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It’s never just about ‘quality’ on some absolute scale . . . There’s vocal quality to rival von Otter and d’Oustrac here (Netrebko and Garança) but as a performance, even making allowances for the thuggish conductor and the bad mix, it’s a phone-in.
Tags: Anna Netrebko, Cristina Iordachescu, Irina Iordachescu, Offenbach, Singers, Singing
Amongst the little comparison-cults on YouTube there’s one for Olympia’s aria, as you’d expect, since every coloratura soprano wants to sing it. Sumi Jo is there, and Sutherland (late performances – don’t go there) and the recent crop of French divas.
Don’t miss Natalie Dessay in rehearsal for her first Olympia, where the voluble director is Roman Polanski. Dessay marks most of the time, taking instruction from choreographer, director, conductor, but we get a bit of it at pitch when Hugues Cuenod enters. You get to hear the underlay of the voice.
There’s also a brief clip from that performance:
And (unmissable!) Dessay singing the whole piece in a production at Orange.
Finally, a contrasting product from Patricia Petibon in what must have been a hugely enjoyable recital.
Tags: Hugues Cuénod, Natalie Dessay, Patricia Petibon, Singing
Here in full, the Wikipedia plot summary of La Vie Parisienne (1866).
Act 1
The story begins at the railway station, where the employees boast of all the wonderful places in France. Soon, Baron and Baroness Gondremarck arrive from frozen Stockholm for a Parisian holiday and ask tour guide Joseph Partout to show them the city’s glittering night life. Finally, Pompa di Matadores, a Brazilian millionaire, arrives to spend a fortune in the capital.
Act 2
Métella, a demi-mondaine with a heart of gold, reads a letter from Baron Gondremarck’s friend, Baron Frascata, asking her to give Gondremarck the same pleasure she once had given him.
Act 3
At a party, the guests vow to make their pleasure long lasting as they eye one another, waiting to see who will make the first move. Bobinet rises to greet the crowd with a drinking song. The champagne flows and Baron Gondremarck (and everyone else) gets drunk. The party turns into a wild, sensual debauch.
Act 4
The Brazilian millionaire is offering a masked ball. Métella, anxious to win back Gardefeu, is in league with the Baroness, who wants to extricate her husband from the perils of Parisian life. The Brazilian and Gabrielle, the pretty glover, discover the virtues of love at first sight. All ends happily.
So: in Act 1, the characters assemble and – the curtain falls. In Act 2, Métella reads a letter, perhaps silently, broodingly, facing upstage. In Act 3, however, all hell breaks loose. I very desperately want to see this operetta.
Tags: La vie parisienne, Music, Offenbach
At dinner recently, topic Wagner and Fascism, someone ran the usual defence: Wagner was ‘appropriated by’ Hitler. There was a good deal to appropriate, I reckon.
What was Wagner ‘s conception of the good life? Take Valhalla: as the music rolls out for the grand procession across the rainbow bridge Loge tells us that all is not well. This is Irony, the gods are doomed, yes, yes. But until that unhappy day, what are they actually going to do, this lot?
Wotan of course has plenty to occupy his mind. What about the others? Run the universe, presumably, but there is almost nothing to indicate what that involves. We get only one detail of home life in Valhalla. From Wotan and Brünnhilde we learn that there are lots of feasts attended by heroes who have died in battle. The heroes are looked after by ‘wishmaidens’ whom it is difficult to imagine, given the palpability of this heaven, will remain maidens for very long. So all in all, we have a dim impression of godly stuff going on in the background, storms to whip up, battles to intervene in, while in the foreground life centres on men who having fought, now qualify for feasting and fucking. As a dramatic conception, Valhalla is much cruder than (say) Camelot. Heaven for the under-18 rugby team. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Hitler, Music, Operas, Parsifal, Richard Wagner, Ring, Siegfried, Valhalla, Völsung cycle
In music departments around the world, the traditional course in the history of music – now called ‘Western art music’ – has been under pressure to give way to a course in the history of popular music (now called ‘music’). More inclusive, less élitist, all that.
I thought I’d help this reform along with some suggestions for the year 1911.
| New worklist | Old worklist |
| Hyacinth Rag | Bartok, Bluebeard’s Castle |
| Somewhere a Voice is Calling | Granados, Goyescas |
| Alexanders Ragtime Band | Nielsen, Symphony No 3 |
| I want a girl just like the one that married dear old dad | Rachmaninov, Études-tableaux |
| The Oceana Roll | Ravel, Ma mère l’oye |
| Gaby Glide | Schoenberg, Gurrelieder |
| Till the Sands of the Desert Grow Cold | Sibelius, Symphony No 4 |
| Little Grey Home In The West | Stravinsky, Petrushka |
Tags: Classical music, Ma Mère l'Oie, Music, Petrushka
Grandeur and a bunch of associated qualities (magnanimity, for example) are tricky to deal with nowadays. The Grand Canyon is probably OK, Mount Everest, that sort of thing. But artefacts of human grandeur such as Louis XIV’s Versailles are, rather insistently, reminders of human misery. We can enjoy then as Architecture only by a forced abstraction.
The grand music of Louis XIV’s time -that deliberate, sustained trumpet-and-drum stuff - fares better because of the much weaker link between music and empirical meanings. Only flint-eyed materialists find nothing but court propaganda in Lully; for most people, the stately processions and rituals invoked by the music might as well take place in Ruritania.
But of course to listen to a Te Deum on the radio while doing the gardening is something less than the experience of those who crowded the church to welcome home Louis from one of his homicidal trips abroad.
Is there such a thing as authentic, guilt-free grandeur in music? I hope so. I’m not contemplating a Hymn to Social Inclusiveness, or an Ode to the Health Care Reform Bill.
Here’s the last minute or so of Carl Nielsen’s Symphony #4. Out of context, it just sounds like lots and lots of E major, too much maybe.
In context, that’s grand, I reckon.
Formally, Nielsen’s symphony can be summed up as the process of getting from D minor to E major the hard way. Here’s how it begins.
Throughout the work, the music arouses those feeling-states of stress, confusion, agitation and states of calm, assurance and clarity. (And lots of other less determinate states of feeling, but let’s keep it manageable.) It places these passages in a a drama of overcoming. E major is worked towards, fallen away from, briefly established, more firmly established and finally speaks unequivocally to close the symphony. A completely abstract and arbitrary structure of key centres becomes a physical, emotional and intellectual experience.
Whereas the music of Lully’s time was designed to impress the listener with the might and dignity of the king and his court (by extension, the glory of France) this symphonic grandeur invites every listener to go on the journey, work through the struggle and to exult in the feeling of achievement. In that sense, it is a document of democracy. Behind Nielsen of course stands Beethoven. The “Inextinguishable” bears a family resemblance to Beethoven’s Fifth, Brahms’s First and all the other 19th century works that progress from stormy minor-key first movements to triumphant endings. But I seem to find a particular satisfaction in the works written late in the symphonic tradition, In Mahler, Sibelius, Nielsen, Magnard – even Elgar.
Tags: Carl Nielsen, Symphony
