MUSIC: On to Astrakhan
Music in Moscow II
Russian roulade
Tshchetnaya Predostorozhnost at the Stanislavsky/Nemirov-Danchenko (24th January);
Grétry’s Pierre le Grand at the Helikon Opera (1st February);
The Borodin Quartet at the Conservatoire Small Hall (31st January);
Vladimir Tropp at the Roerich Museum (7th February);
Russian Philharmonic Orchestra at the Conservatoire (25th January); &,
The Scriabin Museum.
I ended my last report fleeing from the ticket touts at Yuri Bashmet’s 50th birthday extravaganza towards the Stanislavsky/Nemirov-Danchenko Theatre (officially the Moscow Musical Theatre), Moscow’s other large-scale serious music-theatre venue after the Bolshoi. Arriving at one minute before curtain-up, I dashed in and bought a spare ticket from an elderly lady in the foyer (about £4) without grasping exactly what was on — the posters announced two Russian words unknown to me, ‘Tshchetnaya Predostorozhnost’ by one Gerold. When I had settled in my seat with a programme I just had time to realize that this was in fact the ballet La fille mal gardée of Herold.
Men in tights
Now I have to confess that I am not a balletomane. I just can’t get thrilled about guys and gals throwing themselves all over the stage and sometimes (as in Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev) interfering with some damned good music. I don’t know the names of any of the manoeuvres and am exceedingly irritated when self-appointed connoisseurs decide to applaud loudly some twist or jiggle, thereby announcing that they have appreciated some technic knack of which we unenlightened boors are ignorant. Also I am still recovering from having attended, for various reasons, three different versions of the Nutcracker in London over Christmas — of which the only really amusing one was the one designed by Gerald Scarfe at the Coliseum, which so profoundly shocked our traditionalist house-guest from the Ukraine that she almost headed straight back to Kiev.
I only know one tune from La fille mal gardée, the clog-dance, and as it turned out, this (2001) production, which is based by the choreographer Oleg Vinogradov on the original version, doesn’t contain it. Nor does it seem that much of the music is by Herold at all. La fille is indeed the oldest ballet still in world repertory. It was first produced in Bordeaux to the music of Jean Dauberval a year before Herold was born, in 1790. Louis Joseph Ferdinand Herold, who wrote the once popular ‘Zampa’, (and whose early death from tuberculosis in 1833 cleared the way for the successful career at the Paris Opéra of his protegé, the grand opera composer Fromental Halévy), refurbished the score in 1828, and others have gone on tampering with it, adding party-pieces like the clog-dance already mentioned.
The ballet is said to be the first to deal with ‘ordinary people’ as opposed to classical or mythological themes — the story-line however is pure pantomime and I was surprised to find myself enjoying the uncomplicated fun of this production, from the Delft-like farmyard (including blue and white cows) with which the production opens, to the village festivities, incorporating the exuberant and bizarrely anachronistic incursion of a group of break-dancing Rude Boys, with which it ends. The music is generally four-square, folk-like and forgettable. I must single out Anton Domashev in the travesty role of Lisa’s mother Marcellina, Dmitry Romanenko as the wimpish Alain (seen blowing away attached to his umbrella at the end of Act 1), and the scrumptious danseuses in the company’s corps de ballet. Lisa (Kadriya Amirova) was also pert and attractive, but I am afraid her lover Colin (Viktor Dik, an obvious favourite with the audience) left me cold. In fact with his permanent rictus of a smile he made me want to knock his teeth in. If Philip Gould advised Tony Blair that focus groups wanted to see him out there dancing, this is the kind of performance the PM would give.
Looking to the West
It is just as well that I spent a sobering, (although perhaps in view of the vodka consumed that is not exactly the right word), week in the hinterland of Kaluga between this and the production of Grétry’s Pierre le Grand (Peter the Great) at the Helikon Opera, or I would have suffered from a serious cuteness overdose.
The Helikon Opera company is one of the best reasons for coming to Moscow. Founded as an independent initiative around 1990 by its artistic director Dmitry Bertman it was the first to develop innovative opera productions in Russia using young and fresh talents (an idea copied by the Mayor of Moscow, as described in my last article, at the Novaya Opera). Bertman and his associates have genius, and even when I have not been satisfied with their productions I have never been disappointed. The setting is intimate — what was once the ballroom of an eighteenth-century townhouse, just up the road from the Conservatoire — adapted to seat around 250 people, with the orchestra at audience level before the small stage. (There is also an even more intimate venue, a former dining room perhaps, where if you are lucky you can attend a performance of Bach’s ‘Coffee Cantata’ during which the performers brew up and distribute cups for the audience). Since 1993 the Russian government has recognized Bertman’s pioneering achievements and has given the company state support.
If you are ever stuck for providing a name in the game of ‘Famous Belgians’, you might venture to offer that of André-Ernest-Modeste Grétry. Born in Liège, where his statue (which when I last saw it was surrounded by road-works of an apparently eternal character) contains, behind a neat grille, his cardiotaph, Grétry wrote around sixty operas all of which have now been quite forgotten. Pierre le Grand owes its resurrection (and its first performance ever in Russia) to the 300th anniversary, this year, of St. Petersburg, the town founded by the opera’s hero, and to the laudable initiative of the French Ambassador to Russia, M. Blanchemaison, in arranging provision of orchestral parts and a sponsor (Total Oil).
The opera was first produced in Paris in 1790, and is thus a very close contemporary of La fille mal gardée. But unlike the ballet, it completely disappeared from the repertoire almost immediately after its debut. This is not so much a comment on its artistic quality as on its political judgement; fables about a good king in harmony with his simple subjects proved not to be the sort of thing that rang the bells of contemporary focus groups such as those that had recently stormed the Bastille.
The story-line is the fable of the young Peter’s anonymous work as a shipwright which has been used by numerous composers since Grétry including Meyerbeer, Lortzing and Donizetti. In this version, which like the others bears no relation to history, Peter, who rates love and friendship above all other virtues, and is working in a shipyard in the guise of a modest carpenter, falls in love with the noble Catherine, whose life is devoted to charitable works, but who still consents to marry him even when she discovers that he is the Emperor of Russia. Bertman, who has produced the opera himself, has had great fun in taking the mickey of numerous musical (and Russian cultural) traditions. The set is the superstructure of a ship, whose sails are furled and unfurled as required for interiors. The chorus of shipwrights, villagers and mendicants (the beneficiaries of Catherine’s selflessness) articulate almost as clockwork automata. The dialogue is in a wild macaronic mixture of Russian and French.
In form and content the work is a bog-standard opéra-comique of its time (a terminology which led one naïve Moscow critic to complain that it didn’t contain many jokes — which I suppose places it in the same category as the National Gallery’s Leonardo cartoon). Disappointingly Grétry takes no opportunity to introduce any Russian-style music, although there is one very odd passage in the overture, with a modal tune accompanied by bare octave leaps, which might be intended to suggest Muscovite barbarity. The production takes a welcome opportunity to vary the music during the act 1 celebrations of Peter’s engagement, when the chorus hands the conductor (Alexander Voloshchuk) a violin on which he gives a spirited rendition of a movement of a contemporary violin concerto (allegedly a concerto of Grétry’s although I am doubtful that he in fact wrote any).
Catherine’s melodramatic aria when she fears Peter has left her (in fact, he has to return to Russia because of — in the programme’s English translation — ‘distemper in Moscow’) gives the singer (Anna Gretchishchina) a wonderful opportunity for over-the-top acting — including multiple self-stabbings — whilst maintaining impeachable musical accuracy. I admired Dmitry Kalin’s politically incorrect characterization of the kind of village idiot that used to flourish all over Russia but now finds its habitat mainly in the corridors of ministries and local administrations. But the triumph of the evening must be the final appearance of Peter (Maxim Mironov) where he reveals himself as Tsar; he enters, mounted on a rearing horse frame embedded in a block of granite, a parody of the famous ‘Bronze Horseman’ statue in St. Petersburg, to the acclaim of the chorus (and the audience). This device is extended to good use during the curtain-calls, when the chorus take photos of the lead singers, themselves, and the audience, with the horse as backdrop, as tourists do every day in their hundreds. I do hope that the city of St. Petersburg, to which this production will be taken in a few weeks time, appreciates this good-natured celebration of its birthday. It returns to repertory in Moscow in July — don’t miss it if you are around. Ticket price £10, by the way, for second best tickets.
Out of Russia
I can only touch on some of the other musical experiences I have had during my visit. A bold cycle, to include all of Beethoven’s quartets and all of Shostakovich’s chamber music, has begun in the Small Hall of the Conservatoire. I caught the second of these concerts, in which the Borodin Quartet playing Shostakovich’s 9th Quartet once again demonstrated how Russian players can make these intricate mechanisms as natural as breathing (ticket price £1.60). At a concert at the Roerich Museum (a mansion just behind the magnificent Pushkin Museum), in a concert which combined music of Schubert with that of the Second Viennese School, Vladimir Tropp gave an exemplary performance of Berg’s single-movement Piano Sonata, perfectly realizing the music’s series of infinite regressions, and, through the appropriate mediation of the pictures by the Roerich dynasty in the concert-room, bringing out a surprising affinity with the music of Scriabin.
The concert of the Russian Philharmonic Orchestra (ticket price £2.40) in the Grand Hall of the Conservatoire, comprising music by Berlioz and Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony, gave especial food for thought. This late work of Prokofiev is generally quickly passed over by commentators as weak, demonstrating the composer’s declining powers, or his submission to Soviet orthodoxy, or both. I beg to differ. It seems to me that Prokofiev has suffered unduly from the elevation of Shostakovich to the status of a secular saint, subtly undermining his Soviet masters. Perhaps he was also unlucky to die on the same day as Stalin, whilst Shostakovich had another twenty years or so to establish his legend, which has since become the center of a fierce debate, fuelled by Solomon Volkov’s controversial compilation of the composer’s apparent autobiography, Testimony. But a hearing clearly reveals that exactly the same factors which are adduced to make Shostakovich a hidden critic of the regime through his music can be identified in Prokofiev’s 7th Symphony. I instance for example the ironic ‘toy-music’ theme of the first movement; and the way in which the last movement, as in Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony, seems to start off with proletarian rejoicing, only to dissolve into something quite different – in this case, a return to the ‘toy-music’ (cf. Shostakovich’s 15th Symphony) which now assumes the ticking, twitching, sinister mockery of a danse macabre for a musical box. It is clearly time for a re-assessment of the relative reputations of these two composers and their compromises between art and Stalinism.
All of the above events, by the way, were more or less completely sold out, and the audiences in each case showed a complete spectrum of ages from children to pensioners. I hope my reports may give some indication of the enormous variety of cultural activity available in Moscow (and I have not even touched on the astonishing volume and variety of theatre in the city). The appetite for culture in the midst of continuing — one might say, institutionalized — economic and social crisis is yet another aspect of the extraordinary paradoxes of this astonishing city and country.
Colour coded
Finally I will redeem the promise made in my first article to reveal the origins of the musical light show. It was in fact the brainchild of the composer Alexander Scriabin. The last home of this great virtuoso pianist, composer and mystic is preserved as a museum in Vakhtangova Street in Moscow, just off the Arbat, which is one of Moscow’s main tourist thoroughfares. Moscow has many such ‘apartment-museums’ of its famous inhabitants, and this is one of my favourites, preserving much of the spirit of the man; his library of books by Schopenhauer and Kant and on Buddhism, his top hat and tailcoat (like many great musicians he was surprisingly short in stature), paintings by his friend Roerich, his grand piano of course, and the bed in which he died in 1915 of blood-poisoning following a wasp-sting on the lip. Scriabin was a believer in synaesthesia, that is, that musical keys are to be identified with specific colours. Many musicians would agree with this in principle, but there is some dispute as to which keys match which colours. For Scriabin, C was red, G was green, and so on (whereas I would say that C is royal blue). To demonstrate his theories Scriabin included a ‘part’ for light in his Prometheus: Poem of Fire, in which the piano represents man and the orchestra the cosmos. He also invented a light-organ to generate these colour effects in the concert hall (a rather feeble version of these was perpetrated at a performance at the Proms a year or two ago), and his original instrument is in the museum. Rather comically, it turns out to be a wooden disc two feet or so in diameter, with twelve coloured light-bulbs at its perimeter, operated by a series of electric bell-pushes. Nonetheless, if only he had patented his vision, his descendants might have reaped fortunes from pop promoters of the last forty years.
I am now off to Astrakhan before returning to London, and if the editorial soviet is willing I will then look beyond my musical remit and offer some opinions about the present state of Russia.
Allen Buchler, February 7, 2003 12:34 PM