Is 12 tone music pretty? Rare opera club, vol. 13 - Luigi Dallapicolla's Il Prigioniero

Well, to answer the premise of the question of the title - yes it can.

Okay cool, you can go now, bye.

12 tone music get’s a lot of bad press. At university, anytime Schoenberg’s name or the 12-tone system were mention there would be audible moans. I knew the music as being atmospheric, romantic, sometimes spiky, but overall I had played many of the short expressionistic and 12-tone piano pieces in high school with wonder.

If I am ever to come across someone who poo-poo’s 12 tone music (which is rare in the new music circles I generally move in) I would send them to Luigi Dallapicolla’s Il Prigioniero. This was a stunning work, that reminded me a lot of Berg’s opera’s in their ability to retain a lyrical and at times tonal feeling about the musical langue, but also this work is firmly in the lyrical Italian opera tradition.

Short and to the point, this work packs a huge emotional and political punch. The lyrical lines lend themselves to beautiful and mellifluous singing, something that at times is missing in the stage works of Schoenberg or Berg. It seems a shame that this work and Dallapicolla’s work in general isn’t more widely know. He is operating at a level on par with Berg, Webern and Schoenberg, and this operatic style could easily set alongside Berg in the major opera houses.

Shameless vertical integration plug - I have a new YouTube video coming out on Wednesday talking about why you should listen to Schoenberg’s music. In the video I argue that at the core of Schoenberg’s music is this clash of the desire to create something new and to continue the great German tradition. Sometimes the more progressive works overshadow his more lyrical works, or the lyrical aspects of the 12-tone works aren’t acknowledged (I would argue the Piano concerto is often overlooked as a work of lyrical music). It’s easier to dismiss the highly chromatic and often dissonant material as ugly or inhumane. I would argue you need to think of the social context of these work, the intention of the piece and needing to listen to them not via recordings but in a resonant, live acoustic and with an open appreciation to accept the unfamiliar.

Il Prigioniero doesn’t have the sort of feel of a musical pilgrimage that Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron and even Berg’s Lulu can sometimes feel like. The musical language and the world it inhabits is lyrical, lush, shimmering and appropriately dark and terrifying.

It’s a remarkable work of modernist music theatre and I would highly recommend it to opera and music lovers as an undiscovered gem, full of surprising and beautiful moments.

From Reddit - https://www.reddit.com/r/LetsTalkMusic/comments/8y03yk/lets_talk_about_12_tone_serialism/

Rare Opera Club, vol. 12 - Georges Aperghis' Luna Park

I first heard the music of Greek (living and working mostly in France) composer Georges Aperghis at the Soundscape new music festival in 2015. I got hooked. I programmed some of his music with Forest Collective in 2016 and have followed his activities since.

He sits in this fantastic place of contemporary music, working a lot in theatre works (in what is often called Music Theatre, not to be confused with Musical Theatre…) , with both acoustic and electronic instruments in a sound world that has always struck me as being sophisticated and well crafted, but also sensuous, dramatic, theatrical and at times almost camp. There are moments of nonsense, sections that need a twinkle in their eye and a sense of theatre and fun.

This work, however, is very much a serious endeavour. It explores security and surveillance, through the performance by 4 people, two playing bass and contra-bass flutes and two actors. What I loved about this work is it walks the line between abstract interpretation of surveillance (and how that could be interpreted and reshaped by 4 performers on stage, with the various video, audio and lighting supports to enhance the performance) and literal ideas of surveillance. It isn’t just a story or set of images unfolding in front of you, or a series of morals into the issues or advantages of surveillance of society. It covers a wide range of feelings and emotional high points, sometimes silly, sometimes banal and dull, sometimes anxious and fearful. It was a fascinating work in that respect as it had a highly sophisticated emotional integration. Sections flowed by with ease, and my eye and ear took in a wild ride of different emotional high points. The issues I took with the experience were more cosmetic. Couldn’t there be some slight suggestion of the experience we are having. What I mean is, the experience came across more like a concert then a piece of theatre. The structure of the set and presentation of the performers (that is costume, engagement with audience etc) made it quite static. The video provided intrigue, and depth to the emotional pull of the music, but the presentation was very much caught in a traditional theatrical experience, which was a shame considering the variety and originality of the content. In our opera club meeting we spoke about it potentially having dance as an element, or being part of an installation or heightening the performance experience slightly with costuming and a more heightened audience experience. This made me think about New Music, and how it can be almost too reverential, cold and austere, or as is the case with this performance, self deprecating and casual. Say what you will about traditional opera, or should I said mainstream opera (or theatre) but you always know that you are in a space dedicated to providing you with an emotional (and intellectual) experience. In my work I aim to create a sense of wonder, delight and drama, while also, hopefully, being thought provoking and philosophical. I had high hopes for this piece, due to my love of the cheeky and capricious music of Aperghis. I’m not saying this work didn’t enthral me, it certainly did, but the presentation of it could have been more heightened to remind me I’m in a theatre, witnessing something with variety, depth, humour, emotion and politics.

There is a great interview with GA, as well as the link to the full video of the performance available here.

Rare Opera Club, vol. 11 - 7 Deaths of Maria Callas by Marko Nikodijević & devised and directed by Marina Abramović

This was an interesting operatic experience. I call it that, because the work wasn’t an opera, in the traditional sense. It was very much a piece of performative live art, Marina Abramovic’s milieu. I would recommend opera loves and lovers of Maria Callas to experience the work, but not to expect an operatic journey in the traditional sense. On it’s surface it seems straightforward, and rather simple - a series of arias from roles made famous by Maria Callas, sung by a series of excellent female singers, with a physical personification of Maria, played by Abramovic, lying in a bed for the entirety of their performances. Then the scene transitions to a sequence with an entirely new orchestra work by Marko Nikodijevic (who I posted in a previous blog post) where we see a mundane and sad image of Maria Callas'’ life at the end of her existence, in isolation and seclusion from the outside world. The story of the end of her life, the way she battled with the end of her singing career and the treatment of her by Onassis is devastatingly sad. It would be worth reading a bit about this before you experience the show.

Like many of Abramovic’s work it’s easy to say “I could do that” or “that seems easy,” or “it doesn’t make sense” or “why would you bother to do that!?” That’s the reason why I like her work. Like Robert Wilson, who I adore, you need to let the work absorb into you, take a journey with it and really think about the world and life you live and how this art can effect and inform you. Simple actions and moments presented to you comment on larger social forces. Simple symbols and ideas have huge philosophical concepts behind them, and it takes time, for me any way, to really absorb the ideas and the work. It’s not going sink into you after a few minuets of experiencing the work.

The extravagance of having a full opera company, orchestra and other resources at their disposal in this project, like film, boogie costumes from Burberry etc does tinge this work with a very decadent, entitled position. In our Rare Opera Club chat this came up a lot - perhaps a younger artist would do something more innovative? Perhaps the two half’s of the work could be more integrated? Perhaps this, perhaps that. It’s so easy to judge big established artists and say they have sold out, or lost touch and that they should always be creating masterpieces and finished worked of genius. I’ve been reading a lot of the work of Philip Ewell who touches on the idea that genius and masterpiece are not only gendered terms, and so we need to step with caution when using them and try and rethink this expression, but also that these words and the language systems they embrace comes from a long tradition of privilege, misogamy and racism. So with this in mind, my initial reaction to the piece, which was about the integration of the different aspects of the work seemed to fade. Abramovic is not interested in this, its time and immaterially of the performance that is key and so we need to allow a ourselves to go on a journey with the piece and to embrace the abstraction of the experience. If I was ever provided such a large canvas that she has for this work, I would absolutely embrace it. Wouldn’t you? The extravagance of telling a small and simple aspect of Maria Callas’ life through such a huge canvas might seem over the top and decadent, but Callas was decadent, volatile and a consummate artist dedicated to a higher expression and representation of herself.

Artists, great or small need to be given big and risky canvases, and they should be allowed the opportunity to take risks and to fail. What I find so wonderful about this work is it might not “succeed” (again, what does that word mean to us now, and how does is play into old stereotypes of art and hyraces at play in art?) in the traditional sense, but it is allowing visionary artists to create opera. An artist this isn’t know to create opera. Opera needs this most of all. It is so stuffy and backward, we need more and unorthodox visions from artists who haven’t been engaged with opera in the past, and we should do the upmost to see this vision be achieved, even if it fails.

“...I do things that I am afraid of…failure is important because if you experiment you fail. If you don’t go into that area you repeat yourself over and over”

— Marina Abramovic

If you are to engage with this work, I think you need to know a little about the sad life Maria Callas led after her career ended. I think you also need to have an idea of the misogamy that has existed in opera and how women characters are allowed only certain pathways through opera - death, lust, love or devotion to god or a man.

Who can make opera and why do they create opera?

For another piece by Marko Nikodijevic I’ve been getting into Gesualdo dub / room with erased figure (recording above).

Rare Opera Club, vol. 10 - Leos Janacek's Junfa & Philip Glass' Satygraha

I know what you’re thinking, and I agree - strange be fellows indeed!

Two works that intrigued me and caught me, but for very different reasons. Jenufa was an incredibly human experience, showing the great passions and emotions that can effect real life. Satygraha showed me monumental blocks of sound, big brush strokes and epic depiction. Neither description could be used for the other. The Philip Glass work, like many of his other stage works, wasn’t really a narrative work, but a series of tableaux’s exploring the idea of something or someone. There are occasional moments of direct interaction, with character or audience, but on the whole I feel that I’m witnessing an image with an incredibly elaborate musical accompaniment, Jenufa on the other hand gives me deep emotions, richness of intention and a yearning for characters to burst free for the day-to-day, to live and to breath in a free world.

You almost can’t get two more different composers; the master of Czech music and text setting and the almost enfant-terrible of 1970s NYC. Text to Janacek is paramount. Before watching Jenufa I didn’t know much of his music - the string quartet Razumovsky, Sinfonietta and some of the songs - but I did know that many colleagues of mine praised his music highly and if often mentioned to composers due to his text setting. I can’t speak or understand Czech, but you could hear the clarity in the crystalline, easy vocal lines of the piece. He creates beautiful and complex orchestral accompaniments that, like Strauss in a way, don’t get in the way of the singer, but enhances their line which is often almost counter to the music flowing from the orchestra. The lines sore in beautiful melody or are clear and direct in declamation, but never once did you feel the flow of the music stop of recitative. The flow and realness of the music was amazing - by that I mean the music didn’t feel contrived or to obvious. The command of the text setting was so superior it flowed with ease.

PG talking to kids about his music

Philip Glass is a composer I know very well. You can’t miss him. He’s style is almost pasé it’s so over done. I do think his music can be remarkable, and I am especially fond of Akhenaten and Einstein on the Beach. Those works form a trilogy with Satyagraha. However, I find the other two more successful pieces, due to the opposite reasons that Jenufa is successful, that is the way text is set and communicated to the audience. In Einstein the text that is sung are numbers, simple vowel sounds and shapes and oohs and ahhs. In Akhenaten the text comes from texts thought to be from the ancient Egyptian period and are sung in languages of those times - Hebrew, Akkadian and for the Hymn to the Sun, the language of the audience it it being shown. These works have a monumentality to them and the grand, slow and never changing pulse of Glass’ music suits these tableaux’s of energy (Einstein) and solemnity (Akhenaten). However, the character and life of Ghandi is what is behind the grandiose and mega music of Satyagraha, and it doesn’t have the same resonance as the other two works. There are references to ancient Indian texts and of course Glass has a firm understand of Indian musical ideas from his time with Ravi Shankar, but it doesn’t seem to jell like it does in the other two works. Einstein is just so odd and unexpected that it works for me, especially when you add the genius of Robert Wilson to it, who was such a driving force for the production. Akhenaten is so mysterious and solemn that if you get the tone right, which I think Glass does, you can basically get away with anything. Satyagraha on the other hand is missing something. It either needs to be more biopic or less, and personally I wanted more. It was written in between Einstein and Akhenaten, and I think the sort of grand tableaux meets grand processional music works well and is given some amazing experimental flair in Einstein, mostly because of what Robert Wilson does on stage and the craft of the slow progression, development and un winding of the music. These elements are fused into a more narrative driven work in Satyagraha. I don’t think they are as successful but and interesting experiments that form the ground work for success in Akhenaten. I enjoyed the music for Sat., but its not dramatically satisfying for me.

For anyone interested in some extra listening, listen to Glass’ first Violin Concerto, I think his best work.

“the point of writing music and experiencing music isn’t to make people comfortable necessarily”

— Phllip Glass

A composer a week: Marko Nikodijević talking about his opera about Claude Vivier

“Strange, beautiful, excessive. Those are the words that come to my mind when thinking about Vivier. (...) Stopped and inverted decays, frozen resonances, delays and echoes, processes recalling granular synthesis, all there to simulate an ever-changing room-size and spatial form, inter-cut with dance-club episodes.“

I have written about Vivier’s opera, Kopernikus here, feel free to have a read.

Rare Opera Club, vol.9 - Michael Tippett's The Midsummer Marriage

I’ve mentioned before about the little book of “Great Composers” I had as a kid. I’m still amazed at how much of my basic knowledge has come from this book.

All I knew of Michael Tippett, the important mid-century english composer, up until watching The Midsummer Marriage, was the main work listed in the book and the one that he’s most known for A Child of Our Time. The book also told me he was the sort of “second” to Benjamin Britten. This sort of lumping of composers together into schools or movements always intrigued and irritated me - Debussy and Ravel; Berg, Webern and Schoenberg; Adams, Reich and Glass etc. It gave me a chance to discover varying techniques and approaches, but as we know to compare so many of these composers almost misses the point and distracts us from looking at a composer in their own light. I’ve always been a big Ravel nut, but its often Debussy who get the limelight. I think there is clearly a similar comparison to Tippett and Britten, and so it’s been a real treat to dive into Tippetts work.

I have always loved Britten. To have such wonderful works to reference when working on setting english text are invaluable. Because of his success it’s easy to find varying interpretations and performances of his pieces, and he’s entered the operative cannon and vernacular of the english speaking world. His influence can be seen as far flung as Jeff Buckley to Thomas Ades. But my love for Britten’s music hasn’t always translated into my knowledge of him as person. In interviews he seems distant and reluctant to engage, some of the accounts of his behaviour with young boys, prior to meeting Peter Pears, sounds a little dodgy and the tiff with W. H. Auden, and what it’s over strikes me as little lame. If you don’t know it, it’s worth looking into. However, exploring interviews and reading some of Michael Tippett’s writings I am excited by his enthusiasm, passion and bravery for speaking out about social issues.

What I loved in Tippett’s music for The Midsummer Marriage is the energy and vibrancy it seems to have. Strikingly different to Britten. It got me thinking about something that I obsessed with while I was studying my undergraduate - the third way. 20th century music is often lumped (much like my discussion above) into two or three camps - neo-classical, neo-romantic and atonality. Upon my study there seemed to be a “third way” that didn’t really get going, or has perhaps only just got going. Composers I had gravity toward didn’t seem to fit in the above. Names like Respigi, Delius, Henze, Messiaen (sort of), Poulenc (sort of) and then more contemporary composers like Saariaho, Rhim and Lachermann. These names can sort of be added to one camp, but not really wholeheartedly. And I really love this about their music and I feel that sort of element in Tippett. A desire to chisel out their own space. It’s especially thrilling to think of Tippett against the back drop of other english composers, Vaughn Williams and Elgar being the main names. There is a freshness and originality there that I wish we could hear more often.

Finally, I found this video of MT talking about art, music and the act of creation. I don’t think I’ve heard someone encapsulate the practice of how and what being a composer is.

“I am quite certain in my heart of hears that modern music and modern art is not a conspiracy, but is a form of truth and integrity for those who practice it honestly, decently and with all their being.”

— Michael Tippett

The Artistic Tyrant & Rare Opera Club, Vol. 8: Chaya Czernowin's Infinite Now

The meeting of the sort-of-weekly rare opera club has been such a great way to get through the pandemic. We have watched a wide variety of works, many I wouldn’t normally engage with. And the discussions that arise from them are fascinating. I want to acknowledge some of these excellent people I’ve been sharing ideas with in the group - composer Kym Dillon, flutist Kim Tan, pianist Dean Skye Lucas, singer Heather Fletcher, singer Daniel Todd, director Daniel Sinfield and singer and performance coach Cailin Howarth.

One recent discussion was from viewing Chaya Czernowin’s Infinite Now. This is a remarkable piece of theatre. The discussion we had with this piece touched on how many modern “operas” are really difficult to categories. The term opera doesn’t really fit with many pieces, and this one. The whole experience is extraordinary and I would recommend you engage with the piece. I would love to experience it in person. The video did not give it justice, especially from an aural perspective. There is an incredible patchwork of sound going on, and I felt that I needed a better acoustic to experience the stunning complexity. I would also recommend this lecture from Chaya about the piece.

I’m not going to do my usual exploration of the composer and the piece for this blog post. I still feel this work is settling in me, and I haven’t gotten to the core of my response to it.

However, I do want to talk about one ideas that was raised in our club meeting - that of the artistic tyrant. In the video below, I was really pleased to witness the collaborative nature of Chaya and the work with other artists involved in the project. It sparked a discussion around the joy in the room one could feel toward the piece and the collaboration. It opened and enlighten some thoughts I have been having recently around collaboration and cooperation in artistic work, which is probably the thing I miss most of all about working from home and having no live performances to experience at the moment.

While I was completing my masters in conducting, we would often talk about how the age of the tyrant was over. Art organisations have been corporatised, and with that came more power to the musicians, the representation to management and the presents of unions. The famous stories of the great artistic tyrants of the past, Gustav Mahler being a well known one, can no longer happen. Organisations no longer allow the bullying behaviour that was accepted, only until relatively recently. Sometimes you get people talking about how this may mean that we wont have genius’ again, but it’s interesting to unpack that parallel. Does a “genius” artist have to be this sort of Beethovenian torched artists, fighting for their vision? I think in the age of post-modernism there isn’t a place for that, and now days people just won’t put up with pretentious, dictatorial visions.

I feel we learn and are encouraged to collaborate and negotiate more as artists, especially as musical performing artists dealing with big groups of experienced individuals. I had an experience while completing my masters where an experienced conductor of youth orchestras completely grilled me while I was on the podium in front of an orchestra, completely belittling me of any respect that the group of my peers had for me. I had and have respect for this person and their work, but I had always questioned their work manner - yelling at people in rehearsals, lack of reasoning or negotiation in their teaching method and a very unapproachable manner if you weren’t a favourite. I learnt a lot from this person in my undergraduate, both about music but also how not to run a rehearsal. But, this run in during my masters really winded me. It lead me down a path to questioning my ability to conduct work from the cannon (it was Beethoven’s Eroica that we were doing in the masterclass). In the long run this has lead me to a very fruitful path in contemporary music (most likely because I find it a much more collaborative and welcoming environment, and I just like the music more). But it’s a shame to think that all the potential I had for focusing more on the cannon went with a few disparaging remarks, made with little tact and no sense of care as a teacher. I am made of pretty tough stuff and it certainly didn’t disparage me from my path as a musician, but as I said it did effect my approach to conducting works from the cannon. It did also have some positive outcomes - it challenged me to go out and try and better my lack of knowledge for those areas of music, and it galvanised me to get better. But to this day I often think about what if this person encourage and taught me, rather then ridiculed me for my opinion? The opinion I had at the time was wrong and didn’t have correct musical judgement behind it, but instead of guiding me to a different opinion or suggesting other options it was insinuated that I hadn’t received the right sort of education. It was a glimpse into a very old fashioned value system, peppered with snobbery, status and power.

I hope to think that we have a more collaborative understanding about how to learn and how to work with people and that no one experiences what I did. It taught me a lot, but at the expense of a lot of my confidence. It also showed me about how a lot of the classical music world operates, or used to operate and how that effects structures and systems still in place in the community now. Again I feel that contemporary music is inherently more open, optimistic and pluralistic and is a huge draw card to me and the way I want to work, rather than trying to dismantle and work against the artistic tyrant legacy.

Rare opera club, vol. 7: Peter Eötvös' Angels in America

What a poignant time to watch this work. I have known about the amazing Tony Kushner play, Angels in America for a long time and have loved it’s amazing ability to marry real life characters (if you don’t know about Roy Cohn, have a read it’s fascinating), this magical bizarre dream world, realism, religion and poetry into an epic celebration of the power of humanity and the growing liberation of queer people as members of the human race.

Stepping into watching the operatic version of the play, I had some apprehension in case it was a similar experience to Alice In Wonderland, where my expectation of the work and knowledge of the source material led me to be very disappointed. But luckily I wasn’t. The shimmering, dreamlike music that pours throughout the score was exquisite and mated the dreamlike, cheekiness of the libretto. The original 7.5 hour play is condensed, I think quite well, into 2.5 hours of opera. The level of emotional directness opera can deliver gives you a directness and immediacy that words can’t give you. In the operatic version they steer away from a of the political elements of the play and just focus more on the character. But through that you still get a really genuine vision of New York City in the early 90s and the plight of queer people, who only recently have received close to the same rights as straight members of the community.

At the centre of the work is the power of death, in the form of AIDS. Watching this poetry of death, with people experiencing visions and predictions of the future world unfolding before them, my thoughts quickly fell onto what we’re experiencing with Covid19, and how will we attempt to depict the current epidemic in poetical terms and what can it mean for humanity. The injustices faced by many of the characters in Angels in America rang so true with so many of the difficulties we face with Covid19. Angels in America is almost seeped in the uncertainty of the future; the future of those suffering with AIDS, the challenge and transformation this put against religion as the world became more progressive and the prospect of a huge, plague and the fall of the atheist Soviet empire.

One aspect of this opera, and perhaps the original production and cast that I watched contributed to, was the depth and breadth of the characters I saw on stage. So often with opera, and especially new opera, I find it so hard to get more than just the music. Acting, as we know, is often the second cousin to the singing in opera performance, but this work really provided me with rich, nuanced and big characters. Perhaps it also had to do with the large sections of the score that were spoken and not sung, or spoken in a rhythmic speaking type technique. The text setting was also generally in the middle range of the singers, closer to their speaking voice and more easier to understand, except for the angels who were more operatic and otherworldly. This perhaps helped push the real focus I felt on text. And it should be noted the amazing quality of the english text setting, and done by someone for whom the language was a second one to them!

I would love love love to see this done in Australia. We have such amazing talent for a work like this. Alas I don’t see any of our major companies taking that risk anytime soon.

Rare opera club, vol. 6: Henryk Penderecki's The Devils of Loudun

Sex, possession & nuns - how could you not love it?

Penderecki isn’t a composer I’ve had the pleasure of exploring too much, outside of the big famous pieces. So I was really excited to dive into his first opera, The Devils of Loudun. This piece went onto to be influential on the 1971 film (with music with Peter Maxwell Davies) The Devils by Ken Russells. Russells spoke about the opera influencing the world of the film.

I really loved this opera. Politics, sex, horny priests, possessed nuns, it’s really got something for the whole family. Jokes aside, it delves into a world that explores 17th century France where politics, women and the power of society appears to be so different to ours, but in reality is such a strong criticism against oppression, dominant governments and the role and power of a women’s body.

This was the aspect that I found most interesting. In our club meeting I mentioned that if this piece was written 50 years earlier than it was (1968) it would come across as reasonably anti-women. But for some reason, it being created around the time of the sexual revolution painted these women in less of a hysterical, crazed women of patriarchal dominated western literature, and gave an eerie beauty to their inner psychology and confused sexuality.

Another interesting aspect to our conversation was the talk around politics, religion and women. It was really fascinating to tease out the idea that the man at the centre of the opera, who is accused of being the devil and possessing the nuns, didn’t do it and was put in that position from politics. And it touched on the nepotism and abuse of power the church had, and can still have on women and the attempts of an individual against the system. When it was premiered, the work had great controversy with the church. But I think its the classic case that it’s not the religion that is in question, it’s the church and the systems put in place that benefited the church for so long. And this was usually at the cost of individual freedom and progressive values.

The music itself is fascinating. The sound world explored in the more intimate moments is basically chamber music, with some amazing writing for Double Bass. The bigger action and crowd scenes have huge orchestral forces, utilising some amazing techniques for the orchestra. The chorus and soloist writing is epic. So many solo singers! And in the version I watched, a TV adaptation of the world premiere production from Hamberg State Opera, some amazing moments to act - the libretto isn’t contrite or awkward, it gave the singers an opportunity for real emotional depth, comedy and convincing melodrama. A work like this teeters on the extreme edges of emotion. It could almost be silly, but it manages to stay inside a unique, tense box that keeps you on your toes. It has comical, dark moments, but is always clear to its vision and tells the story amazingly well, especially with such large forces.

I’m especially happy to have explored this fantastic, wild and deep music as the maestro passed away in March this year.

#opera #operaclub

Rare opera club, vol. 5: George Benjamin's Written on Skin

George Benjamin is a composer I’ve know about for a long time, but I haven’t really known the music. When I was about 15 I found a CD at an op shop that was originally a promo CD given with a magazine. The CD was a compilation of tracks from newly released recordings. From what I can remember the CD contained track’s from a recording of the Verdi Requiem, a lied by Gustave Mahler, a scene from Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring and a piece by Lutoslawski, among others. All these were very new to me and really opened my eyes up to new sonic worlds I hadn’t been exposed to before. The most arresting piece on the CD was the second of the Three Inventions by George Benjamin. The fresh and subtle music of this piece really intrigued me. It had an extended solo for Cor Anglais (and now that I think about it, this might be where my obsession for the Cor Anglais as a melismatic solo instrument came from) accompanied by a lot of percussion and pizzicato strings. It was an intimate work, a solo voice framed by small bursts of cacophony and rhythmic complexity.

I had a compendium book called something like The Great Composers or The History of the Great Composers, which I devoured cover-to-cover. This little CD put sounds too many names I had read in this book. However, there wasn’t an entry for George Benjamin. His name remained there in my mind, until I got to university and was able to listen to his first opera Into the Little Hill, which has stayed with me since. Though looking back now, I wonder to myself why I didn’t look any further into his work? Especially as I was verging of obsession over Olivier Messiaen, George Benjamin’s teacher.

Now I should say that Written on Skin really isn’t a “rare” opera as it’s received a lot of excellent productions since it’s premiere in 2012 and has been lauded as the first “great” opera of the 21st century. Though, for the purposes of the club as primarily a group of Aussies watching and reviewing work it is rare, because I doubt we will see a production in Australia any time soon, if at all.

I found this piece to be exquisite. It was fascinating, tense and eerily beautiful throughout. The lightness of touch of orchestration is masterful. As Is Benjamin’s handling of the orchestra in the performance, and he’s also conducting it. The singing and acting, came together beautifully and I didn’t feel that one out-shone the other as I often feel in opera. The tension and intention of the performers was gripping throughout. The physical production was also amazing (I watched the world premiere performance at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, 2012). My one issue with the performance was that at times the direction of the performers could have been a little less safe. Sometimes it felt a little stand a deliver, and maybe the direction didn’t necessarily give the singers enough focus as to where to guide their intention, but overall it was really gripping.

What struct me most about the music was the easy of the vocal line, and the clarity of text. Now, the singers employed are excellent, but setting and writing opera in english is notoriously difficult. Comparing the work to Unsuk Chin’s Alice in Wonderland from a few weeks back, which had some really awkward and unreasonable text setting, this work was so easy to understand and seemed pretty singable. Where Chin would hold vowels for really long phrases, and have awkward settings of word stresses this piece avoided that so well. And most of the time, text wasn’t elongated, but was sung in a way that resembled speech without losing its operatic feel. A good example of how Benjamin does this is in this video from his next opera (above).

The libretto for the work, by playwright Martin Crimp, is also an excellent piece in itself. It struck me as subtle and full of shadow and light. An incredibly sophisticated structure emerged between the three central characters, and the drama that plays out was intoxicating.

I don’t want to give to much away about the plot, but in the penultimate scene we’re confronted with cannibalism. In writing this now sounds so melodramatic and stupid, but the way it’s written in the libretto it becomes this weird, sad and almost touching moment. That to me is the greatest master stroke in the work, it allows you to watch this grotesque moment and see beyond the taboo into a desperate and sad act of control. The exploration of taboo on stage is such a fascinating to me. This piece touches on not only cannibalism, but speaks to a dominant persons control of someone and if you read into the character of “Boy” which to me suggests he is an adolescent, the power of sexuality, lust and control, something I touched on in my own Orpheus. This work is an essay in tension, manipulation and desire, and I found it thrilling.

Two articles I found really useful in additional reading was this one from the New Yorker and old mate Alex Ross’ amazing blog.

Rare opera club, vol. 4: Francesca Caccini's La liberazione di Ruggiero dall'isola d'Alcina (1625)

Now, I’m no expert in baroque opera. I’ve done a little bit of baroque music, mainly the production of Poppea by Monteverdi that I did last year, and I certainly have a passion for pre 1750 music and the process of researching music of that time. However, watching this opera was a really interesting once to monitor my reaction. The production I looked at unfortunately wasn’t the best and so it was hard to really give it my most authentic opinion on.

What I was most struct with was practical questions around mounting older work like this in our time. The tropes and references of the work harken back to ancient Rome, Greece, christianity of the day and people of the day. So, it’s difficult if you don’t know the references. The characters are also generally quite one dimensional, the text isn’t usually to inspiring or poetic, especially when you’re dealing with a translation and if performed mediocre it’s really hard to understand if its the work that is intolerable or the performers.

This work had some really firey, exciting exchanges between characters written into it, but the execution was so banal and tepid, I found myself yelling “you just told that character to fuck off, you need to look like you’re pissed at them!!!” And this is always my bug bare with opera, I find myself 5 out of 10 times leaving a show complaining that the singing was nice, and the orchestra was fine but the acting and usually the direction, too, aren’t up to scratch.

Directing these dated works is very hard. You have odd musical structures and old timey theatrical techniques to navigate. You have to deal with pages and pages of static music, in-place to tell the story, or be an entertaining march depicting the decent into an under water fantasy land or long interlude put in place so that in sets could be moved and changed in the original production. So, as a director and/or a conductor you need to make very clear and good decisions around what to do with all this material that is hard to understand and difficult to structure. Theatres operate in different ways now. Performers too. The role of the director didn’t exist in the time we’re talking about with this opera, singers would be amazing and just have to sell the whole thing, with some basic blocking given by the musical director.

We have at our disposal so many techniques, trick and options as theatre makers and I feel so oft period work suffers from trying to be authentic to the work and the tropes. Work can get so bogged down in that. Singing always perfect, direction an after thought, orchestra precise but dull.

If I get the opportunity to work with period opera again, I would at least try my hardest to make sure that at all costs the story is being told and that the performers have as clear intention possible as to why they are on stage, otherwise what’s the point?

Rare opera club, vol. 3: Unsuk Chin's Alice in Wonderland

Well that’s the effect of living backwards, it makes everyone a little giddy at first. But there is one great advantage, the memory works both ways.

The White Queen in Through the Looking Glass

This piece has been on my watch list for a long time. I’ve watched snippets of the Munich State Opera premiere performance in the past, and so I was very excited to finally sit down with this piece.

My understanding of the piece, prior to seeing the full thing, was that it was a pretty wild ride, with a really fantastic production. Unfortunately, my expectations of a wild acid trip weren’t met.

Out of the two hour playing time, I certainly found some moments musically really fascinating but on the whole I felt that a lot of the material was either too long, too dull or too smart. I only laughed, and really it was a chuckle, once. I thought I would be giggling a lot more.

In doing some research of the piece I read this concise musical analysis, which brought to light some interesting musical techniques Unsuk used, such as palindromes, quotations, crab cannons and other musical riddles dotted through the score. Unfortunately, sometimes what looks cool on the page and which takes significant composition time to execute doesn’t transpose to something charming and witty aurally.

I also took issue with some of the text setting and the way it was sung. Opening this can of worms can provoke an unending debate between operatic and musical theatre traditions, but I feel many contemporary opera composers focus so much on the musical ideas and less on the text and the way the text is heard. Text is often an impetuous to composition, which I think is all well and good for concert work, but the moment we’re in the theatre there needs to be clear delivery of the text (away from the usual supertitles now common in opera, regardless of language) to the audience. The singing can sometimes inhibit this. The singers do an amazing job to execute what has been written, and can at times communicate the language to the audience very well. However, I don’t think this is achieved in a majority of sung moments in this work.

Being given such a big canvas as an opera, I feel that many composers want to pack in too many tricks and too many musical ideas. In this piece there seems to be some long or high singing that really blocks my understanding of the text. I actually thought that the spoken sections with orchestra accompaniment were some of the best sections of the piece. I guess it’s a question around why should this piece be sung in the first place, and what do we get out of the drama by a character singing. The Queen of Hearts, for instance, is given excellent over the top melodramatic music sung by a high Wagnerian soprano, though I didn’t understand a word she sang. But, this sort of worked for the character. But when Alice or the Cheshire Cat sang long, legato lines I felt a strong disconnect between the text, character and musical intention.

I also felt at times there was s disconnect from the music to my understanding of the characters and the setting. Alice’s long and legato aria toward the end lamenting what she’s seen and where reality and wonderland meet is stunningly beautiful and moving, but it just didn’t seem right to me and my reading of the book .

Second to this issue around directness of singing is acting. A work that I feel should be whimsical, dreamy and fun struck me as very hard and cold. There just didn’t seem to be a lot of joy on stage and I would be curious to see another production to see if that’s the cast, direction or anxiety from the difficult music.

Another thought, in Unsuk’s defence, is first operas are bloody hard to do, especially if you aren’t a singer. No matter how much vocal writing you do, trying to marry good quality vocal writing, with clear text setting and dramatic pacing is exceptionally difficult. I know that Alice has gone onto having a life as a concert piece, which maybe suits its musical objectives a bit more. But for me the dramatic pacing doesn’t work. I was also left guessing if this was a work for adults or children. I don’t think it had an interval, so 2 hours is a long sit for a child, especially when the music is so dense and the action on the stage so cold and slow.

Ultimately, it’s hard for me to be objective about Alice in Wonderland. There are few books I’ve read twice. Picture of Dorian Grey and Alice in Wonderland and Alice through the Looking-glass would have to be the works I’ve reread the most. I grew up on some amazing adaptations of this book, including of course the iconic Disney version, a really psychedelic UK version from 1972 with Peter Sellars, Dudley Moore and even Robert Helpman as the Mad-hatter, with a excellent John Barry (James Bond) score, the dreadful Tim Burton version, a Hello Kitty version and probably my personal favourite, a 1985 two part tele-movie adaptation with songs by Steve Allan. My personal highlight being Carol Channing as the White Queen singing about Jam.

Comparing these more commercial adaptations with an operatic version isn’t really fair. But ultimately for me this should be a psychedelic, fantastical trip intended for children and this version strikes me at times hyperactive, dull and nightmarish, unsure as to its purpose.

Alice and the characters and moments of the book often pop into all my work. My first symphony carries the subtitle In my garden with Alice and suggests a wild Wonderland-esq journey. At my Alice themed 21st birthday party my poor parents had to deal with each room of the house being turned into a different section of the book. She is an iconic symbol of fun and innocence, but all I got from this piece was clinical coldness and fear.

My backyard set up for my 21st Alice in Wonderland birthday party

Rare opera club, vol. 2: Franz Schreker's Die Gezeichneten

Franz Schreker

I first heard about Franz Schreker while studying, when a friend mentioned the Chamber Symphony and how wild, passionate and inspiring it was. I remember them describing it as music that took Mahler and Richard Strauss but pushed it just the next step further into this wild, exotic and crystallised world. From then on I researched his music and I become hooked. I wanted to conduct the Chamber Symphony for my masters recital, but I couldn’t find a harmonium to use in the concert and along side needing seperate players for both the harmonium, piano and celesta it all proved to hard and so I opted for the keyboard-less Arnold Schoenberg First Chamber Symphony.

I’m not going to go into to much analysis of the piece or description of the narrative. Alex Ross has an excellent write up on this blog. This opera is a mad love triangle, exploring the role of an artist, beauty and lust. In researching further about the piece, one comment about the third act, which depicts an orgy in a grotto on an island near Genoa, suggested it could have been inspired by the life of German Industrialist Frederick Alfred Krupp. Krupp was caught out for holding gay orgies in a hidden grotto near his personal hotel on Capri. Once the authorities found out, the scandal was so far reaching it made its way to the Kaiser, and is believed to be why Krupp took his own life. This tragic story really drew me in. In my previous opera, Orpheus, I wanted to shine light on a masculine, cis-male character with a fluid sexuality, which encompassed love and lust for cis-women, men but also children. This is a topic I find fascinating, especially when we’re viewing from our historical perspective. Not just lust and desire, but the length people go to to fulfil the dreams. Also the darker edges of passions and taboos that drive people is not only a story I find intriguing, but drives a lot if not most operas. Greek myth is of course foreign and unfamiliar to us now, but the story of Krupp was only 100 years ago. A upstanding contributor to society forced into a wretched corner, with only one horrific way out, because they acted on their desires. Again queer people being persecuted for pleasure. With the added hypocrisy of it happening in Capri, where Roman Emperors created wild playgrounds to fulfil their generally more hetro, masculine desires.

the VIa Krupp leading down to the Grotta di Fra Felice, Capri

This period of Austria art and music is one of my favourite periods, and this piece proved to be a new highlight from that period. The stunning orchestration and bubbling, ever changing harmony melds Strauss, Mahler, Debussy and Dukas together into an amazing sound world. I programmed from Schreker songs in a concert of music written under Nazi oppression. I was especially interested in Schreker, because there are musicological arguments that Schreker really should have been the next big thing in German music. However, due to some Jewish family connections, Schreker was banned. And with his death, just as the Nazi’s took control, sealed his fate of being largely forgotten.

There seems to be a resurgence in his music and we’re seeing a lot more productions of his many and varied operas. I loved watching this 2005 Saltzburg Festival production, and I can’t wait to explore more Schreker operas, and I encourage you to do the same!

Rare Opera Club, vol. 1 - Claude Vivier's Kopernikus

Since finding out about the music and life of Canadian composer Claude Vivier, I’ve been intrigued. A style that authentically melds East and South-East Asian influences with Spectralism and other French styles, plus a slight drop of camp, fantasy and lyricism. Vivier is also famous for his death, murdered by a truqueur (eng. trickster - young attractive man who turns tricks as a prostitute or accepts sexual advances to take money or harm) in Paris. This gothic, queer melodrama ending to his life speaks not only to my love to queer-ness in music, especially contemporary music, but also the long line of pain and suffering queer people have been exposed to over time. Alan Turing and Matthew Sheppard come to mind.

So, with all this in mind, for the first meeting of my new Rare Opera Club, I was really excited to explore Vivier’s opera Kopernikus. The idea with the club is to meet every week on Zoom, while stuck at. home in isolation during the Covid19 pandemic, and discuss a lesser performed work of the opera cannon.

This piece is a mystical walk through a myth laden, dream like world inhabited with Alice in Wonderland, the Queen of the Night, Mozart, Tristan & Isolde and Kopernikus who are all met by the Indian Fire God Angi traveling to the throbbing-stars. The libretto, by the composer is wild and multilayered and the music is for 7 singers and 7 instrument. They mimic each other, echo each other or work to accompany each other. The roles of each singer and instrument interweave in this fantastic texture. It’s primarily homophonic, that is solos music with accompanying material, and has the feeling of timeless stagnation where we are aurally focused on one single idea, very much like Messiaen. The next moment we receive a complexity of sounds, words (some real, some made up by Vivier) and textures. This meeting of stagnation and complexity, in a very effortless way, is a style and feeling I trying to implement in a lot of my own music and so speaks to me deeply. As does the slightly camp meeting of different mythological, real and historical characters. This patchwork of times and persons is very inspiring to me.

This sentence about his death, from his offical website speaks volumes. The last passage of music he wrote for this Tchiak opera, a character called Claude (so possibly himself) sings a line to do with plunging a knife into his heart for a lover, in a strange premonition of his own death.

In June 1982, with the help of a Canada Council grant, Vivier left Montreal for Paris, where he began work on an opera based on the death of Tchaikovsky. In March the following year he was stabbed to death by a young Parisian man who may have been a prospective lover and who was later caught and sentenced. His last work was the unfinished Glaubst du an die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, which contains a disturbing premonition of his untimely death. - http://www.claudevivier.com/

Images from documentary, featuring his friends and colleagues, including Gyorg Ligeti - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xfKna3MvvbU

Claude Vivier