When I first read the score of Midnight Son, composer Gordon Kerry and librettist Louis Nowra’s chamber opera inspired by tragic events that occurred in Melbourne in 2005, I was immediately captivated by the score and the libretto.  Without giving too much away, the story is told in reverse, beginning with the protagonist’s suicide.  The remaining 11 scenes occur in his mind, as he untangles the web of deceit, lust and manipulation which has led him to this point, culminating in the initial knot, when he first met his future wife.   Like a good thriller, there are a number of unexpected twists and turns, as each scene takes on a thread from the previous scene to reveal the complexity of the characters and the situations they are in.  While Midnight Son deals with themes such as love, lust, and the relationships between men and women, it is also, for me, an opera about truth and fantasy, an element underlined by the score.

Preparing a new opera represents a unique challenge.  Opera is an art form that combines elements from all the arts, not only music and words, but also visual elements such as set, costume and lighting design, not to mention the practicalities and the magic which happen backstage.  Unlike a work of abstract music, in opera it isn’t enough to just try to understand and realize the composer’s intentions musically.  Although this is vital, the page must also be brought to life dramatically and visually.  When it comes to a new work, the conductor’s role is particularly important, because he/she is probably the only one working from the full score (in a contemporary opera, piano reductions or even midi recordings can only give a very approximate impression of what the orchestra will sound like) and therefore the onus is on the conductor to try to clarify the composer’s intentions as much as possible for the director and the cast.

In Midnight Son I was particularly fascinated by the moments when the orchestra stops playing, or when the pulsation slows or disappears altogether.  Music measures time, so when one has the feeling that time is suspended this seems significant.  Gordon Kerry uses this technique to underline moments in the libretto when the protagonist lies or when his lies are brought into question.  It’s as if time is suspended at these points connecting each of the lies in a timeless continuum, and indeed the tragedy unfolds as a direct result of the choices made based on those lies.  By underlining the moments at which the truth is altered, it is as if the composer is driving home the point that had honesty prevailed at any one of these instances the tragedy may have been averted.

In the wake of any tragedy, memory plays an important role in the healing process, by helping people to grieve, to remember their loved ones and to understand the lives they led by coming to terms with who they were, who they became and the journey that resulted in the tragic events.  Likewise, memory plays an important role in Midnight Son.  The opera takes place in the protagonist’s mind, alternating moments of real time with moments of remembered time when the pulsation is slowed, stretched or suspended and the orchestral textures take on an eerie, surreal quality.  It also requires the audience to use their memories to piece together the elements of the plot that are told in reverse.  Music plays a significant role in this process – when we listen to music, we consciously or subconsciously recollect the themes, textures, key-areas, motifs and figures in order to understand the musical discourse and structure.  Gordon Kerry’s score is full of such elements.  For example, in the first scene the protagonist quotes the exact pitches that his wife sings at their first meeting (scene 12 in the opera) as he recalls his “perfect” memory of his wife.

Midnight Son is presented by Victorian Opera at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, from 16-23 May.  The outstanding cast includes Byron Watson, Antoinette Halloran, Dimity Shepherd, Roxane Hislop and Jonathan Bode, and it has been a great pleasure and extremely rewarding working with Director Nicki Wendt and the talented musicians of Orchestra Victoria.

© Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo 2012

If Carmen were a traditional opéra-comique, love would triumph and order would be restored.  Carmen, however, as the personification of freedom, cannot be captured and caged by any man, and so salvation and redemption are impossible.  This struggle between order and freedom is represented musically as the opposition between arioso and recitative: José’s pleas for Carmen to join him in a traditional ‘happy ending’ duet are rebuffed by Carmen’s insistence on the freedom of recitative.  As a result, the overall structure seems quite open.  Harmonically, however, the final scene is carefully worked out.

The first cadence is in C major, as José implores Carmen to leave with him to start afresh, while the tragic alternative, Carmen’s death, occurs in F-sharp major, a tritone away, as the offstage chorus triumphantly sings the Toreador Song.  The F-sharp/G-flat goal and its association with Carmen’s death is first hinted at by a loud first-inversion F-sharp major triad as she sings, “Mais que je vive ou que je meure” and then by threatening g-flat triplets at the words, “je ne t’aime plus.”  The principle key areas also point to the inevitable tragic conclusion: A-flat major (V of V), b-flat minor (relative minor of V).

The dominant is almost reached as Carmen states defiantly that even in the face of death she would repeat that she loves Escamillo, only to be interrupted by the chorus in A major (the relative of F-sharp minor).  Ultimately, only the repetition of the ‘Carmen’ (or ‘fate’) motif in F-sharp major, as José admits his culpability, can create a sense of conclusion.  There is no redemption, however, as the orchestra has nothing further to add other than to complete a perfect cadence.

© Ollivier-Philippe Cunéo 2011

Angelo Soliman was a fascinating figure in Viennese history. When he was a child he was taken as a slave to Marseille from his home in what today is northeastern Nigeria/northern Cameroon.  He was later given as a gift to count Lobkowitz, an Austrian Fieldmarshal. From then on he gradually worked his way up through the echelons of Viennese society, gaining his freedom on the way. He spoke several languages fluently and was very highly regarded by the city’s cultural elite. The emperor Joseph II held him in high esteem. He was a friend of Mozart’s and they were both members of the same Masonic lodge ‘True Harmony’. He eventually even became the grand master of that lodge. It is quite possible that the ‘enlightened’ character of Bassa Selim in Die Entführung aus dem Serail was modelled on Soliman.

When he died of a stroke in 1796, something happened which to us today is unthinkable. The director of the Imperial Natural History Collection asked permission from the emperor Francis II, (permission duly granted), to have Soliman skinned, stuffed and put on display as a ‘curiosity’. No good Christian burial for him! He eventually went up in flames during the October revolution of 1848.

All of which brings me to this:  modern society often has trouble with controversial lines from libretti, plays etc. of bygone eras that are, or may at least appear to be, discriminatory or downright racist. In The Magic Flute Monostatos is quite plainly described in the list of characters as a ‘Moor’ – like Othello - and therefore black. In his aria when he tries to steal a kiss from Pamina, (incidentally marked pianissimo, almost whispered with the piccolo adding a Turkish ‘zing’ to it), he sings:

Weil ein Schwarzer häßlich ist.

Ist mir denn kein Herz gegeben?

And in the next strophe:

Eine Weiße nahm mich ein,

Weiß ist schön! Ich muß sie küßen;

Monostatos is obviously in deep emotional distress and both Mozart and Schikaneder make us feel very sympathetic towards this tortured character. When, a few minutes later, he is discovered trying to kill Pamina because she doesn’t reciprocate his love, Sorastro speaks these lines:

Ich weiß nur allzuviel. - Weiß daß deine Seele eben so Schwarz als dein Gesicht ist.

Ouch! How does one cope with that line in our politically correct society? Many productions just leave it out but I often wonder if that’s the right solution. Mozart, as I have said, was a friend of Soliman’s – and it is quite possible that Schikaneder was also. It is highly unlikely that, preaching the Masonic virtues as they did, they would think that purely because of someone’s skin colour they were good or evil.

Mozart’s Vienna, just as our society is today, was full of paradoxes. At one and the same time Joseph II’s reign as emperor encouraged freedom on all fronts (even abolishing the death penalty), while installing a repressive secret police when things began to go a bit pear shaped. Soliman rose to the highest rank in social and intellectual circles but was then unceremoniously stuffed like an animal.

Instead of cutting it, keeping that small but troublesome line of text in to my mind opens up avenues of territory to be explored. I like to think that it simultaneously and very succinctly represents both the hypocrisy at the heart of 18^th century Viennese society and, by their sympathetic treatment of Monostatos – and by that I mean showing us the pain and rejection of an outcast - Mozart and Schikaneder’s coded condemnation of it. It is a sort of transposition of Merchant of Venice if you like.

 I don’t believe that things, as in life, in The Magic Flute are altogether what they seem: - no real good or evil, no black or white. Only grey paths that take us deeper and deeper into our own white/black souls.

JD conducts this very colourful Magic Flute for Opera Australia until 27 Jan - The Sydney season continues until the 23 March, Sydney Opera House. 

Recently while I was studying the choreography for Romeo and Juliet my two and a half year old daughter said, “Daddy, I don’t want Peter and the Wolf”.  After only a few minutes of listening she had made the connection between the two Prokofiev pieces, and, as it so happens, Peter and the Wolf was composed in 1936 while Prokofiev was working on Romeo and Juliet.  

Romeo and Juliet was composed for a sophisticated adult audience, for the higher echelons of Soviet society who could go to the Bolshoi or the Kirov, while Peter and the Wolf was written specifically for children, and yet both are unmistakably by Prokofiev.

Having left Russia following the 1917 revolution, Prokofiev became a US citizen, before living in Paris for more than a decade.  When he decided to return to Russia in the mid-1930’s Stalin’s purges were escalating, reaching their apex in 1936, the year he settled in Moscow.  The doctrine of Socialist Realism, which basically dictated that the only purpose of art was to serve as propaganda for the Stalinist regime, had also recently been introduced.  Social Realism stipulated that all art be optimistic.  Tragic heroes and unhappy endings were forbidden, and the ideal Communist society had to be depicted in all its perfection with individuals only serving to illustrate positive qualities of that ideal state.  Clearly, Shakespeare’s play couldn’t have been further from this. As a result, Romeo and Juliet had a protracted birth.  Prokofiev had been commissioned to write a ballet by the Kirov in 1934, but they rejected the composer’s proposal, and the first performance didn’t take place until 1938 in Czechoslovakia.  The first two orchestral suites were completed in 1936. 

I don’t know whether Prokofiev was politically naïve, or whether his inner compulsion to compose was so strong that it overrode practical considerations.  Whatever the case, his music transcends these issues to speak to us regardless of our age, nationality, education, politics or religious beliefs.  Romeo and Juliet is the great masterpiece that it is because its message is not limited by the period in which it was composed, but deals in a most subtle and profound way with themes that are timeless and universal. Romeo and Juliet is now widely accepted as one of the great ballet scores.

Learning a new piece is always a fascinating journey and usually takes me a very long time, depending on the work’s length and complexity of course. Kurt Weill’s Street Scene has indeed taken me a long time and we open on June 19th here in Dresden at the Semperoper. I learned the piece in English but found out rather late in the day that we were doing it in a German translation by Stefan Troßbach. Benjamin Britten was very keen on his operas being performed in the vernacular and I think that Street Scene, which contains so much dialogue and ‘melodramas’, will be much more appealing to a German audience in translation. The purists may not be so enthusiastic!

The first piece I ever conducted as an undergraduate at university was Weill’s ‘Threepenny Opera’ and I’ve always loved his maverick-like musical personality. When he fled from Germany in 1933 Weill first went to France, then England before travelling to America. Once there he tried as hard as he could to become as American as possible. After 1941 even the letters he wrote to his wife Lotte Lenya were in English even though their mutual native tongue was Geman. With Street Scene he set out to write an ‘American Opera’ (he also referred to it as a ‘Broadway Opera’). It is a vast melting pot for every possible musical idiom imaginable. Jazz, blues, grand opera, melodrama, Broadway dance numbers .You name it and it’s there. It’s a musically virtuosic tour de force and he considered it to be his masterpiece.

One of the challenges of the piece is for the singers who have to be able to sing, act, dance and speak like actors. In the original production the four principal roles were taken by opera singers and the rest of the cast were Broadway artists. In our production all the singers are members of the Semperoper ensemble who are doing a great job in combining all the necessary artistic disciplines. Put that together with Bettina Bruinier’s lively production and the wonderful Staatskapelle orchestra and it should be an evening to remember!

100 years ago this month, Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde was premiered in Munich, conducted by Bruno Walter.  Mahler had died six months earlier, on 18 May 1911.  This was the first work Mahler didn’t premiere himself, and it was also the first time that Mahler gave Walter a new composition of his to study without having played through it for him first.  With regards to the complicated cross-rhythms in the final movement, he apparently said to Walter, “Have you the slightest idea how to conduct this?”  I haven’t!”

Mahler completed Das Lied von der Erde in New York in the winter of 1908-1909, and believed it was the most personal thing he had composed to that point. Death and life after death are recurring themes in Mahler’s work, but in Das Lied von der Erde the subject is no longer approached through philosophy or poetry, but through personal experience. In this work, which is both a song-cycle and a symphony, he confronted his own mortality and his increasing feeling of isolation from the world following the death of his beloved daughter, the diagnosis of his heart condition, the deterioration of his marriage and his resignation from the Vienna Hofoper, all within the space of a few months.  He found solace in Hans Bethge’s recently published anthology of ancient Chinese poetry and of the 83 poems, chose seven to set to music.  Mahler had always found inspiration in nature but, as a result of his heart condition, he could no longer do the physical activities such as climbing, hiking, swimming and rowing, which were so essential to him.  Mahler’s disillusionment and alienation from his environment are reflected in his choice of poems, in which man’s brief existence is at odds with the eternal renewal of nature.  Youth and beauty are transient, destined to wither and decay, and man’s lot is to die alone.  “Dark is life, is death.”

In the final song, Der Abschied (“The farewell”), which lasts as long as the other five songs combined, Mahler used two poems, “In Expectation of the Friend” and “The Farewell of the Friend”.  The song opens with solemn Grabgelaüte (“Death knells”) on the tam-tam, which are later developed in a lengthy orchestral interlude in the style of a funereal march inserted between the two poems.   It becomes clear that in Mahler’s vision the expected friend is in fact Death, and that through Das Lied von der Erde Mahler came to an acceptance of his fate and found comfort in the notion that through death man merges with nature and becomes eternal.  The final lines are Mahlers’ own:

My heart is still and awaits its hour!

Everywhere the dear earth blossoms forth in spring

and grows green again!  Everywhere and for ever distant

horizons gleam blue.  For ever, for ever…”

Ravel’s orchestration of Musorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition, which I am conducting in concert with WASO next week, is a popular staple of the repertoire. Thanks to the wonderful Spotify, which in Sweden and selected other countries enables unlimited listening to a massive library of music of all kinds, I have been trawling through recordings, from Reiner to Giulini (who I observed rehearsing Pictures with the Philharmonia in London in 1988 or so).

On my travels through Spotify, I came across Oliver Knussen’s recording of Pictures with, I think, the Cleveland Orchestra - not the Ravel, however, but the orchestration by Stokowski. Ollie’s conducting and the quality of the orchestral playing are equally vivid and memorable, and it set me to thinking about transcriptions more widely.

The brilliance of Ravel’s orchestration is unquestioned, but it is the only transcription of his I can think of where others, before and since, have made their own versions. Not only Stokowski, but more recently Ashkenazy. And on reflection the reasons for this cast an interesting light on the whole subject.

The edition of Pictures from which Ravel worked was the Rimsky-Korsakov, at that time the foremost (and quite possibly only available) edition. Even taking this into account, some of Ravel’s  choices are unusual, particularly the saxophone solo in the Castello movement. But more fundamentally, musical details in the Rimsky-Korsakov edition differ from the critical edition of Pictures which appeared after Ravel’s death, and which you can find today on IMSLP. Bydlo, which begins pianissimo in Rimsky and thus Ravel, should start at a full-throated fortissimo. In Stokowski, as performed by Knussen, this attack is thrilling - all the more so because it shows how accustomed we have become to the Ravel! And there are some further details, including note lengths and pitches, which really alter the tone of passages throughout Pictures more generally.

If an orchestration can be imagined as the act of costuming a body, then Ravel’s Pictures is like Coco Chanel dressing Peter the Great. There is a degree of distance between the finesse and clarity of Ravel and the iron ore of Musorgsky’s original. This distance in general results in a beautiful complementariness between style and substance, but we hear the Ravel so often that these two have become somewhat fused in our minds. At some moments, I believe, Ravel transcends Musorgsky; in general he transmits the essence of the piece; but at others he fails to do its granite-like strength justice.

For this reason, although I love and revel in the version I will be conducting next week, I would be happy if the other, competing orchestrations got more frequent airings. Because Ravel is not to be confused with Musorgsky, and neither are Stokowski or Ashkenazy. But, as we get acquainted with them - just as we listen to Richter and others in the original piano version - we can develop a more variegated understanding. Things easily become hackneyed when they are always viewed from the same perspective. In the case of Pictures, we have the possibility of a triangulation, a variety of perspectives, through which we can view Musorgsky’s prismatic richness.

©Brad Cohen 2011

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It’s a privilege to observe the final rehearsals for the Paris Opera’s new production of Götterdämmerung.  The complete Ring Cycle hasn’t been presented in Paris since 1957 and this Götterdämmerung is to be the final installment in a new cycle which has been unveiled over two years.  There is a tremendous buzz surrounding this event, and the honours fall squarely with Swiss conductor Philippe Jordan, who at 36 is now in his second year as Music Director of the company.

Time management is important at every stage orchestral, a balancing act between the need to run large sections and the need to work in detail, so it is fascinating to see the artistry with which Philippe Jordan skillfully rehearses this colossal 4 ½-hour score.  His ability to pass seamlessly from one language to another aids the flow of the rehearsal, as he addresses the singers in either German or English and the orchestra in French. During the breaks he chats with his music staff and language staff, before giving notes and encouragement to the singers.  In the remaining time he seeks out the director, Gunter Kramer, to see how things are coming together for the production team.  Not a precious second is wasted.

At the 4^th of 6 stage orchestrals, Jordan starts at the top of Act 3 and more or less runs the act, giving directions to the orchestra without stopping.  He is particular with what he wants with regards to ensemble, colour, intonation, and dynamics and after the break he pinpoints moments which require more detailed work, such as the 8 bars near the beginning of Act 3, where the 8 horns recall a leitmotiv from the start of Das Rheingold in canon.  It’s a very exposed moment and notoriously difficult as it lies very low on the instrument and must be played pianissimo.  On top of that, all eight horns must enter with the same tuning and the same dynamic.  Jordan is insistent that the intonation and the balance be right, but is also mindful of the fact that there are only so many times you can repeat a passage before everyone gets frustrated.

Act 1 offers a different challenge.  It lasts closer to two hours which means it isn’t possible to play through it all before the break.  Jordan’s approach is therefore to run larger sections, stopping to rehearse in detail when required, but always keeping an eye and an ear on the overall structure.  Not surprisingly in a work this length, the singers occasionally miss an entry or come in a few beats early or late.   Jordan is adept at putting them back on track with a gesture.  Throughout the rehearsals he barely looks at the score.

The orchestral playing is particularly impressive.  The sound is sweet and warm, the clarity of the instrumental textures is breathtaking, and while there are moments of great volume and intensity, such as Siegfried’s death, the sound is never harsh or forced.  Jordan’s interpretation flows very naturally, balancing attention to detail with a firm grasp of the overall architecture, as well as the drama.  Although, the only (nearly) complete run of the opera I hear is the pre-general, a six-hour marathon, it is clear that this will be a great success musically, no small achievement for a company which hasn’t staged the opera in over 50 years.