Results tagged “wagner” from Slipped disc

Most musical responses, public and private, to my discussion of religious anomalies in Daniel Barenboim's Diwan orchestra have taken a markedly hostile tone.

Several professional musicians argued that religious faith should have nothing to do with the process of making music. 'A majority of Israeli musicians just like most of their international colleagues have no time for religion,' is how one London violinist put it to me in an email. He, and others, go on to assert that 'the world would be a better place without religion.'

He is entitled to that view, and can claim support from the spirit of the times whether in science or the arts. It is cool to be an atheist in the 21st century. In recent Lebrecht Interviews with Jonathan Miller and Stephen Hough, it was the God-denying director who was more certain in his convictions than the God-seeking pianist. 

Whatever one's personal beliefs, however, all musicians ought to be aware that without religion there would be no music for them to play. It was the church that laid the foundations for symphonic music and a search for God that led most of the great composers to write as they did. Beethoven may have been anti-authority and Verdi anti-clerical, but with the lone exception of Richard Wagner it is hard to find a major composer before the 1918 who actively denied the existence of God and was not driven to compose by a religious impulse.

It is, of course, possible to separate between a composer's intentions and the interpretation of music, but to assert that religion is irrelevant or detrimental to the art exposes what the mid-20th century psychologist Leon Festinger called 'cognitive dissonance' and Freud referred to much earlier as Das Unheimlich - the uncanny.

Both mean the same thing: a discomfort felt by someone grappling with two contradictory ideas. The therapeutic 'solution' is either to find a balance between the ideas or to rationalise one of them out of the picture. That seems to be what post-religious musicians are doing in relation to the faith basis of their art. It is not a viable intellectual position.

As far as the East-West Diwan orchestra is concerned, the cognitive dissonance is the inbuilt imbalance between a multiculturalist respect for Islam and a liberal contempt for those who observe the religious heritages of Judaism and Christianity. Fiona Maddocks argued justly that this inequality needs to be addressed. I would add that a resolution of the dissonance is essential if the Diwan is ever to have more than a decorative, symbolic and largely sentimental role in the search for a Middle East peace.

I've just come off a WNYC Smackdown head-to-head with Anne Midgette on the never-ending question of my Wagner right or wrong. You can hear the debate here, I think, and I'm not going to use this space to have the last word on her.

What is extraordinary, though, is how every time one attempts to balance the monstrosity of Wagner's ego and his cult against the musical genius of the work, you run up against a brick wall - not Anne, I hastily add - of people who pretend that it is possible to isolate a creator from the things he creates.

It isn't. No Wagner, no Ring - as Bob Marley might have put it. The man's odious ideology is part and parcel of the work. Eliminate it, and the Ring becomes a teddy bears' tea party.

Telarc, the first label to issue a digital release, has ceased production.

The founder, Robert Woods, will leave this month, along with the chief recording engineer, Michael Bishop. Half the workforce has been laid off - that's 26 jobs - and the backlist becomes heritage. More details here.

Telarc had first call, as local patriots, on the superb Cleveland Orchestra and the quality of its sound was an audiophile's delight. The label won 40 Grammys over the years and produced 800 recordings across several genres.

My guess is that its all-time bestseller was Wagner's Ring Without Words, an improvement in certain respects on the original in a concept created by the conductor Lorin Maazel. Of late, the label blazed a trail for Paavo Järvi and his Cincinnati band. It has yet another version of the Gorecki third symphony coming up from Atlanta.

A sound philosophy, though, is not enough to save a label. Telarc, for all its merits, never took much risk by way of extending repertoire when the going was easy. I am really sad to see its purist values fall by the wayside and I fear that executives in the major labels will be encouraged by its fall to cut corners and compromise standards still further.  

Telarc's values, however, endure as a permanent record. Its disappearance suggests that, in times of technological and financial upheaval, only by using creative imagination as a driving force can a musical enterprise be saved from extinction.

John Adams's opera Doctor Atomic had its fifth production and UK premiere at English National Opera last night. It is, I think, deepening with each exposure and every aspect of the ENO performance was polished by the experience gained by director Penny Woolcock and several cast members at the Met, Amsterdam and elsewhere.

What came over more searingly than on the DVD pre-release was the diversity of styles that Adams adopts, one for each scene of the first act. He starts with the language of Berg's Lulu, segues into the English hymnody of Herbert Howells and Benjamin Britten and emerges in a post-minimalist instrumental patter and a vocal line somewhere between Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. This is high opera, and no mistake, sometimes a little too high on its own aspirations.

The story of the Los Alamos scientists who conducted the first nuclear test is dramatically told. When Edward Teller informs the General that he does not know if the blast will knock out New Mexico or the whole human race, he does not exaggerate. The excitement and danger of science is everywhere in this piece, the driving force on stage. Even the drop curtain displays the periodic table.

What I miss is the sense of dislocation. The core scientists were Hungarian Jews who belong in a cafe, not a desert. Their intellectual and emotional lives are absent. Personal qualities are invisible and Peter Sellars' script is often too wordy. Read Kati Marton for context.

Gerald Finley is outstanding as the project director, J. Robert Oppenheimer, who sold his soul to the war effort, and Sasha Cooke is fetching as his wife Kitty. Both characters need more script development. A purple dress is not enough to express sexual frustration. Jonathan Veira as the General adds menace to the experiment.

ENO's orchestra has not sounded this wonderful for a long time and the young conductor Lawrence Renes was intensity personified. The atmosphere in the house was almost epochal and the ovation for Adams was the loudest of all.

Doctor Atomic is real opera. It sets you thinking and sometimes touches the heart.

www.eno.org

Last night, I went to see Kurt Weill's Street Scene at the Young Vic, its first UK staging in 20 years which drew chief theatre critics from almost every national daily.

This morning, I addressed a dozen students, year 10-11, at corporate HQ on the prospects for arts careers in the media. Which would you think was the more excitable audience?

The students were terrific, sharp as buttons and receptive to early-morning stimulation (they laughed at my jokes). They were also media savvy, fully informed about the impact of internet usage on the print and record industries. They were not going to be fobbed off with bromides. What they wanted to hear was a range of fresh solutions to a familiar crisis. I did my best to give them hope.

The critics were in Thursday-night mood, worn out after too many late nights filing reviews for the last editions. But by the interval, the ones I chatted to were hopping and popping with the impact of the work. And by the end they (and I) were on a Weill high, totally blown away by the sensational mutations of 'Lonely House' leitmotiv with which the composer drives the piece.

Someone said this sort of excitement reminded him why he became a critic in the first place. I was struck more by the vital social function that performing arts critics perform, wading night after night through dullness and mire in the hope that something will light their fire, as Weill did ours last night.

That is why newspapers need critics - to protect readers from the routinely awful and the meretricious rubbish that masquerades as novelty, and to excite them with the blood-rush of the real thing. This is also why people read newspapers - to find a voice they can trust to lead them through the barren wilderness to a kind of promised land. Kurt Weill knew that, even as old man Kaplan ranted about 'the capitalist press'.  

Every newspaper that sheds its critics, as so many are doing, loses a powerful reader magnet.

Jonathan Carr, who died last week near Bonn, was an astute political journalist and a musical enthusiast of expert knowledge and sound judgement.

He brought an aesthetic perspective to his professional occupation and a shrewd political eye to his musical researches, adding a dash of wit that made him constantly readable.

As Germany correspondent for the Financial Times and, later, bureau chief for the Economist, Jonathan saw just about every Meistersinger in 30 years, and held Rafael Kubelik's 1967 Munich production with Thomas Stewart as Sachs to be supreme.

He forged a musical bond with Chancellor Helmut Schmidt, becoming his biographer. Two months before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he wrote an essay foretelling German reunification. Both the FT and Economist have published warm tributes, here and here.

As a friend, he was both giving and undemanding. In 15 years, I never experienced an awkward moment in Jonathan's company or heard an empty phrase from his lips. He was a true idealist, living to the full the values he held important and dear.

I gave him the title for his first musical biography, The Real Mahler. He delicately declined my suggestion for the second - The Wagner Gang - preferring The Wagner Clan as the more decorous option. Unmoved by reputation, he maintained a critical independence that, in its occasional severity, was always tolerant of human weakness.

Journalists are generally not the best advertisement for their vocation. Jonathan was.