Classical CDs Weekly: Górecki, Haydn, Shostakovich, Second Viennese School

A quartet of string quartet recordings is sized up and assessed

It’s string-quartet Saturday – a young German group tackle Soviet classics and a rejuvenated Russian quartet smile with Haydn. There’s music from a contemporary Polish master and exquisitely uncomfortable fin-de-siècle music from Vienna.

theartsdesk Q&A: Script Supervisor Angela Allen

John Huston's right-hand woman recalls The African Queen and other journeys in film

The credits unfold against a backdrop of a tall, exotic plant, down whose length the camera slowly pans. The African Queen, in glorious Technicolor, based on a novel by CS Forrester, directed by John Huston, shot by Jack Cardiff, starring two of the great names of the cinematic age. Katharine Hepburn, the female face of the screwball comedy, and Humphrey Bogart, the hardbitten star of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. If you’re reading carefully, you’ll note that the credit for continuity goes to Angela Allen. Sixty years later, I sit in a cinema in Soho with Angela Allen and watch The African Queen.

Die Fledermaus, Welsh National Opera, Cardiff

Iconic operetta returned from director-land to its true home

Those WNO regulars who remember the company’s last Fledermaus (directed nine years ago by Calixto Bieito) with a shiver of horror can rest assured that its replacement contradicts it at almost every point. John Copley, past-master of Texttreue (truth to the text, or at least its spirit), does not rummage around in Strauss’s frothy masterpiece for a critique of modern man, does not transplant it to Merthyr Tydfil or turn it into a rugger-club knees-up, does not coarsen the text or doublecross the music.
Instead, he accepts it as it is: a middle-class fantasy of the high life with Vienna as its simulacrum, an immaculate study in vapid, delicious pleasure, a joke at the expense of expensive jokes and, above all, a dazzling score that never lets up from first note to last.
Copley perhaps updates the setting a touch, though in a work whose dramatis personae are constantly in and out of costume, it’s hard to be sure. In any case the stars of the evening, in my book, are the designers, Tim Reed and Deirdre Clancy, and the lighting designer Howard Harrison, who provide a visual treat that never strays into the vulgarity modern stagings find so tempting in this piece. Bankers are (naturally) invoked in the Pountney/Hancock translation as Eisenstein’s likely fellow inmates in the local jail; but happily their tastes in décor are mostly left alone. The Eisensteins are parvenus, of course, and their suburban villa shows it. But the bored, fun-loving millionnaire Prince Orlofsky (vividly played and sung en travesti by Helen Lepalaan from Estonia) knows how to party in style; is no oligarch; won’t, one feels, be buying football clubs: his palace offers a restrained, semi-exterior setting for a range of genuinely exquisite costumes, subtly lit, and even the prison is the sort of establishment where one might not mind meeting one’s banker, at least if one could avoid the ghastly Frosch (Desmond Barrit).
The evening’s other main feature is the conducting of Thomas Rösner, a Viennese in a piece that can die without style. In his hands the music lilts and sparkles, and the orchestra dances brilliantly to his tune. For the singers, in translation, he could perhaps give a shade more time in the quicker numbers – Orlofsky’s champagne song, or Eisenstein’s initial Terzetto. Rösner, I guess, is used to Viennese singers who have this music in their pocket. But this will come, even in the Land of Song.
The WNO cast is clever, musicianly and highly watchable, thanks not least to Stuart Hopps’s neat choreography, which goes well beyond the regulation of formal dance. Joanne Boag shines as Adele, buxom but agile and clear-voiced in her laughing couplets; and while Nuccia Focile struggles to get Rosalinde’s Csárdás across in this big theatre, she is excellent elsewhere, including in her scenes with the spoof tenor Alfred (Paul Charles Clarke), who sings almost as much Verdi as Strauss and insists on her calling him Alfredo.
Opposite her, Mark Stone is a stylish Eisenstein, enough of a baritone, as Rösner points out in his programme-book interview, to project the rather wordy numbers Strauss gives him, but lyrically tenorish when required. Alan Opie is a witty Frank, a Hapsburg stuffed uniform who breaks into a two-step when instructed by the music. David Stout presides as a just sufficiently sinister Falke, spectacularly transformed into a bat for the finale, but warm enough in the Brüderlein ensemble, a number which typifies the essential pointlessness but irresistible charm of Viennese operetta.

CBSO, Nelsons, Symphony Hall, Birmingham

Mahler's last completed masterpiece almost too exciting

Mahler cycles in his centenary year are about as predictable as dead leaves in autumn. But they perhaps belong more in Birmingham than in some other cities. Mahler, after all, was a big factor in making Simon Rattle’s name, and Rattle was a big factor in getting this superb concert-hall built. So the current cycle there, now halfway through, is like a civic statue to the Master: a tribute both ways, honour to the giver and the receiver.

Rameau's Castor et Pollux, Theater an der Wien

Leggy recitative guides us to heaven and hell in a compelling family drama

For us Ramistes the brilliance came as no surprise. But did the genius come across to the uninitiated? This new production of Castor et Pollux, one of Rameau's finest tragédie en musique, was the Baroque composer's Austrian stage premiere. Would the Theater an der Wien's audience look past the oddities and archaisms and unfamiliarities of Rameau's 300-year-old musical and dramatic language and embrace the radical nature of his leggy recitatives and proto-Romantic ebb and flow? No question.

Seduction: An Erotic Black Comedy, Above the Stag Theatre

Jack Heifner's all-male version of La Ronde is short on wit and good acting

Have you ever found onstage nudity sexy? Unlike a friend of mine, for whom the epiphany of the National Theatre's Bent was the giant member in the first five minutes, I honestly haven't. Sensuous, once, in the Maly Theatre's skinny-dipping Platonov, and even sweet, in ATS Theatre's strong adaptation of Forster's Maurice. Since the theatre's Artistic Director Peter Bull, evidently a good guy, was staging this, Jack Heifner's all-male updating of Schnitzler's La Ronde, I'd hoped that some good things would come of it. Unfortunately, for me at any rate, Seduction was neither erotic, very funny nor very dark (until you read the programme note for a reason why).

The Merry Widow, Opera North

Lehár’s Viennese bauble yields only mild amusement

It’s such a pity that the more striking elements in Franz Lehár’s orchestration are heard so fleetingly, such as the tiny glints of cimbalon which give the best parts of the score an authentic bohemian - or Pontevedran - flavour. But too often the relentless parade of waltzes and polkas begins to grate, and you’re about to nod off when suddenly something ear-catching happens – a sequence of gorgeous string portamenti, a languorous violin solo, or stopped horn chords that sound as if they’ve escaped from a Mahler symphony. Then you recall that The Merry Widow was first performed in Vienna in 1905.

Zacharias, BBC Philharmonic, Sinaisky, Royal Albert Hall

A transfigured night in the company of Schumann and the Waltz King

The Proms listings are full of concerts a bit like the one last night that seem to offer up, on paper, little of real burning interest: no big names, no star foreign orchestras, no intriguing rarities, no new works, nothing beyond one hard-working BBC orchestra and a few staple classics (a Strauss family waltz-medley and some Schumann) that could be rattled off by any professional orchestra blindfold. Be warned: these are the concerts that are most likely to transfigure your evening, stir your soul and leave you reeling.

Zaide, Sadler's Wells

Mozart's unfinished opera fails to sparkle in this new completion

The question remains why Mozart never finished Zaide. One immediate reason is he got a well-paid commission for Idomeneo, and Zaide was written on spec. Another reason, at least on last night’s evidence, was that it seems as likely he didn’t finish it because he realised he had a turkey on his hands. On a beautiful summer's evening when, if you wanted drama or entertainment you could be (to take a few examples) watching the World Cup or Wimbledon or the fabulously operatic Muse at Glastonbury, you would in any case have to have a pretty compelling night in the theatre to compete. This turgid gallimaufry wasn’t it.

The question remains why Mozart never finished Zaide. One immediate reason is he got a well-paid commission for Idomeneo, and Zaide was written on spec. Another reason, at least on last night’s evidence, was that it seems as likely he didn’t finish it because he realised he had a turkey on his hands. On a beautiful summer's evening when, if you wanted drama or entertainment you could be (to take a few examples) watching the World Cup or Wimbledon or the fabulously operatic Muse at Glastonbury, you would in any case have to have a pretty compelling night in the theatre to compete. This turgid gallimaufry wasn’t it.

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