London orchestras, and one pianist
I: The Covent Garden orchestra’s eightieth anniversary
On Friday 20 February, Kevin O’Hare, artistic director of the Royal Ballet, introduced the evening performance at the Covent Garden opera house with a curtain speech that observed this was the eightieth anniversary of the house’s reopening. He thanked in particular the orchestra.
For almost fifty-three of those eighty years, i’ve been hearing that orchestra, even under such veteran conductors as Adrian Boult (1889-1983), Karl Böhm (1894-1981), and Reginald Goodall (1901-1990). The biggest change has been that the orchestra’s worst playing, sometimes risible on ballet nights in the 1970s, is now from bad. And its best? I’ve been proud to attend certain performances conducted by such luminaries as Claudio Abbado, Bernard Haitink, Robert Irving, Carlos Kleiber, Charles Mackerras, Gennady Rozhdestvensky, among others. The two biggest disappointments are that ballet conducting has grown much slower, more dancer-indulgent, and that the level of new ballet music has deteriorated signicantly over the last twenty years.
II: The Royal Ballet’s “Giselle”
On that eightieth anniversary, February 20, the performance was of the Royal Ballet’s “Giselle”. This, directed by Peter Wright (who will be a hundred in November), was new in 1985. The designs by John Macfarlane are what we used to call Woolworths art: they depict “Giselle” as occurring in a sepia village in which nobody is allowed to wear blue, purple, or green.
I’ve read that this “Giselle” is true to pre-1985 Royal Ballet traditions: this is twaddle. I’ll just give four basic examples. In a ballet that abounds with musical cues, Wright has the hero Albrecht make his first entrance, with no such cue, during the overture, thus blunting the audience’s sense of music-action connection. Later in Act One, Giselle used to end her big variation with a tight-wound diagonal of changing turns (“a whirlwind of turns”, in the words of Margot Fonteyn), but under Wright Giselles have ended it with the showier but easier and monotonous circuit of piqué turns. In Act Two, the Royal Ballet corps of wilis used to do the famous stage-crossing hops in arabesque with eyes and heads addressing the floor (a fabulously morbid look), but Wright - first nicknamed Peter Wrong more than fifty years ago - in 1985 changed these to the Soviet version, with backs raised and heads and eyes facing forward. Later in that act, Rudolf Nureyev startled British audiences by introducing multiple sequences of entrechat-six in the 1960s, but into the 1980s Anthony Dowell continued to dance far more complicated and richer phrases, of steps sanctioned in the nineteenth century; you may be sure that Wright got rid of the Dowell tradition. (He also insists that Giselle commits suicide, though it’s all too obvious that she doesn’t and that the music has no suicide cue.)
The programme tells us that the scenario is by Théophile Gautier after Heinrich Heine, - thus ignoring Jules-Henri Vernoy de Saint-Georges, who composed the narrative for Act One. Although three of the main dances are to music by other composers, the programme credits only Adolphe Adam “edited by Lars Payne”. Payne’s main achievement was in Act One, moving the peasants’ festival of the vintage to an earlier point in the action (why?) but removing Giselle’s big solo from it and instead - very clunkily indeed - interpolating that into the middle of her mime conversation with the aristocrat Bathilde. Structure does matter in the old ballets, but it’s flouted here.
The Royal Ballet used to lead the world in its fidelity to historically scrupulous accounts of the classics. But in “Giselle”, as in “The Nutcracker” (another Wrong production) and, worst of all, the late Liam Scarlettt’s “Swan Lake” (2018), commissioned by O’Hare, the Royal Ballet has become just another ballet company in its disregard for textual tradition. Even in “Coppelia” and “The Sleeping Beauty”, other companies now dance texts that are historically truer to nineteenth-century precedents than the productions at Covent Garden. What on earth does the Royal Ballet now stand for?
One answer is the sheer stylishness of Royal dancing, even now. On Friday 20, my Giselle and Albrecht were the dissimilar - but newlywed - Fumi Kaneko, both at their finest. Kaneko, who used to project disastrously exaggerated facial expressions, played Giselle with restraint and subtlety; her footwork, legwork, and adagio phrasing showed immense improvements in artistry. Muntagirov has long been one of the world’s most admired ballet heroes. In Act Two, the distinction of his jumps and phrasing were exceptional. Even in this dismally wrong-headed staging, “Giselle” itself - the most resilient of the old ballets - keeps coming back to life.
III: Giltburg’s Bach
At the Wigmore Hall on Sunday 22, the Russian-born Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg, now in his early forties, played the first book of Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier”. There were illumining Romantic inflections throughout - he is known for his Beethoven and Rachmaninov - but never disfiguring. The many facets of Bach kept deepening: you could hear metre within metre, harmony within harmony, pattern within pattern.
IV: Diaghilev’s Ravel.
2029 will bring the centenary of the death of Serge Diaghilev, who died after twenty-one years of presenting his increasingly less Russian Russian Ballet in the West. I hope enterprising programmers will honour his importance to classical music. He commissioned premieres from dozens of composers, from Debussy and Satie through to Poulenc and Prokofiev; and his restless appetite for the new - every year brought fresh generations of modernism changed with Diaghilev’s seasons - found its ideal musical exponent in Stravinsky, who moved from “The Firebird” to “Les Noces”, from “Petrushka” to “Apollo”, with Diaghilev as his inspired patron and editor.
Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloë” (1912), one of Diaghilev’s first commissions from a Westen composer, is often played in concert in one of its composer’s two suites, both of which I enjoy. But the complete ballet is an infintely greater score, and a miracle of orchestration. Thanks therefore to Esa-Pekka Salonen, the Philharmonia Orchestra, and the Philharmonia Chorus for giving us, on Wednesday 25, the complete “Daphnis” at the Festival Hall. Even though there are brief moments when Ravel’s inspiration flags, those pale beside the fabulous imagination he here shows so often, from the wordless choir at the start of scene 1 through to the pounding, folk-like 5/4 rhythm that ends the ballet in sublime joy. Chloë’s two solos are wonderfully conceived, with a slow pulse underneath a rippling, long-phrased, Middle Eastern, wind-instrument melody, seemingly beyond any rhythm (plaintive oboe in scene 2 when Chloë is captivated, flute in scene 3 when she has been returned to Daphnis and home). When the London Philharmonic recently played Bartók’s ballet “The Wooden Prince”, the music was accompanied by projected lines from its scenario; the same principle should be employed for all ballets (even or especially “The Rite of Spring”), not least “Daphnis”, whose story is often elusive when not accompanied by a good staging. Ravel is telling a story. (After too many years, Frederick Ashton’s complete “Daphnis” - for some people the greatest single vehicle of Fonteyn’s glorious career - returns to Covent Garden repertory next season.)
There are several passages in which Ravel’s “Daphnis” anticipates the minimalism of John Adams. Salonen began his Philharmonia programme with Adams’s “After the Fall”, a piano concerto that had its premiere in San Francisco last year - and which flaunts conventional concerto form in favour of something closer to a rhapsodic tapestry for orchestra and piano, sometimes overtly quoting Bach. Adams’s pianist is Vikingur Ólafsson, who played Bach’s Air on a G String as an encore.
V: Gianandrea Noseda
At the Barbican the following night, Gianandrea Noseda conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in two of Debussy’s three nocturnes (“Nuages” and “Fêtes”), in Berg’s violin concerto (led by the barefoot Patricia Kopatchinskaja), and in Rachmaninov’s first symphony. I’m sorry I’ve caught too little of Noseda’s work in the past. On the strength of his two recent LSO concerts, he’s one of the great maestri. It’s fun to watch his body language in action: his weight tends to be over the front of his feet, and he often leans forward from the waist. He inflects his long arms with a wide variety of nuances; his long fingers have especial range. And it’s evident that the LSO players have the utmost respect for him.
The two Debussy nocturnes were near-polar opposites in terms of colour and rhythm; both showed how Debussy was - is - on the frontier in taking music’s powers of evoking atmosphere. I’ve heard the Berg concerto a few times over fifty years, it’s never a work I feel I know: dedicated “in memory of an angel”, it hovers on the cusp of the sublime, sometimes as if feeling its way, moving between romantic fervour and tonal uncertainty.
Exciting as it was to hear these works, the evening reached its climax with a superlative account of Rachmaninov’s first symphony (1895). You could hear both how Rachmaninov, then in his early twenties, was the most complete heir to Tchaikovsky - and how he anticipates Shostakovich. This is the most heroic writing I’ve heard from Rachmaninov: the London Symphony - cellos above all - played it with incisive ardour.
@Alastair Macaulay