Macaulay's London Week: Canellakis, Adès and a French-Sung ENO Shock

By Tom Whitfield

Karina Canellakis announced the death of the conductor Herbert Blomstedt, aged 99, from the Royal Festival Hall stage on Wednesday 4 November, and dedicated that evening's Beethoven Fifth to him. The announcement came from the London Philharmonic Orchestra's conductor mid-concert, after the interval, as Alastair Macaulay reports in his three-night survey of London performance for Slippedisc.

The programme had been, in Macaulay's judgment, "an ideally balanced triple bill": Christian Tetzlaff as soloist in Elgar's Violin Concerto, the London premiere of Dai Fujikura's Radiance, and Beethoven's Fifth. Tetzlaff, he writes, plays Elgar "as if driven by conflicting inner forces", moving solo passages from fortissimo to pianissimo and back, giving "the inward and outward sides of Elgar at the same time".

What was Fujikura's Radiance actually echoing?

The ten-minute score had its world premiere on 1 November in Thessaloniki. Fujikura has written that he was asked to compose it "on the scale of a Beethoven symphony, with the request that it might, in some way, 'echo' Beethoven's world." Macaulay's verdict carries a caveat: while he liked all of Radiance, "at no point did it bring Beethoven to mind". It recalled later Romantics instead, with one central passage leaving conventional Western harmony and returning; a sequence of irregular staccati "made a particular impression, like birdsong".

Canellakis, he writes, conducted the Beethoven "briskly but suspensefully", so that "every pause, every chink of silence, mattered". Macaulay adds a personal note: his two brothers used to run the Fifth through their heads while ploughing fields on tractors, before the Sony Walkman existed — one arguing the merits of Karajan against Böhm.

How did Thomas Adès make the Barbican a major event?

On Thursday 5 November, Thomas Adès conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in Per Nørgård's Dream Play (1975, revised 1980), his own In Seven Days (2008) with pianist Bertrand Chamayou, and Sibelius's Fifth. Macaulay compares their physical styles: Canellakis's "undulating arcs through her arms" against the "musculature" of Adès's back and legs, "charged with power and intention".

He regrets that the Barbican programme notes did not link Nørgård's Dream Play to Strindberg's 1901 play of the same name, which inspired Bergman and Caryl Churchill. Adès introduced the ten-minute work as hippy, funny, even trippy. Chamayou, in In Seven Days, played the instrument's full range with "eerily shimmering effects at the top", evoking "multiple solar systems and zodiacs".

Macaulay's reservation is pointed: he finds Adès's vocal music "entirely resistible" — but otherwise rates him "one of the great assets of the British musical scene".

Why is ENO singing Gluck in French?

English National Opera's new Iphigénie en Tauride, staged by Lyndsey Turner at the London Coliseum on Friday 6 November, is sung in the original French — a major policy break for a company long dedicated to opera in English. Macaulay calls it a "dereliction of opera in the vernacular", softened only because the three leads sing "some of the best French to have been heard on the London stage for many years": Christine Rice as Iphigénie, Nick Pritchard as Pylade and Jacques Imbrailo as Oreste.

Rice, he writes, has "pathos, distinction, vulnerability, and heroism", though her vibrato "is inclined to spread somewhat". Imbrailo captures the matricide Orestes "without any exaggeration". Pritchard is so good in punitively high lines that Macaulay wants ENO to stage Gluck's French Orphée et Eurydice for him at once.

Conductor David Bates, a baroque specialist new to ENO, makes the score "live from within". Turner's direction is "refreshingly — unfashionably — understated", with Soutra Gilmour's costumes in an approximately Ancient Greek look. The sole reservation: the chorus is "somewhat too subdued", often too low-energy.

Macaulay's closing question — whether ENO's French departure "will lead to more" — goes unanswered. What the production does prove, he argues, is why the company still matters at a moment when it shows no overall artistic policy.