Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla : Peer Gynt and other choral stars

Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt a choral blockbuster ?  Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla conducted Grieg's full incidental music to Ibsen's play with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, showing how the choral sections make a difference to the way the drama is received.  Peer Gynt is so well-known through extracts that the original context is lost.  Not a fjord in sight, except in a metaphorical sense. Peer Gynt isn't a hero. Ibsen's original as a Leseopera, an opera to be read and meditated upon, not "just" entertainment. He satirized aspects of Norwegian mentality in the period when the country was a colony of Denmark.  Peer's adventures are fraught with danger, supernatural as well as physical, The innate tension between moments of beauty and wildness creates a dynamic which is fundamental to interpretation.

Gražinytė-Tyla's approach brought out the power that lies beneath the surface : a vivid reading, bristling with energy.  Not for nothing does Grieg's wedding procession end with ferocious chords. Peer disrupts proceedings and gets kicked out for fighting.  Thus the first chorus with its almost primitive savagery : the subconscious being released.  Congratulations to the CBSO chorus (chorus master Julian Wilkins) showing their metttle. Indeed, this whole programme focusssed on choral music though no doubt the media will think in more simplistic nationalist terms. Thius does matter, since Gražinytė-Tyla has a choral background and is in an ideal position to build on CBSO's reputation for choral music of all kinds.

Having established the drama, Gražinytė-Tyla could focus on the interplay between expansive lyricism and more unusual forms, from the "barbarism" of the Hall of the Troll King to the exoticism of the Arabian dances.  In the Abduction of the Bride, the chorus led into Ingrid's Lament with soloist Klara Ek, and the Death of Åse prepared the way for Solveig's Song : both expressions of love and loss.  In Peer's Homecoming, the CBSO played with strong definition so the obvious imagery (a ship on the sea) seemed enhanced by forces beyond Nature. The Whitsun hymn, sung right afterwards, indicates that this conflation of inner and outer worlds is no accident, but central to meaning. Peer lives in the world of the imagination, feckless until he comes to appreciate true values.  Thus the finale, when Klara Ek, the soloist, the chorus and orchestra come together in glorious balance.

The programme began with neither conductor nor orchestra but with the City of Birmingham Youth Chorus in Esa-Pekka Salonen's Dona Nobis Pacem (2010) a five minute a capella miniature. Salonen plays with chords and textures, the three words of the text repeated in undulating cadence, the last notes held until they dissolve in silence.  Because it's so minimal, careful modulation like this is of the essence.  The freshness of these young voices connected well to Einojuhani Rautavaara's Cantus Arcticus: Concerto for Birds and Orchestra, where recorded bird song replaces chorus.  The orchestra reacts and responds, gradually coming into its own : long, searching lines, suggesting distance, flutes singing together as if they were birds.  A cello sings, its melody enhanced by the cries of birds.  For a moment, the orchestra falls silent, "listening" to birdsong before embarking on long, surging lines that expand, flutes in full flight, low voiced winds adding depth, until the music disappears beyond audibility.  These two pieces combine extremely well.  In both cases the performers must be listeners, sensitive to the subtlest nuance.

Back to more conventionally choral chorus with Jean Sibelius's Rakastava (The Lover), op 14 (1912).  More thoughtful programming from Gražinytė-Tyla, the minimal accompaniment reflecting the delicacy in Salonen and Rautavaara. The men's voices dominate at first - the cycle was originally scored for unaccompanied male voice -  but the women's voices enter with brighter, brisker figures until both reach parity.  Yet again the value of sensitive singing, hushed but precise.  Sibelius En Saga op 9  (1892) was also played well, (great solo moments !), Gražinytė-Tyla conducting with the clarity that brings out structure and detail. 

Peer Gynt - naked Charlton Heston, aged 17

Long before Ben Hur, Charlton Heston as Peer Gynt ! Charlton Heston, aged 17, in the surprisingly sensitive film based on Ibsen and Grieg's Peer Gynt.  The film was made in the summer of 1941 as a school project  at New Trier High School in Willamette, where Heston was a student.  It was filmed in the woods in Illinois and Wisconsin, where thousands of Norwegian immigrated during bthe 19th and 20th century.  At one time, there were more Norwegian newspapers in that part of America than there were in Norway.  So the film doesn't need much in the way of sets, using the landscape as it was.  Real mountains, valleys and forests and rivers that can pass for fjords.

The actors were students, most of whom can't act, but look healthy and enthusiastic.  Kids then didn't do dope, TV or computers.  Their faces are so fresh, they don't look like they've ever worn makeup. Although the film is clumsily made, that very naivety suits the story much better than something more sophisticated.

It's also good that the film was shot without spoken dialogue.  The actors' mouths move, without sound, like in a silent movie. Even this is a plus, because it adds to the sense that the story exists in a strange, eternal world  outside time and place, where trolls live, and from which Peer can escape predicaments as if by magic.  The sound track, a recording of Grieg, was added after filming.  The recording quality is horrible, but I quite like the clumsiness because it fits the gaucheness of the film and the primeval nature of the story.  I have watched with the sound off, while playing a CD, but that doesn't work.

Enjoy the village wedding, and the march of the trolls, with their crude costumes and lumpy dancing.  The Bøygen though, was made for the movies. A disembodied head appears ,wobbling in front of dark curtains. He speaks - with an American accent !  Heston is, unquestionably, the star. After all, Peer Gynt lives only for himself ! The camera lingers lovingly on his face and body. He's often seen with his chest oiled up, his features lit so he resembles a  Greek God.  He's so beautiful that you can see why Peer is so much in love with himself. (Heston has a slight , ironic smile, he knows it's only a movie).  The crew were amateurs, too, though the director, who also wielded a camera, David Bradley went on to a proper career in Hollywood.  He was also one the cameramen : maybe we can tell, since some angles and frames are very inventive, while others are shot without much imagination.

Nice dressing up games in the Desert scenes, shot on a beach, the women in bikinis, the "Arabs" playing home made instruments.  No sound, of course, leave that to Grieg.  When sound does again intrude, it happens when Peer grows old and hears Solveig's Song (badly sung, in English).  Please also see my other pieces on Grieg and on Peer Gynt . HERE is a link to my description of the two main recordings of the incidental music with added text. Ole-Kristian Ruud and Guillaume Tournaire. Time for a new one, I hope.

Lise Davidsen Luonnotar steals whole Prom ! Storgårds BBCPO

At the BBC Proms, Lise Davidsen stole the show with a spectacular Sibelius Luonnotar. op 17 (1913). Luonnotar is a life force exploding with such intensity that its spirit seemed to spring from the depths of Sibelius's soul, materializing in his score.  At the time it was written, Sibelius was at a crossroads. With his Fourth Symphony he was reaching towards new horizons but hadn’t quite come to terms with their implications. He was approaching uncharted waters and the prospect was daunting. As before, he turned to the ur-source of Finnish mythology for inspiration.
Luonnotar was written for, and premiered by the great Finnish soprano Aino Ackté.  Elisabeth Schwarzkopf was another early champion. When she sang it in Helsinki in 1955, she was moved to say that it was the "best thing she had ever done in her life". There is a clip of this performance but sound quality is poor. Schwarzkopf had guts: until then, most sopranos steered clear of this piece unless they were Finnish (a beautiful language, but tricky to sing) and weren't bothered about the strikingly modern savagery in the part.

Lise Davidsen's Luonnotar was mightily impressive.  Her voice is magnificent, floating the strange modulations in the line with well-judged poise, projecting the keening forward lines so they seek out the furthest corners of space.   Voice as tsunami ! Her Luonnotar is very, very strong, for Luonnotar is the mother of creation itself, forged from struggle.  Davidsen is only 30, so she still has a way to go, but she could well be one of the really great voices of our time, a worthy successor to Söderström, Isokoski and Mattila.  Recently she astonished audiences at Glyndebourne with her Ariadne : definitely a singer to watch.

Luonnotar is the Spirit of Nature, Mother of the Seas, who existed before creation, floating alone in the universe before the worlds were made "in a solitude of ether". Descending to earth she swam in its primordial ocean for 700 years. Then a storm blows up and in torment, she calls to the god Ukko for help. Out of the Void, a duck flies,looking for a place to nest. Luonnotar takes pity and raises her knee above the waters so the duck can nest and lay her eggs. But when the eggs hatch they emit great heat and Luonnotar flinches. The eggs are flown upwards and shatter, but the fragments become the skies, the yolk sunlight, the egg white the moon, the mottled bits the stars. This was the creation myth of the Karelians who represented the ancient soul of the Finnish cultural identity
 
.The orchestra may play modern instruments and the soprano may wear an evening gown, but ideally they should convey the power of ancient, shamanistic incantation, as if by recreating by sound they are performing a ritual to release some kind of creative force. The Kalevala was sung in a unique metre, which shaped the runes and gave them character, so even if the words shifted from singer to singer, the impact would be similar. Sibelius does not replicate the metre though his phrases follow a peculiar, rhythmic phrasing that reflects runic chant. Instead we have Sibelius’s unique pulse. In my jogging days, I’d run listening to Night Ride and Sunrise, finding the swift, "driving" passages uncommonly close to heart and breathing rhythms. It felt very organic, as if the music sprang from deep within the body. This pulse underpins Luonnotar too, giving it a dynamism that propels it along. They contrast with the big swirling crescendos, walls of sonority, sometimes with glorious harp passages that evoke the swirling oceans.

The last passages in the piece are brooding, strangely shaped phrases which again seem to reflect runic chanting, as if the magical incantation is building up to fulfilment. And indeed, when the creation of the stars is revealed, the orchestra explodes in a burst of ecstasy. The singer recounts the wonder, with joy and amazement: "Tähiksi taivaale, ne tähiksi taivaale". ("They became the stars in the heavens!"). I can just imagine a singer's eyes shining with excitement at this point - and with relief, too, that she’s survived! As Erik Tawaststjerna said, "the soprano line is built on the contrast between …the epic and narrative and the atmospheric and magical".

In his minimalist text, Sibelius doesn’t tell us that  in the Kalevala, Luonnotar goes on to carve out the oceans, bays and inlets and create the earth as we know it, or tell us that she became pregnant by the storm and gave birth later to the first man. But understanding this piece helps to understand Sibelius’s work and personality. Like the goddess, he was struggling with creative challenges and beset by self-doubt and worry. Perhaps through exploring the ancient symbolism of the Kalevala, he was able in some way to work out some ideas: in Luonnotar, I can hear echoes of the great blocks of sound and movement in the equally concise and to the point Seventh Symphony. The year after Luonnotar, Sibelius was to explore ocean imagery again in The Oceanides, whose Finnish title is Aallottaret, or "Spirit of the Waves", just as Luonnotar was the Spirit of Nature, tossed by waves. The Oceanides, written for a lucrative commission from the United States, is a more popular work, and beautiful, but doesn’t have quite the unconventional intensity and uniqueness of Luonnotar. One of the things that fascinates me about Sibelius is the way he envisions remarkable new territory, yet pulls back as if overwhelmed by the force of what lies ahead.

Prior to that stunning Luonnotar, John Storgårds conducted the BBC Philharmonic Orchestara in  the suite from Edvard Grieg's Peer Gynt (of which I've written HERE) and HERE where Davidsen sang Solveig's Song.  Under Storgårds, the BBCPO sounds thrillingly alive. In Robert Schumann's Cello Concerto in A minor op 129, their support for soloist Alban Gerhardt was superb, almost palpable, as if in symbiosis.  To conclude, Paul Hindemith Symphony "Mathis der Maler".  A garagantuan programme, pretty hard to pull off by any standards. I could write volumes but I'm all wrung out.     

The "full" Edvard Grieg Peer Gynt

From the 1876 premiere of Grieg's Peer Gynt

 Edvard Grieg's birthday, a good excuse to listen again to Peer Gynt op 23 in the edition by Finn Benestad from 1988, which keeps the order of the composer's score from the premiere performance in 1876, omitting the cuts made in later performances, but including Grieg's fuller orchestration from the 1886 performances in Copenhagen.   The original play by Henrik Ibsen was a Lesedrama, a play meant to be read, as opposed to being watched on stage.  The full text apparently takes five hours to act out, plus another hour or so of music - quite tiring, I presume. But in book form, you can savour the ideas without pressure, reading back and forth. Peer Gynt is an allegory that doesn't exist in real time.  Ibsen was satirizing aspects of Norwegian mentality in the period when the country was a colony of Denmark. Life was hard : the peasants so poor that many did live, like Peer, in rags, scrambling to survive by using their wits. 

Peer uses his imagination to get ahead, but he's also a rascal who scams other people, especially women, and gets scammed himself, also by women.  Peer goes to North Africa, but at heart he's the same local yokel who hangs out with trolls, whose take on reality is defiantly perverse  Whatever the Bøygen is, he doesn't overcome it so much as scam his way past. In the end, he's back where he came from.  Solveig doesn't have much sense either. She still loves the scoundrel.  Not all so different from the Troll King who feasts on cow turds and ox piss, whether bitter or sweet "as long as they're our cow turds and ox piss".  Grieg's music is so wonderful that you can blissfully enjoy fantasies of fjords, mountains and goblins, but knowing the context is even more rewarding.

I first heard the "full" edition with dialogue in 2001 when Manfred Honeck conducted it with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, with Bo Skovhus, who stole the show, even from a star like Barbara Bonney.  In 2011, Marc Minkowski conducted the BBC SO at the Barbican Hall with Miah Persson,  Johannes Weisser and Anita Hallenberg.

There are numerous recordings of Grieg's Peer Gynt suites but extended versions  with text are few.   In 2005, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra under  Ole-Kristian Ruud recorded the incidental  music with  dialogue in Norwegian. The following year, Guillaume Tournaire conducted the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande  in the world premiere of the Perroux edition, with texts in English translation.  Hearing the music in context is important, but once you've got the picture, so to speak, it's better to hear the words in Norwegian, since the language fits the music so well. 

The Orchestre de la Suisse Romande have much more stylish polish but the Bergeners are nicely down to earth. The Bergen singers and choir are clearly native speakers, which gives their singing natural verve. On the other hand,  the "Swiss" orchestra used a professional Hardanger player, using a traditional fiddle, as opposed to a violin. This electrifies the performance, giving it a wildness and crazy freedom conventional orchestras can't quite manage.   It shouldn't be too difficult for Bergen to one day record the piece again with an authentic Hardanger fiddle.  They're sounding particularly good these days with Edward Gardner, so maybe they should revisit the full Peer Gynt.
 
Please see my other posts on Grieg, Norway, Norwegian film and Ibsen by following the labels below. 

Troll-Elgen : Landscape and culture

Slow moving but strangely compelling, Troll-Elgen, a Norwegian stumfilm (silent) from1927, directed by Walter Fyrst (1901-1993). It's fascinating because it describes a world poised between the past and the modern, magic and reality. Think of Edvard Grieg's song cycle Haugtassa, where a girl lives alone in the mountains, communing with unseen spirits. Think also of Carl Maria von Weber's Der Freischütz, where a young huntsman must  prove himself, even if it means dealing with the devil.  The very pace of the film is part of its power, forcing us inward, cleansing us of the toxic muzak that passes for life.  Troll-Elgen is also important because it connects to the aesthetics of culture. Read Daniel Grimley Landscape and Norwegian Identity (2006), or, for that matter, Simon Schama : Landscape and Memory (2004) on forests and German art.

Fyrst's Troll-Elgen was based on the 1921 novel Troll-Elgen by Mikkel Arnesen Fønhus (1894-1973). Notice the time frame : Norway became independent from Sweden only in 1905   Literature and culture strengthened Norwegian identity, just as language and culture helped Finland break away from Russia.

The film begins with a panoramic shot of the mountains, densely forested and hostile to humans.  Wonderful landscape shots fill the screen throughout, emphasizing the beauty and power of nature.  In the wilderness lives an ancient elk, the Troll-Elgen , raely seen by humans, reputedly supernatural. Gaupa the huntsman tries to kill it but is driven insane. Huntsmen, like elks, are happiest in the woods but their lives are filled with hardship.  The craft in which Hans lives with his widowed mother is  utterly spartan. Even the rich don't do luxury. The local landowner, Rustebakke, throws a party, but his guests eat off wooden tables, No linen. There's no plumbing. Water is kept in a bucket and ladled into bowls.  Hans is forced to work on Rustebakke's farm, but he and Rustebakke's daughter Ingrid fall in love. The social divide between landowner and tenant is so great that he can't win Ingrid. "Unless", her father says, he can do something impossible, "like shoot the Troll-Elgen".  Gunnar, a horse dealer, and Hans fight over Ingrid. Gunnar gets stabbed. Hans runs away to the big city, thinking he's now an outlaw. He gets a job in the circus as "The Texan" sharpshooter.  Ingrid runs away too, hoping to find him.There's quite a bit of social comment in the film. Hans's boss abuses female employees and the relative Ingrid lodges with turns out to be a lecher. Separately, Ingrid and Hans return to the mountains, rejecting corrupt society.

Hans looks after mad old Gaupa, from whom he learns that Gunnar didn't die, so he isn't being hunted by the law after all.  Gaupa gives Hans a magic bullet, with which he fells the Troll-Elgen.  Ingrid is living alone in a remote cottage. Gunnar comes and attacks her. Hans walks in and the two men fight, but this time Rustebakke and his men intervene.  Hans and Ingrid marry. Presumably with elk for dinner. Or symbolically, anyway.  Although the plot is simple, the film is beautifully shot.  When Hans pursues the Troll-Elgen we see more panoramic vistas, and see the elk galloping over steep slopes and valleys, running along the river, its legs immersed in water. How did the camera crew set that up? The elk doesn't look tame.  The print is in good condition. Whispers of colour appear, too elusive to be remnants of hand tinting. I don't know the technology enough to know how that was done, but the effect enhances the magic of this film.