The estimable LindoroRossini is a Russian political scientist in love with bel canto singing. He has posted hundreds of excerpts on YouTube, each neatly annotated. The single best thing about the web is encountering these generous people. Go thence and enjoy.
No sooner had I decided that Pineapple Poll might stand in for the operas than LindoroRossini introduced me to the Charles Mackerras recordings with Welsh Opera (on Telarc). ArkivMusic has all five for US$70.
Kokoschka: Webern
Quality versus quantity. The marathons of youth . . . I remember one blissful salad day afternoon spent with a cellist who introduced me to a couple of Boccherini quintets, all six Bach cello suites and for an encore, the Kodaly sonata for unaccompanied cello.
Is it worth spending 2 1/2 hours on a Bellini opera for about 30 minutes of first-rate music? Excerpts don’t carry anything like the full import of that thirty minutes music, because opera, like the novel, is the art of preparation. But really – all that noisy bustle, those indifferent arias for comprimarii, those choruses (Ho ho, let’s drink, whatever). Taking it a step further, why not just listen to some Chopin, where Bellini’s melody is distilled and refined?
Gilbert and Sullivan operas all the way through? Why not just Mackerras’s brilliant ballet suite, Pineapple Poll?
I once had a student who announced rather proudly that she could no longer listen to Mozart. Her ears had been re-configured by Webern, whose Four Pieces for Cello and Piano last about five minutes total. Every phrase unique, no repetition. That was the ideal, she thought.
OK yes, there’s obviously something screwy about an ideal that confines music to Webern.
What happens to these poor ladies when they turn 40, I wonder? ‘Twas ever thus in the world of opera. I’ll post another strip to decorate that point – this one is big enough already. What’s new is the increasing tendency to market all classical music with good ol’ sex.
And perhaps this is the way to attract young people. In teaching opera, I learnt that, at first, no sound whatsoever is as compelling as a glamorous clip. Show them something like Franco Rossi’s Carmen movie – the scene in which Carmen seduces Don José. Keep away from fat ladies. Even fully mature female voices (Fleming, Callas) tend to remind them of their mothers.
The marketing is of a piece with the re-location of classical music to a genre within a mass marketing world, as if a ‘taste’ for it were the equivalent of (say) a taste for Cajun. The few specialist shops that remain are places that check your postcode at the door; you will be attended to, if at all, by scented and disdainful young men.
The upside, for old hands, is the undreamt of availability of a vastly expanded catalogue at vastly cheaper prices. This morning on the ABC, Andy Ford interviewed David Patmore, author of a 900 page booklet on orchestral conductors which comes bundled with four Naxos CDs and (I find) can be bought for the sum of A$43 – that includes postage. Oh, and access to a website with 2oo more samples of historic recordings.
If you want it, don’t try Discurio, Naxos’s preferred Australian retailer. Now that HMV as such has been folded into the mix, you can buy the set, with its examples of Furtwangler, Stokowski, Beecham, et hoc omnes at Sanity.com.
Better get through these by the end of January.
The Wordability highlights of 2008, Number 3
Ravel, L’enfant et les sortiléges, Netherlands Dance Theater, choreography & staging by Jir? Kyl?an, cond. Lorin Maazel
Ravel’s ‘lyrical fantasy in two parts’ to a libretto by Colette was written 1920-1925. The action is simple. A child in rebellious mood is naughty to his mother. He goes on a mini-rampage, tearing the wallpaper and his books, wounding a squirrel he has trapped and put in a cage, breaking his favourite cup and saucer. The broken and wounded objects come to life and begin to tease and harass him until, frightened, he goes out into the garden. But here it’s no better. The insects and even the trees come to hostile life. At the work’s climax, he binds a ribbon around an injured squirrel’s paw. The animals are awed, they imitate his calls for his mother. She appears, and the piece ends on the word Maman.
Ravel’s brilliantly varied music can be enjoyed for itself, but what bowled me over was this DVD. Get hold of it if you can. Amazon discouragingly says it’s no longer in production, but you never know.
Here in Oz, there are all too few opportunities to experience live the music-theatre-dance stuff from the end of the First World War to Hitler. One year brings Brecht and Weill’s Mahagonny, ten years later there’s a Soldier’s Tale, and so on. Things are looking up though at the Australian Ballet, with their four-year Ballet Russes project.
Personal note. Back in the 1980s I had a vocal quartet. We were invited to sing in a festival production of Brecht and Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins. State Theatre, State Orchestra, Joshua Rifkin conducting, fairly big deal. It’s a piece for soprano, male quartet and dancer. The central character, Anna, is represented by both the dancer and the singer. (The male quartet’s varied roles include Anna’s mother.) Doubling Anna in this way is of course the most interesting aspect of an interesting and powerful work. It’s one of the few pieces of Brecht where he actually builds in that independence of creative elements recommended by his theory. But for budgetary reasons, in our version, no dancer.
Still, at least there was an orchestra – it’s sad to reflect how many dance performances must make do with recorded sound.
The best in this kind are but shadows.
Roland Barthes put a lot of impressionable people off realistic art by announcing that signs that pretended to be natural were very wicked indeed. Bourgeois. The only ethically OK sign was the one that called attention to itself as sign. (The period was big on portentous italics.) The stage, for example should never try to look like bits of the world. It should emulate the Brechtian theatre, where the stage is a stage, people, and Stop gawping! (Glotz nicht!)
Oh what a fuss. Later, Barthes said he actually rather liked reading realistic novels.
But enough of these lavender-scented memories. In recent years, I find myself vastly enjoying certain kinds of performance, broad, shamelessly manipulative and completely conventional, which in my youth I considered the work of the devil. I like hokum: Godzilla movies for example – apart from the one with Matthew Broderick – the anim? series R.O.D. (Read or Die), best of all Italian blood-and-thunder opera. It’s not that I’ve forgotten or no longer register the difference between Adriana Lecouvreur and The Marriage of Figaro. But age (I find) brings a perspective from which the experiences of masterpiece and hokum can peaceably coexist.
Sometimes, especially in performance, it is difficult to tell them apart. Here’s an aria from Adriana Lecouvreur. I probably should have chosen something from La Gioconda, one of the hokiest of operas, but I think this one will do (“I am but a humble handmaiden of the arts”.) The first version, on mp3, is from a 1959 live recording and includes a brief ensemble; the YouTube version is from 1993 and includes the recitative beforehand; the soprano in both performances is Magda Olivero (b. 1910). Warning: lousy sound.
No soprano today could get away with the liberties Olivero took in 1959 on the last two notes of the aria. But the Italian audience didn’t care, and neither do I. And the way she sings them at the age of 83 is a miracle of vocal husbandry.
Garry, commenting on the Hatto business, wonders if record producers will eventually eliminate the live performer altogether and just splice notes into a completely synthetic performance. Let me take that straight and see where it goes. I guess there are approximations already in those eerily perfect studio recordings based on numerous takes and lots of editing. These don’t correspond to any one performance. But yes, eliminating the original performer altogether – and calling the product a performance – that would be a step beyond.
Would it work? Would people respond to such ‘recordings’ as if they were recordings? Maybe not. In the very early days of CD some people complained about the complete silence between tracks. It sounded weird to them. In response, the studios mixed in a little barely perceptible dirt, and suddenly the CD sounded normal, i.e. more like an LP or a live venue. To get away with a synthetic performance, the studio would have to build in similar marks of plausibility, concessions to psychoacoustics, and these can be subtle indeed.
Two pianists who record the same passage of rapid, apparently even semi-quavers from a Beethoven sonata will show up as different in micro-analysis of wave patterns. The irregularities are not a failure of technique but a sonic signature, a bit like a painter’s brush-strokes. On Gestalt principles, listeners smooth them out into what they hear as notes of exactly the same length. Stravinsky complained that nobody played triplets exactly in time: everybody played the last of the three too short and prolonged the first two. But maybe everybody somehow got something right. The commonest complaint people made about Stravinsky’s conducting was that the music sounded lifeless and metronomic.
So (I suspect) our machine-recordings would have to be cannily programmed. All in all, it might be cheaper to hire a piano-player.