w
Di ic Fi c -Di u
100 years of the iconic baritone
The tra ic tale of Simon Barere
D N i P c
C u i i’ M é
Vaughan Williams’s plea for peace
Opera’s most shockin bloodbath i i
Vi li i
D Si Willi
How to convert classical naysa ers
The healing power of music
Also in this issue…
Classical music’s key role in the Nazi war machine
Why pianist Myra Hess was more than a WWII hero
How Sibelius crafted beauty from personal turmoil
Brought up in Russia, pianist Yevgeny Sudbin moved to Berlin aged 10, and then to London at 17, graduating from the Royal Academy of Music. He made his BBC Proms debut in July 2008 and has since performed with orchestras all over the world. Widely considered to be an example of the Russian pianistic tradition – thanks to his vivid musical imagination and virtuosity – he is a champion of Scriabin and Medtner. His new recording of Scriabin’s piano works is released on BIS this month.
Scriabin Vers la Flamme
The pianist Vladimir Horowitz, who met Scriabin when he was ten years old, said that Scriabin had this fantasy of engulfing the whole world in fire – of destroying it and creating something better out of it. Vers la Flamme, meaning ‘Towards the Flame’, embodies this concept, conjuring the image of a fire that gets bigger and bigger until it engulfs the whole piano. I love the way that Scriabin generates such complexity from simple beginnings; for me, this symbolises the idea of the universe. What emerges is something bigger than the sum of its parts.
Medtner Stimmungsbilder, Op. 1, ‘The Angel’
Unlike Scriabin, who evolved enormously as a composer, Medtner remained consistent in style from his first opus to this last. This piece, based on a poem by Lermontov, is the first one he ever wrote. It speaks of an angel flying across the sky, carrying a young soul in its arms. That may seem morbid, but the piece is incredibly serene, without a hint of sorrow. It’s like Mozart’s music, where you feel you can’t change a single note: a
sublime take on a subject that others might see as painful and negative.
Scriabin Prometheus, Poem of Fire
This work, which depicts fire as a symbol of the development of human consciousness, is full of mysticism. It’s the first piece, I think, ever to combine light with music, thanks to the inclusion of the colour organ: a new instrument that Scriabin invented for this piece, which emits coloured light instead of music. But what I find incredible are the harmonies – at once out of the ordinary and primordial, as though they have always been there, like the fabric of the universe. And the way that the choir blends harmonically when it comes in towards the end gives me goose bumps.
Medtner Fairy Tale, Op. 51 No 3
Medtner wrote a lot of musical fairy tales and, being part-German, he took inspiration from German folklore. I was sitting at Euston Square station, surrounded by people in suits on their way to work, when I heard this music. It immediately gripped me – there was something about the way Medtner used harmonies, rhythms and textures that was
so imaginative but also so pianistic. I just had to sit down to listen to it properly and then listen to it many more times. It felt like being hit by magic.
Debussy L’Isle Joyeuse
This piece, based on Jean-Antoine Watteau’s painting The Embarkation for Cythera, symbolises the quest to achieve eternal bliss: it is full of beautiful, watery textures in the piano and constant shifts in key, with an orgiastic climax towards the end, leaving you with the feeling that, after this experience, the whole island drowns and everybody on it either dies or transforms. There is the idea that you can die of ecstasy – Scriabin was obsessed with it, and I feel that Debussy was also tapping into it. This is probably his most exuberant and extravagant musical work.
Saint-Saëns Danse macabre
This piece, in which the dead are summoned up from their graves, is the most literal depiction of death on my list. But what is striking is its whimsical, humorous quality. This idea that death comes to you, takes you by the hand and starts trying to get you to dance: it’s kind of ridiculous, almost making fun of death. Then everybody dances through the night, and the whole thing becomes crazy and convoluted, until the morning hours when the cockerel crows its famous tune. Although we often hear this piece in its orchestral version, it works brilliantly on the piano: you can hear the bones rattling.
Scriabin Piano Sonata No. 9, ‘Black Mass’
This piece is also about summoning demons back to life. But whereas Danse macabre is ridiculous and humorous, this is very dark. Interestingly, around the time that the piece was written, devil worship, sadism, necrophilia, cannibalism and other strange ceremonies were thriving throughout Russia. For instance, the painter Nikolai Sperling, Scriabin’s favourite artist, drank human blood and ate human flesh to achieve mystical experiences. So, there was something in the air at the time and maybe some of it worked its way into this music – it is terrifying. Interview by Hannah Nepilova
British composers played a vital role in lifting spirits in World War II, sometimes in unlikely ways. Rob Ainsley tells how they played their part with symphonies, film scores… and jam
Audiences at the 1943 Proms season experienced performances of two great, very different, war symphonies. On Thursday 24 June, the world premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth; then on Monday 19 July, Shostakovich’s Seventh, first heard in Britain at the previous year’s Proms.
Shostakovich was in a besieged Leningrad, frozen and starving. Dark and epic, the Seventh’s narrative martial solemnity set the pattern for ‘war music’. VW, however, wrote his in the comparative warmth and comfort of Dorking. His magic Fifth floats serenely, like morning haze over the Cotswolds. Any struggle – in its Romanza, inspired by Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress – is personal, internal.
spirit, lift morale and perhaps help spades dig for victory or trowels spread cement a bit more resolutely. So what did Britain’s composers do to help the war effort? It’s a tale of film scores, jail terms, jammaking and bad driving.
Vaughan Williams himself was a veteran of World War I. In 1914-18, he’d put music on pause to enlist as a private in the Medical Corps – harrowing work down in the field, even though at 42 he could have been excused. Also serving were Arthur Bliss (with
Bombs were, nevertheless, pounding Britain. The 1940 Proms had been cut short by the Luftwaffe’s destruction of its base, the Queen’s Hall – the only available London venue for the 1941 season was the Royal Albert Hall, its home ever since. A symphony can’t grow potatoes or rebuild houses. But music can charge a national
‘Intensity and authority’:
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau accompanied by pianist Gerald Moore c.1965; (below) recording in 1948
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s consummate artistry enthralled all who heard him sing. Andrew Green marks 100 years of the celebrated German baritone
The ability of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau to excite youthful minds is an intriguing measure of his unique talents. Daniel Barenboim was ‘completely mesmerised’ at age ten by a FischerDieskau recital. The distinguished British tenors Ian Partridge and Ian Bostridge both had their moments of revelation while at school. ‘The quality of his voice was something I’d never heard before, the warmth, the immediacy,’ Partridge recalls of a Mahler recording. One Schubert track did it for Ian Bostridge: Erlkönig: ‘It was the intensity and authority, the beauty of the voice.’
As a student in London in the 1960s, the soprano Teresa Cahill attended ‘all FischerDieskau’s song recitals with [pianist] Gerald Moore. I had a respect and reverence for him that bordered on hero-worship.’ Cahill would go on to work with Fischer-Dieskau twice. ‘Those performances will stay in my memory forever. To have known him personally and performed with him represents the pinnacle of my career.’
The teenage Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was himself a discophile, one element of an unquenchable thirst for classical music (as well as for art, theatre, poetry and books). His schoolteacher father, Albert Fischer-Dieskau, was a devoted musician, composer and sometime concert promoter. Dietrich’s mother, Dora, was likewise in love with music, which adorned the family’s life in Berlin. FischerDieskau remembered his excitement at hearing Wagner’s opera Lohengrin on the radio at age four. Piano studies rendered him a far more than
‘The warmth and immediacy of his voice was something I had never heard before’
competent player. The overarching bonus was the rich musical life of 1930s Berlin. All of this made Fischer-Dieskau the intensely musically aware individual he ever remained.
A teacher at ‘Dieter’s’ secondary school decided the youngster had ‘the voice of an angel’ and singing seemed his most likely career by the age of 16. There weren’t so many angels on the streets of Berlin, however, as Hitler’s takeover of Germany unfolded. This young man of civilised sensibilities found Nazism at best uncouth and boorish. He was nonetheless forced to join the
Composer of the Week is broadcast on Radio 3 at 4pm, Monday to Friday. Programmes in May 2025 are: 28 April – 2 May Jacquet de la Guerre
5-9 May Elgar
12-16 May Bruch
19-23 May Janáček
26-30 May Beethoven
Tempo Sibelius’s (left) love of nature permeates his music, but it goes deeper than mood or simple tonepainting. For instance, wind and water don’t move at regular, steady speeds, and his music reflects that increasingly as he develops. Different strands in the texture can seem to be moving at different tempos, like ocean cross-currents, the eddies of a river or the interplay of breezes through tree canopies.
Form Sibelius starts out rooted in classical forms, especially sonata form and rondo, but in time these begin to blur, until he arrives at something that seems to be continuously evolving. Elements of slow movement, scherzo and allegro can be heard in his last symphony, No. 7, but where are the boundaries? It’s wonderfully seamless. Harmony Dissonance was on the rise in music in Sibelius’s time, and he can be abrasively discordant too. At the same time, though, he rediscovers the elemental purity of basic tonal harmonies, so that a C major chord, emerging from an aura of dissonance near the start of the Sixth Symphony, sounds like a stunning new discovery. Orchestration Sibelius’s orchestral forces are often restrained, in size and in colour range, especially in the symphonies. But the way he uses even the most familiar instruments creates a sound palate that’s like no one else: austere yet rich at the same time.
Can we judge a composer’s character from their music? With Sibelius, says Stephen Johnson, this would not necessarily appear to be the case
ILLUSTRATION: MATT HERRING
Imagine, if you can, that you know only the music of Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler – nothing of the men that wrote it. Imagine I then tell you that one of these men (Composer A) was a strict disciplinarian, ran a tight ship professionally and financially, balanced his day job and creative life to nearperfection, was as exacting in his personal life as in his work, and never drank or otherwise indulged to excess. I then tell you that the other (Composer B) was a needy, womanising emotional mess, with a terrifying alcohol dependency, who spent money like water and who sometimes had to be propped up at his desk by his
then Eliot had his reasons for wanting to keep his private life out of the public eye. It depends ultimately on whether ‘the man that suffers’ sees artistic creation as selfexpression or self-transformation: do you simply express who you are or, rather, who you would like to be? Or do you aspire even higher? Like Mahler, Sibelius seems to have seen his work as inspired by someone or something transcendent. He often talks about ‘God the Father’ in his diaries, fascinatingly putting himself in the classic female role – the receiver of the creative seed, who conceives, internally nurtures the artistic ‘child’ and brings it to birth. But unlike Mahler, who could pour
He seems to have seen his work as inspired by someone or something transcendent
heroically patient wife in a desperate effort to get him to finish a piece on time.
Unless you rightly suspected a trick question, I imagine you’d almost certainly get them the wrong way round. I’m pretty sure I would. Composer B was indeed Jean Sibelius, mythologised in his own lifetime as the austere ‘Titan of the Northlands’, who rejected Mahler’s notion of a kind of symphony that could ‘embrace everything’ in favour of ‘severity of form’ and ‘profound logic’, who was said to have compared his own music to pure spring water – so different from all those lavish continental cocktails (which as a man he would definitely have preferred!). If ever there was a warning against trying to explain artists’ work in terms of their life…
Was poet TS Eliot right, then: should we be at pains to separate ‘the man that suffers and the mind that creates’? But
out his monumental Eighth Symphony in a vertiginous eight weeks, Sibelius worked at his music over and over again. He would make copious sketches and then, even when he’d apparently finished, there would be full-scale reworkings. As a listening experience, the glorious Fifth Symphony (1915-19) may feel like following the course of a river from source to wide-open sea, or like watching a speeded-up film of a plant growing from seed to full flower. But Sibelius compared the process of writing it to moving the tiles around in a mosaic, thrown down from Heaven at random. And what a laborious process it was: four years of more-orless continuous work, with two major revisions, and all the while the struggle with the lacerating critic in his own head, only silenced with the assistance of massive doses of whisky.
You may be surprised to read that putting these pages together is not an exact science – how can it be, with so many new (and old) recordings sent our way to consider? That said, I do like to think I put at least some thought into how things land, while others are happy accidents. It is no accident that there is a shedload of Shostakovich, from a symphony to three quartets (our Recording of the Month) via a rare song cycle; or indeed a bounty of Bach (which is always a good idea) and a pair of must-listen Mahler symphonies (Paavo Järvi’s new Fifth is very special). I have, though, accidentally assembled one of the most global selections possible, with at least 23 countries represented by ensembles and artists from Scotland to Australia, China to Canada. Enjoy the journey. Michael Beek Reviews editor
This month’s critics
John Allison, Nicholas Anderson, Michael Beek, Terry Blain, Kate Bolton-Porciatti, Garry Booth, Geoff Brown, Michael Church, Christopher Cook, Martin Cotton, Christopher Dingle, Misha Donat, Rebecca Franks, George Hall, Claire Jackson, Michael Jameson, Berta Joncus, John-Pierre Joyce, Nicholas Kenyon, Ashutosh Khandekar, Erik Levi, Andrew McGregor, David Nice, Freya Parr, Ingrid Pearson, Jeremy Pound, Anthony Pryer, Paul Riley, Jan Smaczny, Charlotte Smith, Jo Talbot, Anne Templer, Sarah Urwin Jones, Kate Wakeling, Alexandra Wilson
KEY TO STAR RATINGS
HHHHH Outstanding
HHHH Excellent
HHH Good
HH Disappointing
H Poor
Erik Levi goes on a thrilling ride thanks to the Jerusalem Quartet’s winning survey of three of Shostakovich’s mighty quartets
Shostakovich
String Quartets
Nos 2, 7 & 10
Jerusalem Quartet
BIS BIS-2654 75:20 mins
This recording is an absolute winner. As in its previous explorations of Shostakovich, primarily on the Harmonia Mundi label, the Jerusalem Quartet provides consummately brilliant playing throughout, combining amazing technical finesse with overwhelming musical insight. The Jerusalems invest every phrase with an exquisite range of nuances, and individual voices are both seamlessly blended and subtly calibrated to achieve a perfect balance of texture. In each performance, the players take us through a vast gamut of emotions, from loneliness and tender reflection
to almost unbearable levels of neurosis and unbridled fury. Yet the flawless control that is exhibited throughout never sounds cold or calculating, and even on repeated listening, the playing yields a compelling spontaneity that is normally only experienced live.
The Second Quartet is delivered here with fiercely Beethovenian dynamism. A patient build-up of tension characterises the opening passage of the first movement, the performers slightly holding back the dynamic levels to ensure that the frenzied climax in the development has maximum impact. In stark contrast, time seems to stand still in the ensuing movement. Alexander Pavlovsky simply takes your breath away with his mesmerising projection of the melismatic first violin writing in the Recitative, and the tricky transition to the more lyrical central Romance is handled with great sensitivity. The clouds darken considerably in the shadowy Waltz movement which is invested with a deep sense of unease that
A thrilling encounter: Jerusalem Quartet plays with great technical finesse
is transformed into brutal aggression in the middle part. Despite Shostakovich’s amazingly resourceful and imaginative manipulation of variation form in the finale, I have rarely been convinced that the movement entirely hangs together – a result, perhaps, of the composer’s frequent and almost schizophrenic changes of tempo. But I experienced no such qualms in the present performance, which takes the music by the scruff of its neck. Exploiting every twist and turn in the musical narrative with a seemingly infinite variety of textures and dynamics serves to make the full-blooded A minor chords at the end of the work sound all the more tragic and inconsolable.
After the powerful conclusion to the Second Quartet, the Jerusalems adopt a much more subdued, even repressed interpretative pose for the epigrammatic Seventh Quartet, a work dedicated to the memory
The playing yields a spontaneity that is normally only experienced live
of the composer’s first wife. There are few passages in Shostakovich’s quartet output that are more chilling than the disembodied sounds of the second movement Lento. It’s performed here with such an eerie stillness that I can almost guarantee listeners will be
Why did you settle on Quartets Nos 2, 7 & 10 for this album?
It was important for us to put three different quartets together so that there was variety. The 15 quartets span a very wide range emotionally, but also in terms of writing style. When we play the cycle live we do it chronologically, and it always amazes me not just how good the programmes are, but how different they are. For this album we definitely wanted to record No. 2, which is one of our favourites, and we felt the three really complement each other and present a compelling view of Shostakovich’s music for quartet. Nos 2 and 10 were composed 20 years apart – what do they say about Shostakovich?
stunned when, almost without warning, the Jerusalems allow all hell to break loose in the unhinged fugal Allegro. Similarly disturbing juxtapositions of mood characterise the first two movements of the Tenth Quartet. Foreboding underpins the obsessive and claustrophobic Andante that here rarely rises above a soft and spookily withdrawn level. Then uncontained anger breaks out in the Allegretto furioso where the Jerusalems exert absolute control when playing a dissonant, percussive series of chords whose cumulative impact is intensified by the time we arrive at the very end.
PERFORMANCE HHHHH
RECORDING HHHHH
The feeling is that he has settled into a certain kind of style by No. 10. In the earlier quartets he is experimenting more and he is a little more careful with what he writes. Nos 9 and 10 are kind of the heart of the cycle and then, starting with No. 11, he veers off into something which is very different again.
The Jerusalem Quartet is about celebrate its 30th anniversary. How does that feel?
I’ve been in the quartet for half of it, but I’m definitely aware of the bond that has been created between my three colleagues. Thirty years is a very long time to do one thing – not that it’s all they do, but focusing your life on doing one thing is something that is becoming increasingly rare. And there is an incredible value to it. For me, what is most present in my day-to-day experience playing viola in the quartet is not just the 30-year bond of the players but with audiences as well. I think that is so special and we really experience this on a nightly basis.