Review of English Touring Opera's The Silver Lake at Buxton Opera House

Premiered in 1933, The Silver Lake was the last theatre work Kurt Weill completed before being forced out of Germany by the Nazis. His collaborator was Georg Kaiser, a gifted playwright who was very successful in the Weimar Republic era, and it’s altogether a more poetic and fanciful creation than most of his work with Berthold Brecht.

The fast-moving succession of scenes (with a narrator to make sure you don’t miss anything) nonetheless convey a clear social message. It begins with the poor and hungry queuing for inadequate handouts because they can’t afford the food shops’ prices, and quickly points out that this is because capitalism dictates that prices must remain high, even if the food itself is getting thrown away to ensure that demand outstrips supply.

A crowd bursts into a shop and loots it, but the character on whom we focus, Severin, takes just one rare thing: a pineapple. He’s shot in the leg by policeman Olim, who’s racked by guilt but tells himself he can’t afford to help him – until he wins the lottery and becomes a rich man.

He takes Severin into the castle he has now acquired and seeks to make amends, but the two of them, once reconciled, are cheated out of their property by their housekeeper, a survivor of the old nobility (with help from her baronial friend). They are dispossessed and head for the land where justice reigns, across the Silver Lake which miraculously freezes over to grant them passage.

This was enough to ensure the Nazis got the show closed after two weeks, and Weill was soon on his way out of the country.

The piece is subtitled ‘A Winter’s Tale’, and in some ways is a fairy story. With spoken dialogue and narration, it’s in the ‘Singspiel’ tradition (the German equivalent of a musical), like The Magic Flute – and Weill’s rich and multi-coloured score, requiring an  opera-quality chorus and using some of Mozart’s devices, too (such as a chorale with a walking bass, for the final journey) is a many-splendoured thing.

English Touring Opera’s artistic boss, James Conway, is the director, and Kurt Weill expert James Holmes (well known to Opera North devotees) conducts. Such resources as ETO has to throw at a project are visible here, with quite an elaborate set by James Wiltshire, including screen projection, and the stage is peopled, in addition to its 14 credited singers, with members of Streetwise Opera’s groups involving homeless people.

The narration and spoken dialogue are in English, and Conway and Holmes have put the choral numbers into English, too, but the solo ones are in the original German … a bit odd, that seems; but with English surtitles for both on display, both electronically and in placards held up by the cast from time to time, we don’t miss a thing.

ETO have done a great job with this rarity and should be congratulated. There’s a quality line-up of principals, with Ronald Samm as Olim, David Webb as Severin, Clarissa Meek as the nasty housekeeper Frau von Luber and Luci Briginshaw as her poor relation Fennimore, and Bernadatte Iglich takes credit as both choreographer (yes, there’s dancing in it, too) and narrator.

Ronald Samm as Olim in English Touring Opera's The Silver Lake c Richard Hubert Smith

Review of English Touring Opera's The Seraglio at Buxton Opera House

This is the piece of which Emperor Josef II reportedly said there were ‘too many notes’ – at least as represented in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus.

What he actually said should probably be translated as ‘an awful lot of notes’, or ‘a vast amount of music’, which is pretty accurate. It’s a story where very little happens but there are wonderful things in the score.

Josef might have been disappointed in the lack of action. He was much more keen on ‘Singspiel’ (a play with music, the 18^th century equivalent of light opera or musicals, which is what this is) than all-sung opera, with its elaborate ensemble numbers and reflective arias.

The story is almost a cliché of its time: hero seeks and must set free a beautiful girl held captive by a big, bad villain. Except here there are two heroes and two pretty girls – the noble Belmonte and his sidekick Pedrillo, seeking lost loves Konstanze and Blonde, respectively, both held in the harem of Pasha Selim (who rather fancies adding Konstanze to his collection of wives) and guarded by Osmin (with similar designs on Blonde).

The ‘abduction’, or escape attempt, comes unstuck, but it turns out that the Muslim Selim has a bigger concept of honour and mercy than the European and therefore ‘Christian’ would-be escapees, and he finally sets them free anyway.

There’s room for fun along the way in presenting the story, which director Stephen Medcalf and his cast do in near-pantomimic style, and which the audience (witnessing it in English and with English surtitles on screen just in case they’re hard of hearing) much enjoy.

And in that multitude of notes, Mozart supplies plenty of lovely music and not a few operatic ensemble pieces. In fact, the major part of the second Act (broken here with the interval at the point where Pedrillo is about to get Osmin drunk) consists simply of two arias by Blonde framing a central section made up of two by Konstanze.

It’s at this point we realize that one of the concepts brought to the piece by Medcalf and designer Adam Wiltshire is that the harem is a collection of caged songbirds: it’s represented by two metal frameworks, closed at the top, and with mirrors to make the modest number of human resources available to English Touring Opera (just two additional girls and two guys) represent a crowd.

That’s one side of a two-part set placed on a central revolve, which does its job very well. The need to get eight voices on stage for choruses brings the occasional incongruity (near the beginning Pedrillo, having said he’ll ‘quickly hide’, comes right back on to sing in one of them), but it’s a price you pay for opera on this scale.

The principals do a fine job: Richard Pinkstone (Pedrillo) is a strong singer with a good comic gift, and John-Colyn Gyeantey brings tenderness to his tenor role; Matthew Stiff (Osmin) reaches for the low notes effectively. The girls (Lucy Hall as Konstanze and Nazan Fikret as Blonde) are very good, especially once warmed up for that feast of vocal art in the second Act. Alex Andreou delivers the spoken role of Pasha Selim with studied gravity.

And John Andrews’ conducting gives us pleasant variety of tempo and generous helpings of ‘Turkish’ colour from the pit.

English Touring Opera's The Seraglio c Jane Hobson

Review: the Hallé in Berlioz' Roméo et Juliette, Bridgewater Hall

Without Sir Mark Elder, and without Alice Coote and Paul Nilon, the originally advertised mezzo and tenor soloists, the Hallé performance of Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette was still a magnificent undertaking and magnificently accomplished.

Julie Boulianne, the French-Canadian mezzo who sang Marguerite for Glyndebourne’s The Damnation of Faust and Mary for the Hallé’s Proms performance of The Childhood of Christ in the summer, became Juliette and the widely experienced tenor Yann Beuron her Roméo: Laurent Naouri took the bass-baritone role of Friar Lawrence as advertised.

And Ludovic Morlot stepped in as maestro. It’s a strange and sprawling work, almost proto-Wagnerian in its combination of programme-symphony and quasi-opera (Berlioz called it a ‘dramatic symphony’), and the dramatic element in it is the key to its successful realization.

What came across most impressively in this performance was the quality of the preparation done by the ‘home’ teams of Hallé Choir, Royal Northern College of Music Chamber Choir and orchestra, as much as that of the invited soloists.

Berlioz chose the human resources for this creation just as he wanted – no more and no less. Four harps, four bassoons, a prominent role for the cor anglais, multiple percussion and an ophicleide distinguish the colours of the orchestra; the choral music is sung by a three-voice semi-chorus (alto, tenor, bass) in which the women are distinctly a minority – giving many of the sounds a darkened hue appropriate to the tragedy unfolded.

Yet as the music begins the strings are in spirited mood, lending the representation of internecine strife on the streets of Verona a near-jolly aspect. The opening narrative introduction to the story (told by semi-chorus and soloists in a completely original recitative style) has a kind of bardic accompaniment for the harps and six harmonious cellos, which lends the flavour of times long ago. And the Capulets’ ball gets going at considerable length, with distant-sounding percussion, as if we’re eavesdropping on events playing out off-stage, almost in real time.

The large chorus take no part in proceedings until Juliette is unconscious, and seem to represent members of the two warring factions – for this performance the Hallé Choir entered colour-coded in red and green sashes, to underline the point. Ultimately, despite trying to argue with Friar Lawrence’s plea for reconciliation, they agree he’s got a point and, joined by the other singers, finally hail the virtue of forgiveness and vow to be ‘Amis!’ in future.

The weakness of its presentation of the story lies in the words of the verbal sections, which are nothing like Shakespeare’s and at time effusive to a degree, and musically Berlioz’ attempt at a programme-symphony is a compromise between formal structures (an expositional opening, a slow-movement love scene, the often-extracted ‘Queen Mab Scherzo, based on a single phrase from the play), and the need to be theatrical.

To his enormous credit, Ludovic Morlot moved it all along smartly, obtained some gorgeous playing from the orchestra and pumped up the tension in the Finale, when it could so easily have seriously sagged.

Congratulations to all on a considerable achievement, one of those that have been the highlights of Hallé seasons in Manchester for many years past, and hopefully will be for many years to come.

Ludovic Morlot c Chris Lee

BBC Philharmonic with John Wilson and Alexander Gavrylyuk at the Bridgewater Hall

The BBC Philharmonic’s Bridgewater Hall season got off to a charming and challenging start with John Wilson on the podium and Alexander Gavrylyuk playing Prokoviev’s third piano concerto.

John Wilson’s been visiting Manchester for a number of years, and his trademark championing of ‘light orchestral’ music of the mid-20^th century, sometimes considered infra dig by high-minded programmers, made itself apparent in the last piece we heard – Eric Coates’ Dancing Nights. It’s in the series brochure as an item in the concert, but the programme booklet on the night omitted it, leaving Wilson to add it as an encore and explain to the audience that he’s recording Coates with the Phil at the moment and hopes we’ll all buy the CD when it’s out in December.

He had something much weightier to offer before that in the shape of Walton’s first symphony. British music is one of his other big interests, and his reading, weighty and emotionally committed as you might expect from the BBC Philharmonic, took flight particularly in the third movement – the ‘Andante, con malincolia’ which was characterized by not just melancholy but a sense of near-despair, with a depth of pathos and passion growing as the movement progressed and a finely shaped climax.

The coda of the first movement had been powerful and gripping, and the real problem (as ever with this work) was how to make the finale – which sounds at first like a dummy run for the Crown Imperial march which was soon to follow it, for the 1937 Coronation – carry enough weight to balance all that’s gone before. But under Wilson’s baton its concluding apostrophising was well paced and carried a sense of inevitability and pride.

The first part of the programme was all-Russian. Alexander Gavrylyuk brought breathtaking virtuosity to Prokoviev’s Piano concerto no. 3, a piece which sounds like what it was meant to be, namely a vehicle for solo display, with its own big tune in the last movement to prove that its composer could match Rachmaninov for soaring melody, too.

It was preceded by Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon overture – a curious blend of late-1930s hyperactivity for orchestral strings with a self-consciously spicy burst of jazzy Western-style syncopation – an excellent starter for any concert and brilliantly executed for this one.

And it was followed by Gavrylyuk’s own solo encore – a relaxing and lovable contrast with the frenzy of Prokoviev in the shape of Schumann’s opening of Kinderszenen: ‘Von fremden Länder und Menschen’.

John Wilson c Chris Christodoulou

Omer Meir Wellber’s inaugural at the BBC Phil

‘I don’t think in history there’s been a music director who opened his tenure with a children’s concert.’

That’s not my comment, it’s the words of Omer Meir Wellber, the young new chief conductor of the BBC Philharmonic, on his first public appearance with the orchestra at its home in Salford since officially entering on his realm.

He’s proud of it. He conducted the Phil in two Proms concerts in London this summer, but as far as its North of England base is concerned, a children’s concert to launch the BBC’s ‘Bring the Noise’ school music streams and podcasts, and a studio concert live-streamed on iPlayer and the Philharmonic website and shown for passers-by on the BBC’s big screen outside its MediaCity studio (it will be broadcast on Radio 3 later), have been the only inaugural events for the new maestro. The Bridgewater Hall audience in Manchester will have to wait until December for his series concert appearance.

Of course it’s all to do with existing contractual commitments and scheduling – but he says he asked for these inaugural performances because he had one week available in the early autumn to be on-site with the North West band – and it’s also symbolic of the spirit of youthfulness and a zeal to communicate that comes with Omer Meir Wellber at the helm. The Phil are only just beginning to find out what hit them when he got the top job.

That studio concert, for instance. He conducted Schoenberg’s Five Orchestral Pieces and Schumann’s Fourth Symphony (the latter from memory) in the second half – pretty much what you might expect from a new chief conductor with a strong track record in the Austro-German classics (he did Mozart’s ‘Linz’ symphony and Act 1 of Die Walküre in a Bridgewater Hall concert last October on the day his appointment was announced).

But the first half had not only the Summer movement from The Four Seasons with a mandolin solo instead of violin (Jacob Reuven, with whom he works in an educational project called ‘Strings of Change’ to help Bedouin children, based in Beer-Sheva, was the soloist), but also the most off-the-wall version of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 12 (K414) I have ever heard. He was his own soloist for it, but instead of the variety of contemporary written cadenzas available for each of its movements (of which there are a number), Wellber produced a succession of improvised interpolations – based on the written ones, it is true, and one of them really just a transcription for three soloists in succession – for a jazz-klezmer group including trumpet, clarinet, solo violin, accordion, bass, drum kit and his piano, which took us stylistically a long, long way from 18^th century Vienna. He’s at home in these idioms as much as any other, and soon had his audience tapping their feet and smiling at the wail of the clarinet and accelerating dance beat that finally adorned Mozart’s restrained Andante.

‘I’ve done this on a smaller scale before, when we asked the public to vote on what sort of cadenzas they would like – I think even Mozart would approve.’

There may be fun in it, but Wellber takes fun seriously. ‘If you have spontaneity in yourself, it’s wrong to cover it,’ he says. ‘My background is that of a gypsy. If there’s something in you, then this is what you bring. When I was younger I used to do magic shows with music – I would do the tricks and play my accordion. I’m now at a point in my life when I can bring out new things as a conductor.’

So who is this self-confessed gypsy with an accordion, preparing to do magic with one of the UK’s top broadcasting orchestras? It goes back to a childhood in the south of the state of Israel, a family with a remarkable range of talents and connections, and a musical training that gave him a rock-solid grounding and respect for gifted teachers.

His mother and family were both from ‘Eretz-Israel’ families – those who’d lived in the land for generations before the founding of the state in 1948, and answered the call of David Ben-Gurion to make the desert bloom, moving from Tel Aviv to Beer-Sheva, which was where Omer and his sisters grew up.

‘That was the biggest decision made in my life – the kind of thing that makes you a different person. My school wanted me to go to Tel Aviv as a kind of prodigy, but my parents wouldn’t have it. I grew up in a place where you have people from 20 different backgrounds and a basically poor economic environment. And my upbringing was in a free style: each of us did what they wanted to do, we were never pushed into anything. I was ambitious, but I have one sister who is not and one who is as much as me.’

‘Music was always there for me. But so was the theatre – in my family about 70 per cent were involved in teaching, including my parents, and the rest were in acting, so I was familiar with the backstage side of theatre life.’

His cousin, Eli Danker, is well known in Israeli theatrical life, and is set to visit the Philharmonic to perform in a future season: ‘He was the most important influence on me, in a way, as my father died when I was young.’

Omer learned to play piano – and accordion – from the age of five, and the violin and mandolin from the age of 12, because, he says, he was already a composer and wanted to find out how those instruments worked. He stayed in ‘normal’ schooling, with extra teaching at the music specialist school in Beer-sheva until the time came for national service in the army (as all Israeli youngsters do) – but his time in uniform was cut to a year and a half so that he could join the national Jerusalem Music Academy.

He studied with Michael Wolpe (himself taught by Alexander Goehr at Cambridge) because at that point he wanted to make composing his main interest (and he does have a string of compositions to his name), but gradually shifted to conducting.

From 2008 to 2010 he was assistant to Daniel Barenboim, both at the Staatsoper in Berlin and La Scala (he and his family now have their home in Milan), and he acknowledges the importance his mentors have had in his development: ‘Since the age of eight I’ve benefited from really big people as teachers – I don’t think an artist can ever be an auto-didact, and I still speak to my first teacher back in Beer-Sheva.

‘Oscar Wilde said “A fine artist imitates, but a brilliant artist steals”, and I took as much as I could from Barenboim, but now I imitate him less and less. I’ve been professionally conducting for 15 years, but in the past five I have found what is my priority and what “fits” for me.’

Those 15 years have included a remarkable range of experience and activity – music director at the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofia in Valencia, conducting Verdi operas in Vienna three years running, appearances at the Bavarian State Opera in Munich and frequently at the Semperoper in Dresden, where he is now principal guest conductor; and he’s been seen a number of times with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and conducted at Glyndebourne (Madame Butterfly last year), in addition to orchestral concerts worldwide.

Oddly enough, he has memories of a brief previous stay in Manchester as a 12-year-old, when his father, a trade union leader and socialist politician in Israel, was offered a diplomatic job in the UK and came to the city. ‘He hated the job and went back to Israel after a year, and I was not here all that time anyway, but I attended King David School and got to eat Kentucky Fried Chicken for the first time!’

He says he also started making model railway sets as a hobby then – another unexpected characteristic of a man of many parts, so it’s almost no surprise to learn that he’s a published author, too. He’s written about Mozart’s three Da Ponte operas (The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Cosí fan Tutte), in a book called ‘Fear, Risk and Love: Moments with Mozart’, and has a novel about to appear in German, Italian and English. The title in the German version translates as ‘The Four Times that Chaim Birckner Fainted’, which he describes as ‘an alternative story of Israel … about a tired, incompetent Holocaust survivor who goes to Israel: he’s a big liar and he lives a strange, passive, crazy life.’ The politically conscious aspect of his heritage is coming out here, he says, in the light of a new emigration from the country on the part of those of left-wing convictions.

And what will the BBC Philharmonic see in terms of future programmes and projects from Omer Meir Welber? It’s early days yet: his 14 December programme at the Bridgewater Hall includes the UK premiere of Sophia Gubaidulina’s Triple Concerto for violin, cello and bayan (a Russian kind of accordion), along with Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, and he’ll be back in March with a Beethoven programme and in April with Richard Strauss, Schnittke and Shostakovich (also toured to Nottingham): the rest of the autumn-winter-spring season was pretty well sorted when he was offered the top job earlier this year.

He says in the programme booklet for Manchester: ‘In every concert, I want to try to tell a story’ and refers to ‘political themes we’ll be exploring over the next few years’. As we spoke he was discussing plans for next year’s BBC Proms and the season to follow them with the orchestra’s general manager, Simon Webb, and his staff. But it’s probably safe to say, ‘Expect the unexpected’.

Philharmonic trumpeter Gary Farr was asked on camera about the experience of working with him on those improvised Mozart concerto cadenzas in the studio concert. He said: ‘Much of it was Omer’s imagination – and it took all of us to orchestrate it!’

Omer Meir Wellber rehearsing with the BBC Philharmonic. Picture: Mark McNulty

Latham-Koenig's new boundary-breaking orchestra

The RNCM hosts a concert on 21^st September that could be a real landmark. It’s not an event confined to Manchester – rather, one of a series that begins in Russia and then moves to the UK for performances at Symphony Hall in Birmingham, the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham, Leeds Town Hall, the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, The Anvil in Basingstoke and finally Cadogan Hall in London.

It’s the inaugural tour of the Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra, a project pioneered by conductor Jan-Latham Koenig to bring young musicians from Russia and Britain  together to play and perform – a bit like Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which likewise is about young musicians coming together and creating links across cultural and political boundaries.

Behind it is a group of top musical training institutions, both in Russia and the UK, of which the RNCM is one, plus some high-placed well-wishers and sponsorship from BP and its Russian counterpart, Rosneft.

Latham-Koenig is well placed to make this idea happen, as he’s chief conductor and artistic director of Moscow’s Novaya Opera Theatre – the first and only British conductor appointed to lead a Russian cultural organisation. The orchestra’s name, obviously enough, derives from the friendship that developed in the 1960s between Benjamin Britten and Dmitri Shostakovich, bridging what were then the big divides of the Cold War. With help from their mutual friend, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, both Britten and Shostakovich were able to cross the ideological boundaries of the time.

Taking part are 87 young players, 52 from Russia and 35 from the UK, who will have been welded together for a week, in Sochi in Russia, by professionals from orchestras and opera houses. Their Russian dates include the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory and the Philharmonic Hall in St Petersburg, before they all come to Britain.

The RNCM programme on the tour features Pavel Kolesnikov as piano soloist in Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, along with Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, Britten’s Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes and Shostakovich’s Suite for Variety Stage Orchestra.

Among the orchestra members are the newly announced harpist to the Prince of Wales,  24-year-old Alis Huws, and violinist Elizabeth Lister, cellist Abigail Davies, bassist Thomas Betts, bassoonist Christian Bushnell and trumpeter Thomas Watts, all from the RNCM. 

Latham-Koenig believes Britten and Shostakovich were the two greatest composers of the 20th century in their respective countries, and adds: ‘Above all, they were friends, two geniuses who admired each other. They were different personalities, but you can see that in subtle ways they were both influenced by each other’s music.

‘I am thrilled that we are launching this first British-Russian orchestra in the spirit of a friendship under unlikely circumstances – the language barrier, which Britten and Shostakovich contended with, was their smallest obstacle.’

Jan Latham-Koenig and the Britten-Shostakovich Festival Orchestra

Review of National Children's Orchestra with Jess Gillam and Jonathan Bloxham, Bridgewater Hall

To tackle a programme including Mahler’s First Symphony after one week’s acquaintance together would be a tall order for any professional orchestra. That the National Children’s Orchestra under Jonathan Bloxham sounded so good doing it is little short of miraculous.

Of course they’re not to be compared with adult professionals, and don’t attain the near-professional standards of the National Youth Orchestra or conservatoire bodies. But if there’s one thing their concert at the Bridgewater Hall on Saturday showed it is that these youngsters can produce amazing sounds with orchestral instruments, both individually and together.

They began with Korngold’s Schauspiel Ouvertüre – itself written by a 14-year-old – in which the most immediate feature of their sound was the sweetness of the string playing and the blending of their brass. Mahler’s Symphony no. 1, when it came, tested every department of the orchestra but emerged as a real success, bringing their audience (favourably biased, admittedly, in many cases) to its feet in admiration. Jonathan Bloxham and his team of music staff had achieved something remarkable in their week’s course of training: the precision of much of the playing (from a very large body), the richness of tone in many areas, and the collective creation of great musical effects were thrilling.

Before that their star soloist, saxophonist, Last Night of the Proms darling, broadcaster, RNCM product and undoubtedly the most exciting thing to have come from Ulverston since Stan Laurel, Jess Gillam, made her own impact with a piece by John Williams called Escapades from Catch Me If You Can (a three-movement suite from Williams’ film score).

Characteristically, she made light of all its intricacies and sailed through its lively jazz-inflected text with an infectious sense of enjoyment. As long as the NCO keeps its emphasis on top-class music making being fun, it really can’t go wrong.

Jess Gillam c Kaupo Kikkas