Jonny spielt auf – German National Theatre, Weimar – 5 July 2014

Krister St Hill (Jonny) and Steffi Lehmann (Yvonne)

Photo: Stephan Walzl

Max, a composer – Alexander Günther
Anita, a singer – Larissa Krokhina
Jonny, a jazzband violinist – Krister St Hill
Daniello, a violin virtuoso – Bjørn Waag
Yvonne, a chambermaid – Steffi Lehmann
Manager – Daeyoung Kim
Hotel director – Artjom Korotkov
Station supervisor – Detlef Koball
First Policeman – Klaus Wegener
Second Policeman – Yong Jae Moon
Third Policeman – Oliver Luhn

DNT Opera Chorus

Weimar Staatskapelle

Conductor – Martin Hoff
Director – Frank Hilbrich
Set design – Volker Thiele
Costumes – Gabriele Rupprecht
Dramaturge – Kathrin Kondaurow

Larissa Krokhina (Anita) and Alexander Gunther (Max)

Photo: Stephan Walzl

It’s difficult to imagine the same happening today: when Ernst Krenek’s opera Jonny spielt auf (Jonny Strikes Up) premiered in Leipzig in 1927 it was such an instant hit with audiences (less so with the critics) that some 30 other theatres had taken it up and staged it within its first year. Krenek’s publisher, Universal Edition, produced a map showing where it had been put on in that one year and it covers virtually every major and minor opera house in Germany bar Munich, as well as places further afield from Antwerp to Budapest, Basel to Leningrad. Its fall from grace was almost as swift – its subject-matter made it the target of Nazi demonstrations from its early days and later Jonny literally became the poster-boy for the ‘Degenerate Music’ (Entartete Musik) exhibition held in Düsseldorf in 1938.

The reasons for both its fame and its rejection seem tame to us today. In short, it is in effect a cross between opera and operetta in which the tussle between European art music and American jazz being played out by composers across the continent in the 1920s is made manifest. Jonny, a black leader of a jazzband, steals an Amati violin from the classical virtuoso Daniello because he feels the old music is dead and his is the future and more worthy of the instrument, in doing so encouraging everyone to head for the New World as the music of America is set conquer the Old. The catchy jazz numbers and subversiveness and raciness of the action were lapped up by early audiences and were among the very reasons that the work fell foul of Nazi doctrine – Jonny spielt auf was almost designed to provoke its worst prejudices (although Krenek wasn’t Jewish, it didn’t stop Viennese protesters complaining of a ‘Jewish–Negro soiling of our opera house’).

As a key representative of 1920s Zeitoper (opera of our time, or more specifically opera with a contemporary milieu), it is also a signature cultural artefact of the Weimar Republic. The chance of seeing it in the very theatre (admittedly rebuilt post-war) where that republic was declared in 1919 was too good an opportunity to miss. Weimar is named on that Universal map, so this was presumably its first return to the theatre since the late 1920s.

Jonny sets its challenges for the director and designer, calling for a singing glacier, a Keystone Cops-style car chase and a character falling to his death under a moving train. Frank Hilbrich and Volker Thiele avoided all three: the glacier was presented as a giant picture in a gallery, and the hard-to-portray action sequences took place off stage. The idea of the gallery, overseen by a trio of decrepit curators (who also undertook the roles of arthritic scene-shifters), actually proved an apt analogy for the ‘museum culture’ that Jonny wants to sweep away, but the added scene at the very beginning, before the music had even started, in which the entire cast paraded past the glacier image was interminable overkill.

The glacier is a paradoxical symbol – the one place where composer Max feels secure while the world around him seems to be slipping from his grasp. Here by chance he meets Anita, who has sung in one of his operas, wins his heart and persuades him to follow her and her career to America. For all the slapstick and all that jazz, it is their relationship that leads the plot, even if ultimately it is Jonny whose guile wins the day. Also in the mix are the chambermaid Yvonne and the lascivious and conniving violinist Daniello who gets his comeuppance under the train. Hilbrich staged all this with cinematic fluidity, helped by Thiele’s mobile set that easily transformed from gallery to hotel to station. His characterisation was sharp, helped by a cast that played together as a true ensemble, from doddery silent museum staff to leading roles.

Most of these were cast from Weimar’s in-house team of singers. Alexander Günther, who has been with the company for 22 years and has recently moved from baritone to tenor roles (most singers tend to move the other way), found the lyricism in the role of the ever-troubled Max. He was strongly partnered by Russian soprano Larissa Krokhina as Anita, who coped well with the part’s demanding coloratura and had admirable presence on stage. Steffi Lehmann was winningly lithe of voice as Yvonne – the perfect soubrette – and Norwegian baritone Bjørn Waag managed to garner some sympathy as a warm-voiced Daniello.

But inevitably the show was stolen by Jonny in the person of guest baritone, the Swedish–Trinidadian Krister St Hill, veteran of the Decca recording of the work from over twenty years ago, but still in full command of the role in voice and character. It’s a part that demands wit, cunning, charm and charisma, and he possessed them all, coupled with a sleek tonal quality and winning way with the German/cod-American text.

Krenek’s score is an unusual cross between 1920s New Objectivity, even atonality, and the popular song and dance idioms that so entranced those early audiences. It’s a difficult mixture to hold together, but Weimar’s General Music Director Martin Hoff gave the score admirable shape and integrity and if the Weimar Staatskapelle wasn’t quite up to the level of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on the Decca recording it was nonetheless idiomatic and enthusiastic in its execution of the music.

Die Soldaten - Komische Oper, Berlin - 1 July 2014

Photos: Monika Rittershaus

Wesener, a fancy-goods dealer in Lille – Jens Larsen

Marie, his daughter– Susanne Elmark

Charlotte, his daughter – Karolina Gumos

Wesener’s Elderly Mother – Xenia Vyaznikova

Stolzius, draper in Armentières – Tom Erik Lie

Stolzius’s Mother – Christiane Oertel

Obrist, Count of Spannheim – Reinhard Mayr

Desportes, a nobleman – Martin Koch

Pirzel, a captain – Hans Schöpflin

Eisenhardt, a chaplain – Joachim Goltz

Haudy – Tomohiro Takada

Mary – Günter Papendell

1st Young Officer – Edwin Vega

2nd Young Officer – Alexander Kravets

3rd Young Officer – Máté Gál

Countess de la Roche – Noëmi Nadelmann

The Young Count, her son – Adrian Strooper

Andalusian/Madame Roux – Beate Vollack

Three Captains – Bogdan Taloş, Benjamin Mathis, Konrad Hofmann

Drunken Officer – Elias Reichert

Countess’s Servant – Wolfram Schneider-Lastin

Young Ensign – Benjamin Mathis

Soldiers Chorus – Jonas Olejniczak, Simon Ortmeyer, Guillaume Vairet, Christopher Lane, Robert Elibay-Hartog, Thomas Hartkopf, Christian Packbier, Simon Mehlich, Christoph Wiatre, Fabian Musick, Jonas Flemmerer, Emil Roijer, Phillippe Hillebrand, Nenad Ivkovic, Fabian Jud, Olaf Taube, Elias Reichert, Marcus Elsäßer

Conductor – Gabriel Feltz

Director – Calixto Bieito

Stage design – Rebecca Ringst

Costumes – Ingo Krügler

Dramaturgy – Beate Breidenbach, Pavel B. Jiracek

Lighting – Franck Evin

Video – Sarah Derendinger

Choreography – Beate Vollack

Given his reputation for controversy, Calixto Bieito could be said to have met his match with Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten. This giant of late-20th-century opera, composed in the early 1960s, was originally deemed too ambitious to stage, with its vast forces and simultaneous running of scenes. Yet it is now becoming almost a repertoire piece, with Bieito’s the third major production in as many years in central Europe, following stagings in Salzburg and Munich. This particular version is a co-production with Zürich Opera, where it had opened at the start of the season. Its Berlin run at the Komische Oper almost brought the drama into one’s lap. The pit was covered over to provide a performance space barely a metre from the front row and the huge orchestra took over the stage behind, ranged around Rebecca Ringst’s bright yellow scaffolding platforms. This lent a rare interaction between singers and instrumentalists, with sections of percussion on occasion being trundled forward on to the stage and characters entering beneath the orchestra or hovering in industrial-scale cradles above the musicians.

One of the masterstrokes of Zimmermann’s dramatic conception is the telling of a tragically human story in the context of a force – militarism – that seems to be defined by the composer’s dissonant, modernist style. But what both Bieito and the conductor Gabriel Feltz brought across in this staging was how much intimacy and delicacy there is to be found in both the story and music. There was no shortage of violence or nakedly displayed brutality, yet at the same time, characters emerged as human beings caught up in a tragedy, rather than mere cyphers. It helped that Bieito’s interpretation of the composer’s ‘yesterday, today and tomorrow’ for his milieu brought the action closer to our time than, say, Harry Kupfer’s bewigged characters in his Stuttgart staging (as seen on an Arthaus DVD release), where caricature seemed more of a danger. Here, from costumes and wigs, we seemed to be in the 1960s, the time of the work’s composition, rather than the period of Jakob Lenz’s Napoleonic-era original. The soldiers, therefore, were ‘modern’ enough to convey a brutality that some in this Berlin audience could conceivably have experienced first hand.

Video was a key component of the conception, with live handheld cameras often giving a voyeuristic intimacy to some of the exchanges, especially for action that took place away from the covered pit. And to discomfit us even more, a looped film of maggots devouring a dead rat filled the theatre for the duration of the interval.

It all provided a context in which Bieito seemed to be exploring parent–child relationships as much as the bigger picture. There was a suggestion that Marie’s father Wesener is more interested in his business activities than caring for his two daughters, or indeed his own mother, who is left to wander round on her own with a hospital drip. The embarrassingly wet Stolzius is patently over-mothered in the early scenes until he finally breaks free to take his revenge on his rival in love, Desportes. And the Countess de la Roche, meanwhile, has a blatantly erotic fixation on her son, fondling and kissing him in their big scene together in Act III – she certainly seems portrayed more as madame than protector when later taking care of Marie’s welfare.

Like Buchner/Berg’s Marie in Wozzeck, Lenz/Zimmermann’s Marie in this work is portrayed not as a helpless victim of circumstances but as a strong woman, who just happens to come up against the unscrupulous, dehumanised military world. Her succession of lovers – apart from the ever-faithful Stolzius – undoubtedly take advantage, but she’s the one in control until her destitution changes the balance of power, with the pessimistic suggestion that society – and particularly the military side of it – has irrevocably failed.

Danish coloratura soprano Susanne Elmark fully inhabited the role of Marie, for all the indignity of having to spend large swathes of the opera on stage in nothing but her underwear. Hers was a performance as brave dramatically as it was finely tuned vocally – no singer ever sounds completely comfortable with Zimmermann’s leaping vocal writing but she and others in the cast managed to make it appear as natural as more conventional melodic lines. There were no weak links among the supporting cast, though Tom Erik Lie’s sympathetically portrayed Stolzius and Noëmi Nadelmann’s man-eating Countess deserve special mention, as do the agile tenor of Martin Koch as Desportes and the seductive tones of Günter Papendell as Major Mary.

This, though, was a true company achievement, from solo roles and chorus of soldiers to the playing of the Komische Oper orchestra – overwhelmingly brutal and filigree by turns, all under Feltz’s masterly control.

Masterpieces of Music

Thoughts on the creation of my new eBook series, launched this month.

As a writer of concert programme and CD booklet notes of many years’ standing, I’ve often felt hampered by the limitations of the written word when trying to describe music’s inner workings. It can be a challenge conveying how one chord sounds different from its neighbour, how one motif is condensed or stretched into another, or how a composer structures an entire movement. A certain language has built up to attempt to express these often inexpressible things, but what has been needed is a way to make it work for people of differing musical knowledge. Now the answer has arrived with modern technology and its ability to bring together several means of communication – the word, the visual image and sound – in the concept of the eBook. There’s no longer any need to be restricted to just words and pictures, or even to a linear approach to covering a subject. And with ‘bits’ rather than pages to play with, there’s the luxury of having the space to explore a subject in far more detail than offered by traditional media – in other words, it is easy to take the ‘everything-you-wanted-to-know’ approach and tackle the piece from a number of different angles. A further advantage of the medium is that in its inherent modular make-up it never gives the impression to the reader of being a weighty tome – an eBook can either be read through from ‘cover to cover’ or dipped into with ease, using internal links to take a more serendipitous approach.

It has therefore been a liberating experience working on my new eBook series, Masterpieces of Music. Pop-up side features mean I can legitimately go off on tangents – to explore side issues relating to the work, or expanding on areas in a detail that would otherwise slow down the main argument of the text. For instance, in the launch title on Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, I have been able to dwell on the composer’s love-hate relationship with the figure of Napoleon, or the links between the symphony’s heroism and the character of Prometheus, while not distracting the reader who simply wants to read the chronology of the work’s creation.

But more than just telling the story behind the writing of the work, I have been able to explore the music’s very essence in a descriptive analysis in terms – I hope – that will be appreciated as much by the inveterate concert-goer or music student as by those just starting out in their appreciation of great music from a non-musical background. There’s always a danger that the beginner might be discouraged from reading further if the text is peppered with copious music examples, but in these digital books, as well as the examples using a simplified notation where possible, each is paired with an audio file that plays the notes with the sound of a keyboard. So individual motifs are picked out, harmonic progressions displayed and whole sections of a movement – in the case of the Beethoven, the Allegro con brio’s miraculous development section – cut into pieces and put back together again in both visual and aural ways. Similarly, all musical terms in the text are linked to their definitions via pop-ups, with layman’s language used to enable greater appreciation of music’s many, and often convoluted, concepts.

With such a wealth of great music available, it hasn’t been easy choosing the pieces to focus on for this series, at least for the first few. But the ‘Eroica’ was an obvious starting point, given its epoch-making status and general familiarity. Then it was a case of taking key works to represent different musical periods and genres, with the result being an initial group of five works: the ‘Eroica’, Bach’s Mass in B minor, Brahms’s First Piano Concerto, Schumann’s Dichterliebe and Debussy’s La mer.

My role as a music-writer and critic has always been to enthuse about great art and performance. I hope some of that advocacy comes across in the texts of these short books. And the writing has been a rewarding task in itself, delving deeply into the history of the period of the work to set the broad background and creating timelines that reveal what else was going on in the cultural world at the same time, as well as making a detailed study of how the composer put the given piece together as music. Being able to work on the text concurrently with creating music examples and audio clips has also made the process of putting together the ‘walk-through’ (a less forbidding term than ‘analysis’) more seamless than I might have expected. The icing on the cake has been an arrangement with Harmonia Mundi, one of the world’s leading independent record labels, to take excerpts from its acclaimed recordings as a supplement to the keyboard-only clips in the walk-throughs.

The first eBook, Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, is now available, with the Bach in production and the Brahms under way. Full details at http://www.eruditions.co.uk/publications/masterpieces-of-music.html

Die Frau ohne Schatten - Staatstheater Kassel - 28 June 2014

Emperor – Ray M. Wade Jr
Empress – Vida Mikneviciute
Nurse – Ulrike Schneider
Spirit Messenger – Marc-Olivier Oetterli
Guardian of the Threshold of the Temple – Anna Nesyba
Voice of a Youth – Johannes An
Apparition of a Youth – Ingo Schiller
Falcon – Lin Lin Fan
Voice from Above – Maren Engelhardt
Barak, the dyer – Espen Fegran
Dyer’s Wife – Stephanie Friede
One-eyed Brother – Marian Pop
One-armed Brother – Krzysztof Borysiewicz
Hunchbacked Brother – Bassem Alkhouri
1st Maid – Anna Nesyba
2nd Maid – Maren Engelhardt
3rd Maid – Elisabeth Rogers
Children’s Voices – CANTAMUS
Voices of Nightwatchmen – Hansung Yoo, Tomasz Wija, Marc-Olivier Oetterli, Hee Saup Yoon
Children – CANTAMUS

Conductor – Patrik Ringborg
Director – Michael Schulz
Scenery – Dirk Becker
Costumes – Renée Listerdal
Dramaturge – Jürgen Otten
Lighting – Albert Geisel
Chorus Director – Marco Zeiser Celesti / Maria Radzikhovskiy

The coup de theatre in Michael Schulz's staging of Strauss's Die Frau ohne Schatten comes in the very final image. The two reconciled couples, Emperor and Empress, Barak and his wife of no name, are surrounded by all the children they are presumably about to have. The children have highly admonishing faces, which takes all the joy out of the adults' faces. A couple of officers stand above, waiting for their new generation of cannon fodder. As a reposte to the idea that Strauss and particularly Hofmannsthal saw their concocted fairytale as a call to the German people to go forth and multiply in the wake of the carnage of the First World War, this was a damningly pessimistic ending, especially ironic given the exultation of the accompanying music. For the first time, all that tosh about only motherhood making a woman complete had a purpose if one takes its message here as a warning: should we bring children into this world if their only fate is to repeat the tragedy of their parents' generation? Setting the whole opera at the time of its composition, during the 1914-18 war, thus gave added resonance; seeing it a hundred years to the day since the fateful assassination in Sarajevo more so.

The plot comes with its Kaiser already there, an emperor more interested in going hunting than concerned with those around him. This Kaiser, though, does not suffer petrification but instead at the climax of Act III seems to have shot himself when finally faced with the reality of the war he blithely had had others wage on his behalf: widows and orphans bury him behind the uniforms of their slaughtered husbands and fathers. Earlier, it had been this battle dress that the dyer Barak had been engaged in making; his three disfigured brothers are war invalids, and the family home becomes a makeshift hospital for the gas-blinded soldiers who in the first orchestral interlude had been shown confidently marching off to war. The wounded falcon is a flying ace and the youth is an all-pervasive dilettante falling for every woman he meets and (convincingly) miming the big cello and violin solos like a symbol of the old world destroyed by war.

Theatre Kassel's presentation of this fascinating rethinking was exemplary in both theatrical and musical terms. Despite a couple of rival productions being staged concurrently in Germany, this one was exceptionally well cast. Ulrike Schneider, the house's resident dramatic mezzo, made a formidable Nurse, with a voice that reminded me of the vehemence (in a good way) of Felicity Palmer. It would be hard to imagine the two rivals for the ownership of the shadow, the Empress and Dyer's Wife, more grippingly sung than from Vida Mikneviciute and Stephanie Friede and for once in Ray M. Wade Jr we were blessed with an Emperor who never showed a single sign of strain with Strauss's Heldentenor demands. The orchestral playing was accomplished under Patrick Ringborg's direction but never quite raised the roof in purely emotional terms.

King Roger - Wuppertal Opera - 26 June 2014

Roger II, King of Sicily – Kay Stiefermann 

Roxane, his wife – Banu Böke 

Edrisi, an Arabian scholar – Christian Sturm 

Shepherd – Rafal Bartminski 

Archbishop – Martin Js. Ohu 

Deaconess – Joslyn Rechter 

Opera Chorus, Extra Chorus and Statisterie of Wuppertaler Bühnen 

Wuppertal Symphony Orchestra


Conductor– Florian Frannek

Director – Jakob Peters-Messer

Set design – Markus Meyer

Costumes – Sven Bindseil

Chorus master – Jens Bingert

Dramaturge – Johannes BBlum

Szymanowski's plot for his operatic masterpiece is an unusual one in that each of its three acts stages an encounter between the shepherd and the king in a different setting without much in the way of conventional action. Jacob Peters-Messer has taken the ingenious route of turning these confrontations into a series of analytic sessions, acting out dreams of Roger's obsession with the Dionysian figure, in which Edrisi, as the king's psychoanalysist, finally frees his mind from its troubles. The problem with this approach, though, is that it is also suggesting the rather distasteful idea that any homosexual feelings Roger has for the shepherd have been expunged by the same method. Surely the idea of the composer's resolution is that he has learnt to reconcile conflicting obsessions rather than destroy them (Peters-Messer even has Roger strangle the shepherd as an act of release).

Markus Meyer's single set (the three acts are performed without interval) is shaped like the inside of a kaleidoscope, with the images projected onto its rear 'lense' reflecting along its length towards the front of the stage. It cleverly suggests the dreamlike setting (shades of Hitchcock's Vertigo) and at the same time provides effective, all-encompassing scenic imagery.

 

With the singers tightly directed, almost choreographed at times, the interactions were vividly drawn. Kay Stiefermann's Roger was gripping in its focus, no more so than in the final bars, when standing in front of the curtain his words seemed almost personally addressed. His baritone was varied in tonal colour and he brought a Lieder-like detail to the Polish text. Banu Bike was equally seductive a performer, singing Roxane's famous aria with refulgent tone. I warmed less to the sometimes effortful tenor of Rafal Bartminski - the one Pole in the cast - as the shepherd, despite an appropriately lascivious stage presence, and he was even out sung by the lesser tenor role of Edrisi - the cool and collected Christian Sturm.

The chorus, including some rather fidgety children in Act I, sang with imposing weight and the orchestra under Florian Frannek played its heart out in those most miraculous of operatic scores.
 

Moses und Aron – Welsh National Opera

Photo: Bill Cooper

Hippodrome, Birmingham, 18 June 2014

Moses – John Tomlinson
Aron – Rainer Trost
A Young Maiden/First Naked Virgin – Elizabeth Atherton
A Youth – Alexander Sprague
Another Man/Ephraimite – Daniel Grice
A Priest – Richard Wiegold

First Elder – Julian Boyce

Second Elder – Laurence Cole

Third Elder – Alastair Moore
Sick Woman/Fourth Naked Virgin – Rebecca Afonwy-Jones

Naked Youth – Edmond Choo

Second Naked Virgin – Fiona Harrison

Third Naked Virgin – Louise Ratcliffe

Chorus, Extra Chorus & Orchestra of Welsh National Opera

Conductor – Lothar Koenigs
Directors – Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito
Based on an original design by Anna Viebrock

Some commentators may down-play the autobiographical connections, but it is easy to see Schoenberg’s choice of subject for the opera that marked his return to the Judaism of his roots as an allegory of the difficulties he found in conveying his new twelve-note language to his audience. Moses, experiencing the revelation of God, becomes effectively tongue-tied as he tries to impart his message to the exiled Jewish people and has to rely on the eloquence of his wayward brother Aron to do the job for him. The opera – of which Schoenberg only managed to complete two of its three acts, despite him living for a further two decades after abandoning it – is a model of serialism. And unlike Berg’s Lulu, written at almost exactly the same time in the early 1930s (and similarly left as a torso, though for more tragic reasons), there’s no leavening of the music’s hard-core twelve-note writing with allusions to tonality or to jazz bands. Indeed, Schoenberg’s language here is uncompromising in the extreme and puts enormous demands on all involved in the opera’s performance.

Jossi Wieler and Sergio Morabito’s production was originally created a decade or so ago for Stuttgart Opera (Wieler has since become the house’s Intendant), and strips the opera of anything illustrative. For a work exploring the struggle between idea and image – Aron’s conjuring of physical manifestations to lure the people to the new god – it proved both perverse and strangely appropriate. The directors set the two acts in a conference chamber in the present – where exactly is only hinted at, though there was perhaps the suggestion of an oppressed people meeting to assert its identity and plan its way forward. They seem to impose the hindsight of seeing the opera’s plot as an unforeseen allusion to the way that survivors of the Holocaust found their new ‘promised land’ in postwar Israel. (There was a moment when what looked like a German flag was set on fire while a blue-and-white-striped one with calf image was brandished in triumph.)

There were no miracles at the end of Act I (where Aron attempts to convince the people of God’s powers) and no Golden Calf in Act II: Aron here shows the people a film, brilliantly directed as the chorus sits in rows facing us, and all we see is their various reactions to what we can’t see, but what is obviously a disturbing run of violent and pornographic imagery that inspires its audience to the opera’s celebrated orgy (here a fairly tasteful melée of couplings in the ‘theatre’ seating). In a neat reversal of the work’s theme, therefore, we are made to conjure up our own images to match the ideas we already 'know'.

Rainer Trost (Aron) and John Tomlinson (Moses)

Photo: Bill Cooper

 

 

 

One of Schoenberg’s inspirational moves was to make the role of Moses a speaker, using his trademark Sprechstimme style of delivery to emphasise the character’s communicative difficulties (the composer also uses it for the choral voice of God, thus setting them both apart from the rest of the cast). John Tomlinson was born for this role – not least, if one is allowed to make physical remarks these days, in appearance, with his ‘Biblical’ mane of white hair. He tended to sing rather than strictly speak much of his role, but with a certain roughness not uncharacteristic of a singer now in late 60s and here giving appropriate edge to his delivery. Needless to say, Tomlinson’s identification with his character was unremitting and his stage presence as compelling as ever.

Schoenberg deliberately contrasts Moses’s vocal faltering with a lyrical tenor role for his brother, Aron. German tenor Rainer Trost was suitably persuasive in the part, never allowing Schoenberg’s angular melodic lines to harden into rhetoric and portraying the character with a winning combination of guile and rebelliousness.

While one can’t easily dismiss the contribution of the singers of all the smaller roles, the third lead character in Schoenberg’s opera is really the people, and the expanded WNO Chorus excelled itself in singing of confidence, accuracy and ensemble that bore witness to its 18 months of preparation for these performances. It is hard to imagine a more ideal realisation of this phenomenally complex choral writing, and if any other opera company has plans to stage this work in the near future it would be well-advised to book WNO’s chorus over its own.

The same might be said of WNO’s orchestra (and here I must declare an ‘interest’, given that my brother is a member), which played with such beauty and clarity of tone that the alleged difficulty of Schoenberg’s musical language was dispelled from the very first notes. Lothar Koenig’s eloquently delineated reading, with chords and ensemble balanced to perfection in Birmingham Hippodrome's dry acoustic, went a long way to argue for wider acceptance of Schoenberg’s masterpiece as a repertoire work rather than a mere footnote, let alone dead-end, in 20th-century opera.

Final performances on tour at the Royal Opera House, London, on 25 & 26 July.

Haitink - Schumann, Berg and Beethoven, 5 June 2014

Isabelle Faust/COE/Bernard Haitink

Barbican Hall

At the risk of being accused of hyperbole, I have to state from the start that this concert, in which the 85-year-old Bernard Haitink conducted the Chamber Orchestra of Europe, was one of the most musically enriching experiences I have had for years. In a period in which we’ve recently lost some eminent octogenarian conductors – Charles Mackerras, Colin Davis and Claudio Abbado – one feels a certain morbid need to catch the rest of these great figures while we can. And thankfully, Haitink looks in the rudest of health – happily standing for 40 minutes uninterrupted for a Beethoven symphony and only once eschewing the effort of the stage steps before returning for an ovation. And what an ovation. Before he had even conducted a note there was a warmth to the applause at his arrival on the Barbican Hall podium that recognised both the great contribution he has made to Britain’s musical life over the decades and the regard in which he is held by concert-goers.

The qualities of Haitink’s artistry were displayed from the very start: Schumann’s Manfred Overture had tonal richness, sense of purpose and the ideal balance between lyricism and rhythmic thrust. The weight of the string sound – perhaps the section was slightly more numerous in personnel than most ensembles that call themselves ‘chamber orchestras’ – was particularly impressive, with the sound seeming to well up from the fundamental of the four basses. And with the violins left and right of the conductor there was some nifty stereophonic interplay between the two sections in the calmer centre of the overture. Apart from some slightly tremulous trumpet-playing in the same portion of the work, the wind added refinement and character to the whole.

Alban Berg is not a composer normally associated with Haitink and as befits this great Mahlerian, the conductor took a very late-Romantic approach to the Violin Concerto, drawing out its engagement with the composer’s Viennese heritage more than its acerbic, forward-looking aspects. In this he was in complete agreement with his soloist, Isabelle Faust, who, while sometimes lacking the last ounce of tonal weight, touchingly caught all the music’s poignancy and guided its emotional trajectory with consummate command. There were some telling details to her playing, too, such as the way at the start where she mimicked the open-string fifths of her first entry with non-vibrato articulation of the motif’s repetitions at higher pitches, only introducing vibrato as the music sunk to its first cadence. However, where one might have expected a purer approach – her first exposition of the Bach chorale – her heavy vibrato contrasted a little too much with the following harmonisation on the organ-like clarinet choir. It was touching, nonetheless, and with Haitink’s masterly control of the orchestra the performance as a whole left a profound effect that lasted well beyond the much-deserved applause.

Haitink’s account of Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony in the second half was as close to perfection in this composer’s music as I’m ever likely to hear. In recent times, we have come to expect lean and fierce Beethoven from chamber orchestras whether or not the players are adopting period manners on their modern instruments. Haitink’s way was neither purely old school, nor over-burdened by ‘authentic’ mannerism and the most obvious aspect one took away from this performance was the music’s abundance of tonal detail and colour. As a past master of Debussy and Ravel, Haitink seemed to bring some of those composers’ colouristic subtlety to Beethoven’s orchestration, making us aware as never before how carefully the composer shaded his orchestral palette. It was a performance notable for its clarity and tonal beauties as much for its symphonic integrity, and much of this wouldn’t have been possible without the supreme artistry of the COE’s musicians at Haitink’s disposal, from the rich blend of the strings to the personable individuality of the wind soloists. A memorable evening indeed.