Fidelio in Brighton

Please use your liberty to help us win ours.

 Aung San Suu Kyi

Hope whispers softly to me:  we shall be free, we shall find peace.

Line from the opera Fidelio

After the Study Day at Glyndebourne, I hopped on the train to Brighton to see Beethoven’s only opera Fidelio.  The semi-staged performance was dedicated to Burmese peace activist Aung San Suu Kyi.  What’s the connection between this opera and the Nobel Peace Prize laureate? Fidelio is about unjust imprisonment and the abuse of power.  (Aung San Suu Kyi has endured years of house arrest.) The Brighton Festival hopes its efforts will raise public awareness about the plight of the Burmese. 

To this end, it commissioned a new performing edition in Aung San Suu Kyi’s honor.   Fidelio, like many German operas of the time, incorporates spoken dialogue.  The music was sung in the original German, but rather than use the dialogue, a narrator filled the audience in on the plot.  It was quite effective.

Conductor Adam Fischer, and consequently the Orchestra of the Enlightenment, brought out Beethoven’s boisterous, raucous side –- except for the prisoners’ chorus.  That was sung with great delicacy.  Fischer is quite a showman.  He conducted the entire work without a score, sometimes using a baton, sometimes not. 

The evening included one of my favorite British traditions –- ice cream at intermission.  It did seem ironic to be hearing this work about freedom from oppression in a hall clearly designed to celebrate British imperialism.  The exterior resembles the Taj Mahal.  The bar’s décor mimics Singapore or Hong Kong, the lobby India and the Middle East.

Surreptitious photo of side lobby

But in the midst of this hang posters with Aung San Suu Kyi’s request:  Please use your liberty to help us win ours.  The evening does call me to use the freedoms that I have in service of others.  And it casts new light on one of the opera’s closing lines: “I let love lead me,” quietly sings the character Leonore when her efforts finally result in justice. 

Even though I should go straight to the train station, I can’t resist going down to catch just a glimpse of the sea. 

Some of my favorite quotes from the study day

For my musician readers, some of my favorite quotes from the study day:

All singers have got to breathe, but it’s lovely when they don’t.

Think of the ornaments like earrings or a bracelet – ‘Oh, I think I’ll put that one on today.’

Handel the great recycler

Armida – a Saracen Stealth Bomber

All the voices are very high – it’s worse than Peking Opera!

The da capo aria is a blank page, you can write on it with every bar.

The da capo is a huge gift to the singer and the director, very liberating.  Tosca’s the problem!

Handel gives sort of the Hollywood version of these sophisticated, dense literary texts. 

The continuo is like a mysterious sandwich.  You have the top line and the bass line, but you don’t know exactly what is in between  . . . you can fill it with what you like. 

[I’m definitely using some of these in my teaching!]

First Visit to Glyndebourne

I visited Glyndebourne for the first time on Sunday  -- a very exciting event for me!

The festival’s education director kindly invited me to participate in one of their study days.   The topic was the opera Rinaldo by Handel (of Messiah fame).  I got to hear presentations by one of the world’s leading Handel scholars, a literary expert, one of the director-designers of the new production, and the repetiteur (a pianist-vocal coach who helps singers with expression and interpretation).   Very informative and fun to hear about the work from so many different perspectives.   Plus, we got to observe the repetiteur work with two of the apprentice singers. 

 

While we were in the education hall learning about Handel, the Sitzprobe (the first rehearsal that combines the singers and the orchestra) for Wagner’s Die Meistersinger was going on in the auditorium.  We could hear it during lunch and the tea breaks.  We could even hear it in the loo! (Translation: what polite Americans call the restroom). The strange juxtaposition brought home how much musical language changed between 1711 and 1868.

The setting of the opera house is as idyllic as it looks on their videos.  (I'll try to get better photos next time -- guess I was too excited.)

And yes, there really are sheep wandering at the edge of the picnic grounds! A moat prevents them from disturbing people’s picnics.

And in case you’re curious, I did not hike there but took a taxi.  (I still hope to walk to Glynde sometime though, and visit the pub.)

If you're not from here it's a little confusing

FYI:  The town of Lewes is near a number of smaller villages, including Glyndebourne, the home of the one the world’s most prestigious opera festivals.  Audience members are expected to wear evening dress (tuxedos for men, gowns and heels for women).

There is Glynde.

There is Glynde Place.

And there is Glyndebourne.

You can take the train to Glynde but not Glynde Place.

You can take the bus to Glynde Place, but not to Glynde.

You can’t take either to Glyndebourne. 

You can walk to Glynde. (“Quite a pleasant path – there’s a pub there.”)

You can also walk to Glynde Place (There’s no pub though.)

You can even walk to Glyndebourne – but 

you probably wouldn’t want to wearing evening dress.

May Day Celebrations in Lewes

May Day Celebrations in Lewes  (May 2, 2011)

I almost didn’t go, but I thought, “When else will I get to see how they celebrate May Day in a small English town?”  So I walked up to the May celebrations at the castle in Lewes.  I’m glad I did.

 It’s traditional here for young girls to make wreathes and garlands from flowers in their gardens and converge on the castle grounds.  I joined a large crowd of parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, neighbors, and friends. 

The festivities started with performances by several Morris Dance groups.  Morris Dancing is a type of folk dancing that includes figures and patterns.  Several of the troupes used garlands, sticks, and handkerchiefs as part of the choreography.  Some wore bells.

A dragon came around and wanted to be fed coins.  He was benign, but some of the children thought he was pretty scary! 

Then the dancers, their musicians, the garland bedecked girls, and whoever else wanted to marched down to the market square.

More dancing ensued.

Those are wooden shoes

One of the bands -- look closely at the guy on the far right

For you musicologist-types -- yes, that is a serpent!

This man was the “fool” for one Morris troupe.  One of his jobs was to bop and “bang” people in the crowd with a dried pig’s bladder that had been blown up like a balloon.  He told me he had never “banged” a woman from Texas before.  (He gave me some flowers after he did.)

More Street Performers

They dance!

                    And play string instruments!

At the same time!!!

(Playing the cello while doing the can-can is no small feat if you ask me!)

I again had fun watching street performers on my way to the Royal Opera House in central London.  I particularly enjoyed this dancing string quintet.  Within a few phrases, they had the crowd -- a mix of nationalities, ages, and ethnicities -- all laughing and clapping. 

Well, almost all.  At one point, they did something all musicians (and teachers) I suspect have wanted to do.  They converged on a woman who wasn’t paying attention.  What was she doing?  

    Talking on her cell phone, of course.  

Going to the Opera: The Tsar’s Bride by Rimsky-Korsakov at the Royal Opera in London

It was as splendid as the box office worker promised!  I did thoroughly enjoy seeing The Tsar’s Bride at the Royal Opera House.  The production was stylish – lots of arresting stage pictures and subtle, effective details.  Director Paul Curran transported the story from the 1500s to Putin’s Russia, so the Tsar’s henchmen were portrayed as mafiosi.  For me, the modern-day setting certainly clarified the issues of fear and power so central to this plot. Most of the singers were from the former eastern Bloc and had those distinctive Slavic cheekbones.  They and the sets gave the performance a Russian flavor.  You believed you were in modern day Moscow.

Until the last act, that is, which takes place immediately after the wedding.  Then the production suddenly looked (but did not sound) very British.  All the female wedding guests were wearing extravagant hats – à la the recent Royal Wedding – and the lighting and costume made the heroine Marfa resemble a pre-Raphaelite painting.

The character Lyubasha’s melancholy song in Act 1 was one of the opera’s most stunning moments.  The aria is practically unaccompanied; no orchestral accompaniment at all during the verses, and only a few chords sound between them.  Mezzo Ekaterina Gubanova sang it so expressively, that it was one of those wonderful occasions in the theatre when hundreds and hundreds of people were captivated and absolutely still. 

 ------------------------------

At intermission, the young man next to me asked, “Do you like it?”

“Oh yes, very much.  Do you?”

“Yes, but I am Russian.”

At the end of the performance he commented, “It’s a tragedy.”

“Russians seem to like tragedy,” I remarked.

“Yes, it’s our national behavior.”