A Village Romeo and Juliet

15/09/2012
Queen Elizabeth Hall

There is a particular category of classical works where you can predict before reading them that the programme notes will claim that we are about to hear a neglected masterpiece that only some dubious circumstance of its inception has prevented from entering into the standard repertoire. Every classical listener will have their personal list of obscurities that they think should have canonic status, and there is often great pleasure derived from listeners in knowing a "secret" work which they can extoll the virtues of and claim is the equal of X repertoire piece. Aside from a few orchestral bonbons, Delius' entire oeuvre might well fit into this category for some people, with the corollory that he is that most rarified and common of phenomenons - the "neglected composer". But the tendency for commentators to either accept or reject him wholesale is not fair on him - his life's work is not a monolith and rather than focussing on his biography as a reason for his lack of presence in orchestral programmes it is an evaluation of the music as notes (or in this case, the opera as drama) that needs to be considered to arrive at a fair appraisal.

The name is a bit of a red herring - apart from the theme of forbidden love, it is similar to Romeo and Juliet only in the broadest sense. The plot can be summarised as follows: two children are forbidden from playing with each other by their overbearing fathers who have a long standing feud. The children's attraction does not diminish with time and they arrange to meet illicitly - when the girl's father discovers them together he drags her off, but he is then killed by the boy. The lovers leave home and visit a fair and are told by vagabonds to take to the road, but they refuse. Their own solution is to get in a boat and sink it.

Though there is also the character of a mysterious fiddler who repeatedly makes an appearance, his pertinance to the drama is hazy and ill defined. Indeed the entire libretto seems somewhat vestigial,  with themes only partially realised and action very limited in scope. But if the work is hardly a Tosca-esque thrill ride, it also contains very little in the way of the intellectual or poetic ideas that may sustain other works that are not overabundant in decisive events (Tristan, Capriccio and Palestrina spring instantly to mind). What is it about? What is Delius trying to show or tell us? What does he want us to feel? Of course the task of the opera composer is to illuminate the libretto through the music, but again the music seems only rarely comitted to this task, and the lack of variety to the languid perambulation of its glutinous rhapsodic beauty soon tires the ear and inures one to its charms. Most damagingly, the vocal lines are only intermittently arresting and never seem to be entirely the point, and for the first 100 minutes, by far the work's most beautiful portions are those scored for orchestra only. Though not entirely bland, the result is a curious anonymity and dullness despite Delius' highly personal idiom and indulgent harmonic ripeness, and this compounded by the lack of emotional content makes it a difficult opera to engage with. Looked at from any angle it's impossible to escape the spiritual void that is at this opera's heart.

However, just as with his Mass of Life, thankfully Delius pulls himself together for the last 10 minutes and finally delivers music of exceptional beauty, focus and clarity. The orchestral colours glow and the voices soar in a mood of ecstatic exaltation that Delius surely intended to imbue the rest of the work with. In the context of the opera it may be too little, too late, but this scene may work well as excerpted in concert.

Anna Devin's light lyric soprano seemed one size too small for the leading role of Vreli, and while never inaudible, the voice lacked the vibrancy and resonance in lower lying passages to really cut through the admittedly muddy orchestral textures. I've liked her very much in the past, and she's still very young though so has plenty of time to work on these things - it's just not the right voice yet for full lyric parts. Joshua Ellicott was pleasing as her lover Sali, his well controlled and dynamically nuanced lyric tenor making the very most of his music's scant opportunities for displaying any sort of line or drama. Best of all was David Wilson-Johnson as The Dark Fiddler, whose rich, fruity timbre, and excellent diction made rather more of this fairly minor part than one might expect. Worrying signs of an incipient wobble have crept into Christopher Maltman's voice, though if nothing else he was impressively loud as the unsubtle character of Manz. The virtually identical character of Marti (who might just be labelled "Overbearing father no.2") was similarly acceptably sung by Andrew Shore. The myriad small roles were well taken by the youthful supporting cast.

Ronald Corp lead a committed reading of the score, and allowed the final scene to move and resonate as it should. Though he kept things moving nicely, more could have been done however to clarify the thick orchestrations and greater dynamic contrasts might have helped enliven the rather limited harmonic pallette. The London Chorus struggled with Delius' complex chromatic harmony, and didn't ever quite manage to bring it fully into focus. The New London Orchestra seemed more comfortable, though brighter, more incisive playing from all might have made things more lively.

It is only through occasionally resurrecting these rareties that we can come to a fairer picture of what we might be missing. Not every resurrection will be worthwhile, but The New London Orchestra and Ronald Corp's pioneering spirit is to be fully commended and one hopes that they might go onto to perform more obscurities in coming seasons.

A Mass of Life at the Edinburgh Festival

11/08/2012

Delius' A Mass of Life is squarely in that category of grandiose gargantuanism that was clearly a big fascination for British composers at the beginning of the English musical renaissance around the turn of the century. The twin predecessors of this category of titanic works are clear: first the German line - Bach's Masses and Passions, Beethoven's Choral Symphony, Brahms' Requiem, Wagner, Bruckner, Mahler 8, Gurrelieder - proving that, talent permitting, works of this ambition and scale were a real possibility, and then early English examples emulating this line (Parry, Stanford) with Elgar at the peak with his masterpiece The Dream of Gerontius (1900), which cements the idea of the Big Choral Work as something achievable by English composers, followed by the comparatively disappointing and only intermittently inspired The Apostles (1903) and The Kingdom (1906), which were to have been two parts of an enormous trilogy.

The proliferance of works of this sort in England also derived from the will and means to perform them - the grand old tradition of the choral society as the cornerstone of British musical life even before it had major composers. A Mass of Life came early (1905) and is therefore particularly significant historically, but other works in this line include Vaughan Williams' Sea Symphony (1909), Foulds' A World Requiem (1921), Brian's Gothic Symphony (1927) (though his Symphonies No. 2, 3 and 4 are all in this category too), in this company the relatively modest Belshazzar's Feast (1931), with later offerings from Howells (Hymnus Paradisi (1938), his masterpiece, then the larger but lesser Stabat Mater (1965) and thrusting Missa Sabrinensis (1954)), Finzi (Intimations of Immortality (1950)) and Britten (War Requiem (1962)).

Like most of these works, Delius' A Mass of Life isn't quite able to fully support its massive bulk as he lacks the technical musculature or the instinctive drive for the task. Its date puts it near the beginning of his maturity where he's still discovering what he can do and as such the work has stronger and weaker portions. At this stage his orchestration lacks the clear water colour luminosity of his prime, and things tend to get muddy, turgid, undifferentiated, (especially in live performance) until the quieter portions which occasionally hint at the dreamy atmosphere of his later works. Not just the orchestration though is responsible for this aural confusion- the slithering chromatic harmony lacks direction and pulse and is choked by its own complexity, though distinctive Delian drooping phrases do occasionally rear their head, as lines wilt and billow ever downwards and outwards.

It turns out that the work's finest portion by some margin, was actually composed first: the two final numbers Gottes Weh ist tiefer and Kommt Lasst uns jetzt wandeln were actually premiered separately in a slightly different form in 1899 - only here does Delius achieve the Wagnerian gravitas and Mahlerian intensity that the whole work so obviously aims at, in music of very special beauty. The rest of the piece reaches for the ecstatic and visionary tenor of the text, but feels overwrought and unremitting, impressive though the massed forces and huge choral outbursts can be. The selection of texts, all excerpted from Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra, sensibly eschew the more overtly philosophical tracts in favour of the more poetic portions of that book, though word setting rarely seems specific enough beyond communicating the general febrile fervour of the text.

No one could accuse the performance of lacking commitment or betraying a lack of belief in the work however - Andrew Davis lead a performance that was ceaselessly energetic and driven, though he ultimately failed to clarify the work's opacity or imbue it with more personality. The bolstered Edinbrugh Festival Chorus did extremely well in a very demanding sing, sounding magnificently full and fiery in the opening chorus, though the relentlessly high writing for the sopranos took its toll on the tuning in the final half hour of the piece.

The work also employs four soloists, of which the baritone has by far the lion's share of the material. Hanno Müller-Brachmann was truly magnificent in this part, singing with a flawless diction, a beautifully lightly coloured lyric line, and rising to Wagnerian climaxes which never sounded laboured or pressured. He's a singer very clearly in the line of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, and his sound and approach invite instant comparison without Müller-Brachmann coming off badly in any way. The aforementioned final section was exquisitely sung and one can only hope that he will be engaged by the ROH for some Wagner or Mozart in the very near future.

The other soloists all sang well even if they lacked the special timbre and clarity of Müller-Brachmann. Anna Christy has a light, rather tweety voice, with an intense vibrato that makes her soprano a little edgy rather than silvery. Still, she sung her small parts with a nice legato and excellent intonation. Tenor Robert Murray sounded fresh and well matched to the baritone, but Pamela Helen Stephen, whose acting I so admired in the recent ROH Troyens, seemed a little out of sorts, with a lack of connection between notes and sounding slightly stressed and pushed in higher lying passages. Diction and tuning were very good however and there wasn't a question of not being able to sing it.

It's always interesting to see these behemoths in the concert hall because they are so rarely done - inevitably there will be disappointments, but Müller-Brachmann's singing and wonderful music of the last quarter hour of the work made it all worth while.

BBCSO with John Storgårds and Truls Mørk

20/04/2012

Very interesting programme, and I'm a fan of Truls Mørk so I couldn't resist. I now cannot wait for the Delius opera that they played an excerpt from, which is being done in concert at the Royal Festival Hall in September apparently.

I reviewed it for Bachtrack. Read it here:
http://www.bachtrack.com/review-bbc-symphony-barbican-storgards-mork-rautavaara-sibelius

Here's a preview:

Finnish cellist Truls Mørk then joined the stage for the UK premiere of Rautavaara's second Cello Concerto "Towards the Horizon". Like the broadly neo-romantic first cello concerto of 1968 the new concerto open with the cello intoning dramatic double stops, though here the orchestra is involved from the beginning and the tone is darker, more intense, more angst ridden. It's a very lyrical work, with dense string clusters adding a hazy romance to its darkly brooding melodies, but overall it cant quite sustain its duration, with faster episodes particularly flagging in inspiration. There is however a very arresting cantilena for the cello in its highest register which comes back repeatedly, perhaps the works' strongest idea, clearly influenced by Tavener's The Protecting Veil but without that piece's extraordinary individuality of tone.