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Opera (English plural: operas; Italian plural: opere) is an art form in which singers and musicians perform a dramatic work combining text (called a libretto) and musical score, usually in a theatrical setting. Opera incorporates many of the elements of spoken theatre, such as acting, scenery, and costumes and sometimes includes dance. The performance is typically given in an opera house, accompanied by an orchestra or smaller musical ensemble. (Wikipedia)

 

For most of my adult life I have been allergic to opera. It must also be said that for nearly half of my adult life (some 20 years) I hardly went near a classical music venue, nor played the piano. A chance conversation with a then colleague – now a very good friend – in the art publishing industry (where I worked before I had my son) revealed a mutual love of classical music and, in particular, live concerts and suddenly I was a regular at the Wigmore Hall, enjoying fine chamber music in one of London’s most perfect venues.

As a child in the late 1970s, I went to many operas with my parents, who were subscribers to the Welsh National Opera (WNO) on tour. We were living near Birmingham at this time, and from a young age (around 5) I was regularly taken to concerts by the CBSO at Birmingham Old Town Hall, where the orchestra was conducted by a vibrant young man with wild curly hair, who has gone on to enjoy a glittering and acclaimed career with some of the finest orchestras in the world. Going to the opera was something else we did, as well as listening to classical music LPs at home, and piano lessons, of course. I was lucky enough to see many fine performances, including the most exquisite production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute with sets designed by David Hockney, and a Madame Butterfly which was all Japanese sliding screens and Zen gardens.

Later, as a teenager at school in Hertfordshire, I went to full dress rehearsals at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, enjoying an afternoon out of school to see some of the ‘greats’ of the operatic world – including Sir Thomas Allen (in Britten’s Peter Grimes) and Dame Janet Baker. These were memorable occasions, not only for the music, drama and spectacle, but also for the plush scarlet and gold opulence of the Royal Opera House.

A rather disastrous trip to Glyndebourne with my fiancé (reader, he married me) to see Britten’s Death in Venice put me (and my husband) off opera. By this time, I had also formed a very deep dislike of anything by Wagner and had decided (perhaps unfairly) that anything by him would be overblown, over-sung and over here.

Musical friends and colleagues have tried to tempt me back to the opera, assuring me that I will love it, pointing out that I absolutely MUST see anything by Wagner, and citing his important influence. (Some people have even tried to suggest that my dislike of Wagner is an obstinate form of philistinism: I just don’t like his music – get over it!)

Across my social networks, in particular on Twitter, I am connected with many people who absolutely adore opera, passionately and fervently, and who go not once but thrice to Covent Garden or the Coliseum (home to the English National Opera) and beyond to see repeat performances of operas featuring the singers, conductors, producers and directors whose work they admire and love. I began to wonder what I might be missing out on: these people were enjoying fine performances and an enviable social life at the opera at the same time.

When I started reviewing for CultureVulture.net at the beginning of the year, my co-reviewer, Nick, suggested we might cast our reviewing net a little wider than piano recitals and art exhibitions, assuring me that we would not be penetrating Wagner’s Ring, but could happily enjoy operas by Mozart, Bizet, Rossini, Puccini and Handel. And so on 3rd May 2014 we found ourselves in the dress circle at the Coliseum for the first night not of Così fan Tutte, but Thebans, a new opera by Julian Anderson based on the Theban trilogy by Sophocles.

Modern opera for the “opera newbies”? We were really jumping into opera at the deep end, but despite the grim narrative (family intrigue, incest, murder), I really enjoyed it – the music was arresting, with some exquisite chorus and wind writing, the brutalist setting was interesting, and the cast were convincing and committed. Within moments, I believed I was there, in Thebes. In addition to this, it proved a thoroughly good night out: the opera crowd are different to the (largely) superannuated Wigmore hall audience and the atmosphere in the foyer and bar was cheerful and noisy.

Opera is of course very different to chamber music or solo piano recitals. There is drama, there are costumes and sets, there are memorable arias and choruses, there is action and emotion, dance, theatre, “speaking to music” (recitative), comedy, tragedy, pathos and poignancy – the full sweep of human experience is here.

Of all the strands of classical music and the performing arts, opera seems to receive the best press – and the worst press. It continues to be regarded as elitist, snobby, inaccessible (eh?), expensive (ahem – opera tickets are often cheaper than West End theatre or pop concerts) and generally the exclusive preserve of toffs and poseurs.

This has not been my experience, so far. Thebans was an esoteric and admittedly quite “difficult” opera to enjoy, per se, but the audience didn’t strike me as especially high-brow. And at Opera Holland Park on Saturday evening (my first visit to this wonderful venture, now in its 25th year, which runs a busy and varied summer season in the grounds of Holland House in London’s Holland Park) the audience was positively garulous, hugely enjoying all the comedy and dramatic irony contained in Rossini’s ever popular Barber of Seville. (And not forgetting noisy interjections from the peacocks who live in Holland Park.)

If anything, opera seems to me to be rather more relaxed than the “sitting in the dark in hushed reverence” atmosphere of the Wigmore Hall, and based on my, albeit limited, recent experiences, the etiquette of opera going is much looser. For example, you can clap after a particularly fine aria or chorus set-piece and no one glares at you as if you have committed some major musical faux pas, and there is a very tangible sense of shared experience.

On another level there is of course the music. Far from being inaccessible, opera is full of memorable, hummable tunes (something my co-reviewer is very keen on!). I bet most people could hum Bizet’s Toreador’s Song (from Carmen) or Nessun Dorma (from Turandot), which has been elevated to the rank of a sporting anthem, or the magical duet from The Pearl Fishers. We hear excerpts from opera in film and tv soundtracks, and in adverts, so embedded is this art form in our Western cultural landscape.

This week my Twitter feed has been full of tweets about the new production of Dialogues des Carmelites at the Royal Opera House (conducted by Sir Simon Rattle), Poulenc’s sublime opera set during the violent upheaval of the French Revolution (the set includes a working guillotine). It sounds fabulous – musically, dramatically, emotionally – and I really hope it may be available online or DVD, or in repertory at ROH at a future date, as I’d really like to see it.

Meanwhile, I am back at the “Coli” (as we opera buffs say!) for the first night of a new production of The Pearl Fishers by Bizet on 16th June. And in the autumn, new productions of Xerxes, The Marriage of Figaro and La Boheme beckon….

And what of Wagner? Well, I’m not sure I’m quite ready for the ladies with horns on their heads just yet…..

Opera Holland Park

Royal Opera House

English National Opera

 

 

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Who or what inspired you to take up composing, and make it your career?

I can’t remember exactly, but I just got more and more into music as a child – hearing my mother play the piano, listening to my parents’ collection of vinyl recordings of Chopin, Beethoven etc., improvising along with my paternal grandmother on the piano: sort of soft jazzy honky-tonk type things. Before I could read music (I started lessons quite late) I would experimentally fill up music paper with random notes and try to get my mother, or my neighbour down the street in Winnipeg to try to play it for me. Eventually I figured out how to make it sound better, and started to be able to play the stuff myself. When I was about nine, I remember announcing at the dinner table to my parents and two sisters that I wanted to become a composer, if not a psychologist, which was my second choice. But I ended up becoming a pianist first.

Who or what were the most significant influences on your musical life and career as a composer?

Though I’m mostly self-taught as a composer, I received encouragement and help from S.C. Eckhardt-Gramatté and Peter-Paul Koprowski, and my musical and aesthetic grounding was greatly influenced by my piano teacher William Aide. My mother introduced me to lots of books when I was young – from ‘Wind in the Willows’ to novels by Joyce Carol Oates. I think this helped me develop creative instincts. Though I never got to meet him, Glenn Gould – with all his individuality and eccentricity – had a profound effect on me growing up. As far as the musical canon is concerned, the inventiveness, depth, and universality of Beethoven’s music grabbed me in my teenage years, and still does. I think of him as the beginning of the modern musical age. My personal interpretation of the term ‘modernism’ is that the individual voice of the composer can deliver ‘truths’ which have a value beyond their fashionability, enjoyability or marketability. There is also J.S. Bach and Mozart, of course, and Schubert, Schumann and Chopin are recurring passions. Of the more recent composers, Bartok, Shostakovich, Ives, Messaien, Xenakis, Weill, (pre-America), Ustwolskaya, Vivier, Feldman, Janacek and Mompou have all offered something special to me. Ronald Stevenson, who I am fortunate to have gotten to know in the last few years, has been an inspiration not just because of his own music (including his masterful Passacaglia on DSCH) but also through his open-mindedness to a wide range of lesser-known music which he’s shared with me – including some wonderful choral folksong arrangements by Percy Grainger.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

As a player, performing Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier Book 2, Ives’ Concord Sonata and Beethoven’s op. 106 ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata. Those experiences (including the task of memorising) helped develop my imagination and sense of structure – not only for composing, but for improvising. Balancing a career performing and composing has itself been a challenge, and I’m still trying to grapple with that. Improvising, besides being an artistic end in itself, has played a mediating role in this inner conflict. Perhaps one of my biggest challenges as a composer was finishing my first ‘opus’ – a piano sonata – in my last year at Juilliard, when I was also busy entering international competitions as a pianist. It was a kind of act of faith to switch gears in this way and start composing seriously. If my improvisation class teacher hadn’t taken me aside and said to me ‘look, from what I’ve heard you do, I think you should consider becoming a composer’, I may never have taken that plunge. It was the last, and practically the only thing he ever said to me in that class, and I’m still grateful for that. My first film soundtrack (Painted Angels, Jon Sanders dir.1999) scored for chamber orchestra was a similar plunge in the dark – very stressful yet exhilarating. From a curatorial perspective, the few festivals I’ve organised posed different challenges – perhaps the most hair-raising being the biggest ever Frederic Rzewski retrospective ever mounted – the first day beginning with the first (and only?) complete performance of his solo piano work ‘The Road’, lasting ten hours. His big compliment to me at the end of the two weeks was to say I was ‘one of the crazy people’.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working on a commissioned piece?

I haven’t had many commissions, but I particularly enjoy it when there is an element of collaboration. My Viola Concerto (Night Love Song) which was premiered in Toronto last year had two collaborative angles – firstly, working directly with Rivka Golani developing the viola part and secondly working with musical and historical/mythical material from the Blackfoot – specifically the ‘Blood’ tribe in Alberta.

What are the special challenges/pleasures of working with particular musicians, singers, ensembles and orchestras?

Well, Rivka who I just mentioned was (and is) very inspiring. I also recently worked with a young Canadian pianist, now studying in Germany, Everett Hopfner who played my Preludes and Afterthoughts – fantasy-transcriptions on Chopin’s Preludes op. 28 across Canada after winning the É-Gré Competition in Brandon – Canada’s most important competition for contemporary music. To feel such enthusiasm and empathy from a young performer just starting out in his career is something that really lifts the spirit. I guess these are the positive experiences, which I tend to remember and look forward to. What I can find a bit difficult to deal with at times is when performers don’t try to read between the notes on the page – to go beyond the score and ‘interpret it’, which is after all what performers are meant to do!

Which works are you most proud of?

Usually the one I’ve just finished – in this case Three Chorales for piano (which Aleksander Szram will be recording next year as part of a CD of some of my piano and chamber music). I just hope that I can keep developing.

Do you have a favourite concert venue?

I’ve never thought about that much. But one of the worst, I think, was a place that used to be called the ‘Communist Club’ in Warsaw. I played a concert there on an abominable piano in 1980 during the Chopin Competition. I was told afterwards that Richter had just come to town a couple of weeks earlier and asked to give an impromptu recital there. That humbled me!

Who are your favourite musicians/composers?

I mentioned some earlier, but out of the myriad musicians I admire, I’ll also say Rudolph Serkin and Sergiu Celibidace.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

Hearing Jesse Norman sing Wagner’s Liebestod and Strauss’ Four Last Songs with an orchestra in London, Ontario when I was about 19. It wasn’t just the singing, which was overwhelming enough, but her stage-presence, and the magisterial slowness of her entrance.

What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?

Try to be open-minded. Opinions are easy to form, and aren’t worth much. But you also have to learn discernment. This might seem paradoxical, but there is a fine balance required – the kind of thing that Zen philosophy seems to be dealing with.

Be generous to others, and as far as possible disinterested in your dealings – doing things for the betterment of the art of music and society rather than entirely for your own career. I think James MacMillan shows an admirably healthy attitude in his interview for this series when he says he never thought of music as a ‘career’.

What are you working on at the moment?

A piece for erhu (a 2-stringed Chinese ‘violin’) and piano for a Canadian duo.

Where would you like to be in 10 years’ time?

Somewhere where I could experience both solitude and friendship in equal measure.

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Solitude and friendship. And, more specifically, lying on a nice quiet beach somewhere with my wife and two daughters.

What is your most treasured possession?

Music.

What do you enjoy doing most?

Making music.

What is your present state of mind?

Tired, happy and just a little uneasy

Douglas Finch was born in Winnipeg, Canada, and began improvising, composing and performing on the piano from an early age with the help of his mother. He later continued studying with Winnifred Sim, Jean Broadfoot and at the University of Western Ontario with William Aide. After receiving a Masters from Juilliard in New York under Beveridge Webster, Douglas won several awards and was a finalist at the Queen Elisabeth International Piano Competition in Brussels.

After moving to London, he co-founded The Continuum Ensemble in 1994 and has collaborated in premiering many new works. He appears regularly with the ensemble at the Spitalfields and other Festivals and at the Southbank Centre, featuring composers such as Julian Anderson, Georges Aperghis, Henri Dutilleux, Charles Ives, Claude Vivier, Errollyn Wallen, Iannis Xenakis and many others.

He has composed for piano, chamber ensemble, orchestra, theatre and film and his score for the feature film ‘Painted Angels’ , was described in The Independent as ‘an extraordinary triumph of artistic will’.

Interview date: November 2013

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A guest post from Jane Shuttleworth

Among amateur musicians, we choral singers are an incredibly lucky bunch. We get to perform with top professional soloists, conductors and orchestras in the country’s best concert halls, without needing music college degrees and whilst still being able to do regular day jobs that pay the mortgage. When I was invited to contribute to this series, there were any number of memorable performances I could have chosen: my first ‘Messiah’, in the Royal Albert Hall; Bach Passions with professional baroque players; a Remembrance day War Requiem in Toronto; another ‘Messiah’ with Ben Heppner; Mahler’s Eighth Symphony… I’ve chewed through a fair proportion of the choral repertoire, but the piece I’ve chosen to write about comes from one of the works that has thus far eluded me – Haydn’s ‘Creation’.

The chorus, “The Heavens are telling” closes Part One of Creation; it was a staple of my church choir’s repertoire when I was a young girl soprano, and we often sang it either as an anthem during a service or at concerts. Everything about it delighted me, particularly the sheer exuberance of the opening phrases, and the madcap dash to the end when the words all tumble out with increasing urgency and the harmony ratchets up the tension; and the simple fact that it was really loud. But the contrasting trio sections with their graceful fluidity, their cast of angels and air of mystery enchanted me too.

To this day, it’s a bit of a mystery why I joined the choir: I think it was mainly to escape Sunday School, but I had always enjoyed trying to sing along with hymns. One of my earliest memories is standing on a pew next to my father, trying to sing a hymn and asking him what all the words meant. I wasn’t particularly good at singing – the school choir-mistress had made that quite clear. But David Strong, the choirmaster, was willing to take on any trebles who wanted a go, and he put in extra time with us before adult choir practice to help us learn our parts.

And this is really the point of this article. Thanks to that early experience of good Anglican choral music, I have spent my whole life singing in choirs; church and chapel choirs, big choral societies, and smaller chamber choirs. I’ve sung in big concert venues, a fair number of cathedrals and have been moved to all extremes of the emotional compass by music I’ve sung. And it’s all thanks to David Strong, that organist who took the time and effort to bring children into his church choir, and just as importantly to let us sing the same music as the grown-ups. This sort of thorough, accessible and (most importantly) free musical education is so hard to come by and should be valued, supported and lauded wherever it can be found.

I only realised just how grateful I was to David Strong when I heard last year that he was seriously ill, and I was glad that I had the opportunity to get back in touch and thank him. He died a few days before I sang my first St Matthew Passion, in Durham Cathedral, and some of the tears I shed during that concert were tears of gratitude.

We sang plenty of other good repertoire but “The Heavens are telling” captured my childhood imagination so strongly that it’s the piece that sums up my early choir years, and whenever I hear it, I think of my 10-year old self, singing out with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and still oblivious to just how much amazing music-making I had ahead of me. And if I ever get to sing Creation, I’ll be thinking of David…and probably resisting the temptation to attempt the soprano line that I used to sing with such delight.

Jane Shuttleworth is a singer, recorder player and writer, reviewing
for Bachtrack, Early Music Review and her own local music website
Music in Durham (www.musicdurham.co.uk). She currently sings alto in
The Durham Singers, a 40-voice chamber choir specialising in
unaccompanied music, and in Voces Usuales, an occasional cathedral
choir.

 

‘Music Notes’ is a new occasional series, mostly comprised of guest posts, in which contributors discuss favourite or significant concerts, performances, artists, recordings or musical experiences. More ‘Private Passions’ than ‘Desert Island Discs’, the series is an opportunity for people to share their love of music and attempt to explain why certain pieces, places and artists have such distinct resonances and associations for them. Further information about the series here:

https://crosseyedpianist.com/2014/04/29/music-notes-a-new-occasional-series/

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A standing ovation is a form of applause where members of a seated audience stand up while applauding after extraordinary performances of particularly high acclaim. In Ancient Rome returning military commanders (such as Marcus Licinius Crassus after his defeat of Spartacus) whose victories did not quite meet the requirements of a triumph but which were still praiseworthy were celebrated with an ovation instead, from the Latin ovo, “I rejoice”. The word’s use in English to refer to sustained applause dates from at least 1831 (source: Wikipedia)

In a recent article, the theatre critic of The Telegraph laments the fact that the standing ovation, an import (he says) from Broadway, has become an all too common and unpleasant feature in London theatres and concert halls. For my part, I found the critic’s argument to be unnecessarily curmudgeonly, in which he claims that the increasing trend of standing up no matter how good or bad the performance is a form of narcissism on the part of the audience, akin to the mass (and crass) exaggerated display of public grief following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.

I beg to differ. First, if the Wikipedia definition is to be believed, the standing ovation is not an American construct, but has an ancient provenance, as does the giving of applause. Secondly, I do not think the spontaneous reaction to a play, opera or concert is as considered as the author of the article claims: are people really thinking “I’ll stand up now so everyone around me can see how much I enjoyed this performance”? I’m not sure….. I agree with the author that the standing ovation does seem to have become more common in British venues (I never go to the theatre, so I cannot comment on this specifically), but personally I don’t have a problem with that – because you don’t have to stand up if you don’t want to! As regular readers of this blog know, I am a voracious concert goer (and someone with a fascination for “audience behaviour” at concerts), but the standing ovation still seems pretty rare in London venues that I frequent (I am trying, and failing, to recall the last time I stood to applaud at Wigmore Hall). We applaud to show our appreciation of the performance and performer/s; we stand, while continuing to applaud, to amplify our appreciation and to celebrate what we have just heard/seen. At a recent concert by Paul Badura-Skoda, the standing ovation came almost before the final note of Schubert’s last sonata ceased to resonate around the hall (St John’s Smith Square). No matter that there were quite obvious errors in most of the pieces Badura-Skoda performed, we were celebrating the fact that at 83 he was still performing and obviously thoroughly enjoying himself. And throughout his performance he exuded such warmth, wit and pleasure, and created such a wonderful intimacy in the big space of St John’s Smith Square, we felt bound to show gratitude for all of this (and I am not alone in feeling this).

At my first visit to the opera in over 15 years, for the world premiere of Julian Anderson’s Thebans at ENO, my companion and I were surprised when, as the cast took their curtain calls, the audience did not rise to its feet. “Isn’t that what you do at the opera?” my friend remarked. But given the narrative – a story of violence, murder, incest and political plotting – perhaps the audience felt a standing ovation was inappropriate, despite fine performances by the cast and orchestra (it will be interesting to see how the audience reacts at the first night of The Pearl Fishers, also at ENO, in June). And that’s something else that interests me – how a collective feeling can quickly sweep through an audience (in the way it does with football fans who suddenly seem to be singing You’ll Never Walk Alone or You’re Scum and You Know You Are! in tune) causing people to stand up to applaud, or not. It is this collective impulse, impelled by some unseen force, which suggests that the mass ovation is not necessarily a premeditated or narcissistic act, as the Telegraph critic claims. (Much has been written on crowd psychology – and indeed on why people cough at concerts…..)

A reviewing colleague on Facebook made an interesting point in response to my link to the Telegraph article – that at political party conferences and rallies the standing ovation has become de rigeur, regardless of the quality or content of the speeches. And here I would agree with the Telegraph critic: these ovations are very obvious toadying to one’s party leader, rather than any sincere display of commitment or belief.

Perhaps the most amusing incidence of the standing ovation – and one which has become ingrained in our concert culture – is the collective rising to one’s feet during the ‘Hallelujah’ chorus from Handel’s Messiah, a tradition which stems from one of the first performances of the work when King George II mistook the chorus for the national anthem. In keeping with royal protocol, the audience had to stand during the chorus too.

(picture source: Teton Music Blog)