A Singer’s Life Pt29
I have written about great concert halls in the UK, and now we turn to concert halls abroad.
Just a Eurostar ride from London is Brussels, where the Centre for Fine Arts is found halfway up the hill from the Monnaie to the Royal Palace and the main Art Galleries. Built in 1929 by the Art-Nouveau architect Victor Horta, and funded by the Belgian banker Henry le Boeuf, it had to follow various planning stipulations, one of which was that it should not obscure the King’s view of Brussels. It is situated in a rather drab street near one of the entrances to the Central railway station, but inside, it looks very grand and seats 2,200, and is one of the many beautiful designs in Brussels by Horta, an architect little known in Britain but much appreciated in Belgium. Sadly, the hall and the general attractiveness of the building is hampered by a very dull, dry acoustic. I can’t remember what I sang there but I remember I didn’t like it! Nonetheless, a fine building.
Moving north to Amsterdam, we find the magnificent Concertgebouw on one side of Museumplein, opposite the famous Rijksmuseum. Opened in 1888, the Concertgebouw (literally Concert Building, in Dutch) is one of the greatest concert halls in the world. It is a most impressive place from the outside, and inside, it is splendid. The Main Hall seats 1,974, while the smaller Recital Hall seats 437. It has been a venue for many wonderful concerts, including the excellent performance of Kurt Weill’s Seven Deadly Sins conducted by Peter Eotvos, and featuring me as the Mother! One of its most quirky features is that the soloists and conductor enter from on high and have to descend a great flight of steps to get to the podium. I wouldn’t fancy it now, after my fractured vertebra disaster in 2018, but it was fun at the time. The acoustics are superb, and it is worth going just for a look, if you are in Amsterdam. Throughout the season, they put on concerts every Saturday afternoon, at a very reasonable price, and your ticket includes a drink!
By a strange coincidence, I sang the same piece in the Concert Hall in Oslo in Norway, around the same time. The Konserthus was opened in 1977, seating 1600, and was much needed in Oslo, as the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra was world famous but without a decent playing venue. I don’t remember much about the hall other than that it seemed a nice venue with a rather dry acoustic, but it was quite a good performance, conducted by my friend Mark Stringer. Since then, it has been dramatically overshadowed by the magnificent new Opera House, built on the Oslofjord, which opened in 2008.
I have only sung in churches in Sweden and Finland, but the concert in Helsinki of Purcell’s King Arthur, with the English Concert under Trevor Pinnock, was memorable in many ways. We sang in the Temppeliaukio, a church built inside a cave, which was consecrated in 1969. It is the most amazing place, hewn out of the rock, and with light coming in through a skylight with a copper dome. Designed by the Suomalainen brothers, it is a functioning Lutheran church but is often used for concerts as its rock interior has a fabulous acoustic. We gave a very good performance of the Purcell, with Nancy Argenta and me starring as Cupid and the Cold Genius, and afterwards repaired to our splendid hotel, where we dined, drank, danced and finally closed the bar at some ungodly hour. Even the hard-drinking Finns were impressed!
That same tour took me over the Baltic to Berlin, recently unified after the Wall came down in 1989, and beginning to emerge as the wonderful capital city it now is. We sang in the Konzerthaus in the Gendarmenmarkt, a magnificent square in former East Berlin, created as the Linden Markt in the late 17th century and reconstructed in 1773. Within the square are the French and German Churches and the Concert House, and although almost completely destroyed in World War Two, the whole complex has been restored to its former glory. The Konzerthaus was built by the great architect Friedrich Schinkel in 1821, originally as a theatre, which explains why it is called the Schauspielhaus (Play Theatre), although after the rebuilding in the DDR time, it has been used as a concert hall. And what a hall it is! It rates as one of the most perfect acoustics I have ever sung in, and its oval neo-classical design is particularly pleasing. It was a fantastic setting for our concert performance of King Arthur, and I recall the Berliners were extremely enthusiastic afterwards. Quite right too!
I have sung many concerts in multiple churches in Germany and Switzerland, mostly with the English Concert and the Hilliard Ensemble, and I have always found the audiences marvellously warm and encouraging. I sang many performances of Bach’s St John Passion with the German group ‘Ensemble Contrapunctus’ in the late 80’s in superb churches from Marburg down the Rhine to Basel. British early music ensembles are particularly successful in Germany, and it was a great pleasure to get to know that great country well.
Again, I have sung in churches and cathedrals all over France, but in Paris, I have sung a concert in the old Opéra, the Garnier (Part 22) and one in the famous Salle Pleyel, which opened in 1927 with a concert conducted by Stravinsky and Ravel. It is not a particularly attractive hall to modern eyes (although Corbusier was apparently very impressed), and it had a dry and difficult acoustic, apparently recently improved. With Marc Minkowski and les Musiciens du Louvre, I sang bass solo in Handel’s Messiah, which we had first performed in Grenoble, the orchestra’s hometown, and which we were recording in the Opera de Bastille at the same time. The performances and recording were connected to the William Klein film of the same name (Part 15), with its disturbing images, especially in my aria ‘Why do the Nations’, but my most vivid memory of our time in Paris was being taken on a Sunday to a very chic hair salon on the Left Bank, opened specially for the soloists and paid for by Deutsche Grammophon, for expensive haircuts for the photos in the CD booklet!
Happy days!
The Barcelona Palau de la Musica
I have written about the Palau de la Musica in Valencia in Part 27, but I must also mention the concert hall of the same name in Barcelona; except it is not quite the same name, as it is called the Palau de la Musica Catalana and the last word is the most important. It was opened in 1908 and is a wonderful example of the Catalan Modernista style, designed by Lluis Domenech I Montaner, and is now officially designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I sang there with the English Concert in a programme of Mozart’s sacred music and was overwhelmed by the magnificence of the architecture. The concert hall seats about 2,200 and is designed to be lit in daytime only by natural light; the whole place is decorated with wonderful sculptures and medallions. Major reconstruction took place in the 80’s to restore the Palau to its full glory, and I would recommend anyone to go and see it.
We took a different programme another year to northern Italy, and I have very fine memories of two great performances of Bach’s B Minor Mass in Cremona and Turin. Usually, I don’t sing the B Minor because, although there are only two arias for the bass, one is written for a bass and the other for a high lyric baritone. Bach never intended the mass to be sung as one piece as far as we know, so it would not have occurred to him that there was a problem. In fact, my researches for this article tell me that the first performance of the Mass, as we know it now, was not until 1859 in Leipzig, 109 years after the composer’s death. He wrote the two arias at completely different times in his life. It is one of the miracles of music that a work so disparate in its composition has emerged as one of the highest points of creativity in Western art. I only ever sing the work when it is played at the lower key used by early music ensembles (415Hz instead of 440Hz – that is a semitone lower than usual), because at that pitch, both arias come into my range.
This whole digression takes me back to the wonderful performances with Trevor Pinnock in Italy, which featured as soloists Nancy Argenta, Catherine Wyn-Rogers, Rainer Trost and myself. We played firstly in the 17th century church of San Marcellino in Cremona, where we also visited one of the several violin makers who still ply their astonishing trade there. It is one of the other miracles of music that, from the middle of the 16th century, Cremona was the home of Amati, Stradivari, Guarneri and Ruggeri and others who were to become known as the greatest violin and lute makers of all time. Many of their instruments are still played by the finest violin players in the world, and their price is beyond measure. Stradivari is the most famous, and at his peak in the 1680s, his name was synonymous with the violin. We were taking part in the Cremona Festival and I remember my own excitement at singing the wonderful music of Bach in this lovely old city. We took the same concert to Turin directly after Cremona and played in an entirely different hall, the Lingotto.
In the building which had housed the old Fiat factory, the Italians have constructed a magnificent new concert hall, seating 1900. It was inaugurated in 1994 by Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, and is a fine design, rectangular in shape with great sight lines and, like Symphony Hall, Birmingham (see Part 28), a variable acoustic. Changing the sound for a Bach Mass or a Mahler Symphony is a big task, but the ‘Gianni Agnelli’ Auditorium can do it. The B Minor in Turin was one of my last concerts with the English Concert, and one of my best ever, not just for the obvious brilliance of the soloists, but for the fabulous playing of the orchestra and the singing of the English Concert Choir, and the inspirational direction of Trevor Pinnock, simply one of the greatest musicians I have ever been privileged to work with.
I will end this round up of great concert halls with a couple of Far Eastern adventures. I have mentioned before that I was lucky enough to sing in many performances of Arvo Pärt’s ‘Passio’ with the Hilliard Ensemble (see Part 8). In the early 90s, we took the ‘Passio’ to Japan, and we performed in amazing venues. One was in the north at Nakanida near where the terrible tsunami occurred in 2011, and it was fascinating to be in the Japanese countryside rather than in a big city. After the concert in the Bach Hall, we boarded the Bullet Train to Tokyo. At the time, this was the fastest train in the world, and we were astonished at the sleekness of the system. Sadly, we travelled at night, and were unable fully to appreciate just how fast we were going, but it seemed no time until we were pulling into Tokyo’s main station. We sang in an extraordinary new concert hall in Tokyo, the Metropolitan Arts Centre, which was lavishly decorated in the modern style. It had only recently opened and was a state of the art hall, seating about 2000, with cleverly controlled acoustics and a double organ, which on one side featured a perfect baroque style organ and revolved 180 degrees to reveal a full modern romantic organ. Both had their own keyboards and pedalboards with their own pipes and style. Chris Bowers-Broadbent, the Hilliard organist, beside whom I sang all Christ’s music, was lost for words in admiration. As usual, the Japanese audience were fantastic!
As a gentle coda to this article, I would like to include the Victoria Memorial Hall in Singapore. Named after Queen Victoria who had recently died, it was built to give more audience space alongside the old Town Hall, and connected to it by a splendid clock tower, it opened fully in 1909 with a performance of ‘The Pirates of Penzance’. I was engaged to sing Handel’s ‘Messiah’ there, and spent a very pleasant week in the tropics, performing, sipping Singapore Slings, playing snooker in Raffles Hotel and watching cricket being played outside the concert hall. It was quite surreal, but rather fun!
