Showing posts with label Ian Bostridge. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ian Bostridge. Show all posts

Thursday 30 September 2021

Report from Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival 2021 : [Place-holder for Thursday 30 September]

Report from Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival 2021 : [Place-holder for Thursday 30 September]

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2019 (17 to 24 October)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

30 September

Report from Hatfield House Chamber Music Festival 2021 : [Place-holder for Thursday 30 September]




As one might expect, Barron's dramatic work or for the stage informed her approach this evening (at 5.00 p.m.), but not perhaps, given that she is mentored by Barbara Hannigan and working with Ian Bostridge, any more than befitted the audience or occasion.

In such a lovely, but relatively small, performance-space [The Marble Hall at Hatfield House], one simply could not give a performance that was audaciously writ large – unlike The Maltings, at Snape, where Bostridge let rip one summer at Aldeburgh Festival [reviewed by #UCFF as 'A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times'] ! – and large gestures were unnecessary, when small ones (such as, early on, fluttering eye-lids) worked in this context much better, alongside the usual recital-room process of clearly and visually thinking her way to, and into, the next Lied.


Even if partly filled in by Müller in Die schöne Müllerin (?), he is anyway handling the universals of love, life and their loss, so there is no need for him or us to delay on the particulars – and those, similarly, who still remark that they are hearing a mezzo-soprano perform Winterreise are perhaps missing the point of its universality, and that there is no good reason why any character of voice cannot inhabit these texts* (or they the singer ?).

The texts speak to us, from and through the performers, of things that extend far beyond any literal scenario outlined, and, excepting, perhaps, the strangely placid encounter (or non-encounter [as of Beckettt's Murphy with Mr Endon] ?) with the vision that ends the cycle (and the eerie scoring that might as effectively have launched Pierrot lunaire from Earth), who cannot relate to the narrator's awareness of how perspectives can be curiously mixed and changed by time, as recalled in 'Der Lindenbaum' or, say, 'Die Post' ?


On half-a-dozen occasions (in live concerts alone), it appears that one can have followed the poems that make up Winterreise and seemingly not have noticed before that – except in three cases ('Die Post' [no. 13], 'Täuschung' [19] and 'Die Nebensonnen' [23]) – they compromise some number, between 8 and 3, four-line stanzas. However, one palpable reason not to be aware (other than that each poem is headed by a title) is that substance far outweighs form in this Liederkreis, and this is not La divina commedia's intense terza rima, or equivalent to a sonnet-sequence (such as Sidney's Astrophel and Stella).

Winterreise is far more condensed, so, with its many different scenes (those titles, again), let alone changes of heart or direction of thought, its progression is at a different scale, and of a different scope, from Shakespeare's sonnets or those of Sidney (though some have disputed that the former appear in the correct order) : there can be (in fact, need to be) such changes, but the formality and requirements of fourteen lines, even if they are constituted as three quatrains, is then affected by leading up to ending with a couplet. (Or there may be, say, a differently structured division, with a rhyme-scheme for the first eight lines, and another for the final six.)





[...]



Ich bin zu Ende mit allen Träumen*



[...]
























One emotional centre that Fleur Barron found and gave to us in this series of pieces was in 'Im Dorfe', from which the words that head this review are quoted*, and these words, in particular, threw into retrospect other times when dreaming and dreams had occurred in the texts of Wilhelm Müller's poems :

Seven poems away from the seeming inevitability of 'Der Leiermann', and after the narratorial voice has already passed through – and given us insights into – such moments as something heartfelt, resolution, noble feeling, moodi- and vengefulness, pride, and despairing***, its experiences seem to have come to one definite conclusion, from which the remaining poems will not deviate – although of course, and not least in 'Der Leiermann', there are more realizations, dreads and existential horrors to come.



[...]



End-notes :

* Maybe we cannot easily forget Dylan Thomas, reading his own work, once heard, but he is not the only one who can or should be heard, reading it aloud.

** #UCFF would render this I'm through with all these dreams. (As perhaps too prosaically translated as 'I am finished with all dreams' in the English version, by Richard Wigmore, provided ?)

*** To capture ones just from the first four poems ('Gute Nacht', 'Die Wetterfahne', 'Gefrorne Tränen' and 'Erstarrung').




Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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Monday 23 June 2014

A swaying, snarling, even spitting Schubert for our times

This is a review of Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès in Schubert’s Winterreise

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2014 (28 August to 7 September)
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

This is a review of a performance at The Maltings, Snape, of Franz Schubert’s Winterreise (Op. 89, D. 911) by Ian Bostridge and Thomas Adès on the evening of Sunday 22 June 2014 in the 67th Aldeburgh Festival (@aldeburghmusic)

One might have imagined that the theatrical nature of to-night’s Winterreise at The Maltings, Snape, was Nicht für alle – but when Adès had sounded the final moment of calm, beyond bereftness, and had maintained long his final position on the keys (holding the reaction off), the vivid acclaim proved otherwise.

And seventy or more minutes had passed without seeming so, taking us to Der Leiermann quite, it might almost have felt, by surprise – could we really be at journey’s end already (wherever we actually were in time, that is)… ? Had we not been immersed, and begun to lose track of the number of song-settings by around the seventh – and why, anyway, was the figure of thirty-two floating around in the mind (or was that from The Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 ?) ?

In ‘Gute Nacht’ (1*), right at the start of Wilhelm Müller’s sequence (though there were originally only twelve poems), there might have been some wonder at Bostridge’s extreme enunciation of clusters of letters at the ends of words such as gemacht / Nacht, and then, in reverse order, Nacht / gedacht**.

The initial impression was that maybe Bostridge had reacted to some criticism of his German by over-accentuation – but no, with further listening, diction in other places was more interior by far, not simply quieter, and, although (with the hall’s fine acoustic) it must have, seemed in danger of not reaching halfway up the side-stalls, let alone carrying to the back of the raked seating :

Something more complicated was going on with the voicing of this piece, which not only looked back to Bostridge’s recording with Julius Drake of ‘Erlkönig’ (D. 328) (on the EMI album Schubert Lieder*** in 1998), but also to his acclaimed appearances in so much Mozart, so much Britten, even as Caliban in Adès’ own much-lauded opera. (And, as Bostridge was in Britten’s The Rape of Lucretia, fitting to be reminded of a Director of Studies at Cambridge, who once expressed the belief that the separate characters in The Rape of Lucrece are different parts of one person – and the concomitantly repellent implication that Shakespeare had composed a fantasy of rape.)


Bostridge was bringing what amounted to a semi-staging to this late work of Schubert (hardly anything later than the year of death, and correcting the proofs of Part 2 of the song-cycle), but almost within the conventions of the concert-hall : done-up dark suit, single buttoned and almost a less-showy dinner-jacket, white shirt, but no tie for Adès or him.

Sometimes leaning on the curve of the Steinway grand as if this were cabaret (and sounding not a little Kurt Weillish), sometimes feeling like about to dive into it, under its lid (yet not as at a word-prompt, but as if his lost love and heart might be there), other times advancing upstage, at yet others writhing, contorted, and seeming to start disintegrating. Which, of course, is at the heart of Winterreise (after – and painfully leading on from – [Schubert’s setting of] Müller’s optimistic and enthusiastic Die schöne Müllerin (no sly self-reference there).

Or, more than two centuries later, at that of Beckettt in Molloy**** (and the other two novels of that trilogy, or even in the earlier work Mercier and Camier), though one was reminded most of that writer’s more famous and actually once cultured ‘men of the road’ in Vladimir and Estragon (affectionately, Didi and Gogo) : Could Bostridge possibly be seeing himself as a Vladimir, first of all seeing that special tree (‘Den Lindenbaum’ (5)), but with difficult feelings because of the mismatch with what is rooted in memory ?

That was the first really lyrical voicing, with Lieder-type gestures and tone, but it led, for example, to :

* ‘Wasserflut’ (6), with a massive, expressionistic stress on Haus (the ultimate word of the lyrics)

* Looking back on the town, as the departing man leaves it behind (‘Rückblick’ (8))

* The heart’s unfettered reaching out, in rapturous hope, when ein Posthorn klingt (in ‘Die Post’ (12)) – more clamorous lyricism

* The fixéd resignation / resolution (in ‘Der Wegweiser’ (20)) of :

eine Straße muß ich gehen,
die noch keiner ging zurück


Maybe at this point a different note set in – or perhaps as early as ‘Der greise Kopf’ (14)*****, contemplating the poet’s happy illusion of being old (because of frost on the hair). From then, diese Resie not seem to be demanding of Bostridge in the same way, and the slightly reeling and slurred Tom Waits down tone, contrasting with the defiant up voice that clearly and angrily states how the traveller has been treated, had evaporated – the feeling of ill-treatment had been early, starting with ‘Die Wetterfahne’ (2), and seeing Cressida-like inconstancy in the weather-vane signalling a change of direction (indicated by what is described as ‘[ein] Schild’, a crest or shield), and in the cynicism of the wind-changed beloved’s parents :

Was fragen sie nach meinen Schmerzen ?
Ihr Kind ist eine reiche Braut.


Yet this living so deeply with the role (no less than that, say, of Lear, where there is some respite) must have been at, and continued to be at, a price : at the end of Winterreise, when Adès and he went off, Bostridge seemed physically reduced from being already slim – though perhaps it was just the back view – and looked depleted, almost lamed.


Just one minor hesitation…

Yes, we can be plunged into this winter-world, but (especially if we do not know it, and struggle to follow the unremitting text in the concert-hall’s relative gloom) do we best find our emotional direction with Schubert’s work here ? Coming to the performance with our maybe hurried occupation of seats, our life outside the hall, brought into our seat ? – until, though, we relax into the offered music. No, we definitely would not have demanded more of Bostridge before Winterreise, but could we not have had a momentary taste of the composer just for piano, just to get us in his sound-world ?

As it was, it transpired that Adès, as accompanist, had read back into the early sections the spiky strangeness of the close, with his brought-out bass-figures and what seemed quirkily anachronistic stress, but could we have followed him better, and alone first, with a suitable Impromptu or two, to remind ourselves of the Schubert who after all strove, not least in Rosamunde (however fragmentarily his efforts usually survive, outside Radio 3’s (@BBCRadio3’s) Schubert marathon, as ‘incidental music’), to be part of theatre ?

Or even Liszt transcriptions of some songs, to take us away from the text-based, score-based literalism with which we might have approached what, it turned out, was anything but a hide-bound Winterreise, but a dangerous encounter with the part-like nature of the self…


A review of the following night's marathon solo piano recital by Festival director Pierre-Laurent Aimard is now available here



End-notes

* The numbering denotes the positioning of the poems of the song-cycle (as against Müller’s sequence of poems).

** Not here, but later, is where sounds were almost launched at the front rows of the stalls, right below Bostridge : ab in ‘Gefrorne Tränen’ (3), and, probably next, überdeckt andausgestreckt in ‘Auf dem Flusse’ (7).


*** The initial recording, to which a Volume II was added (in the release in 2001).

**** ‘Rast’ (10) talks of sheltering in a charcoal-burner’s house, and there is such a person in Beckettt’s Molloy…

***** In the closing two lines, we have confirmation that this is a definite departure, eine Reise :

Wer glaubt’s ? under meiner ward es nicht
auf dieser ganzen Reise !


Also on Aldeburgh...

Ever-ambitious Aimard wows with authenticity

The Humphrey and Andy Show (Britten on Camera)



Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)
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