Searching out lost musicals of yesteryear is rather like reading The Da Vinci Code. The long slog through banal lines and plod plotting is never rewarded by the ultimate revelation. This does not stop theatres from dusting off hits of the past, usually to pointless effect and occasionally to the point of self-implosion, as English National Opera discovered when it set Kismet in post-Saddam Baghdad. Anyone for car-bombs? Most musical theatre is, of its nature nostalgic. … [Read more...]
Out with the count
December 8, 2009 By
I was sorry to read this morning of the death of Otto, Count Lambsdorff, the former German economics minister. I met him briefly last summer at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, where he turned out, in visible discomfort, to share memories of his heady days in office. He had been summoned into government in the summer of 1977 after one of the executives at the bank he directed was kidnapped and murdered by the Baader-Meinhoff terrorist gang. He recounted the events of that … [Read more...]
Chewing up the critics
December 7, 2009 By
One lunchtime last week as I masticated a lonely calory, BBC Radio 4 announced a discussion on the role of the critic. Ears pricked and finger on the button (they usually have game shows at this time), I attended with the appropriate acuity - only to find that the lineup consisted of a non-specialist critic, a book blogger and a tenured academic. I'd heard enough in ten minutes to switch off, walk upstairs and finish a book. I'm past getting angry with the triviality of public media and … [Read more...]
Who knows best in Puccini?
November 27, 2009 By
Contrary to a slew of press reviews that called it 'trashy' and 'pointless', I found Rupert Goold's production of Turandot at English National Opera apt and often exhilarating. Goold, 37, is the latest in a parade of youngish theatre and film directors who have been hired to bring an alternative perspective and a different, younger audience into London's second opera company. The best thing he does in Turandot is shift its frame from introspect to retrospect. Before the curtain … [Read more...]
A death in Haydn Year
November 24, 2009 By
H C Robbins Landon - who did for Haydn what Alexander Wheelock Thayer, a fellow-American, once did for Beethoven - has died at his home in France, aged 83. A jovial fellow who liked to frolic naked in his pool with research assistants and guests (or so he told the press), Robbie got on the Haydn trail in Austria as an occupying US soldier and spent the rest of his life digging out manuscripts from disused monasteries and seeing them through to performance at the Musikverireinsaal and … [Read more...]
A Serious Man? You gotta be joking…
November 24, 2009 By
Grounded in Detroit on a Spirit aircraft with a cockpit problem, I got chatting to my very close row-mates, an academic humanist lawyer and an Orthodox rabbi. Both had the same topic uppermost in mind. They had just seen the Coen Brothers' movie A Serious Man and were deeply troubled both by its content and by its critical reception. The film is about a man's midlife crisis in a mainstream Jewish community in the Midwest, set in 1967 when society was on the cusp of change and … [Read more...]
Last Composer Standing – the retro edition
November 19, 2009 By
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 … [Read more...]
Unsung premiere
November 18, 2009 By
Simon Mawer's reflective novel The Glass Room, shortlisted for the Man Booker prize and one of my reads of the year, digresses midway into a sub-story about a shortlived composer. Vitezlava Kapralova, born in 1915 in Janacek's town, Brno, was a star pupil of the conductor Vaclav Talich and, in Paris, of the composer Bohuslav Martinu, whose lover she became (Martinu, though married, had two or three long-term liaisons, but that's another story). In 1937, Kapralova conducted the … [Read more...]
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