Wędrówki operowe/Operatic Journeys

It took me eight years to come full circle and return to the beginnings to my freelancing career. In 2014, instead of celebrating the 160th anniversary of my favourite composer at home by the loudspeakers, I decided to go to a performance of The Cunning Little Vixen in a production that originated in Prague and was brought to Brno for the Janáček Brno festival – the motto of which was “Happy Birthday Leoš!”. After more than two decades on the editorial board of Ruch Muzyczny I made my debut as a freelancer with a review of Ondřej Havelka’s production. Janáček’s oeuvre has always been at the top of my priorities as a reviewer. As it happened, however, I made it to the Brno biennial for the second time only now: partly because I was always at a loss as to what to choose from the festival’s rich offerings. I nearly gave up again, because this year the organisers exceeded themselves: the programme of the nineteen-day event included no fewer than thirty-six musical events, among them five opera performances, headed by the hosts’ production of From the House of the Dead combined with the Glagolitic Mass, directed by Jiří Heřman and conducted by Jakub Hrůša, the newly appointed successor to Antonio Pappano at London’s Royal Opera House; as well as non-operatic performances of the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, conducted by its boss Tomáš Hanus, and of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande with Tomáš Netopil. I decided to content myself with the last four days of the festival, not wanting to miss a rare opportunity to hear Erwin Schulhoff’s only opera Plameny in its entirety. For the next two years I will wonder how to see the most of the 2024 biennial, which will last over three weeks.

Janáček Brno is a fairly new venture, launched in 2008 with an overview of all stage works of its patron. With time music by other composers was added to Janáček’s oeuvre, making it possible to show his legacy in a broader context of the period. However, the main programme axis is still opera of the modernist era – which is what adds uniqueness to the event, appreciated by, for example, the jury of the International Opera Awards, who in 2018 presented Janáček Brno with an award for the best festival. I have written many times about how the Czechs love their national repertoire and know how to popularise it all over the world. When I was in Brno I saw once again that they also know how to appreciate the mastery of foreign performers, but – unlike my compatriots – do not feel that their own music requires persistent promotion by great stars from the West.

Věc Makropulos. Nicky Spence (Gregor) and Ángeles Blancas Gulín (Emilia Marty). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

This is hardly surprising given that Czech conductors – well-versed in the idiom of Central and Eastern European music – head some of the best orchestras in the world. I had an opportunity to admire Tomáš Hanus shortly before the outbreak of the pandemic: in a brilliant interpretation of Smetana’s The Bartered Bride at the Bayerische Staatsoper, and soon after that at the helm of WNO in a stylish and disciplined approach to Prokofiev’s War and Peace. On the day of my arrival in Brno, which happened to coincide with the Czech Struggle for Freedom and Democracy Day, Hanus led the Welsh orchestra in a programme consisting of Britten’s Four Sea Interludes, Dvořák’s Biblical Songs, Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde and Janáček’s Sinfonietta, which was highly appropriate in the circumstances. I had the impression that Hanus felt the least “at home” in Wagner’s music – played too smoothly, without an inner pulse and appropriate gradation of tension. On the other hand he was able to beautifully highlight the exuberant contrasts and shimmering nature of the textures in Britten’s Interludes and at the same time surprisingly emphatically stress the composer’s Mussorgsky inspirations (for example, in the swaying Allegro spiritoso). He provided a wonderful example of collaboration with the singer in Dvořák’s songs – Adam Plachetka’s velvety bass-baritone is often lost in the sumptuous acoustics of grand opera houses; in Hanus’ subtle interpretation the soloist impressed not only with the beauty of his voice and soft phrasing, but also with wisely delivered text, taken from the 16th-century Kralice Bible. But all this was nothing in comparison with the thrilling performance of the Sinfonietta, in which the fanfare – as Janáček would have it – was played by thirteen musicians of the Czech Armed Forces’ brass band. Unlike most symphony orchestra players, they did it without a single slip-up, which clearly suggests that Janáček knew what he was doing. The concert received a tumultuous and fully deserved standing ovation, which may have contributed to WNO’s even greater success in the performance of Věc Makropulos the following day.

To this day I shudder at the memory of the only staging of this masterpiece in Poland, presented exactly ten years ago at Teatr Wielki-Polish National Opera, when the spectators – lured by a misleading promise of a science-fiction comedy, accustomed to the image of a cheerful Czech over a pint of beer, and unfamiliar with both Janáček’s oeuvre and Karel Čapek’s bitter dystopia – began to leave the auditorium in droves already halfway through the performance. What must have also contributed to this was the inept playing of the orchestra under Gerd Schaller, who not only failed to control the various instrumental groups, but also to explain to the musicians what the score was about. Hanus didn’t have the slightest problem with this, probably also because he had been poring over the score for months together with Jonáš Hájek and Annette Thein, preparing a new edition for the Prague branch of the Bärenreiter publishing house. In addition, in their interpretation of Janáček’s operas British musicians equal and sometimes even surpass Czech performers. Among the members of the international cast of WNO’s Věc Makropulos the most pleasant surprise came from the Spanish soprano Ángeles Blancas Gulín in the role of Emilia Marty – a singer endowed with a small but very charming and exceedingly expressive voice, appropriately “old-fashioned” for this difficult part, and supported by excellent acting and a great feel for the character. When it comes to the rest of the cast, the most noteworthy performances came from Nicky Spence as Gregor, David Stout as Baron Prus and the ever-reliable Mark Le Brocq as Vítek, whose monologue explaining the intricacies of the libretto – during the interval between the first and second acts – won far more approval from the Czech audience than from the blasé spectators at the Cardiff premiere. Yet who knows, perhaps my most vivid memory of the production – in a pared-down, but very stylish staging by Olivia Fuchs (director), Nicola Turner (set and costume designer), Robbie Butler (lighting designer) and Sam Sharpless (video projections) – will be Alan Oke’s brilliant performance in the episodic role of Count Hauk-Šendorf. In any case, it has to be said that the creative team hit the nail on the head when it came to Čapek’s and Janáček’s message – this is one of the masterpieces of the modernist grotesque, which in the finale should force guffaws back down our throats and transform them into helpless sobs. The creators of the Welsh production fully succeeded in this.

Plameny. Tone Kummervold (La Morte) and Denys Pivnitskyi (Don Juan). Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

Not quite so in the case of the creative team of the eagerly awaited Flammen, brought from the National Theatre in Prague and presented in its original Czech version as Plameny. Schulhoff’s only opera was unlucky, as was its composer: after the failure of the Brno premiere, nothing  came out of Erich Kleiber’s plans for a Berlin staging, due to the Nazi campaign against modern art. Schulhoff, cursed as a representative of Entartete Kunst, and hated as a Jew and a communist, after the Nazis seized Czechoslovakia he applied for Soviet citizenship, which did not protect him from deportation to the Bavarian fortress of Wülzburg, where he died of tuberculosis in 1942. He came up with the idea for an opera loosely based on the myth of Don Juan in 1923 and discussed his vision with Max Brod, a friend and biographer of Kafka, and translator of Janáček’s librettos into German. Brod advised him to collaborate with the Czech scriptwriter Karl Josef Beneš, who together with Schulhoff created an oneiric, surreal tale of a seducer in love with Death – the only woman he is unable to seduce and who ultimately seals his fate. The dissolute Don Juan will not end up in hell: the punishment for his transgressions will be the curse of eternal life, with no hope of fulfilment.

Schulhoff got down to work on the score in 1929 and slugged away at it for three years. The premiere in January 1932, at the Divadlo na Veveří, the former seat of the National Theatre in Brno, was a complete fiasco. The audience rejected not only the unique structure of the work – which combined elements of opera, pantomime and symphonic poem – but also its exuberant eclecticism, vacillating between impressionism, brutal expressionism and relatively orderly neoclassicism. Plameny begins like Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, only to end in gentle sounds of the glockenspiel and the celesta, which initially bring to mind the operas of Richards Strauss and then – of his not always inspired numerous imitators. In the middle it is possible to find literally everything – from almost line-for-line quotations from Berg’s Wozzeck to New Orleans jazz inspirations and an archaising pastiche in the style of Szymanowski. Schulhoff treats the human voice in Plameny in a strictly instrumental manner: perhaps the only truly “operatic” fragment in the work is La Morte’s solo in the finale of the tenth scene: with a moving glissando of the mezzo-soprano at the end of the phrase “salvation is so far away again”.

I have to do justice to Jiří Rožeň, who managed to keep the sometimes unruly musicians of the Prague orchestra in check throughout the opera. Among the soloists the singer who deserved the biggest applause was the Norwegian Tone Kummervold, underestimated by the audience, who in the thankless role of La Morte showed the full range of now nearly obsolete vocal techniques. A very decent performance came from the female chorus of Shadows, but the performers of the main roles were disappointing, which is especially true of Denys Pivnitskyi as Don Juan, a singer who is not very musical, though gifted with a healthy and strong tenor. Slightly more satisfying was the soprano Victoria Korosunova in the multiplied role of the seducer’s previous mistresses. However, I can hardly blame the singers, as the chaos on stage was primarily caused by Calixto Bieito, a director who after a few phenomenal productions in the early days of his career lost his inspiration completely and has been frittering away his talent ever since. I would advise those of my colleagues who compare Bieito’s concepts to Luis Buñuel’s to go and watch some of the latter’s films again and refresh their memories of their youth. All in all, Plameny turned out to be a beautiful catastrophe giving us hope that Schulhoff’s forgotten work would eventually return to the stage for good – hopefully in a better thought-out staging.

Jan Jirasky. Photo: Marek Olbrzymek

However, Brno did not live by opera alone. During these four days, I also managed to form an opinion (a very favourable one) on the Brno Children’s Choir under the direction of Valeria Mat’ašová and the mixed Kühn Choir, which fared slightly worse under the direction of Jakub Pikla; admire the stylish playing – reminiscent of Rudolf Firkušný’s artistry – of Jan Jirasky, a professor at the Brno Academy of Music and an outstanding specialist on Janáček piano music; and contemplate the condition of contemporary piano playing after a recital by Linda Lee, winner of this year’s Janáček Competition. Lee is technically phenomenal, but completely unaware of the meaning of the music, which pours from her fingers like perfectly round and clearly artificial pearls.

Still, I will go back to Brno, the city where Janáček spent over forty years, created his biggest masterpieces and to this day has not let himself be forgotten.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

I didn’t expect that after nearly two years of pandemic scarcity I would be travelling to the United Kingdom as often as I have done recently. In the past six months alone, despite concerns over the war and the growing post-Brexit chaos, I have visited two of London’s most important concert halls and three English opera houses, one of them twice. The occasion for my November trip was another festival of Polish sacred music, Joy & Devotion (which I wanted to hear in its entirety after the excellent impressions of last year’s inaugural concert), and the world premiere of Agata Zubel’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – two events co-organised by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute and included in London’s still extremely rich musical offerings within just one week.

London greeted me in its usual way: with torrential rain, deafening noise and plenty of surprises in the hotel, which the following day – after I changed rooms – I linked to the presence of Sir John Barbirolli’s ghost roaming around. Had I realised earlier that the conductor had been born in that very house, in a flat above a bakery that closed down years ago, the ghost might have left me in peace already on the first night. He was more gracious later, although he continued his pranks until the end, breaking my radiator and from time to time, without any warning, turning on the shower in my tiny bathroom. Such things sometimes happen in England, and this is one of the reasons I love this country, where a newcomer is reminded at every turn that he or she is treading on the footsteps of the past. For example, on the way to St Martin-in-the-Fields, through a labyrinth of West End theatres, where the senior Mr Barbirolli, one-time violinist at La Scala, played, as did his son John, before he put aside his cello and took up the baton.

It is hard to find a place in this part of the capital without a thriving cultural life. All the more reason for me to admire the persistence and consistency of Paweł Łukaszewski, who not only managed to organise his festival for the second time – in one of Europe’s most famous churches – but is already making bold plans for next season. Once again he managed to persuade three English ensembles to work with him, each ensemble with a very different character and different mission, but all well known to the local audiences, and to the musicians who collaborate with them and often even were brought up within their ranks. I have already written extensively in Tygodnik Powszechny about The Gesualdo Six, an ensemble led by Owain Park, which opened last year’s festival. The leaders of the other two choirs fully deserve to be called icons of British musical life. Stephen Layton is one of the few choirmasters who are just as successful as conductors of orchestral ensembles (until 2016 he led the City of London Sinfonia, which he took over two years after the death of Richard Hickox). In 1986 he founded the chamber choir Polyphony with one concert in mind. The choir has been active ever since, recording more than a dozen albums, some of them for the Hyperion label, and establishing itself as one of the world’s leading ensembles specialising in Bach and Handel. Two years its “senior”, the Rodolfus Choir came into being thanks to the initiative of Ralph Allwood, former Director of Music at Eton College and a keen populariser of choral music among people of all ages and levels of musical ability. The choir is made up of young and very young singers, most of them participants in the famous Choral Courses, organised by Allwood for more than forty years – courses that for many became the springboard for future careers, not just in choral music.

Stephen Layton. Photo: Marcin Urban/IAM

The festival’s size and structure of its programme have remained unchanged: three concerts of Polish choral and organ music (the only departure from this pattern being the participation of the cello in a work by Roxanna Panufnik, but more on that in a moment), primarily works by contemporary composers, including those of the younger generation, works sometimes presented alongside the legacy of earlier periods. This time, however, there were no revelations on a par with Krzysztof Borek’s Missa Mater Matris, and the debutants were somewhat disappointing – among them Marek Raczyński, whose Missa brevis was heralded as the festival’s greatest sensation. Yet the members of The Gesualdo Six interspersed its individual segments with music by other composers, perhaps in the hope of concealing the formal shortcomings of the work, which lost its momentum already after a very interesting and original Kyrie, inspired – perhaps subconsciously – by the tradition of the Eastern Churches. In comparison with last year the performance of the phenomenal sextet (joined in several pieces by Fiona Fraser, Rachel Ambrose Evans and Will Prior) was not entirely satisfying. Despite their customary perfect intonation, wonderfully blended voices and overall culture of sound, their performance lacked the enthusiasm that so inspired the singers at the inauguration of the previous festival. The “Joy & Devotion” could only be felt in Górecki’s Veni, o mater terrae and O mater semper alma, which began the concert, and which are, after all, nothing more than extracts from the unfinished cycle Z pieśni kościelnych (Church Songs) based on the church songbook compiled by Father Jan Siedlecki – with a Latin text by Edward Tambling, published only after the composer’s death. Górecki’s harmonisations are simple and, at the same time sincere and decidedly “his own” – which cannot be said of Teofil Klonowski’s nineteenth-century setting of Gaude Mater Polonia, sung gloomily at the end of the evening. For us it is one of the most important historic pieces of Poland’s musical culture; for the English, well-versed in the history of plain-chant – another version of the popular Eucharistic hymn O salutaris hostia in an anachronic and rather graceless setting for four voices. I think that Owain Park’s ensemble needs to be intrigued by something again, be given pieces of the highest quality, be made proud that they are revealing to the local audience early music other than the relatively well-known works by Pękiel and Gorczycki.

Members of Rodolfus Choir during a rehearsal. Photo: Marcin Urban/IAM

Much more delight was provided by the excellent Polyphony choir, which opened the festival with a programme consisting exclusively of new music. This was the first time I heard the ensemble live and I fully agree that Layton has raised it to the highest world-class level. The singers’ clear voice production, beautiful, luminous timbre (especially in the even-voiced sopranos), and above all, their perfect sense of musical timing and drama, enabled them to emphasise all the more the strengths of works written in the aesthetics already familiar to the British (e.g. Paweł Łukaszewski’s Missa Sancti Papae), draw attention to the intriguing aspects of the style of the young composers (Ziółkowski’s subtle Ave Maris Stella, intriguing in terms of its colour) and cover the shortcomings of the weaker items on the programme (I will not mention the names, but just note that Polish choral music sometimes verges dangerously on kitsch). It was a display of sheer professionalism, just as the concert of the Rodolfus Choir three days later was an exemplary demonstration of the effects of working with a virtually amateur ensemble largely made up of teenage singers. Ralph Allwood chose their repertoire cleverly, selecting primarily texturally simpler gems of early music. Neither minor rhythmic stumbles nor occasional intonation slip-ups were offensive in their performance; instead, the audience was gripped by the joy of music-making and full commitment to the works presented. The experienced choirmasters instils in his choristers the most essential elements of their craft, as we saw during the performance of Roxanna Panufnik’s composition, which was interrupted by sudden applause. All Shall Be Well, a dialogue rich in complex harmonies and sudden dynamic shifts between the choir and the cello (Leo Popplewell), in which Panufnik juxtaposes the text and melody of Bogurodzica with the words of the English mystic Juliana of Norwich, requires maximum concentration, especially from such young performers. The choristers resumed the interrupted climax confidently and with a smile on their lips. This small incident encapsulated the essence of the festival slogan, also captured in the playing of the excellent organist Rupert Jeffcoat, who amazes not only with his technical virtuosity, but also with his sophisticated ornamentation and imaginative, often unusual registration of the instrument.

Edward Gardner, Tomoko Mukaiyama and the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Photo: LPO

The walk across the Thames, to the Royal Festival Hall, proved not only to be a trip into entirely different aesthetics, but also an unexpected journey deep into musical time. Agata Zubel’s Piano Concerto No. 2 – a concerto with a single soloists but with two pianos, including one microtonally tuned – was written for Tomoko Mukaiyama, a Japanese-Dutch pianist, visual artist and performer. Both the author of the programme note and later commentators stressed the performative aspect of the piece – of little significance in my opinion in comparison with the intricate form, the polyphony of sparkling colours typical of Zubel and the subtle references to Lutosławski – in terms of working with rhythm and sophisticated transitions from chaos to order and back again. Particularly striking in the Concerto is the middle movement: a delicate, instrumental “song” in which faithful observers of the composer’s work will easily find grains of an almost human voice thrown into the spectral orchestral fabric. Zubel has been extraordinary lucky when it comes to performers. It would be hard to imagine more sensitive interpreters of this work than the London Philharmonic Orchestra with Edward Gardner, one of the world’s most distinguished specialists on Lutosławski’s legacy, who in the following items on the programme showed the inspirations of the Concerto in ever deeper retrospect. First, he unveiled the astonishingly classical beauty of Lutosławski’s Symphony No. 4, which Andrzej Chłopecki once called the swan song of modernism, then he delighted the audience with a lyrical take on The Rite of Spring – two pieces without which Zubel’s Piano Concerto No. 2 would never have been written or would have sounded quite different.

So there are reasons for us to be proud, but we must not drown this pride in national complexes. I’m looking forward to future Joy & Devotion festivals. I wish Agata Zubel a speedy return to London concert halls. I expect that Polish music will be heard more and more in the British Isles. In the meantime let us explore, answer questions, reveal contexts and prepare programme booklets for future seasons. British music lovers are genuinely interested in music, and not only their own.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Apparently Ingmar Bergman learned about his first success in the film industry, which was soon to set his career on a whole new track, while reading a newspaper in his own toilet. Although the Palme d’Or at the ninth Cannes Festival went to the documentary Le Monde du silence, directed by Jacques Cousteau and Louis Malle, Bergman’s 1955 comedy Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende) was also among the winners of six official prizes with the Prix de l’humour poétique, awarded in this particular category only once in the entire history of the festival. Bergman must have felt deeply embarrassed by this accolade and not only because the good news found him on the toilet. He had been directing films for nearly ten years. His oeuvre at that point included films – like Sawdust and Tinsel and Summer with Monika – which with time became part of the canon of Swedish cinema, and which their creator himself valued very highly. He may have been a little bit coy in his statements to the press, in which he emphasised that he took up comedy for financial reasons, without much conviction, as he had always been regarded in his family as a surly, touchy and humourless child. In any case, he left the Cannes screening halfway through, indignant that the audience – instead of laughing uproariously – only occasionally rewarded his Smiles of a Summer Night with a perfunctory round of applause.

He did not appreciate the sense of humour of the French, who immediately were taken by the Shakespearean farse about a superannuated lawyer Fredrik Egerman and the entire amorous constellation of characters complicating his life: his young wife Anne, “unconsummated” for two years; Henrik, his son from his first marriage, who is struggling with his desire for his nubile stepmother; the actress Desiree, with whom Fredrik once had an affair and who reappeared in his life with a child bearing his name and at an age unequivocally pointing to the date of his conception; her puppet lover, Count Malcolm, and the countess, who desperately flirts with Fredrik in order to draw on the inexhaustible pool of male jealousy and get her husband back. The intrigues of the upper classes are counterpointed by the coarse and painfully direct love of the servant Petra and the coachman Frid. Things take an unexpected turn, when Desiree, in love with Fredrik and seasoned in love battles, persuades her mother, Madame Armfeldt, to organise a party with all of the above at her country estate – at a very unusual time, in the middle of the joyous Swedish Midsommar celebrations …

If Bergman lacked a sense of humour, this would be like saying that Conrad, the protagonist of Erich Kästner’s novel The 35th of May, lacked imagination. In addition, Bergman drew on the best possible source, namely Shakespeare. The inspirations drawn from A Midsummer Night’s Dream are not only obvious but also filtered through the director’s unique sensibility and his extraordinary feel for erotic human relations. Smiles of a Summer Night even features a Puck – in the form of Desiree’s impish offspring – and the double role of Titania and Oberon is played by the mean, grumpy and yet irresistibly moving Madame Armfeldt. The audience in Cannes – instead of collapsing with laughter – froze in front of the screen in silent awe. After its festival success Bergman’s work was ranked among the ten most important films of the year by Cahiers du Cinéma and was nominated for the BAFTA award. Masterfully directed and brilliantly acted, the scene of the mutual unmasking of Desiree’s two lovers – the lawyer in a saggy nightcap and the count in a ridiculous hussar uniform – has gone down in the history of cinema. Fanclubs of the film were set up all over the world and there were several imitations, including Woody Allen’s A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy.

Agatha Meehan (Fredrika Armfeldt). Photo: Sharron Wallace

However, very few people in Poland realise that Bergman’s Smiles of a Summer Night was given a second life primarily thanks to Stephen Sondheim’s musical A Little Night Music (the title of which refers not only to the amorous rituals of a “midsummer’s night”, but also to Mozart’s famous serenade, with its references to music accompanying outdoor flirtations in darkness lit by candles and torches). This may be because the musical as a form is still regarded in Poland as a guilty pleasure for less sophisticated audiences, the last resort for musicians and producers who have failed on the “real” operatic stage, a modern equivalent of a trashy operetta. Sondheim’s oeuvre reaches Poland by a roundabout route, paradoxically through film: older audiences were delighted by his songs in Richard Lester’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), younger ones – by Tim Burton’s brilliant film adaptation of Sweeney Todd (2007). Yet A Little Night Music has an international reputation of one of the American composer’s most sophisticated masterpieces: musically, it requires truly operatic skills from the performers; dramatically – craftsmanship normally associated with outstanding performances in plays by Shakespeare, Ibsen and Strindberg.

British opera companies try to include “lighter” operas and musicals in their repertoires every season. This is particularly true of Opera North, which has an exceptionally versatile orchestra and a team of soloists cast in roles allowing them to shine and show off all their current vocal and acting skills. That is why no one is surprised by the presence in this year’s production of A Little Night Music at Leeds’ Playhouse (in a co-production with the local Quarry Theatre) of Dame Josephine Barstow (Madame Armfeldt) – an eighty-two-year-old soprano who used to score triumphs in Bayreuth, London, Munich and Vienna in roles like the Marschallin in Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier, Lady Macbeth in Verdi’s opera and Sieglinde in Wagner’s Die Walküre – or of the excellent Dutch baritone Quirijn De Lang (Fredrik), a singer at the peak of his vocal powers, cast equally readily in oratorio parts, roles in classical Mozart operas as well as parts from the canon of modernist and contemporary repertoire. Shining performances among the rest of the cast – apart from the expressive Sandra Piques Eddy presenting a superbly acted Desiree – come not only from major performers of minor roles, but also from singers just taking their first steps on stage, still undecided as to whether they will devote themselves wholeheartedly to a career in London’s West End, or go for interpretations in the spirit of reconstructing old performance practices, or perhaps – as their voices and skills develop – take up challenges in a heavier operatic repertoire.

Dame Josephine Barstow (Madame Armfeldt). Photo: Sharron Wallace

The most admirable thing is that they all treat the spoken and the sung word with equal affection and competence. With an equally “poetic” sense of humour they portray their ambiguous characters, building bridges between radically different conventions, singing styles and acting techniques in an admirably offhand manner demanded by Sondheim’s genius (Madame Armfeldt’s phenomenal “Liaisons”, irresistibly bringing to mind both the reminiscences of the Countess in Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, and Przybora and Wasowski’s frivolous song “Biżuteria” (Jewellery) performed by Barbara Krafftówna). Hidden behind a semi-transparent curtain, the orchestra under Oliver Rundell accompanies the soloists as alertly as a bird – in the original Broadway line-up with a discreet brass accompaniment, with the piano and celesta, without a large rhythm section that effortlessly “carries” most standard musical productions.

James Brining’s direction in Madeleine Boyd’s sets and costumes is certainly no match for Bergman’s original in either panache or splendour of imagination. It is, nevertheless, effective in organising the varied planes of this convoluted tale: by moving the narrative to a time a little closer to us, presumably the inter-war era, it makes it more digestible for British audiences, obsessed as they are with the period. The staging requires no additional explanation: thanks to the singers’ impeccable diction and superb voice production, it goes straight to the hearts of the Yorkshire theatre regulars, who come here not only for musicals and Christmas adaptations of The Lion, the Witch and the Old Wardrobe, but also – and perhaps above all – for plays like Tony Harrison’s The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and offerings from the youngest luminaries of British drama.

Quirijn de Lang (Fredrik Egerman). Photo: Sharron Wallace

It would be hard for me to try to convince my readers of the intrinsic value of A Little Night Music, written in collaboration between the great – though still not appreciated everywhere – composer and the eminent British screenwriter and librettist Hugh Wheeler, known to fans of classic detective novels for the books he published under the pseudonym Patrick Quentin, in fact a partnership of authors with several writers, primarily Richard Wilson Webb. And yet I will try: a good whodunnit can tell us more about the people and the world around us than pretentious “high” literature written in line with the dictates of fashions making it possible to become well-known on the international publishing market. Well-performed, A Little Night Music still says more about the human need for truth and love than a thoughtlessly sung operatic masterpiece.

Translated by: Anna Kijak
Original text available at: https://teatr-pismo.pl/19180-milosc-w-swej-prostej-i-niesmialej-mowie/

There was a time when Mozart’s oeuvre was put above the music of the good old Haydn. There was also a time when Haydn’s Creation was valued more highly than his Seasons, although in any case both oratorios were considered masterpieces in comparison with Il ritorno di Tobia, composed more or less a quarter of a century earlier. According to Charles Rosen, in neither of the two works did Haydn achieve the level of his quartets and great symphonies, and after completing The Seasons he even experienced an artist’s block, too old and too weak to hold on to even a fraction of the ideas rushing into his head. It is as if the master, who was not yet seventy, reached a point when he had ceased to refer to anything except his own experience and own impotence.

Rumour also had it that Gottfried van Swieten, author of the libretti to both The Creation and The Seasons, in vain tried to persuade Haydn to close the cycle with a third oratorio, The Last Judgement. Yet a letter by Georg August Griesinger – Haydn’s diplomat friend – to Empress Maria Theresa suggests something quite different: that the initiative came from the composer, who asked Christoph Martin Wieland, called the German Voltaire, for a libretto. Wieland refused. Thus it would be hard to lay the blame for the fiasco on the artist’s block afflicting Haydn – after all, he went on to write two magnificent masses, Schöpfungsmesse  and Harmoniemesse, and fell silent for good five years before he died.

However, there is no denying that it took him two years to write The Seasons and that at times the work was hard going. What undoubtedly contributed to this were the composer’s health problems as well as the libretto by van Swieten, who this time clearly bit off more than he could chew. He took as his basis James Thomson’s extremely popular poem The Seasons, although a lot suggests that he first went for Barthold Heinrich Brockes’ German translation and on its basis produced the text of the oratorio, spicing it up with numerous additions from other sources and with his own imagination. What emerged as a result was a rather misshapen work, in which the charm of the original was lost, while van Swieten’s deficient skills were revealed to the full. If that had not been enough, van Swieten, despite his poor command of the language, undertook, like in the case of The Creation, to translate the libretto into English, which produced an even more inferior result than before. Suffice it to say that until recently British artists used to perform The Seasons in German, because the “English” original would have listeners break into uncontrollable laughter. There were several more or less fortunate attempts to make van Swieten’s libretto palatable until Paul McCreesh came up with his own, exceptionally graceful translation, which may stay in concert repertoires for good.

Academy of Ancient Music, Laurence Cummings. Photo: Mark Allan

Laurence Cummings used the translation – to the benefit of the work and much to the delight of the audience gathered at London’s Barbican Hall – during the inauguration of the second season of the Academy of Ancient Music under his leadership, in a dramatised performance of the oratorio with stage movement by Martin Parr presented against the background of pleasant but in fact unnecessary projections by Nina Dunn Studio. I reviewed last year’s Creation, inaccessible to observers from outside the United Kingdom because of the covid restrictions in place at the time, on the basis of a broadcast. This time I decided not to miss an opportunity to hear the AAM in The Seasons live, especially given that I had had intense previous contact with McCreesh’s translation, translating it into Polish for a CD booklet for Signum Records.

Haydn was undoubtedly right, when he demanded that his oratorios be performed in languages understood to local audiences. That is why the premiere of Die Jahreszeiten was very warmly received at the Palais Schwarzenberg in Vienna, while The Seasons with the original version of the libretto was not performed even once in the composer’s lifetime. This is a work carried by text: only in symbiosis with the word does it reveal its true nature. Only then does it pave the way for the listener to understand the refined harmonic and textural devices, justify numerous self-quotations, make it possible to appreciate the novelty of solutions soon after used in the oeuvres of Beethoven, Weber, Schubert and even Wagner. Only on this condition does it reveal the tribute to the prematurely deceased Mozart hidden between the lines: when a theme from the Requiem appears in the triple fugue from Spring, when Sarastro’s wisdom resounds in Simon’s singing, when we can hear the voices of Papageno and Papagena in the love duet between Hanne and Lukas from Autumn, when in Winter a quotation from the second movement of the Great Symphony KV 550 appears with the words about the passing summer of human life.

Rachel Nicholls nad Benjamin Hulett. Photo: Mark Allan

For nearly half a century the sound of the Academy of Ancient Music evolved under the influence of two distinctive musicians with extremely different personalities: Christopher Hogwood and Richard Egarr. Laurence Cummings has added another important element to the identity of his ensembles: an irrepressible joy of music making, an enthusiasm that makes it possible to become engrossed in the rhetorical intricacies of the score. The AAM chorus not only impresses with its excellent voice production and impeccable diction; it savours its singing and imbues it a powerful emotional charge. Each instrument in the orchestra speaks with its own conscious voice – when necessary blended and balanced with the sound of the rest of the ensemble, at other times unceremoniously highlighted, surprisingly bright, saturated in the extreme, balancing on the edge of ugliness. There is dazzling brightness and deep darkness, the heat of the sun and the cold of the ice in this playing – everything needed to convey the changeability of the seasons and the inexorable cycle of earthly existence.

Of the three soloists I was the most pleasantly surprised by Rachel Nicholls, who replaced the indisposed Sophie Bevan at the last minute. I must confess contritely that I had my doubts whether the soprano, who has been scoring triumphs in the Straussian and Wagnerian repertoire for several years, would be able to find her way back into the long-abandoned idiom of pre-Romantic music. I am critic of little faith: Nicholls is perfectly capable of embedding her supple, radiant voice in a very different style of singing, phrasing in line with all the classical rules, flashing lightly through long passages and embellishments. Similar brilliance came from Benjamin Hulett’s tenor, silvery and bright, impressing both with confident intonation and wide, open breathing, allowing the melodic line to be free and expressive. The ardour of the two young lovers found a perfect counterbalance in the dignified singing of Jonathan Lemalu, marked by the wisdom of mature age. With his warm and velvet soft bass-baritone Lemalu was able to paint each affect with a slightly different hue, to outline each reflection with a line of different thickness.

Rachel Nicholls, Jonathan Lemalu and Benjamin Hulett. Photo: Mark Allan

In May 1809 the Napoleonic army set off against Vienna. The city surrendered after a brief and uneven fight. The ailing Haydn collapsed at the piano one day and never got up from his bed. He died on 31 May, shortly after midnight. His last words are circulated in several versions. After listening to The Seasons at the Barbican, I am willing to believe that shortly before he died he said: “Cheer up, children, I am all right”.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Do you remember Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri? Or, more precisely, the music Mildred Mayes is listening to in the car at the very beginning of the film? Most movie buffs were led to believe that they were dealing with a contemporary arrangement of a traditional Irish melody, while in fact Renée Fleming sings Lady Harriet’s aria “Letzte Rose” from Friedrich von Flotow’s opera Martha, though with Thomas Moore’s original text, taken from the 1813 collection Irish Melodies. The composer indeed referred to a popular song of the day, but transformed it in his own way and made it the basis not only of the aria, but also of the love theme that runs through the piece. Martha, staged in 1847 in Vienna, turned out to be Flotow’s second and last operatic success. Known to music lovers today for several immortal hits, it completely overshadowed his previous work: the opera Alessandro Stradella, the triumph of which at the Hamburg Opera subsequently led to a contract to stage Martha at Vienna’s Theater am Kärntnertor.

Flotow was neither the first nor the last among 19th-century composers who decided to make one of the most influential yet most mysterious composers of the Italian Baroque the protagonist of their operas. However, they were not interested in his music, but in his sensational biography, described in, for example, Histoire de la musique et de ses effets, the first compendium of the history of music in French literature, written by Pierre Bourdelot, a libertine, freethinker and physician to Louis XIII, later supplemented by his nephew Pierre Bonnet-Bourdelot and published only after the death of both by another heir of the family in 1715. The ambiguities of Stradella’s biography – which gradually expanded to include tales of his difficult character, propensity for scheming and gambling, and promiscuity, which ultimately brought upon him the revenge of his cuckolded rivals and death at the hands of assassins – became ideal fodder for Romantic librettists. However, instead of perpetrating a black legend of him, like the one surrounding the tragic figure of Caravaggio, the librettists came up with more and more complicated cloak-and-dagger stories, with the amorous Stradella successfully throwing a spanner in the works of torturers and guardians of female virtue, stories with an obligatory happy ending. This Stradella-mania even affected the teenage César Franck, who in 1841 – four years after the failure of Louis Niedermeyer’s five-act grand opéra at the Salle Le Peletier in Paris – composed his own Stradella, but stopped at the voices with piano stage and left the work unfinished.

Interest in Stradella waned at the turn of the 20th century, only to be revived in recent decades, thanks in part to new research which has finally made it possible to look at his life and work in a broader historical and aesthetic context. We know now that he was not born in 1639 in Nepi, but four years later in Bologna, though the most formative period of his life was his childhood and youth spent in Rome, where he received his musical education. We know that his innate independence combined with immense talent and extraordinary ambition got him into trouble more than once, and it is difficult to say whether his tragic death at the hands of Genoese thugs – when he was not yet forty – had more to do with his propensity for reckless love affairs or his inability to navigate the labyrinth of political and moral intrigues of the day. Stradella left behind a huge and immensely valuable body of work, rivalling the legacy of Purcell and Biber in originality, and going far beyond the stylistic framework of the period in innovation and imagination. He was a precursor of the concerto grosso. In experimenting with a more tuneful, rhythmically freer variety of counterpoint, full of dissonant tensions, he was more than ten years ahead of Corelli. He came up with the idea of the da capo aria before he had time to give it a proper form.

There is something spectral in Stradella’s oeuvre. It is possible to hear in it things that are not physically there yet, that were only geminating in the composer’s visionary imagination. This is probably why it is so admired by Salvatore Sciarrino, a contemporary master of musical understatements, thinned out consonances, of silence louder than sounds. In 2017 Sciarrino wrote an opera, Ti vedo, ti sento, mi perdo (I see you, I hear you, I lose myself), whose protagonist is Stradella – or rather his absence. The action takes place in 1682, in one of the Roman palazzi, where rehearsals take place before a performance of Stradella’s cantata. Everybody is waiting for a new aria promised by the composer, but instead they get the news of his sudden death. The truth about the composer, who became a legend during his lifetime, must from now on be sought in in-depth reflection on his music.

Andrea De Carlo. Photo: Famiano Crispi & Vincenzo Scudieri

The man at the forefront of this reflection is Andrea De Carlo, one of the world’s most eminent specialists in the legacy of Alessandro Stradella, an artist well known also to Polish music lovers from his collaboration with Rinaldo Alessandrini’s Concerto Italiano ensemble, not to mention the student production of Stradella’s comic opera Il Trespolo tutore (2018), which featured Polish musicians and was recorded on DVD. De Carlo began his career as a jazz double bass player, later joined in the orchestra of the Teatro Massimo di Palermo and eventually – after studying with the gambist Paolo Pandolfo – devoted himself almost entirely to the practice and theory of historical performance. In 2005 he founded his own ensemble, Mare Nostrum, which has evolved from a homogeneous viol consort into an extremely versatile and dynamic early music ensemble. Following their first, critically acclaimed concerts and recordings of German and French Baroque music, De Carlo and his musicians began to focus increasingly on the works of 17th-century composers associated with Rome. This naturally led to “The Stradella Project” – initiated as part of the Baroque Festival in Viterbo, headed by De Carlo – which has already resulted in eight excellent albums of monographic recordings for the French label Arcana. Young talent and future collaborators of De Carlo are forged in the “Stradella Young Project”, an education and research initiative launched in 2011, whose apprentices regularly participate in De Carlo’s projects.

This year I had the pleasure of accepting an invitation from the event organisers and the Munich-based agency Ophelias Culture to attend the first days of Festival Barocco Alessandro Stradella. And thus I was able not only enjoy the music, but also to relish the beauty of the historic region of Tuscia, the cradle of Etruscan civilisation, a land stretching among the hills between the Tiber and the Apennine range, in a territory that overlaps not only with today’s province of Viterbo in the northernmost part of Lazio, but also with the whole area of Tuscany and a large swathe of Umbria. Viterbo, one of the best-preserved medieval cities in central Italy – with its imposing Cathedral of Saint Lawrence, supposedly built on the ruins of an Etruscan temple of Heracles, and the mighty Palazzo dei Papi, where from November 1268 to September 1271 the cardinals were held on bread and water during the longest conclave in the history of the Church, before the election of Pope Gregory X – was preparing for the Macchina di Santa Rosa procession.

The march with the relics of St. Rose, a Franciscan tertiary expelled from the city by the Cathars, takes place year after year on the night of 3 September, along a route of more than a kilometre from Porta Romana to the steep climb to the church of Viterbo’s patron saint. One hundred men from the Sodality of the Porters (Facchini di Santa Rosa) carry a nearly 30-metre high tower, weighing five tons, through the streets, literally in the dark, following only the directions of the capofacchini, who march at the four corners of the enormous machine. In the days leading up to the procession residents are busy building stands in the traditional stopping places of the porters, and members of the Sodality proudly display its banners in the windows of their homes, in shop windows, restaurants and craftsmen’s workshops. Admission to the porters community is considered an exceptional honour in the local community – not least because, as part of the test, each candidate must lift a 150-kg box on his shoulders and carry it at least a hundred metres.

In these circumstances it is not surprising that the first concerts of the Festival took place outside the province’s capital. Yet it would be hard to imagine a better venue for the inauguration, with an opera by Stradella, than the Mannerist Villa Farnese, a gem of the late Italian Renaissance, towering over the town of Caprarola, which clings to the volcanic Cimini Hills. The young Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, only thirty-something at the time, acquired the estate at the very beginning of the 16th century. Educated by Pomponius Laetus to love classical proportions, he decided to erect a defensive palace above the settlement and commissioned the best architects active in Rome at the time to prepare the designs. The architects included Baldassare Peruzzi, who drew out the shape of the future fortress on a pentagonal plan. The construction of the foundations was completed only a few years before the cardinal was elected pope, who went down in history as Paul III. The work on the fortress was understandably put on hold. Nearly thirty years later it was resumed by the pope’s namesake and grandson, Alessandro Farnese: a cardinal, diplomat and generous patron of artists, who replaced the idea of completing the palazzo di fortezza with the idea of erecting a grand country villa on its foundations. The arduous mission of incorporating the body of the palace into the pentagon of the fortifications was undertaken by Jacopo Barozzi da Vignola, one of the most eminent architects of the second half of the 16th century, not only in Italy.

The result was a building of uncommon beauty, in the form of a pentagonal prism, but with a regular four-storey façade and a circular arcaded courtyard inside. Each storey of the villa served a different purpose and was furnished accordingly. Visitors are dazzled by the Sala dei Fasti Farnesiani on the piano nobile level. It is richly decorated with frescoes by the Zuccari brothers depicting the greatest achievements of the Farnese family. Taddeo Zuccari and his assistants are also the authors of the allegorical paintings in the Jupiter Room, accessible from the courtyard, which served as a sort of reception room for guests and a vestibule to the summer apartments. To enter it, visitors must first take their eyes off the illusion of foliage rustling in the wind, birds’ wings flapping and glimpses of sunlight on the azure of the frescoes on the arcade vaults.

Moro per amore, Villa Farnese, Caprarola. Eleonora Filipponi (Lindora) and Danilo Pastore (Floridoro/Feraspe). Photo: Famiano Crispi & Vincenzo Scudieri

This was the venue of the Festival’s inaugural performance – of Moro per amore, Stradella’s last opera, completed in 1681, a few months before his death. A similar villa, castello or palazzo may have been the venue for the first rehearsals before the work was staged at some theatre in Rome or Genoa. Similar frescoes may have witnessed cardinals, princes and their mistresses taking pleasure in making music, especially as the libretto was written by another well-educated aristocrat with a passion for the arts: Flavio Orsini, who sometimes wrote under the anagrammatic pseudonym of Filosinavoro.

The seven soloists and the nine-member Mare Nostrum ensemble, conducted by Andrea De Carlo, entered this space richer in knowledge and experience which the pioneers of historical performance could only envy. De Carlo’s musicians are fully aware of the fact that today no one will get all the allusions, references and puns in the allegedly absurd libretto, but they nevertheless should try to get as many of them as possible and then help the audience get them. Since the trap is set already in the ambiguous title of the piece (no one really dies of love here, but it takes a Moor to make a certain beautiful queen finally fall in love), every pun that is caught needs to be supported by an appropriate gesture, passion in the music, a meaningful glance. The artists need to attract attention to the passage that, for some reason, Stradella himself highlighted: by strengthening the articulation in the singing, bashing body of the instrument. They need not to wring their hands over the sense of humour of the Orsinis, the Farneses or suchlike, but to laugh at what made people laugh at the time (for example, the aging, contralto nanny and the soprano castrato proposing to her in the finale). The Mare Nostrum musicians know how to enthral the listeners and teach them something at the same time – and this is an increasingly rare skill, even among people involved in education on a daily basis.

View from Torre Monaldesca, Civitella d’Agliano. Photo: Dorota Kozińska

This year Festival Barocco Alessandro Stradella takes place until the end of September. It does not rely on Stradella alone. Over the next two days I went on two sentimental journeys to the repertoire from which my experience of historical performance had begun: the instrumental dances of the Ars Nova era (the excellent lutenist player Peppe Frana, partnered brilliantly by the flutist Alessandro de Carolis and the percussionist Antonino Anastasia); and the music wandering between Iberia and the New World since the first wave of the conquistador conquests (participants in the Stradella Young Project). The first concert took place in the rooms of Torre Monaldesca in Civitella d’Agliano: a tower from the top of which the local Guelphs used to look out for their enemies, the Ghibellins. The second concert was an open-air event in Borgo Fantasma, one of hundreds of “ghost towns” scattered around Tuscia, destroyed by landslides, earthquakes and other natural disasters.

I will have to go back there one day. For the austere beauty of the stone towns, for the effusion of colours in the frescoes in the cardinals’ villas, for the music of Stradella – brought back from oblivion by people who go forward full of love and don’t look back.

Translated by: Anna Kijak

Link to the source:
https://www.tygodnikpowszechny.pl/takie-festiwale-to-ja-rozumiem-178593