Vanessa Recordings Guide

(This guide was written for a production of Vanessa, Brickhouse Theatre, 2016)

Vanessa Recordings

Vanessa has been recorded in the studio three times, and all three versions have much to commend them, but no truly ideal recording has emerged so far.

The Dimitri Mitropoulos recording has the advantage of the original cast and conductor, but the sound quality is not quite stellar for its age (1958). Mitropoulos favours fast tempos, and rushes past some of the score's loveliest details, but his hand is firm and he knows what he wants - it's a brittle, chilly view of the opera, not necessarily inappropriate given the wintry setting. His cast (Steber, Elias, Gedda, Resnik, Tozzi) are perhaps the starriest on record, but there is a politeness to this performance that makes it feel like a costume drama. Much more recently, a live recording of the European premiere at Salzburg was released, with the Vienna Philharmonic in the pit, the same conductor and essentially the same cast. Here we find all involved much more comfortable in these challenging roles, giving them a fluency, depth of characterisation and dramatic conviction not found in the original recording. The poorer sound quality, stage noise and occasional musical mistakes are the compromise, but this is a much more exciting recording.

Like the Mitropoulos, the Naxos recording under Gil Rose from 2002 has the advantage of having a cast who have actually sung their roles on stage together. This is the first recording of Barber's slightly revised three act version of 1964 which is dramatically taughter. The recording quality is decent, if not state of the art, but it is the conducting that is the main strength of this set. Rose's pacing is virtually faultless, he balances Barber's wonderfully lush orchestral textures with stylish ease, and manages to convey the drama of the music with superb detail. His cast are not as vocally secure as their rivals on disc, but all are committed and believable dramatically.

You wait for a bus and... After a 44 year hiatus, another recording of Vanessa arrived within a year of the previous one, here with Leonard Slatkin at the reins. This recording was made during live concert performances of the opera in London, and so is not technically a studio recording, but the sound is crystal clear and audience noise is completely eliminated. Christine Brewer's cavernous, slightly pinched soprano is a size or two larger than is usual for Vanessa, but she is always impressive and sings well. Susan Graham as Erika is lovely of tone and technically immaculate, but lacks vocal personality. William Burden is a thoroughly affecting Anatol, with a throb in the vibrato that is mostly very appealing. One wishes the cast had performed the role on stage before recording it, but this cast is fully up to the job. The BBC Symphony orchestra play with consummate polish but the real problem with this set is Slatkin - while he must be commended for his continued championing of lesser known repertoire, his conducting is often leaden and prosaic - he can't maintain a sense of flow in the lyricism, the dynamics are poorly gradated, his sense of phrasing and rhythm is heavy handed. The fine cast and sound, will satisfy some listeners, but this isn’t the last word on the opera.

Recordings of excerpted arias are rare enough to allow a complete overview. Vanessa's gothic tour de force aria "Do not utter a word" is especially popular with American star sopranos. Top of the pile must be Renée Fleming's reading: recorded in 1998 at the peak of her prime on a disc of American operatic rarities, the singing is almost miraculous in its liquid beauty and technical flawlessness, but better even than this is that hers is the most fully vocally realised conception of the character on record - every nuanced phrase is fully believable and the character becomes almost visible in sound. It is our loss that Fleming has said that she is not interested in essaying the full role. The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, lead by James Levine, give thrilling support. Leontyne Price, possessor of another voice of the most rounded beauty, is technically impressive but is unwilling to allow enough sense of vulnerability into her interpretation - the result is that her attempts at vocal characterisation can sound mannered and even cartoonish, especially at this stage in her career. Roberta Alexander's voice is rather soft grained and her fluttery vibrato is possibly apt for the role, but her performance on a disc of Barber works for soprano and orchestra is a little bland. The British soprano Kate Royal sings the aria with technical assurance but the words are oddly hammered, which distorts the line and interferes with the legato.

The beautiful "Must the winter come so soon?" is by far the opera's most famous number, and was interestingly only inserted at the last minute by Barber to give Erika a proper aria to sing. Surprisingly it has not been recorded all that often considering its ubiquity as an English language mezzo aria. Roberta Alexander recorded this aria on the same disc as "Do not utter a word" and despite being a soprano, she feels vocally much better placed to tackle this gentler, more questioning music. Denyce Graves' fruity mezzo is a little too rich and rounded for this rather chaste music, but is serviceable. The most beautiful stand alone recording of the aria, in this writer's opinion, is a live account from 1993 with Frederike Von Stade and Leonard Slatkin (not the same recording as above), recently reissued and available on Amazon for download. Stade is in very fine voice, with a wonderful legato, and uses a beautiful range of vocal colours, including sobbing chest notes, to evoke the mood and character of the piece.

Finally, an interesting curio can be found on youtube: surprisingly, Kiri Te Kanawa planned to retire from her operatic stage career with the role of Vanessa, singing it in three productions in the early 2000s. (In the event she subsequently sang a few final Rosenkavaliers). By this stage she was sadly no longer at her vocal best however, and the staging is rather slow. Note also that most of the end of Act I is missing. Find it here.

Copyright 2016 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your performance, please get in touch on the contact page.

Vanessa Programme Notes

(Programme notes written for a production of Vanessa, Brickhouse Theatre, 2016)

Vanessa

Samuel Barber's opera Vanessa has had a mixed life on the stage: it enjoyed a wild success at its prestigious premiere at the Metropolitan opera house in 1958, then was met with a more rocky reception the following summer at the Salzburg festival, and since then has had only the most ephemeral hold on the stages of the world's opera houses. This is a tuneful, opulently beautiful opera with a nuanced, well crafted libretto, so why has it not prospered? One reason is surely its year of composition - in 1957 the tonal, grand opera style was seen as hopelessly outdated outside of America, but on the other hand, for much of the conservative mainstream opera going crowd, its bittersweet lyricism still sounds too modern and dissonant. In more recent years, a number of productions have been mounted in America, as part of a broader trend which has seen the renaissance of Barber's music along with many other tonal 20th century composers neglected in the post war era.

The title role was composed with Maria Callas in mind, but when Barber played it through for her, the compositional idiom was too modern for her tastes, she wasn't comfortable singing in English, and she cannily noted that the mezzo role of Erika is perhaps the true protagonist of the opera, even if her music isn't as glamorous - hers is the bigger spiritual journey that we witness on stage, as Vanessa's drama is rooted in the events that precede the opera.

The character of Vanessa and the whole gothic situation of the opening has rightly been called camp by numerous commentators, starting with Susan Sontag in her brilliant and seminal essay "Notes on camp". The fading diva haunted by her past reminds us of Bette Davis' character Margo in All About Eve, or Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire (the latter of which Barber was offered as an opera project, but rejected on the grounds that it already contained too much music in the language). But the distance between every characters' words, intentions and actions, the exploration of identity and relations between the sexes, and the depth of unconscious that is present here, makes this a fascinating psychologically complex work, and rescues it from being a trashy verismic soap opera.

Anatol, the drama's romantic interest, is a fascinating creation. Much of what he says is antithetical to fairytale operatic romance, though is delivered in a style completely congruous with operatic convention; as such he is a charming and subtle deconstruction of the operatic tenor. Though he is the opera's principal source of confusion and disarray, "villain" would be far too strong an epithet for him. His credo could only be conceived of as villainous in the context of an opera, and specifically the expectations and stereotypes he inherits from being an operatic tenor. Upset arises because he can't take seriously the operatic demands of the women that surround him - he is at all times honest about his world view and needs, and though he is certainly interested in regaining his parents' lost fortune, he is open enough to intimate this in the very first scene. Just like the doctor, he wants to bring fun to these women's lives and let them see that life doesn't need to be taken as seriously as they take it. He is however fascinated by the opera's founding myth that has preoccupied Vanessa (and evidently his own father too) for 20 years - he very consciously shrouds himself in the mythic mantle of his father ("yes I believe I shall love you"), completing what his father couldn't do and therefore besting him. Not for nothing do the women read Oedipus in the first act.

Comic relief comes in the form of the Doctor, Vanessa's oldest friend. Like all the best clowns there is a tragic element in his life that is trying to be escaped from through humour. Vanessa's mother the Baroness has instated herself as the unimpeachable moral arbiter of the house, a role she plays with such commitment that it is to the detriment of her own life. Erika, Vanessa's orphaned niece and the Baroness' granddaughter, has grown up in this stifling atmosphere of isolation and closure; commitment to and rejection of this inheritance engender the growing pains of this passionate young woman.

In the score, the librettist, Gian Carlo Menotti, writes an intriguing if ambiguous preface: "This is the story of two women, Vanessa and Erika, caught in the central dilemma which faces every human being: whether to fight for one’s ideals to the point of shutting oneself off from reality, or compromise with what life has to offer, even lying to oneself for the mere sake of living. Like a sullen Greek chorus, a third woman (the old Grandmother) condemns by her very silence the refusal first of Vanessa, then of Erika, to accept the bitter truth that life offers no solution except its own inherent struggle. When Vanessa, in her final eagerness to embrace life, realizes this truth, it is perhaps too late."

Thematically then, the opera is linked with Strauss and Hofmannsthal's Ariadne auf Naxos, which, behind all the surface buffo/seria antics and dazzle, is subtly centred around an important existential question: how do we maintain our ideals in the face of life's flux, including our own mysterious, constant and ineluctable change? How much should we compromise with what life offers us, and how long should we stand firm and wait for our ideal to materialise?

Menotti's explanation of the opera also has an interesting bearing on the relationship between Barber and Menotti. The two men met aged 17 at the Curtis institute where they studied composition together under Rosario Scalero. They became the best of friends, then lovers, then partners, a relationship which lasted several decades. Soon after Barber's death in January 1981, Menotti said in an interview "there was this quest for an ideal love that never seems to have come into Sam's life. The kind of love he would like to have had - love forever, eternal love that never changes. So that's the theme of the opera, this eternal waiting." Vanessa marked the point where their relationship began to fray at the seams and the libretto, which Barber rightly considered the finest that Menotti ever wrote, is a sort of love letter to Sam and moving testament to their relationship. Across the five principal roles, the opera is drenched in analogues of their two personality types - southern versus northern, light versus serious, pragmatic versus idealistic, sentimental versus realist.

What then of the music of Vanessa? The first thing to note is that Barber uses Wagnerian leitmotifs, that is, certain characters and ideas are represented by musical motifs that can then be altered and recombined by the composer to suit the exigencies of the dramatic situation. It's often hard to register these things fully on a first listen, but Barber's themes are exceptionally well delineated and easy to recognise: the screaming high tension plunge that opens the piece represents the legacy of Vanessa's affair; a statically fluttering theme is heard every time the servants perform household chores, and so on. Where they become most telling in the opera is where a motif reappears in a dramatically changed form - the duet 'love has a bitter core' reappearing thundering in the bass when Vanessa confronts Anatol in Act III, or Erika's sighing "anxiety" theme reappearing in a much more philosophical iteration after the household leave for chapel. The other thing to mention is that the opera is rather traditional in its use of recitative, arioso, and "set piece" arias and ensembles, which links him firmly to the Italian tradition and takes him away from the Wagner/Strauss nexus. Some of his musical gestures, such as the melodramatic aforementioned "failed affair" motif, might just as well have been found in Tosca, and are shockingly crude in the context of the pellucid lyricism of the rest of his immaculately refined oeuvre. For this reason the opera stands apart from everything else he composed, and though the mantle of hot blooded late romantic grand opera composer is worn with superb style, one does feel sometimes the effort that it requires of the composer, whose natural mode is found in the flowing, intimate poetry of the song literature, and also in the effortlessly turned, vaulting architecture of his more abstract purely instrumental music.

The arias are without exception beautifully wrought lyric creations, different in feel from his songs, but imbued with the same sensitive feeling for text and all contain passages of breathtaking beauty. Occasionally though, in what was up to that time by far his largest orchestral canvas, we feel the structure creak a little in the joins; the whiff of routine creeps in in some of the recitative and especially the very short Act 3 duet between Anatol and Vanessa - his normally fresh well of harmony becomes a little stagnant, the passion feels by rote. But no matter, when there is so much that works so brilliantly. For me, the most haunting episodes are often found in the quieter moments - the glistening parlando passage that immediately follows the doctor's heartbreaking farewell aria is worthy of the highest praise, as are the searingly intimate scenes between Erika and her grandmother, the fevered, dreamlike moments for offstage chorus and orchestra, the luminous sonorities of the Act III intermezzo, among too many others to mention. The final quintet is often remarked upon as being a particularly touching and expertly crafted set piece; the arresting choric commentary that follows the formal quintet in which each character's future is predicted, is chilling and just as powerful.

Though Barber is often seen as an arch conservative, the influence of Stravinsky's neoclassicism, Schoenberg's and (especially) Berg's atonality and serialism, and even jazz, is obvious in his music if one ventures in his oeuvre outside the handful of popular favourites. These influences make their mark even in the ultra romantic Vanessa; we also get echoes of Janacek in the eerie post quintet chorus just mentioned, and Shostakovich's demented scherzos in the party music. Unlike most American composers of his era, his music is never academic, and his impish sense of humour in life and art often showed an understated subversiveness. For instance, this much hyped "American grand opera" starts in French, on a monotone, in a reading of a dinner menu of all things. It is set in a "Northern country" which is certainly somewhere in Europe, and there are quiet hints it might even be Russia - this during the Cold War and in the immediate wake of McCarthyism! This opera has been a rare joy to work on, and we sincerely hope that you will enjoy it as much as we have enjoyed putting this show together!

Copyright 2016 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your performance, please get in touch on the contact page.

Onegin and Tatiana Programme Notes

(Programme notes written for my production of Onegin and Tatiana, Grimeborn Festival, 2018.)

Onegin and Tatiana

In thinking about Pushkin and Tchaikovsky's characters in the context of creating this show, it occurred to me that using projectors could help represent the incredibly vividly portrayed theme of psychological projection in Tchaikovsky's opera and Pushkin's novel. Both Tatiana and Onegin have radical and instantaneous transformations of their inner worlds triggered by the simple event of meeting another person in a particular time and place. Psychological projection is the denial of certain impulses or traits in ourselves and ascribing these things exclusively to others. We are perhaps most familiar using the word "projection" in a negative sense, for instance to describe a jealous husband, who suspects his wife of infidelity because he can't accept his own desire for extramarital affairs. But Eugene Onegin deals throughout with positive projections, that is, seeing another person as a paragon of goodness, wholeness, or even as the only possible source of happiness and redemption, i.e. a saviour figure. This is the sort of projection which a lot of religious writing is engaged in, and in the course of the drama both Tatiana and Onegin reach for spiritual metaphors when talking of each other.

Having pared back Tchaikovsky's opera to its two central characters, I knew I had to flesh out the narrative with other material, and I wanted to explore the inner worlds of Onegin and Tatiana in a way that was more explicit than 19th century operatic convention allowed. As well as narration and spoken dialogue I decided to use song repertoire, and for this I reached for the generation of composers after Tchaikovsky - Mahler, Debussy, Strauss and Rachmaninov who were born into a world of burgeoning interest in the life of the mind. The novels of that era and poems they chose to set are often richly psychologically suggestive, full of allusions to the world of dreams and the psyche, and it's no accident that they were all direct contemporaries of Freud and Jung, the two geniuses who articulated these ideas most fully in the language of science.

As such, I set the production in the late 1870's (think Anna Karenina, Brothers Karamazov), which was also the time when Tchaikovsky adapted Pushkin’s verse novel into a libretto and then composed the music in a fury of white hot inspiration. This had come about because of an eerie coincidence of life and art. Tchaikovsky received a secret declaration of love in the form of a letter from his pupil Antonina Miliukova, just two weeks before a friend suggested Eugene Onegin as the subject for an opera. Not wanting to act like Onegin, Tchaikovsky agreed to marry his student just two months later, despite his homosexuality, and the marriage proved an instant and catastrophic failure. Tchaikovsky felt immense guilt towards Miliukova, but simultaneously could not bear to live with her. He poured out these feelings into his opera, as life imitated art. His extraordinary affinity for Tatiana as a character is a classic example of projection in itself and caused him to create one of the greatest operas ever composed - there is nothing else like it in the repertoire. 

I hope this show will be a good introduction to the piece for those who have never seen the full opera, and provide compelling new insights for people who know and love the piece. The drama of Onegin and Tatiana is tragedy domestic proportions. In it Tchaikovsky and Pushkin created one of the most moving portrayals of unrequited love we have.

Copyright 2018 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your performance, please get in touch on the contact page.

The Cunning Little Vixen Programme notes

Programme notes I wrote for my production of The Cunning Little Vixen, Grimeborn Festival, 2017.

On directing the drama

The Cunning Little Vixen is Janacek's most charming opera. I have loved it for many years, but in directing it - getting to know it from the "inside out" alongside this marvellous cast - my admiration for it has only grown.

The musical beauties of the score are obvious, and each person will have their list of favourite moments when hearing it for a first or fiftieth time. Dramatically though, the piece is very strangely constructed: central characters are introduced for the first time in the second and third acts, and individual scenes or episodes are often incredibly short, like comic book panels, or even film scenes, a genre which was still finding its feet as Janacek was writing his operas. The comic book comparison is of course apposite because Janacek got the idea for The Cunning Little Vixen from a popular Czech newspaper comic of the time by Rudolf Těsnohlídek, and based his libretto on it. Janacek also intersperses the opera with many dance sequences or 'pantomimes' as he refers to them, and I have worked hard with the choreographer to ensure that these feel like an organic part of the story telling, rather than diversions from the main thrust of the piece.

What we discovered in rehearsals was that it wasn't just the larger construction that was fast paced, but that also within scenes, Janacek's terseness is incredibly tough to live up to - the rate of new events, both musical and dramatic, is extraordinary, surely the fastest in all opera, and for the singing actor, the timing has to be immaculately controlled to make it convincing dramatically. This quick pace can also make the piece difficult to follow, so we have worked hard to tell the story of each scene as clearly as possible - I've lost count of the number of Vixens I have left not quite understanding why people were doing what they were doing. Though all the characters are drawn with exquisite sensitivity and humour, interestingly, it is the humans that are most elliptical, isolated and hard to understand, the dialogue halting between gawky jokes, ruminations that are hard to find a source for, oblique cultural references, and moments of shared meaning which we are given only the smallest amount of context for. It is the animal world that has the most emotional clarity, and clearest dramatic arcs. Janacek's stage directions, all too often ignored, often provide vital clues as to the meaning of a potentially ambiguous passage.

There are conventional elements of course, chiefly a central love duet of breathtaking beauty and sensitivity. But it's rare that operas show us not just the path of romantic love from infatuation (via frustration) to sexual consummation, but further on to love's fulfilment and final consummation in children and family. This after all is Nature's reason for the gift of love and sexuality - to ensure that we reproduce and repeat the cycle! That we get to see the Vixen's whole life from fox cub to parent is quite extraordinary then, and central to Janacek's intention for the piece. It is exactly this which sparks the Forester's redemptive final scene, the blazing chords of the ending a wordless paean to nature's wondrous beauty and endless renewal.

Another fascinating part of the puzzle is the up to the minute (for 1923) political references, mainly made by the animals, which come usually to great comic effect. The delicious image of a fox using the language of liberation and equality to incite a revolution amongst the hens against the patriarchal rooster, is so striking and prescient a critique of communist rhetoric that it's hard to imagine a more brilliantly simple one. But there's always a twist, a smiling irony that doesn't allow for picking sides. Not so stupid as they seem, the hens won't have any of the Vixen's talk, preferring to stay with the Rooster. But then it is his hubris, vanity and need to prove himself that leads to his demise. Later, in the love duet, female independence is extolled as the highest virtue, and then it is the Vixen that is the clear leader in the face of danger. Underlying all these contemporary references is a deeper source of parody and humour - that the political movements du jour should be trotted out by members of the timeless animal kingdom is absurd - under the surface we are aware that we are also a part of the animal kingdom. The idea that we might transcend or discredit the effectively infinite depth of 500 million years of vertebrate evolution with a mere intellectual idea, when our bodies, minds, senses, thoughts, relationships and social structures have been moulded, shaped, and forged by that very evolutionary process appears laughable in this context.

This sublime and bizarre opera then is entirely nonpareil, and its relative popularity might be a bit of a shock in the context of the operatic mainstream. The secret, I am sure, is the music, which grants Janacek's characters such humour, charm, dignity, and life. Real life.

On arranging the music

Janacek has enough currency that he is no longer a cause that needs champions (as he used to be) but his work is still relatively rarely staged and less well known in comparison to his direct contemporaries Puccini and Strauss. All three composers wrote their most famous operas in roughly the same years. In some ways his music couldn't be more different from these two masters, though the influence of both is unmistakable, always fully digested and integrated into his native idiom.

The Cunning Little Vixen contains music as rapturous and gloriously generous as anything in Puccini. The difference is that Janacek tends to grant these moments of soaring exaltation to the orchestra, while the vocal lines remain rooted in speech patterns, a technique gleaned from years of notating the precise rhythms and pitches of conversations from his private life or just as often, from those overheard from passers by. It is the musical interludes of Vixen that consistently show Janacek at his most lyrically inspired, in a work that contains almost no weak passages.

From Strauss he gets the astonishing quicksilver shifts of colour and mood, all gleaned from a tiny array of fundamental motives, though the effect is again very different from the model. Strauss presents us with an opulent tapestry, a cornucopia of onomatopoeic orchestral effects and sensuous delights that attempt to overwhelm the senses and thrill the ears and loins. In contrast, Janacek constructs a mosaic, tiny shards and fragments set side by side to incredibly potent psychological and emotional effect, so brilliantly differentiated in colour, mood, texture and register that one hardly realises how closely related the sections are. This simultaneously gives him his underlying unity, and also that ineffable sense as a listener of not being given enough time with the music to fully grasp it - he shows you a glimpse of some precious gem, and already has moved on to his next treasure. But the unity is there - Vixen is a piece I have listened to for many years now, but as I was arranging the orchestral score for piano quintet I was bowled over again and again by the evolutionary flow of his musical ideas, how each develops from the last and on into the next. Very often, two contrasting ideas, a first and second subject, are actually just different iterations of the same motif. How often is it that the very compositional technique is a reflection of the subject matter of an opera!

Janacek is very much his own composer though: he has a rhythmic vitality, a gutsy, earthy quality, a sense of humour, and a soul tearing sincerity that largely eludes his more famous contemporaries. His use of hammering repetitions and ostinatos keep his music taught, alert and sometimes brutally unprettified, and his profound mastery of harmony breathes radiant new life both into the decadently overripe tonal harmonic practises of his Teutonic contemporaries, and the increasingly cliched sentimentality of the Italian school.

It's music that can be hard to grasp initially, but is compelling enough on a first listen to beckon one to return. There is endless beauty and depth to be found in his operas, and I hope very much that this production and arrangement might open a new window to Janacek's unique sound world, whether you are a first timer or an old hand.

Copyright 2017 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your performance, please get in touch on the contact page.

Programme Notes No.2: Mozart's Clarinet Quintet

This programme note was written for the brilliant Lewes Chamber Music Festival.

Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet in A major is one of his very finest chamber works, and its composition in the summer of 1789 makes it the chamber music companion to his opera Cosi fan Tutte. Something happens to Mozart’s style around this time which points to the clarity, boldness and calm of the very final works which some have labelled ‘masonic’ – both Cosi and this clarinet quintet seem bathed in Mediterranean sunlight and possess a curious symmetry, poise and transparency that feel like a paring down after the boundless energy, white hot intensity, and lush extravagance of the immediately preceding Symphonies No. 39, 40 and 41, and the operas Figaro and Don Giovanni. The level of musical complexity remains unaltered however, it’s just that it’s subsumed beneath the honeyed surface – harmonically the palette is wider than ever, and the compositional range as great as it ever was. Although written for the basset horn of the virtuoso Anton Stadler, this isn’t merely a clarinet concerto in microcosm – the clarinet blends, converses, leads and accompanies as a true chamber partner. Only in the endlessly rapt slow movement does it take on the clear role of a soloist in a pliant, drifting cantabile line of beatific serenity. The charming minuet is accompanied by two trios: the first, for strings alone, much more delicate and mysterious than the minuet would suggest; the second, insouciant, cheeky, and not without its own strangeness. The Finale is an easy going set of variations – a more lovely last movement to this most lovely of chamber works would be hard to imagine.

Copyright 2015 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your concert, please get in touch on the contact page.

Programme Notes No.1: Catoire's Magical String Quintet

This programme note was written for the brilliant Lewes Chamber Music Festival.

Every festival worth its salt requires the inclusion of a forgotten masterpiece and they don’t come more forgotten (or strangely masterful) than Catoire’s String Quintet op.16 (1901). Born in Moscow in 1861, Georgy Catoire studied mathematics and after graduating with top honours from Moscow University as per his family’s wishes, he decided to devote himself to music, this time rather against his family’s wishes. Tchaikovsky was impressed with his talent and encouraged him to persevere and improve his compositional technique. He went on to study in Berlin, which perhaps explains certain “un-Russian” aspects of his style, but German music is only one ingredient of a rich brew. The influence of French music is keenly felt – the opacity and lushness of Franck, and maybe more importantly, the suppleness, fluidity and grace of Fauré too – an attraction with its roots in Catoire’s Gallic heritage perhaps. The peculiar sense of Russian melancholy, and certain textural fingerprints, link him clearly to his teachers Tanayev (to whom the piece is dedicated) and Arensky, as well as the more restrained aspects of Rachmaninov. But enough of the comparison game. His neglect has been explained as a result of his commitment to Wagner at a time in Russia when Teutonism was not at all in line with the prevailing desire to forge a national identity for Russian music. But surely also the idiom is a problem – familiar in sound, but utterly strange in expression, seductive yet austere, complex, restless, veiled. The extraordinary contrapuntal density of the music is what gives it its unique aura – five separate string voices intertwining in a sinuous, undisentanglable nexus of melody, in which a single tune on one instrument is impossible to discern for more than a few moments before another will surge over it, through it, alongside it. The effect is unique in music, a minor innovation maximally capitalised on by the composer in this quintet. The third movement is the most unusual and so perhaps bears special mention. In its pellucid, diaphanous radiance this music represents an exquisite refinement of the knotty beauty of the other movements, each voice floating in its own space, velocity and time zone, though eventually focusing and coalescing to reach a climax of Janáčekian ecstasy. How lucky we are to hear the work of this minor master alongside the canonical works of the established greats, and how much richer we are for knowing both!

Copyright 2015 Guido Martin-Brandis. To ask for permission to use this or other notes for your concert, please get in touch on the contact page.