A Singer’s Life Pt26
What’s your favourite opera, Brian? (continued)
I couldn’t possibly exclude Wagner’s Ring Cycle from my list of 10 favourite operas, although I will include them as one choice despite being in 4 parts and lasting about 17 hours! It is one of the greatest works of Art ever created, on a par with the Last Judgement of Michelangelo, the Last Supper of Leonardo da Vinci, Chartres Cathedral or the works of Shakespeare, and its gargantuan dimensions are, for me, less of a challenge than an opportunity to indulge my emotions and sensory faculties. The sheer scale of Wagner’s conception is mind boggling, especially when you realise that he wrote the music and the words, with all the psychological insights into the human character that are to be found on both planes. He wrote the whole work over the course of 26 years from 1848 to 1874, starting at the end with Siegfried’s Death which ended up as Gőtterdämmerung in the final cycle. “The Ring” had its first full performances at the opening of the Bayreuth Festspielhaus from 13 to 17 August 1876. The reaction was instantaneous and overwhelming, and since then, it has held audiences in raptures ever since. Stiff, but in raptures! I first saw the various components of Scottish Opera’s Ring Cycle conducted by Sir Alexander Gibson in 1971 and fell in love with it. I have been lucky enough to take part in various productions and concerts of the operas singing Wotan, Fafner, Hagen and Hunding and have seen wonderful performances in Covent Garden, the New York Metropolitan and Seattle Opera (where I also understudied Fafner and Hagen). Wagner can be an acquired taste, and Hitler’s obsession with his music has cast a pall over it for some, but what an achievement!
The last choice was in many ways the most difficult. Should I include Parsifal (making 3 Wagner operas), Don Carlo (giving us 3 by Verdi) or Billy Budd (3 Britten)? Should I include Carmen, unfairly hackneyed but wonderful, or Boris Godunov?
Well, I have chosen Puccini’s La Boheme, for two reasons. It was the first opera I ever heard on record, on a very old LP,with Gigli singing Rodolfo. Secondly, despite the weirdness and downright cruelty of his subjects, Puccini was perhaps the greatest composer of Tunes in the history of opera.
Che gelida manina, Nessun dorma, Un bel Di, Mi chiamano Mimi, E lucevan le Stelle, in questa Reggia – there are so many fantastic arias penned by him, and these are just the most famous ones. One of the Puccini operas I have been most closely associated with is “Manon Lescaut”, which incidentally has one of the very few decent bass roles he wrote, and that is full of the most wonderful music. It needs a hell of a good tenor, mind you, which I have been lucky to have shared a stage with in my several productions.
The reason I chose La Boheme is that, for me, it has a great story and is not hampered by the strangely cruel and violent librettos of many of his other operas. I have sung twice in Gianni Schicchi which is funny and clever but most of his stories are creepy. Not many people know, when they swoon over Nessun dorma, that Calaf is announcing that, because he refuses to divulge his name to Turandot, the secret police are out torturing and killing anyone who might have information. When he sings that wonderful high B natural on Vincero, he is declaring his triumph in “love” despite all the deaths and horrors that his silence has provoked.
La Boheme is a wonderfully tragic love story, credible in its changes from happiness to sadness to grief. It is also shorter than most single acts of Wagner’s operas, and is a model of concision and clarity. Its story of poor students surviving in poverty amidst the wealth of Paris is heart-warming and, well performed, is a guaranteed tear jerker. I sang in it only once, as the student philosopher Colline, with Scottish Opera, and thoroughly enjoyed it. It is a great ensemble piece, and we were all young singers playing naturally. I had to wave a herring around at one point. In Glasgow, we had a fresh herring for each performance but, on tour, I had to wave a realistic plastic substitute. It is the only prop I ever stole, and I still have it! We saw the splendid Covent Garden production many times and, on our honeymoon in 1979, we saw it at the Paris Opera, the Garnier. I will always remember that, just before it started, there was some sort of altercation near us. A love affair gone wrong? Anyway, there was a bit of a furore, people were standing and exclaiming, people behind were shouting “ASSIS ASSIS” (Sit down), when suddenly one of the protagonists jumped down from our level to the one below, and disappeared. I have no idea what happened, but a few minutes later, the music started and we were all immersed in the life of the bohemian students.
I have deliberately not suggested recordings of these operas I have chosen because I know my tastes might not coincide with anyone else. I would only recommend my recording of L’Incoronazione di Poppea with Sir Richard Hickox because it is obviously the best! Oh, and my recording of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Philips with Sir Colin Davis and the LSO because, well, it’s also the best!
I have however decided to attempt a sort of Desert Island Discs selection of my top 8 records, and here, I have included all forms of music, because my tastes are quite catholic and I am writing about myself after all!
I will surprise you no doubt by starting with “Alan Stivell: Renaissance of the Celtic Harp”, released in 1972. I have listened to this record and its digital successors at least twice a month ever since I first bought it in St Andrews in 1973. I have no idea where I heard about it. It was a record that revolutionised the connection between traditional folk music, modern rock music and world music, and I cannot recommend it too highly. It is the most sublime, restful and beautiful disc I own.
Next I choose Bach’s Double Violin Concerto, a work, particularly in the slow movement, of such irresistible perfection that it takes the breath away. The performance I still love best is by the father and son duo of David and Igor Oistrakh with the RPO and Eugene Goosens on DG. The two violins intertwine beautifully in one of the most gorgeous pieces Bach wrote. Also recommended is the, completely different, authentic instruments version with Trevor Pinnock and the English Concert, also on DG.
Mahler’s Symphony No 2 is one of the greatest creations of all time, and the record I love is that made with the LSO and Leonard Berstein. It was recorded in Ely Cathedral, and you can see it on a DVD produced by Humphrey Burton in 1973. It is impossible to decide on the best recording of this extraordinary work, but I saw the Edinburgh Festival performance with these forces the summer before the Ely recording was made and will never forget it. It was one of the concerts of my life!
“Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” was the 8th studio album released by The Beatles, and came out in 1967. when I was 11. I had already fallen in love with the Beatles in their earlier Beatlemania phase and I had bought the original singles “She loves you” and “Can’t buy me love” when they came out. At that time, you were either a Stones fan or a Beatles fan. It was difficult to be both. Fortunately, I have come to appreciate both in later years, but when I was a boy in Edinburgh, the Stones were much too dangerous and edgy for me. I love Sgt. Pepper for its fabulous mixture of styles and its near perfection as an album, and enjoy it still. A tragic diversion here reminds me that, when I left home for London and marriage with Fran, my dear mother (referred to in Part 1 as a wise old owl!) decided to throw out a lot of my childish things, including the two original Beatles singles! Heaven knows what they might be worth now!
How can you choose a best Beethoven record? You can’t, so I offer my selection as non definitive but how I feel today. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony just shades it, and I have chosen Gűnter Wand’s fabulous recording with the North German Radio Orchestra from the 1980s. We were very lucky that, for several years as quite an old man, Wand came to Scotland conducting Bruckner, Beethoven and Brahms. He spent most of his career working largely in Germany and never built up a fan base worldwide until he was very old, but his warm and well-considered interpretations are now seen as some of the best available. I love the 7th Symphony for its energy, passion and downright joy. The final few minutes can always lift my spirits. For someone often described as tragic and gloomy, Beethoven had a remarkable ability to portray total happiness and delight in music, and he remains my all time favourite composer.
By way of contrast, I offer you now Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Water”, their definitive album from 1970. Still to my mind one of the greatest ever albums, it could almost qualify as a Greatest Hits disc. There are so many great tracks here, it is almost impossible to imagine that the combination of Simon’s songs and the beauty of Garfunkel’s voice could end here, and that this was their last song and last album together. There is a very interesting documentary about the writing of the album and its aftermath, and we must remain grateful that they lasted as a partnership long enough to make this record. Apparently, Garfunkel didn’t want to sing the final track, Bridge over Troubled Water, but Simon persuaded him to do it. Thank goodness! I love Paul Simon’s quirky singing but this just needs vocal beauty and Art had it in spades!
Richard Strauss composed his Four Last Songs at the age of 84 in 1948 but never heard them sung, as they were published posthumously and performed for the first time in 1950 by Kirsten Flagstad and the Philharmonia Orchestra under Wilhelm Furtwängler in London’s Albert Hall. A composer who wrote better for the female voice than perhaps any other, summed up his life’s work in these beautiful and serene songs, with a wonderful orchestral score which gleams and sparkles. I have heard a recording of the first performance but Flagstad, for me, was not the ideal exponent. I have recordings by Schwartzkopf, Lisa della Casa, Jessye Norman, Gundula Janowitz and Erin Wall, wonderful all. I shall choose Janowitz, with Karajan and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra on DG today, as it seems to me to fulfil all the requirements of tempi, colours, vocal glory and orchestral magnificence. Tomorrow, maybe another?
Finally, I must have some Wagner, and I choose the recording that made me a Wagner nut all those years ago, “Gőtterdämmerung” with the VPO and Georg Solti on Decca. This was the final opera in Decca’s immense first studio recording of Wagner’s Ring Cycle in the 1960s and sums up both the fantastic recorded sound, masterminded by John Culshaw, and Solti’s thrilling interpretation combined with some of the greatest singers of this and any other era. We hear Wolfgang Windgassen, not the most beautiful Heldentenor voice but unflagging and brilliantly imaginative, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s glorious Gunther, magnificent of voice but racked with guilt as a character, Gottlob Frick’s immense black voiced and evil Hagen and best of all, Birgit Nilsson’s utterly perfect Brunnhilde, pouring out hours of truly magnificent soprano singing, the like of which we have not heard since and are unlikely to hear ever again.
There was no room for Arvo Pärt’s “Passio”, for Bruckner Symphonies 4 and 8, for Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” or for Tito Gobbi’s “Falstaff”, but there you have it. Today’s choice!
