Music to my ears
What the classical world has been listening to this month
Antonio Pappano
Conductor and pianist
A friend of mine told me that I had to listen to the recording of Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor conducted by Thomas Schippers with Beverly Sills in the title role. Schippers is so dramatic and exciting while Sills’s expressivity is beautiful – you can just see the character in front of you. Her musicality is incredible, too, and she puts in some very unusual cadenzas. She had a remarkable stage personality in general and her vocal capacity was amazing.
I’ve also been listening to Riccardo Muti’s recording of Verdi’s La forza del destino, mainly to hear Mirella Freni as Leonora. I got to know Freni many years ago when I worked with her as the pianist at the Liceu opera house in Barcelona – she was the loveliest person. This recording is a testament to an amazing career. It isn’t a role I would have associated with her and it does stretch her but, my God, she gives it her all! She doesn’t pussyfoot around.
I listen a lot to Erroll Garner, who is the most exuberant jazz pianist and just makes me very happy. His playing is very unusual, and when he starts a song he goes off on all sorts of incredible tangents in the introduction, so that even his bandmembers don’t know what it is he’s actually introducing! There’s also a sort of dislocation between his two hands – they’re not together – and yet it still swings totally naturally. And his right hand just goes wild.
And also…
I’m currently reading Walden by Henry David Thoreau. In it, Thoreau takes himself off and builds himself a little hut near Walden Pond in Massachusetts where he uses only the bare necessities and is at one with himself and nature. It’s a beautiful metaphor for solitude in the most positive sense. It’s a slow read, but one that you really have to savour. Pappano joins Ian Bostridge, Vilde Frang and Nicolas Altstaedt on ‘Beethoven: Songs and Folksongs’, out now on Warner Classics Kathryn Rudge Mezzo-soprano During lockdown, I’ve been turning to the things that I’ve always enjoyed and loved. I’ve been missing going to see the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, who are right on my doorstep, and when I go on my daily exercise the music I’ve been listening to most is them playing the Adagio of Rachmaninov’s Symphony No. 2. The RLPO has had a huge influence on my appreciation of classical music, particularly since Vasily Petrenko arrived as chief conductor, and this is music to really lose myself in.
I also miss going to church, which is where I first began singing and where I still sing every weekend when I’m at home. I love the music of Tallis, and really enjoyed the incredible performance of Spem in alium that Stile Antico recently filmed as a virtual choir. I also adore the harmonies in Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme of Thomas Tallis, and the way that he gets across the message of the psalm that Tallis originally set.
I’ve been streaming a lot of music, including a wealth of Elgar
Thoreau’s Walden is a beautiful metaphor for solitude in the most positive sense
and Brahms. There’s something about Elgar’s orchestral music that lifts me to a different place, but then there’s also the beautiful way that he sets the texts in his song repertoire. And if I could choose just one recording of someone singing Elgar, it would be the mezzo Janet Baker, as she’s my hero. Her voice is just so special. And also…
I’ve probably got as many art and illustration books as I do music books! I enjoy painting and I often doodle on my scores as the visuals really help me to word-paint when I’m singing. I’m currently enjoying discovering new art, but some of my favourites illustrators are Quentin Blake, Ronald Searle, Chris Riddell, William Steig, Helen Bradley… I could go on! Rudge’s disc of Hamilton Harty songs is out this month on Somm Bram van Sambeek Bassoonist
I recently realised that one of my favourite recordings really pushed me to pursue my career: the Royal Concertgebouw’s Shostakovich 12th Symphony, with Brian Pollard playing the bassoon. Though there is a very famous bassoon solo in the Ninth, this one is very short – just 30 seconds or so. However, it was so strong when I was 15 years old: I discovered the emotional, expressive power that the bassoon actually has, and that has stayed with me ever since.
My listening right now is inevitably connected to the extreme times we are in. I’ve always found pianist Martha Argerich’s amazing 1979 recording of Bach’s Partita in C minor,
BWV 826, extremely comforting. It’s on a playlist that helps me calm down; I’ve used playlists to influence my mood for years. I started with mixtapes, but now it’s a playlist on my phone with a streaming service. I listen to a lot of music that way now.
I have an affinity with rock music and once made a rock album with my group, ORBI
– The Oscillating Revenge of the Background Instruments. I always stuck to rock-band studio recordings because I valued the perfectionism in the sound and thought that would be compromised in concert. But I saw Metallica in Cologne last year and was impressed with how they made the show work. The energy from both stage and audience was something I’d not expected.
And also…
Reading has been keeping me sane and more focused. I started reading Haruki Murakami’s Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World before the crisis began. It has quite an adventurous, experimental storyline, but there is also something in his writing style that’s calming and accessible. Such as the daily routines he describes: he can spend a whole page on preparing a sandwich.
Van Sambeek’s disc of concertos by Du Puy, Mozart & Weber is on BIS