Author: Antony Jeffrey

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Edinburgh at the famed Festival – last tour for Academy

This has been my last tour for Academy Travel and in many ways the most interesting and unusual. I had spoken to the ACO about the tour being built around their London and Edinburgh Festival tour, and Robert Veel of Academy had met Marita Supplee of Sydney Festival and the Festival had agreed to be part of the overall plan for the tour. So the group was drawn from Academy clients, ACO subscribers and Sydney Festival donors, a very unusual mix of backgrounds. Marita was there to look after her donors, I was there to lead the tour, and Robert was there to make sure the disparate interests were properly served. In addition the Edinburgh end of the tour was supplemented by the presence of Wesley Enoch, newly appointed Director of the Sydney Festival, who was in Edinburgh looking at talent that might be invited to Sydney. In some ways there were too many cooks, who in the view of some of the group, were spoiling the broth.

Partly because of the connections we had between us, the tour was brimful of fabulous events and performances, probably the best of any tour I have led so far. Highlights were:

  • Barry Humphries and the ACO’s performance of his Weimar Republic tour de force at the Cadogan Hall in London followed by a marvellous after party at the Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square where Barry made a hilarious speech taking time out to send up Alexander Downer the host
  • An utterly unforgettable performance of Berlioz’ Romeo and Juliet at a Prom at the Royal Albert Hall given by Sir John Eliot Gardiner, his Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique and Monteverdi Choir and soloists
  • An interview by me for the group at the Royal College of Music with Sir John Eliot Gardiner
  • A performance of Janacek’s delightful opera The Cunning Little Vixen at Glyndebourne on a perfect day, preceded by a fascinating interview for the group I arranged with Tim Walker, Artistic and Managing Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra which for many years has played through the summers at Glyndebourne.
  • A hilarious performance of Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist at Stratford and a really profound and moving all black production of Hamlet
    In Edinburgh Wesley took us all on whistle stop journeys through the Fringe and its countless performances all over the city
  • In intimate Queens Hall we saw two fabulous concerts, first the ACO with an extraordinary performance of Mahler’s Song of the Earth in Schoenberg’s chamber arrangement with Alice Coote and Stuart Skelton the incomparable soloists, then a couple of days later Mark Padmore and Kristian Bezuidenhout singing Schubert’s Schwanengesang
  • But the highlight of all was the amazing production of Bellini’s Norma starring the incomparable Cecilia Bartoli in the remarkable Salzburg Festival production updated to the French Resistance in World War II. It made real sense of this creaky story about druids and the singing was exceptional
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The Bach Festival in Leipzig

Bach’s Thomaskirche Leipzig  (Photo Ad Meskens, Wikimedia Commons, above)

Our group has just concluded six terrific days in Leipzig at the Bach Festival, one of the most inspiring festivals anywhere in the world. Here is our brochure for the whole tour: June 2016 Tour Brochure

But not only is Leipzig one of the most friendly and fascinating German cities, its musical heritage is second to none: Bach’s home for the greater part of his professional life, residence of one of the oldest and most famous orchestras, the Leipzig Gewandhaus, and the spiritual home of at least two other great composers, Mendelssohn and Schumann. During our stay, we:

  • Attended a performance of the St Matthew Passion directed by John Eliot Gardiner and his English Baroque Soloists and Monteverdi Choir – can’t get any better than that
  • The superb violinist Christian Tetzlaff playing Bach’s solo Partitas and Sonatas
  • The incoming Music Director of the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra for the first time since his appointment, playing a stupendous performence of Mahler’s 3rd Symphony, sounding glorious in the rich but clear acoustic of their great concert hall, the Gewandhaus (Cloth Hall)
  • Visited both the Schumann and Mendelssohn houses and museums
  • Last night, on the last day of the Festival, William Christie directed a wonderful performance by Les Arts Florissants of the Bach B minor Mass in Bach’s own church, the Thomaskirche. During the Agnus Dei at the end, the sun poured through the clouds and lit up the east end of the great church as if handed down from on high in honour of the sublime music

Julia meets William Christie after the B minor Mass

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Four Days in Paris

Paris Opera, Palais Garnier (Photo: Eric Pouhier, Wikimedia Commons, above)

Four days in Paris! We are staying in a rather cramped hotel a few minutes away from L’Opera and the Galeries Lafayettes, but then eveywhere you stay in Paris is rather cramped unless it’s the Georges Cinq or its ilk. Paris is not so much for the music but for being here, window shopping and observing the ever-fascinating French. We saw Traviata at the Bastille with the stunning Sonja Yoncheva but the lighting was in such stygian darkness we could barely make out who was who. The designer seemed to want each scene to be a floating blob of light in the middle ot total blackness. Nice concept maybe but most of Traviata is in daylight or brilliant party scenes. In comparison, last night’s Lear by German composer Aribert Reimann, (commissioned in the 1970s for the great German baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau) was prison bars next to Traviata’s gilded cage. A fearsome opera by turns with discordantly shrieking orchestral paasages then groaning, moaning stasis. Depending completely on outstanding singing actors, it was well served and received tremendous applause from the remaining audience who had not left at the interval! Our group had very mixed responses, some loving it, some hating it, but all loved cruising around the magnificent foyers of the Opera’s Palais Garnier before the performance and during the interval.

But the highlight of our Paris visit has been the visit to the wonderful new Philharmonie de Paris designed by Jean Nouvel who designed the Central Park complex in Broadway Sydney. This hall is designed with the Berlin Philharmonie’s concept of ‘hanging vineyards’ with a huge inverted mushroom baffle over the auditorium giving magnificently even acoustics to all seats. We heard Richard Goode play the Emperor Concerto and Herbert Blomstedt conduct the Orchestra de Paris. After the interval they gave a superb performance of Mahler’s 1st Symphony.

Philharmonie de Paris (Photo: BastienM – Wikimedia Commons)

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Opera Everywhere in Berlin

One of our group, Philip Levy recommended our hotel, the Camper Casa and it has proved to be a great success and its facilities much enjoyed by all. It is very simple with a plain foyer and front desk, large utilitarian guest rooms with every convenient facilty you could want. Best of all is a 24 hour cafeteria style lounge dining area on the top floor where you can have self serve food and drink on an honour system any time you want, ideal for a group like us when we come home after a concert at 11 pm wanting a drink or three, gossip and a snack. Berlin is such a wonderful varied city these days, a place where everything happems for whatever your taste is – at all times of the day or night. in nearly a week here, we have been to a performance at all three of the full time professional opera companies here. The Deutsche Oper, the Staatsoper Berlin, and the Komische Oper, the last run by the redoubtable Australian Barrie Kosky, once our-love-to-loathe director of horrible productions, now the poster boy of European high opera, soon to debut at Bayreuth. At the Deutsche Oper, we saw Graham Vick’s controversial production of Tristan and Isolde set in a retirement home with often inexplicable goings on. In many ways it seemed completely illogical, even incomprehensible, but there was a painful dreaminess and angst that gave it a powerful dimension. At the Schiller Theater, (while the Staatsoper Berlin is being endlessly renovated), altogether more entertaining was Martinu’s Juliette or the Key to Dreams, an absolutely wonderful staging and performance of this mysterious surrealistic opera about a man and his lover locked in some kind of separate time capsules. The director, Claus Guth, (who directed the sensational Messiah Leo Schofield and I saw in Vienna a couple of years ago) had a field day with a set of madly opening and closing sets of doors and windows plus extraordinary performances by Rolando Villazon, singing gloriously and looking and moving like a young Charlie Chaplin and the gorgeous Magdalena Kozcena. This was a completely memorable performance and production that you wait years to see. A mad Don Giovanni at Komische Oper like marionettes on speed completed our opera in Berlin

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2015 Sequence of Tours

What a wonderful sequence of tours we have just returned from. Three in three months! First to the United States, to Chicago and New York, especially nearly two weeks of music and opera in NYC. What a feast. Then a few days later I flew to Vienna to meet a new group for more musical delights in that capital of music, and on to Berlin, Leipzig, and Dresden. Finally in June our own tour in Northern Europe starting in Prague and on to Hamburg, Copenhagen, Riga and Tallinn. All in all we had some 60 people travelling with us for the three tours. It is such a buzz for me meeting and getting to know many music loving people, and of course there were quite few who we already knew, especially on the last tour

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Tannhäuser in Tallinn Estonia

In this beautiful city of about 400,000 we have ended the tour with a performance of Wagner’s Tannhauser. Their opera house is not large and is fairly plainly built but it works well and seems to have a good acoustic. The performance was excellent especially the Elisabeth. Our son Adam is principal of the timpani and percussion section and I am not at all biased when I say how outstanding the percussion was!

Adam at Glyndebourne

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The original Madama Butterfly in Riga

Tonight we attended our second performance at the Opera House in Riga. The city boasts an excellent opera house set in beautiful gardens, so that standing on the spacious balcony overlooking the park having a drink in the interval on a sunny summer evening is an enormous pleasure.

The performance of Manon Lescaut, though, was not such a pleasure. It was generally well sung but suffered from a pretentious production where in the last act where Manon and Des Grieux are supposed to be perishing in the desert, we find ourselves in the waiting room of a psychiatric hospital – maybe it was meant for the director.

On the previous night in the same theatre – we were in the midst of an annual opera festival, this year devoted to Puccini – the fare was on a much higher plane with the original 1923 production of Madam Butterfly. Not only miraculous in having had Puccini’s personal blessing, the beautiful original designs and staging were nothing short of a revelation, putting to shame the fakery of most modern productions. One example: when Kate Pinkerton arrives to take the child, there was none of the politically correct delicacy on her part about taking the child from Butterfly that you see these days. In this original version she took the child with disdain and hauteur as if even being in the presence of the geisha was beneath her.

On our first night in Riga, through the recommendation of our Latvian friend in Sydney Ojars Greste, we visited the amazing ALA Folk Club, a cavernous basement complex where folk groups from all over Europe and beyond perform their hugely varied styles of music. Their level of excellence was matched by many of the extraordinary instruments they played. We consumed gigantic dishes of hearty Latvian food and stayed till the small hours, though our friends Matthew and Leone Lorrimer, both architects, left early, explaining thet the place was a fire hazard, having only one entrance/ exit.

 

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Fantastic new Venues in Copenhagen

With its canals, magnificent historic precincts, not to mention its great museums, Copenhagen is a dream city to visit and wander around. But all this was dwarfed by our fantastic musical experiences. First we attended a concert of the fabulous Vienna Philharmonic on a European tour in the brand new Konserthuset, a technologically advanced hall of the new style (designed by Jean Nouvel who designed Central Park on Broadway in Sydney), where the stage is just a little away from the centre of the hall, and where a huge convex mushroom baffle over the stage bounces the sound back equally to all parts of the hall whereever you sit. The stage is a kind of arena surrounded by the sloping walls of the elevated tiers of audience seats which help to push the sound up to the mushroom. Apparently the cost was huge and the Government ran out of money, as it’s pretty obvious from the cramped and inadequate foyers that have walls clad in painted chip board!

However the acoustics are superb and the concert equally so with a fabulous performance of Nielson’s 4th Symphony to celebrate the 150th anniversary of Denmark’s most famous composer. The most unusual aspect of the program was its conclusion, rather than its beginning, with a performance of Beethoven’s great Leonora Overture No 3. The applause for this was deafening, far more so than the Nielson, centre piece of the program. Good old Beethoven. The next night was a further step up with a visit to arguably the finest and most spectacular opera house in the world.

The story of the Royal Danish Theatre’s new opera house is worth telling briefly. The patriarch of the Danish shipping line Merckx decided some years ago that Copenhagen needed a new Opera House, so approached the government with an offer to commission and fund the building with two provisos, first that a small disused island in the harbour opposite the Amalienborg Palace be the site, and second that permanent funding to a sufficient level be provided by government. This enlightened deal has provided the city with a magnificent new opera house in a superb setting and is a splendid model for private/ public sector support for the arts!

We saw an amazing production of Verdi’s spectacular Sicilian Vespers in a joint production with Covent Garden by the acclaimed Norwegian director Stefan Herheim. It was updated from its 12th century origin to the time of its writng and set in the theatre in Paris where it had its premiere, substituting the original story with the real history of the merciless exploitation of theatre artists by French aristocrats at the time. Both the concept and its realisation were tours de force.

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The Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg

Terrific city with marvellous and huge new waterside precinct in old docklands area on the Elbe. Absolutely amazing new concert hall nearing completion on the river bank called the Elbphilharmonie. Looks like a giant ship and features all the most up to date acoustic technology. Saw very strange production of Simon Boccanegra where most of the action takes place through a huge apparent painting on the back wall, which then becomes a false proscenium into a secondary world. None of us could quite make head or tail of it. Also an interesting piano recital at the Laeiszhalle by Helene Grimaud, a rather eccentric pianist who likes to play in the dark with only a light for the piano and who keeps a farm for wolves back in Canada.

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Prague Spring Festival

Frank Gehry’s Fred and Ginger Building in Prague

In gorgeous Prague, we started our third successive tour in three months. But this is our first private tour this year, and promises to be great fun as everyone in the group are our friends. It is the famous Prague Spring Festival and the first concert was magical. The last three sonatas of Beethoven played by top British pianist Paul Lewis, in the Rudolfinum Dvorak Hall, the home of the Czech Philharmonic, with a very high ceiling, short sightlines and a very bright resonant acoustic. Lewis has a quiet concentrated presence on the stage and was completely inside these three profound works. An absolutely mesmerising experience – the sort of memorable musical experience you come on tours like this hoping to find.

The time in Prague was lovely for its sightseeing but the other three performences didn’t live up to the splendour of the first, though the performance by the Liverpool Philharmonic under Vasily Petrenko of Elgar’s A flat symphony in the beautiful art nouveau Obecni Dum (Town Hall) concert hall was excellent and Andrew Neill, my tour co-leader, and Elgar expert pronounced the performance top rate. A performance of Marriage of Figaro in the elegantly restored baroque Estates Theatre was something of a miracle to be there at all as on the morning of the performance it was scheduled to be Cosi fan Tutte, but apparently somone crucial fell ill, and it was hastily replaced by Figaro. Not a great performance, nevertheless the show went on without a hitch.

The rare production of Arrigo Boito’s Mefistofele was best forgotten. Boito was a terrific writer and poet and sometime composer, librettist for Verdi’s great late operas, Otello and Falstaff, but this strange piece needed an illuminating production and instead received a farrago of obscurantist nonsense.