... to go back to Beethoven’s 5th - or even Mahler’s 5th - because I need ... new colours and new ideas to go on with the standard repertoire.’ In tonight’s concert, he demonstrated just how beneficial such an ethos can be for new and established repertoire alike, by rounding off his first year as BBC National Orchestra of Wales’ Principal Conductor with terrific performances of Huw Watkins’ Violin Concerto (2010) and that very Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler (written in 1901-2).

Indeed, this was the first time that Søndergård has ever conducted Mahler 5, making this concert a particularly resounding success - for the Fifth is a symphony so potentially bewildering in its innovative formal design and complex orchestration (both subsequently oft-revised) that Mahler himself once despaired of its receiving a convincing performance under any other conductor than himself; after its poor reception in Berlin and Prague in 1905 under Artur Nikisch, he wrote that ‘a musical score is a book with seven seals. Even the conductors who can decipher it present it to the public soaked in their own interpretations. For that reason there must be a tradition, and no one can create it but I.’ Alas, albeit more celebrated in his lifetime as a conductor than as a composer, Mahler died in 1911 without committing his own interpretation to phonograph or gramophone for us to hear what he may have wished to pass down by way of performing tradition - and, moreover, having eschewed tempo markings in any of his scores beyond the usual broad indications. Hence, arguments continue to rage, not just about the Fifth, but about how each of his symphonies ‘should’ be interpreted.

Part of the controversy stems from Mahler’s ambiguous status as a backward-looking late-romantic and a forward-looking modernist as we will see. Such ambiguity continues to affect the reception of many composers besides Mahler well into the 21st Century in different ways - not least the still-youthful Watkins who, as he noted in an interview for Wales Arts Review, is often held to be too ‘modern’ (that is, too dissonant) by mainstream audiences on the one hand, but too ‘old-fashioned’ (that is, too redolent of post-war English music) by critics and fellow composers on the other. Notwithstanding judgements based on aesthetic taste and Weltanschauung, Watkins’ music clearly owes a debt to the Benjamin Britten he has loved since childhood. So it was fitting that his Violin Concerto was paired with Mahler for this second performance in Cardiff following its première at the Proms alongside Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5; for, as Arnold Whittall has noted, ‘a strong Mahlerian influence is evident in two of the [20th] century’s most appealing post-Romantics, Britten and Shostakovich’. Tonight, the direct line to Watkins seemed all the more apparent for Søndergård’s thrillingly insightful approach.

The soloist was the fearsomely capable Alina Ibragimova, for whom the Concerto was written. In her hands, the violin is at once an instrument of attacking virtuosity and molten lyricism, and Watkins has rewarded her with a substantial piece utilising both characters; equally intense and often switching from one to the other in a moment. A brilliant performance to match a brilliant part - not to mention a BBC NOW on superb form - was never really in doubt, but Ibragimova has matured and (if the Proms radio broadcast is anything to go by) played with even greater depth on this occasion, throwing phrases to and fro the tightly driven orchestra with acute musical sensitivity as well as dramatic bravura. Each of the three movements (subtly subverting a classically-based fast-slow-fast design) offered combinations of a kind of expressive fury with firmly balanced, more delicately ‘held’ textures. I have a slight compositional concern regarding the relationship of the first to the third movement, as the latter seems rather to echo a gesture already made in the former than to succeed in defying expectation for a second time, with another quietly subsiding ending. But the piece is beautifully written overall; Watkins’ ear is undoubtedly alive to instrumental possibility as well as harmonic colour, and the tripartite relationship between violin, harp and punctuating bass drum was particularly satisfying at various points throughout. I look forward to hearing his forthcoming Flute Concerto, to be premièred next February at London’s Barbican Centre - interestingly here, alongside a performance of Mahler 1.

Perhaps listening to Mahler may have encouraged Watkins’ impressive instinct for knowing what to leave out as much as knowing what to put in, so to speak, instrumentally speaking. Certainly, tonight’s glowing performance of the Fifth Symphony emphasised Mahler’s rich and subtle use of orchestral colour, which made such a profound impact on the younger composers he encouraged in the Vienna of his day; figures such as Schoenberg, Webern, Zemlinsky and Berg. But, for them as for the music philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, ‘more important than ... Mahler’s style are the more hidden [innovations] of his compositional method. All contemporary compositional technique lies ready in Mahler’s work under the thin cover of the late romantic language of expression.’ The grand reference here to ‘all contemporary technique’ might in fact be largely applicable to Austro-German music but, in that context, it certainly seems fair; for Mahler effectively expanded the structural boundaries of symphonic form to modernist breaking point through vast, long-range thinking, incorporating new kinds of episodic writing and variation techniques, as much as through ‘backward-looking’, romantically intensified expression. No composer since has expanded the symphony further - at least, not in terms of sheer scale and intensity of utterance.

Not only that, but Mahler incorporated all sorts of overtly ‘popular’ - and often deliberately garish - devices in his self-expressed bid to portray the ‘whole world’ in his music and to ‘make[s] objective an untrammelled subjectivity’ as Adorno put it; all sorts of ironic and parodistic sounds from hurdy-gurdies to cow bells, via gushing sentimentality, manic waltzes and terrifying marches find their brash way into his music alongside beautifully embedded folk tunes, literary references, the most exquisitely subtle harmonic thinking and passages of truly searing existential joy and angst.

In terms of the accepted ‘reading’ of the Fifth Symphony as a journey from ‘dark to light’, Søndergård and the BBC NOW did a superb job tonight - not least because the conductor seemed to succeed in laying out all such devices and underlying formal subtleties as they appeared, as it were; allowing them to bubble up in service of the score’s apparently sprawling forward momentum, rather than trying to shape them in too ‘conscious’ a way. Thus, the heavy Funeral March of the first movement seemed to dovetail into the clean, almost Beethovenian parallel world of the second movement Tempest with its echoing funeral march, leading naturally to a third movement Scherzo blessed with a lightly, ironic touch and so on. Part of this achievement was undoubtedly due to the excellence of the orchestra, who quite simply played their socks off - with particular praise owing to the exceptional Principal Trumpet Phillippe Schartz and obbligato Principal Horn Tim Thorpe.

But another crucial aspect was Søndergård’s wonderfully unfussy phrasing and, above all, his sense of clarity and pace - most notably in the fourth movement Adagietto, made famous by Luchino Visconti’s use of it to depict heart-rending loneliness, unrequited love and impending personal doom in his film Death in Venice. Unfortunately, the film (not to mention Mahler’s apocalyptic later symphonies) seems to have encouraged many conductors to treat the Adagietto like a dirge - but not here, thank God; rather, Søndergård’s quicker tempo and transparent string sound helped to uplift the movement to its more authentic and characteristically autobiographical purpose, as a love song without words from the ecstatic Mahler to his beloved Alma, whom he was shortly to marry - and thus the conductor made sense of the ensuing glorious optimism of the symphony’s climax in its fifth movement Rondo-Finale, in which many of the work’s monumental musical and emotional themes make a final re-appearance.

Altogether, this concert offered music-making of an extremely high calibre and proved a thought-provoking, as well as celebratory, way to end the BBC NOW season. As Mahler himself said of the Fifth Symphony, ‘a completely new style demanded a new technique’. Tonight, the confident programme and the expansive, generous way in which it was delivered seemed indicative of Søndergård’s ongoing ambition to develop and shape his own vision as a conductor, as well as the playing of this exciting orchestra with which he has already forged a deep artistic resonance. Personally, I can’t wait for the new season to begin this autumn.


Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.17: http://www.walesartsreview.org/bbc-national-orchestra-of-wales-watkins-mahler/






What Makes a ‘Great’ Singer? BBC Cardiff Singer of the World 2013

16-23 June, Dora Stoutzker Hall, royal Welsh College of Music and Drama / St David’s Hall, Cardiff



What does it mean to be a ‘great singer’? What are the elements that define greatness - and how do we decide if a singer possesses them? These are some of the most slippery and hotly contested questions in contemporary culture. Indeed, they are questions which go to the heart of culture itself; cutting across boundaries of musical style to show the vital importance that singing and music in the broadest sense - and the act of vocal expression itself - hold for us as human beings. Clearly, any answer is contingent upon a whole host of factors, many of which are entirely subjective and based on our different understandings of the type of music being sung; to be a ‘great singer’ of free-style jazz or blues, say, might mean something very different from being a ‘great singer’ of rock music or of German Lieder. And where might the dividing line be between the ‘great singer’ and the ‘great performing artist’, whose singing happens perfectly to encapsulate - or even to define - some essence of the musical genre in which they sing? Such questions can not only be subtle and emotive, but fraught with cultural politics - as seen, for example, in the divide between ‘popular’ and ‘art’ music that still persists for many mainstream devotees on either ‘side’ (with glitzy talent shows like the Voice cashing in on people’s desire for instant fame). But, if these questions are difficult to resolve, how much harder is it to determine what elevates a ‘great’ singer to the level of star quality; indeed, to be crowned a ‘singer of the world’? And is it a question worth asking?

If the exceptional quality and spirit of the 2013 BBC Cardiff Singer of the World competition is the touchstone of my response then yes, emphatically, it is a question worth asking, however difficult to pinpoint or contentious the answers might be. The competition may have become more overtly glamorous over the years as its televisual profile has increased, but it is based upon real musical substance - and, although the arias and some of the art songs are inevitably performed out of context, many of the competitors this year managed nevertheless to ‘stop time’ (as Roger Parker and Carolyn Abbate describe operatic arias as doing) with performances of real depth and insight. Indeed, this 30th anniversary year produced some stunning singers from a field of ‘greats’ - not least the glorious American mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton who deservedly won both the main Concert Prize and - more controversially - the Song Prize with a combination of grace, drama, wit and intelligence, all expounded by a thrillingly opulent voice and through a staggering technique. (Singing four different characters in four different languages in arias by Cilea, Humperdinck, Berlioz and Sibelius’s orchestral song Var det en dröm Op.37 No.4 felt somehow the least of her accomplishments).

But more than anything, Barton - and all her fellow competitors to varying degrees - seemed to embody something which has come increasingly to occupy the attention of opera scholars intrigued not just by what exactly makes great singers ‘great’, but by that which makes opera itself such a compelling art form despite its fundamental absurdities - and that is the notion of presence and what that means on a performing stage; the real, physical embodiment of something - be it a character or a narrative or an emotion - from where we are transported into abstract and often transcendent worlds. And this paradoxical mixture of physicality and abstraction is at least part of the reason why it is so difficult to put into words what makes a ‘great’ singer great - whatever the genre. But any great singer somehow shares the ability to achieve - through a certain sheer physical quality of the voice and body itself as a resonating, performing instrument - a way of producing sound which is capable of transporting the listener by transcending the corporeal body from which it is born, and through which we as listeners hear it. Michelle Duncan puts it eloquently in terms of the relationship of the singing voice to language when she writes: ‘as anyone who has ever heard opera knows, the singing voice has moments where it tears language apart, or tears itself apart from language.’

In terms both literal and metaphorical, ‘opera can make us forget’; by which the authors of that comment, Parker and Abbate, mean that great operatic singing can make us forget not just ourselves for a moment of time, but to forget that we are watching something unreal on a stage. Hence, we forget all sorts of absurdities in the plot and the unreality, say, of a Violetta dying of tuberculosis yet still able to sing in the most sublime way (as happens in Verdi’s La traviata). Indeed, the whole point of opera is that it actually relies upon such absurdities and inconsistencies in encouraging us to take flight as it were, into the world of the action on stage and away from the ‘real’ of the everyday; the very fact of drama that is sung is, of course, itself inherently ‘unreal’. But, paradoxically, in order to facilitate such flight, a great opera singer needs to have that sheer, heightened presence in a literal vocal and physical sense, as well as being entirely convincing on emotional and musical levels.

Far from being about some supposed ‘beauty’ of tone, then, great operatic singing is about something even more rare and elusive. As David Pountney put it, to possess an inherently ‘beautiful’ singing voice can even ‘get in the way’; after all, how many opera characters are simply - or at all - ‘beautiful’ and no more than that? It is far more important that a singer should have the ability to embody the fullest range of human emotion, from murderous rage to passionate desire via wistfulness and comic insolence. Indeed, what does ‘beauty’ really mean in an operatic context? I would argue that, in operatic singing at least, true beauty has little to do with some perceived perfection of vocal utterance, but rather with that indescribable combination of the physical with the metaphysical. And, in terms of physical beauty - what the singer looks like - whilst it is increasingly true that productions now aim for more ‘authentically real’ casting than hitherto, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa is by no means alone in worrying that young - usually female - opera singers risk endangering their very instrument by starving their body in the pursuit of concepts of beauty that ultimately make no sense on the operatic stage - if anywhere.

Although great operatic singing may not be about technical ‘perfection’ per se, it does nevertheless presuppose an entirely sure and practiced technique; something without which the voice cannot function and certainly cannot grow and develop over time. Coming back to the competition, obviously, it offered an opportunity to compare and evaluate the participating singers on a technical as well as a musical level, which gave the audience some great insights into the physical demands of art song and operatic singing, and hence an intriguing peek under the bonnet as it were and into the engine of opera itself. Cardiff Singer is one of the most prestigious competitions world-wide precisely because of the BBC’s excellent coverage across the media platforms - although it must be said that the commentary on the BBC2 Wales highlights programme skittered into the inane at times. And must we shove microphones up people’s noses to ask them idiotic questions about how they’re feeling when they’ve just walked off stage? Of all the ways to ‘bring us back down to earth’ as it were after a performance, this is surely one of the most crass. But then, alas, this is ‘classical music’; a species of culture which seems to strike such fear into the hearts of broadcasters that they feel they must somehow bend over backwards to make it and its practitioners ‘approachable’ for viewers.

Thankfully, the sheer amount of coverage more than made up for the occasional gushing moments,  and much of the commentary was fascinating and superbly done - Mary King in particular stands out as an articulate and passionate ambassador of great singing, together with Iain Burnside on BBC Radio 3, whose insights regarding song repertoire were a great asset. Cardiff Singer also happens to be justifiably famous for the informed passion of its live audience, as well as its genuine, personal warmth - not to mention the outstanding skill and generous encouragement of the two official piano accompanists, Llŷr Williams and Simon Lepper, with the resident orchestras, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and Welsh National Opera Orchestra (conducted by Jun Märkl and Graeme Jenkins). This year, both orchestras acquitted themselves with aplomb, but Märkl excelled in his rapport with the singers, leaving one wondering whether some singers who found themselves working with the nonetheless solidly able Jenkins may have felt they drew a somewhat shorter straw.

But equal playing fields often prove as chimeric as they are laudable to aim for. At least, however artificial the environment, competitions can be an opportunity for singers from nations with less strong or younger opera traditions to showcase their abilities internationally (this year saw the first competitor ever from Egypt, the soprano Gala el Hadidi, join entrants from sixteen other countries). It may be hard to expect singers from cultures as far removed from Western operatic traditions as Egypt, China and South Africa to compete on equal terms with Italians or Russians. But no German or French singer made it through the audition process to appear in Cardiff on this occasion - and, in any case, to compare sopranos with bass-baritones (as will inevitably happen on an operatic stage shared by sopranos and bass-baritones), is already a case of comparing ‘apples and pears’ - not to mention ‘varying degrees of ripeness’ depending on the age and experience of the singer concerned as Donald Macleod put it.

And Cardiff Singer is unique in offering participants the chance also to compete for a Song Prize based on art song and Lieder repertoire - a contest which turned out to be controversial this year as some felt the marvelous English tenor Ben Johnson should have won the prize with his beautifully considered recital. For, of all the Song Prize finalists, it was he alone who constructed a programme around a poetic theme; conjuring an interior world of exquisite fineness and depth with settings of sonnets by Shakespeare and Petrarch (by Britten, Schubert, Parry and Liszt). Alas for Johnson, his voice, presence and the recital he performed may have been undoubtedly great, but he was competing with a frankly astounding figure in Barton, who not only also managed to draw the audience into the more intimate world of art song (proving an extraordinary interpreter of Brahms and Sibelius), but who did so without compromising the range of expression in a voice that is enormous in scale. So it was wonderful to see Johnson win the richly deserved Dame Joan Sutherland Audience Prize. But the fact is, whether one ‘likes’ competitions or not, opera itself is a hugely competitive world for singers - and mainstream opera is an increasingly global phenomenon, with singers who take differing approaches to a vast song repertoire.

In many respects, the popularity of Cardiff Singer is due to its unique atmosphere, which makes it a celebration of the art of world-class operatic singing as well as an intense and high-stakes competition; as each of the twenty young singers (selected from a field of over 400) took care to point out, every competitor - and certainly every finalist - stands to benefit massively as a professional from the coverage that the competition affords, as well as the experience of competing against other superb singers. It is not just the main Concert Prize winners whose careers can be propelled into stellar realms as Bryn Terfel can famously testify, having been pipped to the post of the main prize in 1989 by a certain Dmitri Hvorostovsky (after having won the Song Prize). Post-competition, the making of a career is as much about finding the appropriate role for the voice at a particular stage of its development; not taking on too much too soon and risking damaging the voice in the long term. Again, as Terfel can testify, a bass-baritone capable of taking on Wagnerian roles, for example, takes many many years to develop and mature.

Ultimately, great singing in opera is so sought after because it is only through the performance of the voice that the ‘truth’ of opera is made apparent to us. Only then can the fundamental dualism which divides the subject and the object - meaning the audience and the performer but also the physical body and the transcendent voice - be shattered such that we can enter those fantastical realms that paradoxically speak so profoundly to us of the realities of human emotion. Choosing one voice as the greatest amongst great voices is bound to come down to subjective matters in the end - and must, in a top-level competition like Cardiff Singer, be based on achievement on the day rather than perceived potential. But, whatever one’s perspective, and regardless of whether one agrees with the judges’ various decisions, it is clear that the voices of all these exceptional young singers have the potential to continue resonating on stage and off for very many years to come.


For further investigation of the operatic voice and how we hear it try the following:
A History of Opera: the Last Four Hundred Years - Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker (Allen Lane, 2012)In Search of Opera - Carolyn Abbate (Princeton University Press, 2001)Metaphysical Song: an Essay on Opera - Gary Tomlinson (Princeton University Press, 1999)

For those with access to JSTOR:
Music - Drastic or Gnostic? - Carolyn Abbate (Critical Inquiry 30 No.3, Spring 2004) The Operatic Scandal of the Singing Body: Voice, Presence, Performativity - Michelle Duncan (Cambridge Opera Journal, Vol.16 No.3, Nov. 2004)

Posted by Wales Arts Review 2.16: http://www.walesartsreview.org/what-makes-a-great-singer-bbc-cardiff-singer-of-the-world-2013/