Classical music

There’s a photo of Paul Hindemith with the pianist Artur Schnabel on hands and knees, surrounded by model railway track. Huge railway enthusiast, Hindemith, you see: he laid sprawling networks through the rooms of his Berlin apartment (before the Nazis drove him out), and organised marathon operating sessions with friends. Anyway, for various reasons, this knowledge makes me warm to him in a way that his music only erratically manages. It’s not that it’s impossible to like (although this is a man whose idea of a crowd-pleaser is called Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber). But there can be few composers whose effect is so hard to anticipate.

Anyone for a spot of acoustic science? Apparently the distinctive colour of a musical note is concentrated almost wholly in the attack: the first split-second; the beginning of the sound wave. Obscure or somehow cut off, that first bite of a note or chord and what’s left sounds – well, not the same as everything else, exactly, but a great deal more samey. It’s like wine-tasting while holding your nose. Everything becomes neutral, and suddenly it’s remarkably easy to fool the senses. The Italian composer Salvatore Sciarrino seems to enjoy playing these games. In Le voci sottevetro (1999) – four arrangements of works by the homicidal madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo – a quick splash of tuned percussion does the job of hiding the start of a line.

Grade: A– For some record collectors, the fun lies in comparing recordings of standard repertoire. For others, it’s more about exploring – discovering works that are extinct in the concert hall, but which the inscrutable economics of recording make viable. If you’ve a habit of forming modest crushes on wallflowers and unfashionable composers, the news that Chandos is recording the orchestral music of Edward MacDowell (1860-1908) will bring a pleasant flush of blood to the cheeks. MacDowell, in short, is what American classical music sounded like before there was such a thing as American classical music – before Copland, Gershwin and all that jazz. Romantic, in other words; very, very Romantic.

Is Sir Andras Schiff becoming the Ken Dodd of the piano? In his later years, you’ll recall, the Yorick of Knotty Ash took to delivering marathon one-man routines that finished long after midnight. A couple of years back, Schiff expressed a similar wish: why should he have to tell us in advance what he was going to perform? And fair enough, because even with no advertised programme, the Wigmore Hall was sold out. Clearly, a lot of people will gladly pay to hear Schiff play anything at all, and part of me hoped he’d launch into Chopsticks or Richard Clayderman’s Ballade pour Adeline. But no, Schiff had a far crueller joke up his sleeve. He walked out without a word and began the ‘Aria’ from Bach’s Goldberg Variations. A purr of happy recognition ran through the room.

Bring me my bow of burning gold; or failing that, the opening notes of Elgar’s Second Symphony. That’s how I’ve always imagined them anyway, those three swelling B flats –  a mighty drawing back of the bow before Elgar propels his arrows of desire into the restless heart of this greatest of British symphonies. Thinking back, though, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt quite that tension in a live performance – not from Pesek in Liverpool or Barenboim at the Proms, and not from this most recent encounter, with Mark Wigglesworth and the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in Bristol. So where am I getting it from? Recordings, presumably, and the long-embedded imprint of two boyhood idols, John Barbirolli and Vernon ‘Tod’ Handley.

Some people like art to have a message. So here’s one, delivered by Katsushika Hokusai near the end of Dai Fujikura and Harry Ross’s new opera The Great Wave. ‘Remember art won’t change the world,’ sings the great painter (as incarnated by the baritone Daisuke Ohyama), and for that line alone I’d gladly have given the show five stars, if the Spectator did anything as barbaric as award stars. Words to live by, at least if you’re an artist; and the very private bliss of a life devoted to creativity is the heart, mind and dramatic engine of The Great Wave. Is that enough to sustain a full-length opera?

Gianandrea Noseda conducted the London Symphony Orchestra last week in a programme of Stravinsky, Chopin and Borodin. The Stravinsky was a relative rarity – the divertimento from The Fairy’s Kiss – and Chopin’s F minor concerto was played by Seong-Jin Cho, a pianist with a large following and a soaring reputation. Full disclosure: I was there for the Borodin, his Second Symphony of 1877. What a masterpiece, and what a man! Alexander Borodin was a scientist of international standing and a campaigner for women’s rights. Deeply in love with his wife, and an inveterate rescuer of stray cats, he was, he confessed to Liszt, ‘only a Sunday composer’. ‘But after all,’ replied the wizard of Weimar, ‘Sunday is a special day.

‘You play Bach your way, and I’ll play it his way.’ That remark by the Polish harpsichordist Wanda Landowska is often described as an ‘infamous put-down’, but it was really just a playful quip directed at Pablo Casals after they disagreed about trills. Anyway, the line has been running through my head all week because I’ve been listening to a recording of the Goldberg Variations – Wandowska’s signature piece – by a pianist who was quite determined to play them her way, not Bach’s. Maria Tipo was born in 1931 and died last year – the same dates as Alfred Brendel, though it’s hard to think of two pianists with less in common. In her heyday she was promoted as ‘the Neapolitan Horowitz’.

The Czech author Karel Capek is probably best known for his plays: high-concept speculative dramas such as R.U.R. and The Insect Play, bristling with wit and ideas. But he paid his bills as a newspaper columnist, and he seems to have been pleasantly surprised when Janacek approached him about turning his ‘conversational, fairly unpoetical and over-garrulous play’ (Capek’s words) The Makropulos Affair into an opera. Capek licensed Janacek to adapt it as the composer saw fit, in words that have the authentic ring of the working journalist – ‘because I simply wouldn’t get round to revising it myself’. No fear on that count. The Makropulos Affair is a brisk, nervy play but Janacek, at 69 (there’s hope for us all), was an old theatrical hand.

First opera of the year, first night back in London, and the jolly old metrop was already springing surprises. A hulking pink Rolls-Royce was parked on Bow Street – a real oaf of a car, the lumpish nepo-baby of a Humvee and Lady Penelope’s Fab 1. And as we stood outside the Royal Opera House, cooling off from Act Two of La traviata, a large fox came jogging out of Broad Court and urinated against the front tyre before sauntering off in the direction of Aldwych. Pure magic. You should never take the capital for granted, just as you should never assume that a mid-season revival of a standard repertoire opera in a 32-year old staging will ever – necessarily – be routine.

The quartet is the basic unit of string chamber music. Two violins, a viola and a cello: subtract any one of those, and you’re walking a tightrope. Add further players and the issue is redundancy: you’d better know precisely what you want to do with those additional voices, because otherwise they’ll congeal like cold gravy. When it comes to the string octet – two string quartets fused together – only the 16-year-old Mendelssohn really cracked it, going all out for transparency, daring and youthful verve. The Romanian George Enescu took the opposite approach. His Octet of 1900 is chamber music as epic construction project, wrought from steel, not spindrift.

I called on Hugo Wolf the other week, and he didn’t look too great. He wouldn’t, of course; he died in a mental asylum in 1903 after suicide attempts, professional disappointment and the slow poison of tertiary syphilis. His face gazes glumly out from his monument in Vienna: above him, a single laurel branch, beneath him an eternal flame. But at least he’s not alone. A muscular youth, semi-ripped, looks away at one side. And on the other, a naked couple clinch in a passionate embrace. Talk about rubbing it in. It’s not that I make a habit of hanging around composers’ graves, you understand. But somewhere along the way I seem to have notched up an awful lot of these posthumous courtesy calls. With the big beasts – Beethoven, Mahler and co.

Bruckner at the Wigmore Hall. Yes, you heard right: a Bruckner symphony – his second: usually performed by 80-odd musicians – on a stage scarcely larger than my bedroom. How? Welcome to Anthony Payne’s very smart 2013 chamber arrangement. Bruckner on Ozempic. Composition is an Alice in Wonderland activity. A key duty is mastering how to make things bigger and smaller, how to stretch and compress and bend – time and space and sound. Bruckner understood this well. If you know anything about his symphonies, it’s that they’re vast – and that critics are mandated to compare them to cathedrals or mountain ranges. What survives after such an extreme trim? More than you expect. The long sightlines remain; paradoxically, the reduced forces sharpen the sense of depth.

Stravinsky’s The Firebird begins in darkness, and it might be the softest, deepest darkness in all music. Basses and cellos rock slowly, pianissimo, in their lowest register; using mutes to give the sound that added touch of velvet. Far beneath them rumbles the bass drum: a halo of blackness, perceptible only at the very edge of the senses. In Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, with Sir Simon Rattle conducting the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, you felt your hairs tingle before you discerned a note. Seconds later, the very air within the hall seemed to be quivering with sensuous, engulfing bass warmth. You can be sure that Rattle anticipated that sensation; planned for it, in fact, from the moment that he confirmed this short British tour with his new orchestra.