Know-all, pontificating, self-aggrandizing, self-appointed critics are the sort I do not like. I also occasionally write reviews, but they are based on how deeply my intellect, my emotions and my experience gathered in a long lifetime in opera, and music in general, are engaged.
I have deep respect even for performers who do not impress me sufficiently, and I would hate to treat them with the contemptuous nonchalance of some of the professional critics. They write about great performers as if they were the prosecution, judge and jury rolled into one supreme authority.
I heard Di Stefano, then at the height of his career, mercilessly booed in the Scala because he slipped on a notoriously difficult passage. Some critics almost hope for something to go wrong, for the opportunity to pontificate on the minor mishaps that can befall even truly great performers, or to speculate how their best years are already behind them.
If I were to write about Bryn Terfel as Mephisto, I would not say how much better Chaliapin sang the role, although I heard and admired his hamming in his favourite role in the late 1920s.
Great performers are great in their own right - which is not to say that sensible, considered criticism of them does not have its place, but I would rather they were not considered as X-Factor fodder.
Monday, 28 February 2011
Sunday, 27 February 2011
Some comments about the recent Tannhäuser at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Although I have spent, throughout my long life, a very considerable effort to learn all I could about Wagner (I have been to Bayreuth six times, once at the invitation of Herr Wolfgang and have even met Gottfried Wagner who disagreed strongly with my meek suggestion that Wagner would have had some trouble with Goebbels), a most well-informed article by Tim Ashley in the Guardian about Tannhäuser taught me a great deal. Freud was enthusiastic about Wagner and spent hours with Mahler talking about their mutual addiction. My late brother happened to be the doyen of the Hungarian psychoanalytical movement and his last work, which was not completed, would have been an analysis of the Ring protagonists.
I considered last December’s ROH Tannhäuser, from the points of view of orchestra, conductor, chorus and much of the singing, and the particularly fine and striking performance of Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram, up to the now, usual, high ROH standard. On the other hand, I found the staging, lighting, costumes, set design and the entire – in my view, fatuous “Regietheater” concept, appalling, and kept my eyes closed most of the time so as not to get too upset.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the superb orchestral performance under Semyon Bychkov and the exceptionally fine and striking singing of Gerhaher, I found Johan Botha’s performance, for all his vocal splendour, rather wooden. His passionate and deeply studied, but stationary and rather uninvolved performance, appearing to use every opportunity to sit on the chairs thoughtfully spread around the stage, would have been more impressive in a concert performance.
As Andrew Clements in his review rightly observed, much of the singing was addressed to the audience. This came from the two acoustically favoured corners of the stage, (from conveniently placed chairs). The alternative could have been the presentation of dramatic encounters between fundamentally differing characters.
For my taste, the inept and often appalling direction, stage "design", costumes, lighting – in short, the entire concept, reminiscent of a performance of Katja Kabanová in Novosibirsk, cancelled out my pleasurable anticipation of hearing this wonderful, last romantic Weberian scream, in a production not having to rely on the legacy of Ruth Berghaus to make it a self-seeking, Regietheater plaything. I was expecting a fearless presentation of the opera as it was meant to have been performed, with all its clumsiness and yet heroic stature and scenic splendour!
As for the Venusberg scene being so "sexy", by the way, it made me think of an extended gym session at a secondary school in the said Novosibirsk, with the girls, instead of undressing to tempt Tannhäuser, cavorting in their underwear on an enormous white table, offering no more suggestion to a somewhat bored Botha, sitting brooding on the only furniture offered for more sexually explicit exploits, than a chair borrowed from the ROH’s own Hamlyn Hall bar. These chairs and 34 endlessly and individually lit candles were the only items to evoke the glory of the radiant and noble Hall that Elisabeth was supposed to greet with rapture.
The protagonists were dressed in dinner jackets, some with machetes dangling at their sides. Chorus members, dressed as early 20th Century kitchen porters or members of the cleaning staff of a village near Munkacevo, carried Kalashnikovs. The Markgraf seemed to be dressed as a 19th Century Premysl horse trader. All this, submerged in a mercilessly and continuously underlit dark stage, in which one could hardly make out who was singing, contributed to an almost constant urge for me to close my eyes and just drink in those superb and inspiring cadences that Wagner, even at a relatively early stage in his career could conjure up.
Please give us opera as it was presented only a few days earlier in a superb and enchanting production of Adriana Lecouvreur - without machetes and Kalashnikovs.
I considered last December’s ROH Tannhäuser, from the points of view of orchestra, conductor, chorus and much of the singing, and the particularly fine and striking performance of Christian Gerhaher as Wolfram, up to the now, usual, high ROH standard. On the other hand, I found the staging, lighting, costumes, set design and the entire – in my view, fatuous “Regietheater” concept, appalling, and kept my eyes closed most of the time so as not to get too upset.
While I thoroughly enjoyed the superb orchestral performance under Semyon Bychkov and the exceptionally fine and striking singing of Gerhaher, I found Johan Botha’s performance, for all his vocal splendour, rather wooden. His passionate and deeply studied, but stationary and rather uninvolved performance, appearing to use every opportunity to sit on the chairs thoughtfully spread around the stage, would have been more impressive in a concert performance.
As Andrew Clements in his review rightly observed, much of the singing was addressed to the audience. This came from the two acoustically favoured corners of the stage, (from conveniently placed chairs). The alternative could have been the presentation of dramatic encounters between fundamentally differing characters.
For my taste, the inept and often appalling direction, stage "design", costumes, lighting – in short, the entire concept, reminiscent of a performance of Katja Kabanová in Novosibirsk, cancelled out my pleasurable anticipation of hearing this wonderful, last romantic Weberian scream, in a production not having to rely on the legacy of Ruth Berghaus to make it a self-seeking, Regietheater plaything. I was expecting a fearless presentation of the opera as it was meant to have been performed, with all its clumsiness and yet heroic stature and scenic splendour!
As for the Venusberg scene being so "sexy", by the way, it made me think of an extended gym session at a secondary school in the said Novosibirsk, with the girls, instead of undressing to tempt Tannhäuser, cavorting in their underwear on an enormous white table, offering no more suggestion to a somewhat bored Botha, sitting brooding on the only furniture offered for more sexually explicit exploits, than a chair borrowed from the ROH’s own Hamlyn Hall bar. These chairs and 34 endlessly and individually lit candles were the only items to evoke the glory of the radiant and noble Hall that Elisabeth was supposed to greet with rapture.
The protagonists were dressed in dinner jackets, some with machetes dangling at their sides. Chorus members, dressed as early 20th Century kitchen porters or members of the cleaning staff of a village near Munkacevo, carried Kalashnikovs. The Markgraf seemed to be dressed as a 19th Century Premysl horse trader. All this, submerged in a mercilessly and continuously underlit dark stage, in which one could hardly make out who was singing, contributed to an almost constant urge for me to close my eyes and just drink in those superb and inspiring cadences that Wagner, even at a relatively early stage in his career could conjure up.
Please give us opera as it was presented only a few days earlier in a superb and enchanting production of Adriana Lecouvreur - without machetes and Kalashnikovs.
Sunday, 6 February 2011
The Queen's English
When I left the country of my birth, my spoken English was still at the "I was - you was" level. Self-respect, determination, my service in the Forces and, chiefly, the BBC, helped me to make English my first language in speaking, writing, reading, dreaming, counting and just living.
I long for the now forgotten days, when Lord Reith was the first Director General of the BBC. Its supreme task was to educate. Under his iron rule, news-readers had to don dinner-jackets and speak with a uniform, well modulated, distinctively clear and careful pronunciation: The Queen's English... To talk like that these days is food for vulgar comedians.
After a lifetime trying to live up to these standards, I still have an ineradicable foreign accent. Spending a major part of my waking hours listening to BBC Radio, LBC chat-shows, to BBC TV, ITV and Channel 4 broadcasts, I am therefore even more appalled to witness an ever growing contempt for the English language that I consider and cherish as my greatest intellectual treasure.
Do you also cringe when you hear, now at all levels of social class, those awful, sloppy, uncaring (and sometimes affected) accents, pronunciation nothing to do with genuine dialects and the ever-returning meaningless filler phrases like "You know - You know what I mean - Yeah - I'm good - Sort of - Kind of - Effing This, Effing That...”?
Only recently, all of the eminent scientists and even the presenter in an otherwise interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 again and again embellished their contributions with a shower of "Sort of" and "Kind of" fillers.
I feel as if I were sitting on a bench, reading my newspaper, and above scores of sparrows and pigeons aim their droppings at my head... I wish the gaunt ghost of Lord Reith would still haunt the executive corridors of Broadcasting House.
And as for the standards of spoken and written English, displayed by school-children, school-leavers, and even students in higher education and at university, in broadcasts and in general in shops, offices and on public transport, I wonder just what was the response to Tony Blair's "Education, Education, Education" mantra.
I know that as a B.F. to the end of my life I have little right to complain, but what are blogs for if not for irritating the natives?
I long for the now forgotten days, when Lord Reith was the first Director General of the BBC. Its supreme task was to educate. Under his iron rule, news-readers had to don dinner-jackets and speak with a uniform, well modulated, distinctively clear and careful pronunciation: The Queen's English... To talk like that these days is food for vulgar comedians.
After a lifetime trying to live up to these standards, I still have an ineradicable foreign accent. Spending a major part of my waking hours listening to BBC Radio, LBC chat-shows, to BBC TV, ITV and Channel 4 broadcasts, I am therefore even more appalled to witness an ever growing contempt for the English language that I consider and cherish as my greatest intellectual treasure.
Do you also cringe when you hear, now at all levels of social class, those awful, sloppy, uncaring (and sometimes affected) accents, pronunciation nothing to do with genuine dialects and the ever-returning meaningless filler phrases like "You know - You know what I mean - Yeah - I'm good - Sort of - Kind of - Effing This, Effing That...”?
Only recently, all of the eminent scientists and even the presenter in an otherwise interesting discussion on BBC Radio 4 again and again embellished their contributions with a shower of "Sort of" and "Kind of" fillers.
I feel as if I were sitting on a bench, reading my newspaper, and above scores of sparrows and pigeons aim their droppings at my head... I wish the gaunt ghost of Lord Reith would still haunt the executive corridors of Broadcasting House.
And as for the standards of spoken and written English, displayed by school-children, school-leavers, and even students in higher education and at university, in broadcasts and in general in shops, offices and on public transport, I wonder just what was the response to Tony Blair's "Education, Education, Education" mantra.
I know that as a B.F. to the end of my life I have little right to complain, but what are blogs for if not for irritating the natives?
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