Tuesday, 27 November 2007

A really good Screw

Purely in the spirit of research, you understand, I went to see some Britten last night: the opening night of ENO's Turn of the Screw, accompanied by Nathalie, who was quickest off the mark in snapping up my free spare ticket that I announced at last Thursday's rehearsal.

And there's good news. After a succession of turkeys from ENO recently (Carmen, Poppea) that should have been culled swifter than an H5N1-infested gaggle at a Bernard Matthews factory, their Turn of the Screw is absolutely brilliant.

I won't say too much more here until my review goes up on the Sky Arts website, but do go and see it. It's really heartening to see ENO back on top form. Unlike the tepid, polite spatter of applause that greeted Carmen or Poppea, this got a thoroughly deserved rainstorm of appreciation, particularly for Rebecca Evans (the Governess), who tackled a tough role with outstanding style and musicality, especially in the second half. (The kids were irritatingly good, too.)

It was interesting to listen to this - a work I knew vaguely from CD but not from live - with Grimes, whose music we all, ahem, know inside out now. Obviously the same composer: some startling linear and harmonic similarities - when the kids start singing in Screw, it's clearly almost-the-the same music as the Nieces from the storm scene in Grimes. And the same overarching themes of emotional claustrophobia, innate evil, suspicion, dark goings-on, and of course absolutely no warmth or good old-fashioned romantic love and still less any shagging. It hardly suggests all was comfy in Ben's head: I hope he got a kiss and cuddle and felt guilt-free and good about physical love on at least some occasions.

It was full, too. Just behind us in the audience was Alice Coote (who was Carmen in the Carmen I slammed). Luckily everything I'd said to Nat about AC while we were waiting for curtain-up was complimentary.

Sunday, 25 November 2007

A titanic struggle

Omigod. Only three rehearsals left before Christmas, following another limp performance on Thursday, and then we'll start on the staging. With the parts all committed to memory, oh yes. Just as securely and reliably as HMRC's data protection policy.

Well, we've been here before. At this stage last year in Carmen, if anything, things were worse, but there's a LOT more music in Grimes, and it ain't the sort you can busk your way through. Will it still go ahead? Well, it has to, because Tim has signed away all of Goldsmiths' performance budget for the next ten years - no, actually it's more than fifty quid - on the notoriously pricey orchestral parts. So we're committed now.

Our performance is 'good in parts' now, but so was the Titanic's. We're also suffering from the prevailing absence of many principals from rehearsals: no Mario/Grimes yet, hardly any Hamish/Balstrode, only sometimes an Abi/Ellen. Not their fault, they have full time jobs - Mario is doing what surgeons do, ie wielding a knife and forceps on voodoo dolls of account managers; Abigail is a nurse, so is used to being surrounded by bewildered people who've just been told if they don't change their lifestyle they have six months to live. Not sure what Hamish does but it's something of good to the community and I suspect he works harder than John Arne Riise (the over-paid and over-here Liverpool footy player whose payslip famously appeared on the Internet recently) and for less money.

I've made all the rehearsals so far, but luckily I don't have to work. I am employed full-time at the British Library.*

And as for how well I'm doing, er, what's for dinner love, see England have dropped down the FIFA rankings, oh look, there's a fox over there.

Can't really say if I'm optimistic or pessimistic about the production so far. As Chou Enlai is supposed to have said in the 1950s when questioned about the effects on history of the French revolution, it's too early to tell. I feel like a seasick-prone passenger about to embark on a long sea voyage: we'll get there, it might just be a long, long slog with a lot of ups and downs.

Unless we go by that Antarctic cruise ship that sank after hitting the ice of course. At least everyone got rescued. But let's not mention the Titanic again.


Wednesday, 7 November 2007

Stick it up your fundamentalism

Never mind counting sheep: Peter Grimes is a much better aid to sleep. Count all those missed beats jumping over the barline.

As I was doing this last night, it struck me how much the plot is Old Testament versus New. Bob Boles is a real Old fundamentalist, banging on about revenge; Ellen Orford is New Testament, talking forgiveness. She is educated (a teacher), reasonable, compassionate.

But, as we know, it's Boles, preaching fire and brimstone from his soapbox outside after the regular Sunday service, who fires up the crowd. They hound Grimes to suicide, and even Balstrode - hitherto a mediating, understanding and wise voice - turns against him. In that chilling section of spoken dialogue near the end, it is he who tells Grimes to sail out and sink his boat. The Old Testament world of vengeance, ignorance and mob rule wins out.

The parallels with today's fears of fundamentalism are pretty clear: it doesn't take a genius to equate Boles with the radical imam preaching to the disaffected young men outside the mosque.

But that, to me, raises a point about staging. If you spot such a parallel, do you then stampede into an updated production, moving The Borough to modern-day Iran or Afghanistan, making the church a mosque, Sunday Friday, and switching all Christian references to Islamic ones?

Well, maybe someone might; they've done worse, as anyone at the recent ENO Poppea, set in an aquarium or something, can tell you. But such updating sounds pointless to me, and not only because the clammy, foggy claustrophobia of Britten's fabulous music perfectly describes Suffolk but is less evocative of palm trees and deserts. Because to me, the whole point is that I, in the audience, make those connections for myself. Someone else might be put in mind of fundamentalist Christian communities in neo-con midwest US; others might make parallels with minority persecution on different grounds.

(Which makes me think of a mucky joke whose tag line answers the question 'on what grounds' with 'Hampstead Heath and Clapham Common, your honour', but the margin is not big enough to contain it here.)

Sadly, there are any number of types of witch-hunt that the Grimes putsch might suggest. But that, I'll say again, is why opera can be so powerful. To me the best option is usually to stick to the original staging and time. Then everyone can make the internal connections for themselves, without some clever director forcing us to see it their way. Boles is a hypocritic fundamentalist, a demagogue who takes the mob that follow him like sheep. That's not about religion, that's about human society and how easily it can be derailed. it's not a specific: it's a universal.

Good, that's sorted that one out. Be suspicious of updated operas. Now, time to get some sleep. Back to counting those sheep...

Friday, 2 November 2007

Mob rule

By the end of yesterday's rehearsal we had finished our first sweep of the score. Hmm. 'Sweep' uncomfortably makes me think of Sooty's sidekick, who could only make staccato squeaks now and then. 'First pass through the score': that's better.

It's still all very fragmentary, and the clock is ticking. Next week is Reading Week (incidentally, have you ever met anyone who was actually born in Reading?) so there's no rehearsal, so we have in essence two weeks to learn this music, with all its tricky entries, odd spacings and absolutely wonderful expressive, atmospheric power. Because on the next sw... sorry, pass, through the score, we'll have to do a bit more than just nod our heads in time with Tim's piano.

After the rehearsal my friend Xenia, who's in the chorus, came up to me.

"What is Peter Grimes about?", she asked.

"Well," I replied, "it's about two hours 45 minutes, or if it's our orchestra doing the second interlude, perhaps nearer three."

OK, so I then gave her a proper synopsis: loner fisherman has apprentice die in fishy circumstances, village turns against him, fisherman manages to lose second apprentice in accident, goes mad, villagers hound him to suicide, his only friend Ellen Orford unhappy accessory to crime.

I fell to thinking, yet again, of parallels between Britten and Shostakovich. Britten said that Peter Grimes is about "a subject very close to my heart — the struggle of the individual against the masses. The more vicious the society, the more vicious the individual". Shostakovich must have nodded in glum sympathy.

It's interesting that in the years following 1945, just as Grimes was playing to packed houses and being recognised as the first great English opera since - no, the first great English opera, and still the greatest - Shostakovich was embarking on his extraordinary 'middle period'. The two weren't to meet until 1960, but already they were explorers in similar territory.

Such Shostakovich works as the Violin Concerto No. 1 and the Symphony No. 10 are huge, dark, powerful, tragic works which seem exactly about the 'struggle of the individual against the masses'. The individual in the concerto is clearly the violinist, goaded and harassed by the jeering crowds in the second movement into a frantic display of resistant complicity. In the symphony the individual is signified by Shostakovich's musical signature D-E flat-C-B in the third movement, defiant against the baying brass and jabbering strings of the orchestra-mob.

And what could be more vicious than the Tenth's 'portrait of Stalin' in the second movement? It's surely no coincidence that the Concerto features a Grimes-like Passacaglia in its third movement, one of the most transparently haunting elegies for violin and orchestra ever written (and note how the cor anglais imitates the violin at one point, as if echoing its tragic tale).

So, a handy hint to all Grimes Goldies: spend the Reading Week listening to Shostakovich. Then, when we do that scary military-march to the tattoo of Jim Hobson's drum, you'll know all about baying mobs, out for blood, an eye for an eye.

And if no Shostakovich is to hand, then just read the tabloids' latest DNA revelation about the McCanns, or watch Jeremy Kyle. The spirit of the Borough is still alive and well.

Thursday, 1 November 2007

When Britten met Shostakovich

There's some interesting stuff about the links between Shostakovich and Britten in a blog posting by a US music journo called Marc Geelhoed.

(He's actually reviewing a new book called The Rest is Noise, which sounds fab, but being skint I'm obviously going to get the Barbican Library to order it for me.)

A parallel is drawn between the desolate soundworlds of Shostakovich (such as in the Quartet No. 8) and of Britten (such as in the final mad scene of Grimes, where Peter loses it completely). In particular, it's the obsessive woe-is-me repetition that interests him of, on the one hand, Shostakovich's D-E flat-C-B signature, and on the other, Grimes belting out his own name.

Grimes hounded by the slow-witted, suspicious inbreds of the Borough, Shostakovich by the Party: it's a telling comparison. The Quartet was written in 1960, 15 years after Grimes, which Shostakovich must have known well - he was a fan of Britten and became an acquaintance. Shostakovich was being pressurised to join the Communist party, something he'd avoided up till then; but, for reasons still unclear, he succumbed. Letters to his friend Glikman suggest that he was suicidal, and that the Quartet was some sort of suicide note - hence the saturation with DSCH. Grimes, of course, does end up killing himself.

And there are other bits in Grimes that sound very Shostakovich-like. The dark tragedy of the Passacaglia foreshadows that of the Passacaglia in Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1, written two years later. The very opening bars, with parping woodwind that usher the court into session, have typical early Shostakovich characteristics of odd, sideways harmonic shifting and skippy, jerky rhythms. Many of the bustling big orchestral stampedes - 'Grimes is at his exercise' for example - recall the Shostakovich juggernaut.

But it's the bleakness that's most telling. Most of Grimes is pretty bleak: grey shapes that appear out of the musical mist like ghosts, such as in the first Interlude, which provides the background for Act I. You can see where the opening of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 14, dedicated to Britten, comes from.

Both were master orchestrators, impeccable craftsmen, and geniuses who could push the aural envelope just far enough to make great, original music that still appeals to the normal listener. When I say 'normal listener', I obviously mean me.

And they did become friends. Shostakovich managed to come over to England in 1966 for the World Cup - he was a big footy fan - and had even learned some English. I have the irresistible image of these two great composers meeting up that year (they'd first met in 1960), and only one wanting to talk about football (I don't know that Britten was a fan of sport - there are references to him playing school cricket though):

BB: Dmitri Dmitrievich! Very nice to see you!
DS: Ah! Benjamin Robertovich! Khello! Khello! Pleased for see you! Tell me, what you think of manager A. Ramsey drop Greaves from team?
BB: Er, well, I don't really follow football, I'm afraid. I wanted to ask you about your Thirteenth Sym...
DS: Why England not play weenger? What team is Hurst? Is West Kham? Very unusual, two foot player. Shoot right foot, shoot left foot. Also, can khead ball. Need such player in Russian team.
BB: Um, yes. Now, I was talking to Slava the other day about your second cello concerto, and...
DS: And Bobby Moore! Best player midfield in world! He hev... he hev... ah, what is word... (to interpreter) Splyoozhy khoozhy blatchka natchka pleetky neetky?... ah, kharasho... (to BB) Ah! Veesion! Veesion! He hev veesion! Also Bobby Charlton, Martin Peters, Gordon Banks... (etc)

Time to go to rehearsal, I think.