Manchester Evening News review 30 November 2015

LANG LANG  Bridgewater Hall

 

MANCHESTER had another chance to witness the phenomenon that is Lang Lang. There are few other classical artists who can fill the Bridgewater Hall today, but his following is faithful and devoted – the gales of applause and final standing ovation showed that.

His playing was, as ever, absolutely stunning in technical skill and constantly challenging in its interpretative curiosity. It was quite daring, really, to begin with Tchaikovsky’s 12-part The Seasons. It’s not his greatest music – but it’s very characteristic of a composer full of the feeling of later Romanticism: sentimental at times, but often dramatic and occasionally inspired.

Lang Lang responds to the dramatic – that was obvious from the January movement onwards. He also loves the chance to play in big, bravura style – we heard that in February, September and November.

And often he can change the whole emotional content of a piece from what you might expect, without any deviation from the score, by using its rhythms, phrasing and cadences in a novel way. He turned August into a jazzy extravaganza with emphatic syncopations, earning mid-piece applause in its own right.

One thing I’m right with him on is his rhythmic freedom. That was the way pianists played for most of the 19^th century and it’s a legacy of later ‘correctness’ that everything should be metronome-regular.

Bach, of course, is a different language. He played the Italian Concerto with bouncing rhythms in the outer movements and a little eccentricity – he was having fun – and an exemplarily eloquent arioso between them.

Finally he moved into some of the greatest piano music written, in all four of Chopin’s Scherzos. Most piano soloists tackle just one to show off: he powered through them, with often exciting and also meltingly beautiful melodic playing, sometimes weird in its interpretation of the written expression marks, but always holding the audience in its spell.

The last two held the best playing of the evening, showing affection for the music, not just showmanship, incredible virtuosity, and an ability to find beauties in the writing that even Chopin may not have suspected he’d created.

*****

Robert Beale

Manchester Evening News and Manchester Theatre Awards review 29 November 2015

CARMEN Opera House

ELLEN KENT’S touring opera company was back at the Opera House for two nights and offered two of the repertory ‘standards’ she has brought so often in the past. I saw Carmen (Tosca came first) and it delivered in full the audience satisfaction that is always her big selling point.

There’s one set, a hemispherical classical-style entrance to something, that does duty for every scene in both operas (a bit incongruous when we’re supposed to be in Pastia’s bar in the second act of Carmen, or out in the countryside in the third), but it helps reflect the voices into the theatre.

The company is essentially very small, but the hard-working group of chorus singers are accompanied by adult and child walk-ons from Stagecoach who manage to fill the stage quite effectively in the final scene outside the corrida, and the costumes (in that scene in particular) are colourful.

There are just eight principal voices, as Alyona Kistenyova did a series of quick-changes to represent both Micaëla (the sweetly devoted girl from tragic protagonist Don José’s village) and Frasquita (one of Carmen’s soldier-teasing, contraband-assisting, card-playing friends. She has a powerful soprano voice to top the ensembles and deserves much praise for versatility. And Irina Melnic (Mercedes) revealed a lovely voice in the Act 3 card game.

Baritone Iurie Gisca was also double-cast, as Morales the army corporal and Escamillo the toreador, and delivered both roles with vigour.

And the two leading characters, Carmen and Don José, were very well sung and (Carmen, particularly, by Liza Kadelnik) well portrayed. She is from the Romanian National Opera and made a sensuous and vocally ample gypsy temptress.

Ellen Kent’s mainly Moldovan performing resources have been augmented on this tour (as fate and politics would have it) by some experienced artists from the Ukraine – Alyona Kistenyova was with the Odessa company, which has toured here in its own right with Ellen Kent before, and tenor Vitalii Liskovetskyi, our Don José, is from the Kiev company. He was one of the best  singers of the role I’ve heard in these productions, holding his pitch well in his duet with Micaëla in Act 1, and in his Flower Song in Act 2, which are often slippery places for singers.

Valeriu Cojocaru (Zuniga) and Vladimir Dragos (Le Dancaire) did their familiar stentorian stuff.

Conductor Vasyl Vasylenko is another Ukrainian – a music director without a company at present, as he hails from Donetsk – and he made a very positive contribution, with disciplined and sometimes even lyrical playing coming from the orchestra (though what the timpanist was on bemused me at times).

When it came to the plotting quintet in Act 2, he let them rush through (as always seems to be the case with eastern European companies), but there was much to admire, the Prelude to the final act in particular.

Carmen returns to Manchester Opera House on March 19 (Buxton March 20), with Die Fledermaus on March 18.

***

Robert Beale

Article published in Manchester Evening News 27 November 2015

OPERA director Stefan Janski brings his last full-length production as Head of Opera at the Royal Northern College of Music to the stage on December 2 (and five more performances – December 4, 6, 7, 10 and 12).

And it’s clear he’s going out on a high.

Stefan will have been with the RNCM for 30 years when his retirement date comes next summer. He’s directed over 40 complete shows there, and around 700 staged excerpts from the opera repertoire.

And his swan song is a Broadway musical from 1946 – Street Scene, by Kurt Weill – though Weill called it his ‘American opera’ and it’s now considered a classic like Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess.

Spectacular, it seems, is hardly going to be an adequate word for it. Stefan, renowned for his multiple casting and brilliantly organized crowd scenes in previous productions, says he has over 66 named roles in his version of the story (based on an Elmer Rice play) of 24 hours in summertime, in a crowded tenement block and the street outside, in the Big Apple.

And, true to RNCM tradition, many of those are double-cast. Oh, and there’s one dog in this cast, too: little Oscar, who is having his own training sessions, getting used to hearing big voices singing at close quarters …

“I’m using the whole of the undergraduate second year,” says Stefan. “Part of their training is in chorus singing, and some of them have cameo roles as well.”

The musical is set in a two-tier tenement block, with eight apartments opening on to the ‘street’ of the title. The orchestra pit, kindly vacated by conductor Clark Rundell and his happy band (who will be upstage, behind a gauze), becomes the basement storey, and the stage proper the upper one, so people in the front row of the audience are looking right into the action.

“This show has got everything,” Stefan says: “Emotional repression and tension, heat, sadness, the quest for true affection, the problems of immigrants, a love triangle, and tragedy and the blues. But optimism is what it’s really about. There are some stunning numbers.”

It’s being modernised to the extent of including boogie-woogie jive, rather than tap-dancing, in one number. There’s a violin lesson on stage, and an Ice Cream Sextet.

The RNCM team includes choreographer Bethan Rhys Wiliam, set and costume design by Kate Ford, and technical direction and lighting by Nick Ware.

Manchester Evening News review 23 November 2015

MANCHESTER CAMERATA  Royal Northern College of Music

 

THE Camerata always sounds at its best in the intimate and lively acoustic of the Royal Northern College of Music concert hall. This performance had two considerable extra buzz factors: Giovanni Guzzo as leader-director-soloist and Gabriela Montero as piano soloist and improviser extraordinaire.

He brought his own genius for style and intensity to the task. It’s what we remember from his time as the orchestra’s regular leader, and even in such a subdued piece of writing as Arvo Pärt’s Fratres (which to my mind is really rather longer than it needs to be) he galvanized the sound as it reached the top of its emotional arch.

Piazzolla’s The Four Season Of Buenos Aires was probably far more on his wavelength, brimming with South American rhythmic life, and with his solos much enhanced by Hannah Robert’s own on the cello. The weather sequence in Buenos Aires is obviously very different from the kind Vivaldi knew in his Four Seasons, but the echoes of that and other warhorse pieces are great fun.

The finale of the concert was Britten’s Variations On A Theme By Frank Bridge. Guzzo had his musicians really enjoying their virtuoso ensemble playing here, with richly burnished violin tone in the Romance, an Aria Italiana which sounded like a very convivial night out in a trattoria, big bravura in the Wiener Walzer, and the quizzical endings of the Funeral March and Fugue And Finale subtly done.

But that was not all this programme had to offer. Gabriela Montero is a phenomenon in her own right. She was the highly accomplished soloist in Mozart’s piano concerto no. 14 in E flat K449, her approach gelling with fellow-Venezuelan Guzzi’s in the bouncy final movement, and a real sense of dialogue with the orchestra strings emerging in the slow movement.

For the first movement cadenza she rattled off a very stylish sequence in free fantasia style, but that was just a foretaste of what came after the concerto. Her trademark spot of asking the audience to suggest tunes from which she can improvise resulted in two instant creations: the first a rhapsodic expansion of the first phrases of McCartney’s Yesterday which began somewhere between Chopin and Rachmaninov with, finally, a touch of Gershwin – still twice as good as some of the stuff peddled by populist Italian pianists which they conceive to be original compositions.

The second was on the Marseillaise. I was afraid someone would suggest that, because it could have brought out mawkishness and shallow emotion, but she began in severely contrapuntal style, worked her way from Mozart to Beethoven and finally, in a thunder of double octaves, gave it an exposition Liszt would have been proud of.

****

Robert Beale

Manchester Evening News review 21 November 2015

BBC PHILHARMONIC  Bridgewater Hall and live Radio 3

 

A CONCERTO for drum kit and orchestra? Sounds like the ideal formula for classical music to get down with the kids and bridge the gap with popular culture.

Well, Mark Anthony Turnage’s Erskine – Concerto For Drum Set And Orchestra (named in honour of its soloist, Peter Erskine), receiving its UK premiere in Manchester under principal guest conductor John Storgårds, didn’t exactly pull in the crowds.

But then, they may have all been listening on Radio 3 instead. I wish.

Turnage’s music is attractive to those who like complicated sounds as well as modern rhythms, but it isn’t popular in style. Its fans are classical cognoscenti – music critics and suchlike.

I found the concerto constantly fascinating, certainly never boring. As a conceptual construction, I think it has weaknesses. Much of the time Erskine (the man) was drumming along with the orchestra as he might with a band in more conventional style. Then, every so often, it all stopped and he launched into a free solo – not exactly the kind of relationship between soloist and the rest that ‘concerto’ normally implies.

Admirable aspects of it were the sly send-up of ‘cool’ dance music in the Habanera movement, the exposition of the drum kit’s gentler sounds in the Blues, and the brilliantly written rhythm-only fugue for soloist and three other percussionists that begins the finale (though it’s hardly a first: Ernst Toch did something similar with speaking voices in his Geographical Fugue).

The concerto was placed amid a sequence of pieces designed to catch the idea of ‘joy’. Appropriately in the year of his death, Joybox by John McCabe (premiered by the Phil at the Proms in 2013), was the opener. It builds its complexities wittily and contrapuntally and, rather like Ravel’s La Valse, makes a mid-course gear-change into controlled chaos.

There were three Stravinsky pieces from the 1940s: Ode, Scherzo A La Russe and the hilarious Circus Polka. The first included music originally designed for an outdoor film scene score and curiously reminiscent of Walton’s outdoor music for Henry V (written about the same time); the other two were lively relaxations.

Ives’ The Unanswered Question came into play as a contrast, I suppose, but keeping on the American theme of the season. Its atmospheric strings (led by Yuri Torchinsky) and stark trumpet and flutes altercation, were potent as ever.

But the final item – Antheil’s ‘Joyous’ Symphony (no. 5) was one of the most joyless pieces of music I’ve ever heard. It’s easy on the ear, and has a thrilling speed-up to the end of the first movement, but it’s also sentimentally tawdry, repetitive and trite. Pity that was the best example of musical joy they could think of.

***

Robert Beale

Article published in Manchester Evening News 20 November 2015

THE silent La Passion De Jeanne D’Arc, made by Robert Dreyer in 1928, is seen today as one of the greatest films ever.

It’s to have a showing at the Royal Northern College of Music on November 24^th with live musical accompaniment by medieval music specialists The Orlando Consort, in a presentation that has been a highlight of music festivals around the country this year.

Dressed all in black, with small earpieces in their ears and the glow of two laptops casting ghostly shadows on their faces, Orlando will look more like Kraftwerk c.1975 than an early-music group.

But they say: “To musicians like ourselves, familiar with repertoire from the medieval period, it was a small imaginative leap to hear the background music to several of the scenes in The Passion Of Joan Of Arc.

“It’s music which Joan herself may have heard, notably in the scene where she is taunted and tempted by the staging of the Catholic service, before it is suddenly terminated. “Dreyer’s parallel between the passions of Christ and Joan immediately suggested texts such as Ave Verum Corpus. At the moment when Joan’s body is bled by the doctors, we are singing (in Latin) the words ‘whose pierced side flowed with water and blood’.

“As an unlikely straw crown is thrust on her head by mocking English soldiers, the audience hears the Agincourt Song, musical triumphalism that celebrates the famous English victory some 16 years earlier.

“And when the crowd riots, the medieval motet – polyrhythmic and polytextual – provides the perfect underscoring of violence and confusion.”

The two 1928 premieres of the film (in Copenhagen and Paris) each had specially composed scores, though Dreyer, like most directors of the time, had no say in what the music was like.

Since then works by a variety of musicians – from Nick Cave to J S Bach – have accompanied screenings, and the score for the Paris premiere is still occasionally performed.

But Orlando Consort’s a-cappella version is the first in which real medieval songs, composed in the saint’s lifetime of c. 1412 to 1431, have accompanied the film.

There is more sacred than secular music to choose from, but, say Orlando, many poignant, heartbreaking secular songs do survive.

“In our soundtrack, these serve as expressions of Joan’s suffering, and underline a frequent parallel in the courtly love tradition between depictions of the Virgin Mary and the perfect object of desire.”

Article published in Manchester Evening News 13 November 2015

WHEN Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero appeared solo at the Bridgewater Hall last year, the most amazing thing – as well as her mastery of classical repertoire – was the last part.

She improvized three dazzling pieces on ideas contributed then and there by the audience. She likes to do it whenever she can, conjuring new creations out of thin air with fluency and bravura that would be the envy of many who’ve practised their music for years.

She’s appearing as soloist with Manchester Camerata and violinist Giovanni Guzzo at the Royal Northern College of Music on November 22 (3pm), and her job is first to play the popular Mozart piano concerto in E flat (no. 14).

But after that she’ll improvize on themes suggested by the audience. Her ability is a remarkable gift, not so much the fruit of training as innate: something most people would call a kind of genius.

She was actually told not to do it by one of her classical teachers. But when she met Martha Argerich, the great Argentinian piano virtuosa, in 2001, she had her moment of revelation.

“She said to me, ‘You have a unique gift, and you need to share it with the world.’ From that point on I’ve been improvizing in all my recitals.”

I asked her what is in her mind as she makes her instant creations. “When I’m doing it, I’m just allowing music to go through my body,” she says. “It’s almost as if I’m witnessing what I’m playing just like the audience. It seems as if part of my brain shuts down. And a lot of my improvizations are very, very fast. I seem to kick into a different gear, neurologically.”

She’s got evidence for that: she’s been taking part in a medical study to compare what goes on in her brain when she improvizes with its state when she plays a prepared work.

Gabriela began piano lessons at four and gave her first concerto at eight.  Later she got a scholarship to the Royal Academy of Music in London and won third prize in the Chopin Competition in 1995.

Today, married to Irish opera singer Sam McIlroy, she has a new home in Barcelona, and a new stage in her career, with rapturous receptions from public and press. But she says: “Applause never meant much to me. It’s really about the reasons for dedicating my life to music.”