Every child should be taught music
Ahead of Sunday’s Prom, Hallé director Mark Elder tells Rupert Christiansen about polishing Rossini and educating the young
Spending time and money on resurrecting long-forgotten 19th-century operas sounds like a mug’s game, but it’s one that Mark Elder loves to play. Since 2012, the affable 69-year-old conductor has been music director of Opera Rara, a small, privately funded organisation passionately devoted to such revivals: its biennial concert performances in London are must-see events for all bel canto buffs and the scholarly recordings that ensue have brought them a wide international audience. Forthcoming projects include the première of an unperformed work by Donizetti at Covent Garden in 2018.
For its Prom on Sunday, however, Opera Rara is making a departure from its usual mission. As Elder puts it: “We’re doing Rossini’s Semiramide, an opera that people may think they know. We aim to show them that they don’t.”
Based on a turgid tragedy by Voltaire and first performed in 1823, Semiramide tells the tale of a Queen of Babylon, infatuated cougar-style with a victorious young general (played by a mezzo-soprano) in her army; to make matters worse, she doesn’t realise he is her son. In the Sixties, Joan Sutherland and Marilyn Horne made the opera their speciality, memorably recording it for Decca, and there have been occasional productions since.
But Elder’s aim at the Proms is unprecedented fidelity to the composer’s intentions: using Philip Gossett’s rigorously researched edition of the manuscripts, he will restore traditional cuts, observe authentic performance practice and erase the stereophonic varnish with which Decca sound engineers of a previous era coated such scores. “This is music that should sound coruscating, spirited and fleet, dramatically lithe,” he explains. “Never dense or heavy. It’s been called the last baroque opera. I wouldn’t go that far, but it is built on vast architectural proportions.”
Semiramide requires exceptional singers, and Elder is excited to have Russian soprano Albina Shagimuratova in the title role, originally written for Rossini’s firebrand wife Isabella Colbran. Previously, Shagimuratova has been best known for singing stratospherically high music, such as that of the Queen of the Night in Die Zauberflöte. But Elder feels that as Semiramide she is ready to show a darker side to her voice and personality. A fascinating evening is promised.
Although now best known as music director of Manchester’s Hallé orchestra, Elder made his name as an opera conductor, and that function continues to play a large part in his professional life. His career started on the music staff at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in the Sixties under Georg Solti, and he’s appeared on the podium there at least once every season for the past 20 years.
When asked if he would be interested in becoming the house’s music director if the incumbent, Antonio Pappano, leaves when his contract expires in 2020, he havers so diplomatically – “Pappano’s doing a marvellous job, I’m extremely happy where I am”, and so forth – that one can only assume that what he really means is, “Are you kidding? Of course I would.”
And he’d certainly have my vote – not least because of his magnificent achievement at English National Opera, where he was music director through the “Powerhouse” epoch, 1979 to 1993, when a cutting edge of innovation and flamboyance made the Coliseum seem like the most exciting theatre in London. Elder conducted David Alden’s production of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa in 1984. This brutal presentation, complete with a bloody chainsaw massacre denouement, was seen as a watershed in opera staging. Asked if he feels that the trend to sensationalise has gone too far, he answers ambivalently.
“I was at the first night of Guillaume Tell at Covent Garden last year and I thought the kerfuffle was absurd. Theatre should challenge audiences. The booed scene was indeed brutally violent, but it was only a short episode in a constantly engrossing show. The opera came alive, which it didn’t when it was done conventionally 25 years ago. The real question should be: does the direction show perception and skill?”
Looking at ENO in its current sadly reduced state (producing half the performances that it did in his day), does Elder feel that underlying problems of governance and financial modelling should have been addressed earlier? He agrees that a lot of issues were swept under the carpet, but insists that the company “achieved wonderful thing in the face of basic inadequacies – including a building never designed to house a repertory opera company”.
At this late stage, he believes it is “vital” that a resident chorus and orchestra is maintained, and hopes the present regime “will find an even keel where funders can have confidence that the organisation is cutting its coat according to its cloth. That must be the starting point for recovery.”
Elder has also conducted some memorable opera in concerts at his present home in Manchester, the Hallé’s Bridgewater Hall, with special emphasis on Wagner. This autumn he undertakes Das Rheingold, part of what will culminate in a complete Ring cycle – the first, surprisingly, in his career. This isn’t a vanity project, but part of a programming strategy that has transformed the Hallé from a near-bankrupt basket case to a crack ensemble that can match any in the land, making “Elder and the Hallé” a first-class brand comparable to that of “Rattle and the CBSO” in the Nineties.
There are several secrets to such success, not least the Bridgewater Hall’s superb acoustics and continuing support through testing times from local government and business, but two factors are crucial. The first is that Elder and his chief executive, John Summers (“one of my best friends”), have been singing off the same hymn sheet with the same aspirations ever since their partnership began here in 2000.
The second is that, by now, Elder has personally auditioned just about every player in the orchestra (the last survivor of the 1943-70 era of his legendary predecessor, John Barbirolli, left about five years ago), giving him the instrumental sound he wants “and a truly distinctive style, whether we are playing Bach or Britten. Everyone in the organisation is so game for challenges that I feel free to develop and explore. I used to be wary of Ravel, for instance. Now I’ve done his Daphnis et Chloé and Mother Goose with them, and I’m infatuated. Today, I’m even beginning to think about Bruckner seriously.”
Elder’s Hallé has done great work in the field of music education, but he insists that what they do can only be supplementary. “What is crucial is that the fundamentals of music, including reading notation, should be taught at every primary school across the board. It’s been repeatedly proved that a child who has been introduced to music finds the absorption of other subjects easier – like the grounding that Latin gave me. So we need more musically trained teachers. But for that to happen, we also need the many politicians who love music to stand up and promote the cause. And so far, they just don’t.”
‘The booed scene was indeed brutally violent, but it was only a short episode. The opera came alive’