Category: Classical

Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello — Recordings and Books

Corrina

Bach’s Six Suites for Solo Violoncello (BWV1007-1012) form one of his greatest musical monuments.  The suites, and their constituent preludes and dances are essential to every cellist, and the moment when a cello student learns their first Minuet, Gigue, or Allemande, is the start of a long, challenging journey. In his biography of Bach from 1802 Johann Nikolaus Forkel noted that:

There are few instruments for which Bach has not composed something. In his time, it was usual to play in the church, during communion, a concerto or solo upon some instrument. He often wrote such pieces himself, and always contrived them so that his performers could, by their means, improve upon their instruments. Most of these pieces, however, are lost. But, on the other hand, two principal works of another kind have been preserved, which, in all probability, richly indemnify us for the loss of the others. For a long series of years, the Violin Solos were universally considered by the greatest performers on the violin as the best means to make an ambitious student a perfect master of his instrument. The solos of the violoncello are, in this respect, of equal value.”  Nikolaus Forkel, Johann Sebastian Bach: his life, art, and work 

It is unclear when Bach wrote the cello suites; there is much debate about whether they pre- or post-date the solo violin sonatas and partitas. Similarly, we do not know whether he composed all six suites consecutively, or whether they were a project Bach completed over time. The same uncertainty applies to the solo violin works, although in their case there exists a fair copy in Bach’s hand, dated 1720.  Bach’s second wife, Anne Magdelene made another copy between 1727 and 1731, for which Bach’s pupil Schwanenberg wrote the frontispieces. It appears that Anne Magdelene’s copy of the suites for cello dates from the same time, possibly intended to be one volume with the violin solos, but Schwanenberg later wrote another frontispiece for them: 6 Suites, a Violoncello Solo senza Basso composes par Sr. J. S. Bach, Maitre de Chapelle. Other copies of the violin and cello solos were made by Bach’s associate, Johann Peter Kellner. 

Continue reading “Bach’s Suites for Solo Cello — Recordings and Books” →

The writing on the wall: Musical prophecies with Orchestra Wellington

Corrina

Three works by British composers and a new piece by Briar Prastiti each exemplify different interpretations of the theme Prophecy at Orchestra Wellington’s concert on Saturday 5 August, the next instalment in the 2023 Inner Visions season. This blog presents a selection of materials that provide additional context and discussion about some of the music that Orchestra Wellington will perform with soloist Amalia Hall, the Orpheus Choir, baritone Benson Wilson, and the Wellington Brass Band, conducted by Orchestral Wellington’s Music Director, Marc Taddei.

Continue reading “The writing on the wall: Musical prophecies with Orchestra Wellington” →

Songs and colours of water and earth: Mahler, Schoenberg, and Orchestra Wellington

Corrina

Continuing the series of posts that explore links between the WCL music collection and Orchestra Wellington’s 2023 Inner Visions season, today’s blog investigates the connections between their July concert ‘Three Colours‘ and books about Arnold Schoenberg (Five Pieces for Orchestra) and Gustav Mahler (Das Lied von der Erde) whose music frames the programme. In between these pieces, sits Richard Strauss’s Burleske for piano and orchestra, an exuberant work of the composer’s youth.

Burleske, which will feature Jian Liu playing the mercurial solo part, dates from 1885-1886 when Strauss was 21 years old. At the time of Burleske‘s genesis, Strauss had completed his tenure as Hans von Bülow’s assistant with the Meiningen Court Orchestra, and was deep in the phase of his ‘Brahms Adoration’. Burleske offers some unabashedly Brahmsian moments, but Strauss’s musical identity — which would be realized more fully in a few years, with Don Juan — is entirely clear. In fact, by the time Burleske had its premiere in Eisenach in 1890, the public had already been introduced to Don Juan in Weimar, a performance that cemented Strauss’s reputation as a leader of the avant-garde.

Strauss wrote Burleske for Hans von Bülow to perform as soloist, but the veteran pianist and conductor did not warm to the piece, writing to Brahms in January 1891 that ‘Strauss’s Burleske decidedly has some genius in it, but in other respects, it is horrifying.’ Strauss himself came to view the piece as something of an aberration, but despite his doubts, Burleske endured: in 1947, a festival dedicated to Strauss and his music was held in London, and the 83-year-old composer conducted a performance by the Philharmonia Orchestra, the programme consisting of Burleske, Don Juan, and Symphonia Domestica. You can read more about Strauss’s life and music in an earlier blog post.

The first performance of Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra also took place in London, at one of Sir Henry Wood’s Promenade Concerts in the Queen’s Hall. The orchestra had never encountered such music, and Wood devoted an almost unprecedented amount of rehearsal to the Five Pieces, ‘three consecutive rehearsals of an hour each,’ as Eugene Goossens (then a violinist in the Queen’s Hall Orchestra) remembered:

Wood, cutting, thrusting, parrying, and dissecting with that long white baton, fighting down the thing that all conductors have to fight sooner or later in varying degrees – the hostility of an orchestra that has fatally prejudged a novelty – eventually secured order out of chaos.” Eugene Goossens, The New York Times, 3 September 1944

Despite Wood’s meticulous preparation, the audience at the premiere on 3 September 1912 was hostile, derisive, and baffled. Undeterred, Wood  invited Schoenberg to come to London in January 1914 to conduct a second performance, and this received a far better reception: a note included in the programme stated that ‘Herr ARNOLD SCHOENBERG has promised his cooperation at today’s concert on condition that during the performance of his Orchestral Pieces perfect silence is maintained.’ Any hostile elements in the audience were drowned out by substantial applause.

It is from Schoenberg’s Five Pieces that the title for this week’s concert, ‘Colours’ is at least partially derived. The third of the pieces, unnamed at the time of composition in 1909, and even in the first edition of the score in 1912, later acquired the title ‘Farben’, possibly shortened from Akkordfaerbungen (‘chord hues’). When Schoenberg conducted a performance of the Five Pieces at Salzburg in 1920, this central piece was subtitled ‘Der Traunsee am Morgen,’ reflecting Schoenberg’s initial idea for the piece, seeing the colours of dawn on the waters of the Traunsee through the eye of an accomplished painter.

Evocations of light, liquid, and colour are also central to the poetic texts in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth). This symphony or song cycle was completed in 1909, making the work contemporaneous with Schoenberg’s Five Pieces. After Mahler read Die chinesische Flöte (The Chinese Flute), a collection of free translations (‘Nachdichtungen’) by Hans Bethge of existing translations of Tang dynasty poetry into German and French, he was moved by their expression and imagery, choosing  poems by Li Bai, Quian Qui, Men Haoran, and Wang Wei to set to music.  In the first poem, ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’ (‘The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow’), we hear of cellars full of golden wines (‘Dein Keller birgt die Fülle des goldenen Weins!’) and the eternal blue of the heavens (‘Das Firmament blaut ewig’). The second movement, ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’ (‘The Solitary One in Autumn’ begins with images of bluish mists creeping over a lake,  while the frosty grass seems sprinkled with jade dust.’ Another image of colour and water occurs in the fourth movement, ‘Von der Schönheit’ (‘Of beauty’) where the poet describes girls picking lotus flowers at a river bank, as ‘Golden sun plays about their form/Reflecting them in the clear water.’ (Gold’ne Sonne webt um die Gestalten/Spiegelt sie im blanken Wasser wider’). 

Detailed discussion and contextualization of Das Lied von der Erde can be found in three excellent books in the Wellington City Libraries collection, each written from a different perspective, and with a different intention in the author’s mind:

Gustav Mahler : songs and symphonies of life and death : interpretations and annotations / Mitchell, Donald
Donald Mitchell (1925-2017) was a pioneering Mahler scholar, his research and writing on his subject spanned many decades, and was frequently revised and updated. Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985) followed on the heels of two groundbreaking studies, Gustav Mahler: the Early Years (1958) and Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years (1975). Mitchell’s Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death focuses on Mahler’s vocal music, with a deep discussion of Das Lied von der Erde that illuminates the composer’s sketches and process, his interpretation of the poetic texts, and the personal significance of this monumental work.

Continue reading “Songs and colours of water and earth: Mahler, Schoenberg, and Orchestra Wellington” →

Operatic Highlights at WCL

Corrina

NZ Opera’s production of Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the St James Theatre (14—18 June) seemed like the perfect time to display some of WCL’s collection of operatic treasurers at Te Awe Library.  Across our branches, and at Te Pātaka, there are many books, CDs, and DVDs concerned with the art form that Samuel Johnson famously called an ‘exotic and irrational entertainment’.  This blog introduces some well-known, and some less familiar, highlights that formed part of the Te Awe display.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0393313956/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 Mozart and the enlightenment : truth, virtue, and beauty in Mozart’s operas / Till, Nicholas
Nicholas Till examines Mozart’s operas through the lens of Enlightenment sensibility, drawing together the strands of history, theology, sociology, literary theory, and even some psychology to anatomize the motivation and vision behind Mozart’s operas. Mozart’s collaborations with librettist Lorenzo da Ponte —Le nozze di Figaro (1786), Don Giovanni (1787) and Così fan tutte (1790) — each receive detailed contextual and musical analysis that considers Mozart’s own intellectual stance on philosophy and politics in that revolutionary decade. Till’s provocative hypotheses and detailed reasoning, combined with his clear fascination with Mozart’s operas, result in a stimulating and highly satisfying exploration of the significance of Mozart’s operas in the eighteenth century and in society today.

The young Kiri : the early recordings, 1964-70 / Te Kanawa, Kirihttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00000E4LX/ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 A colour photograph of Kiri te Kanawa when young. She is looking to the left. Her hair is shoulder length, and she is wearing a red stole with a striped pattern, and smiling gently.
This two-disc set of Dame Kiri te Kanawa’s early recordings offers a compelling aural portrait of the young singer, at the start of an extraordinary career.  CD 1 is devoted to arias and art song, with Puccini especially well-represented in extracts from La bohème, Tosca, and Turandot, as well as showpiece arias from Johann Strauss’s Die Federmaus and Gounoud’s Faust among other treasures. CD 2 turns to musical theatre and popular song, demonstrating te Kanawa’s versatility in different styles of singing. A number of ensembles and collaborating musicians also make an appearance: the NZBC Orchestra, organist Peter Averi, singer Hohepa Mutu, and harpist Dorothea Franchi.

Fashion designers at the opera / Matheopoulos, Helena
Gianni Versace created a stunning dress for Kiri te Kanawa in Strauss’s Capriccio at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden in 1990; Zandra Rhodes has designed costumes for Verdi’s Aida, Mozart’s Magic Flute, and Bizet’s Pearl Fishers; the bejeweled gown worn by Mélisande in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande at the Stadttheater Klagenfurt transformed the character into a source of golden light in a world of sinister, oppressive darkness. These are just a few examples of the work that leading fashion designers have produced for opera productions around the world, responding to the challenge of creating costumes in which performers can move and sing. Helena Matheopoulos profiles many many figures from the world in this collection of interviews, sketches, and resplendent full-color illustrations of the costumes in production.

Hänsel und Gretel : opera in three acts
When Richard Strauss conducted the premiere of Engelbert Humperdinck’s  Hänsel und Gretel at Weimar in 1893, he declared the piece a ‘masterpiece of the highest quality’. This 2011 production is a musical and visual feast, the action shifted from the terror-ridden Ilsenstein forest to a modern urban setting. Gretel and her brother live in a house of cardboard boxes, which they share with their loving but poverty-stricken parents. Rather than finding a gingerbread cottage, the habitation of  Rosine Leckermaul (the witch) is amid the aisles of a supermarket offering every alluring and mass-produced confection. This production is superbly cast, every singer inhabiting the style with energy. Of special note is Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s turn as a matriarchal yet terrifying witch. Humperdink’s music is a captivating fusion of orchestral opulence and gemütlich spirit that draws on more than a century of German Romanticism, from Schubert and Weber to Wagner and Mahler.

The only way is up : reflections on a life in opera / McIntyre, Donald
It is impossible to summarise the career of Donald McIntyre in a paragraph, but fortunately The Only Way is Up more than compensates. A page-turning memoir of life as an aspirant All Black, and then as one of the foremost exponents of Wagner’s music, The Only Way is Up charts the successes and surprises of working on the stages of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, and the Festspielhaus at Bayreuth. McIntyre’s stories include appearances by leading conductors, directors, and fellow singers too numerous to mention here, but a particular highlight is McIntyre’s role in Patrice Chereau’s extraordinary ‘Centennial’ Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, a series of productions that revolutionized the staging of Wagner’s music dramas.

Dido and Aeneas : opera in three acts
Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas brings together opera and dance in a collaboration between the Royal Opera, and Royal Ballet at Covent Garden, with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment conducted by John Eliot Gardiner. A musical and visual spectacle, Wayne McGregor’s contemporary choreography fuses with Purcell’s music, realising in the dancers’ movement many of the intricacies in the score. Sarah Connolly (Dido) and Lucas Meachum (Aeneas) imbue their roles with magnificence befitting their royal status, Dido’s descent into despair truly wrenches the heart as she is undone by the witches’ cruelty. Although this production met with mixed responses in 2009, mainly to do with the size of the stage in relation to the intimacy of Purcell’s opera, McGregor’s seems vision is more successful on screen, where the cameras bring us closer to the action.

The partnership : Brecht, Weill, three women, and Germany on the brink / Katz, Pamela
Although the partnership between Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht is well-documented, Pamela Katz is the first author to bring to the fore the roles played by Lotte Lenya, Helene Weigel, and Elizabeth Hauptmann in the creation and performance of Weill and Brecht’s operas. Brech and Weill’s deconstruction and subversion of operatic conventions in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera have been the subject of much research and discussion, but the significant involvement and influence of Weigel, Hauptmann, and Lenya in the creative process have never been adequately examined. This book does so, charting the development and early performance history of the operas in the tumultuous years of the Weimar Republic, as well as their creators’ flight from Germany in 1933.

Southern voices : international opera singers of New Zealand / Simpson, Adrienne
Adriennehttp://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0790002256 /ref=ase_wellingtoncit-21 Simpson and Peter Downes dedicated this book to the singers it profiles. Southern Voices is a trove of insights into the careers and reflections of a succession of truly great artists. The singers reflect on their early training and the formative experiences in local choirs and competitions that set them on the path to the most august heights of their profession.  Malvina Major’s recollections of her triumph as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia at the 1968 Salzburg Festival, working with Claudio Abbado; Inia te Wiata’s creation of roles in operas by Benjamin Britten; Patricia Payne overcame homesickness and uncertainty at the Opera Centre in London to find musical fulfilment on the concert platform before becoming a soloist with Covent Garden’s permanent company, and a guest soloist in productions all over Europe and the USA; Barry Mora’s successes in many roles over several seasons at Gelsenkirchen, before joining the permanent ensemble at the Frankfurt Opera, where experimental and provocative productions made the company a provocative centre of Regietheater in the 1980s. These stories, and many more, make Southern Voices a fascinating source of history, reinforcing the remarkable achievements of New Zealand singers on the international scene.

The birth of an opera : fifteen masterpieces from Poppea to Wozzeck / Rose, Michael
Michael Rose slices through centuries of myth-making and romanticising to document the creation of fifteen operas, from Monteverdi’s Poppea (first performed in 1643) to Berg’s Wozzeck (1925). Rose examines the manifold complexities of making operas, including the composers’ selection of libretti and collaboration with librettists (for example, the partnerships between Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte, and Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal), the challenges and benefits of aristocratic patronage, grappling with censors, and parrying hostile critics and cabals. A rich array of primary sources, including exchanges of letters between composers and their collaborators, treatise extracts, and aesthetic manifesti, illuminate the making of Fidelio, Otello, Turandot among other works.

Pene Pati
Tenor Pene Pati is equally well-known here as an outstanding operatic tenor, and one-third of  Sol3Mio.In the last five years, Pati’s career has been spectacularly ascendent. Currently performing the role of Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris — a role he will reprise in Toronto with the Canadian Opera Company later this year — Pati’s recent schedule has seen him perform in Monte Carlo, Naples, Prague, and Berlin. In 2021, Pati signed an exclusive recording contract with Warner Classics, and this, his debut album, includes extracts from some of the operas in which his recent performances have earned particular acclaim: Verdi’s Rigoletto, Gounoud’s Romeo et Juliette, and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’amore. 

Opera, or, The undoing of women / Clement, Catherine
A foundational text in feminist musicology, Opera, or, The Undoing of Women (originally published in French as L’Opéra ou la Défaite des femmes in 1979) was contentious when it was first published in French 1979, and remains controversial today. As one of the first critical studies to apply feminist theory to the plots and texts of operas, considering specifically the situation of opera’s female characters, Clément unpicks the fates of Turandot, Cio-Cio San, Lucia, Tatiana, Violetta, Tosca, Isolde. Her analysis identifies several plot and character archetypes, to demonstrate how ’19th-century opera perpetuates a social order which requires either the death or the domestication of the female protagonist.’ Although Clément’s musical analyses are unsophisticated, her poetic language remains compelling, while her arguments remain relevant and provocative nearly 45 years after the book’s first appearance.

 

 

 

Exploring the visions of Bartok and Strauss

Corrina

On Saturday 3 June, music by Richard Strauss and Béla Bartók bookends Myth and Ritual, the second concert in Orchestra Wellington’s 2023 Inner Visions season. This programme leads the audience into exotic territories through Salome’s infamous ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ in Herod Antipas’s palace, Arjuna Oakes‘s new work Safe Way to Fall, and John Psathas’s Zahara (2006) — a saxophone concerto inspired by the journey of shipwrecked American sailors through the Sahara Desert in the early nineteenth century. Bartók’s The Miraculous Mandarin evokes another dangerous environment through its musical depiction of the traffic, noise, and viciousness of a big city.

In this blog, we introduce six books in the Wellington City Libraries collection that explore the pieces by Strauss and Bartók and offer a variety of personal and analytical perspectives on the inner vision that both composers realised in their music.

The subject matter of Bartók’s pantomime-ballet The Miraculous Mandarin (1926), with its dances and ‘seduction games’, and the unrestrained licentiousness and blasphemy in Strauss’s opera Salome (1905) caused both works to be censored in the early twentieth century. After its premiere in Dresden, Salome was initially proscribed in London, where its first performance (heavily cut) did not take place until 1913: despite Gustav Mahler’s best efforts, he could not persuade the censors in Vienna to permit a performance at the Hofoper; the New York premiere took place in 1907, but the piece was deemed ‘repugnant to Anglo-Saxon minds’ and not performed again at the Metropolitan Opera House until the 1930s. In 1909, however, the Scottish singer Mary Garden had performed the role, at the rival Manhattan Opera House in a French language production of Salome. A year earlier, in Paris, the astonished correspondent of the New York Times had witnessed Garden rehearse the  ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’ wearing a body-stocking of ‘nearly transparent flesh-coloured silk’ with bare arms and feet beneath veils of ‘soft organdie’:

Nothing more thrilling than Miss Garden’s rendition of the dance has been seen recently on the lyric stage, and the bacchanalian finale is most wonderfully carried out. Miss Garden whirls and sways and stands on her toes until you are fascinated and wonder how she can do it; and finally she ends at the feet of Herod asking for the head of John the Baptist.

Continue reading “Exploring the visions of Bartok and Strauss” →

Women on the Podium: 20th & 21st century conductors imagined and real

Corrina

The starting point for today’s blog about recent arrivals in our classical recordings collection is Music from and inspired by the motion picture Tár. Todd Field’s 2022 psychological drama about conductor Lydia Tár — an ambitious, driven, but chaotic woman (ferociously realised by Cate Blanchett) who is appointed director of the Berlin Philharmonic —has won many awards and been nominated for many more.  Tár has also proved divisive for its depictions of the musical world and for its presentation of Lydia Tár as a woman and conductor in a profession where male composers and conductors still dominate the repertory and the podium. John Mauceri has summarised the debate in a pithy New York Times op-ed.  Deutsche Grammophon has also climbed aboard the Tár train with a ‘multi-faceted concept album‘ that includes new pieces by Hildur Guðnadóttir alongside extracts from Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E minor, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. The concept behind the album, as director Todd Field explains, is ‘to invite the listener to experience the messiness involved in the making of music’ and the CD includes spoken-word content, rehearsal discussion, and short takes from recording sessions.  If you have seen, loved, or loathed Tár, here is a great opportunity to hear new work by Guðnadóttir. The music is performed by the London Contemporary Orchestra, Dresden Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, and the New Trombone Collective, with Cate Blanchett herself at the helm.

Turning from the world of fictional conductors to real ones, here is a selection of CDs, DVDs, and books by and about some eminent women currently at the top of their profession.

Candide / Bernstein, Leonard
One conductor whose criticism of Tár has been vociferous is one of the most eminent in her profession Marin Alsop, the first woman to be appointed director of a major USA orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, in 2007. After gaining degrees in violin performance at Julliard School, Alsop was rejected three times by their conducting programme, before finding success by founding her own ensembles. In 1989 she won the Koussevitsky Prize for conducting at the Tanglewood Festival, the first time that the prize was awarded to a woman. At this Festival she also met Leonard Bernstein, who would become her mentor. Since that time, Alsop has conducted many of the world’s major orchestras in concerts and recordings. In 2013, at the time when she conducted the Last Night of the Proms, Alsop spoke of some of the residual prejudices facing women who wanted to conduct. Here, Alsop conducts a live semi-staged performance of Candide by her mentor Leonard Bernstein, three decades after he recorded the piece with the same orchestra. Guided by Alsop, the London Symphony Orchestra and Chorus play and sing with precision and wit. The cast includes Leonardo Capalbo (Candide) Anne Sofie von Otter (The Old Lady), Thomas Allen (Dr. Pangloss), Jane Archer (Cunegonde), and Marcus Farnsworth (Maximilian). All the singers bring the acerbic text (with contributions from Dorothy Parker, Richard Wilbur, and Stephen Sondheim) to life with their committed characterizations.

Continue reading “Women on the Podium: 20th & 21st century conductors imagined and real” →