Results tagged “bernstein” from Slipped disc

As debate continues in several languages over who will still be heard 50 years from now, several readers have asked how accurate our forecasting can be.

Well, let's go back to 1959 and ask which living composers, in the view of listeners at that time, would be likely to endure.

Shostakovich, for sure - he was the flagship musician of the Soviet Union, and everyone thought the USSR was forever.

Stravinsky had just produced Threni.

Britten was receiving more opera stagings than any of his contemporaries.

Bernstein and Copland were universally renowned, if only for West Side Story and Appalachian Spring.

Samuel Barber had just opened the new Met with Vanessa; Rodgers and Hammerstein were reaching apotheosis with the Sound of Music.

None of these selections would have appeared contentious or doubtful. Hindemith, still alive, would have seemed a dead cert. Kodaly, likewise.

The last one might have been a modernist - Berio, Boulez or Stockhausen - but who could have forseen the importance of Cage and Feldman, the emergence of Ligeti and Sondheim, the birth of the Beatles?

If anyone had put it to the test, Khachaturian and Menotti might have made it into the top ten.

Please don't attempt to cast a retro vote, but I'd be interested to hear your thoughts. 

Watching Bernard Haitink at the BBC Proms last night, I experienced my usual frustration at his suppression of emotional contrast, his flat dynamic line and his fussy accentuation of peripheral detail. There was much to admire, as well, not least the tension that Haitink creates at the opening phrase and sustains to the last.

But in more than thirty years of watching Haitink I have never been convinced by his approach to Mahler and the Ninth he gave last night with the London Symphony Orchestra will not lodge in my memory beside those I have heard from, to name an indelible few, Bernstein, Tennstedt, Solti, Sanderling, Gatti and Rattle. Which may be why I am noting these thoughts in a blog, as a point of reference for the interpretation chapter of my next book on Mahler.

Still, mine is just an individual sensitivity exercised through one pair of ears. Others with me who were hearing the work for the first time were moved. So, too, apparently, were some members of the orchestra.

My eye was caught by the facial expressions of some of the under-utilised players - the E-flat clarinet (Chi-Yu Mo), the principal bassoon (Rachel Gough) and above all, the piccolo player, Sharon Williams.

The piccolo spends much of the first movement perched at the end of a row of hard-working flutes with not much to do except count bars and worry about rising mortgage rates. Most players in these circumstances adopt an attitude of glacial detachment that veers from mild ennui to the characteristic NY Philharmonic grimace of what the heck am I doing here?

Ms Williams, by contrast, seemed completely absorbed in the music, swaying along with the flutes, smiling at the surrounding sounds. It was impossible not to share her pleasure, to be drawn into a performance that was objectively unappealing. Music is an infectious germ. It is so easy to get carried away. 

The most striking feature of English National opera's new production of Leonard Bernstein's Candide is the drop-curtain.

It has been made up to look like a 1950s television test-card and it takes us instantly back to that era.

The card melts, as the music strikes up, into newsreel clips of Middle America, McCarthyism, gas guzzlers and the rise of the Kennedys. I won't review the show - Fiona Maddocks gets it bang to rights in the Evening Standard - except to say that Robert Carsen's co-pro with Paris and La Scala seemed to appeal more to under-30s in the audience than to over-40s.

Carsen's supposedly controversial caricature of Bush, Blair, Putin & Co in flag-design swim pants was silly rather than provocative and the Eurotrash anti-American tone of the show grew tedious after the first ten gags.

What bothered me most, though, was what I had liked best.

When the test card became an active screen for moving images, it completely distracted attention from the Overture which, in my view, is the most concentrated and exciting piece of music that Bernstein ever wrote. I missed the Overture and it may have blighted my evening.

There is a growing tendency for directors to use Overture time to do clever things beneath the proscenium. Some have actors wandering the footlights, others project movie clips. They miss the point.

There is a reason composers write overtures, and it's not just to allow latecomers to find their seats. The Overture sets the mood of a show. Overlay it with visual peripheria and you risk going into the performance without the courtesy of foreplay.

I'm setting up an Overture Protection Society. Sign up in Comments, below.