Copenhagen: bikes, bins and garbage

I have never been to a more filthy city than Copenhagen; beautiful but filthy.

The guide book says Scandinavians are touchy about tourists criticising them so let’s look at Bergen or Oslo just across the water as well. All three are great tourist cities – particularly if you manage to score one of the five days a year in Bergen when it’s not raining. All are easy to get around if you ignore the fact that Copenhagen bus maps and timetables are difficult to find. All three have great food that poor Aussie pensioner-tourists can afford. Anyway, snuffling out cheap, obscure bistros is much more fun that simply consulting your Michelin Guide (number of stars equals number of years in advance required to book). All three have great suburban train systems that connect to very frequent country systems. And when you get stuck people will happily help.

Copenhagen’s bikes deserve a tourist star in their own right. None of the macho status stuff we get in Melbourne. Not a thread (?) of lycra in sight. Dad pedalling like mad, Mum and the kids in a box-sort-of-thing out front and everybody getting stuck into ice-creams. And the thousands of commuter-riders don’t yet appear to have found the sport of attempting to kill tourists who amble all mind-in-neutral onto the bike lanes.

What Copenhagen does have as well is rubbish in huge quantities. Walk across the Børsgade bridge over the canal. Every crevice, every crack is full of cigarette butts; thousands of them. Drink cans and coffee cups wedged into the bridge superstructure suggests clean-up is an annual event if at all. Suburban streets are much the same; dray-loads of cigarette butts in gutters and on footpaths.

Norreport Metro station opens above the fabulous driverless trains that run every two or three minutes. On the surface a monumental bike rack that doubles as a giant pissoir. The stink is overpowering. The glass skirt panels of the escalators to the platforms are all lavishly decorated with dribbles of melted ice-cream or some sugary liquid. And on a Sunday morning about 10 am dried vomit still festoons the platform rubbish bins.

The bright yellow Havnebussen (water ferry) commutes between the Nyhavn ferry terminal (a few metres from the Royal Danish Playhouse) and the Copenhagen Opera House just across the water. Under the Nyhavn jetty’s wooden seat, two neat piles of human shit. They were there for more than 24 hours quietly drying in the morning mist.

Mahler Chamber Orchestra: Leif Ove Andsnes

Bergen International Festival

Grieghallen, Bergen

May 25 2012

Two little blokes they were; one about ten, his brother - with round glasses - about eight. Both had number two crewcuts; both looked sharpish. At interval they'd taken advantage of losing their parents in the crowd and of the sample chocolates and the promo-coffee with a kick like a moose. The nuclear grade coffee evidently did the trick. They sat alert in the middle of the front row almost immediately behind the pianist - who had his back to the audience - and absorbed the entire concerto: Beethoven's third.

The kids probably had no idea of the standard of the music they were listening to but the sell-out crowd did. At the end they roared approval. Two and a half thousand people leaped to their feet and not just because Andsnes was the home-boy made good - very good.

Leif Ove Andsnes had once been an usher with the Bergen Interational Festival. He had come back as the lead act with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra from Berlin to play Beethoven's first piano concerto wth its beautiful slow movement and, after coffee time, the third.

The playing was simply superb. Beautiful Beethoven. Perfect piano concerto-making.

Early on there were a number of indicators that this was to be. The first - and most obvious - was that the piano faced the orchestra - or, if you will - the pianist had his back to the audience. The second was that the pianist, when conducting, made no extravagant arm movements, no tortured hand gestures, no doubling-up in an agony of music making, no stamping of the foot to emphasise the down beat to bring in the brass: all gestures used by "maestro" Jensen conducting the NDR Radiophilharmonie  in the same hall a few days later. The third, at the end, was that his orchestra loved him. They smiled at him - and each other - and applauded him because he had evidenty rolled in and said, "You blokes (men-blokes and more than 50% women-blokes) know what you are doing, I know what I am doing, let's go out there and do it". And they did. He treated his young players with respect and they responded with relaxed, precise, skilled music making.

The concert was not about Andsnes. It was not even about Mahler Chamber Orchestra - although it could have been about either. This performance was about Beethoven.

Trine Wilsberg Lund and Alexander Soddy, Bergen International Festival

Nordic Hour
Haarkon's Hall
Bergen
28 May 2012

I got chased down a lane today by a (not at all angry) waitress. Something about not paying for the wine glasses. Wine glasses? Glasses of wine!  Same difference! Blame the company: a gorgeous Nordic blonde soprano, a superb 29 year old accompanist and 15 oldies including me. We were investigating "Spring Music in Norway and Iceland" with Renaissance Tours and we were spending six days at the Bergen Internatioal Festival.

We'd all had lunch, us olds, with our guests Trine Wilsberg Lund and Alexander Soddy. We'd heard them the day before in the Hakonshallen - a huge 13C stone baronial hall - as part of the Bergen Festival. In a display of enormous courage the two young people had accepted an invitation to eat with a gang of Aussies who were on a sort of concert version of a pub crawl.

Trine had sung songs by Sibelius, Stenhammar, Alfven, Sjoberg and, very importantly for me, Grieg.  A lot of Grieg. I'd played some of the Grieg lied decades before for an A Mus A friend and I loved them. I had worked with singers all my life so I knew how to pick a bad - and a good - accompanist.

Trine had selected songs that showed off her beautiful (lyric?) soprano: a lovely strong head voice with assured high notes and a rich chest voice with no growl and no break in transition from head to chest. But best of all she had the skill and musicianship to sing high notes p, pp and ppp with full depth of tone. That singing was both rare and beautiful.

The singing was simply delightful! We were entranced - sitting in the secod row just behind her proud parents, her sister and her friend from kindy - and one or two of us were moved to tears. We heard Grieg and Norway that day, not the singer, because the songs were in the singer's heart and she gave  each phrase the space it needed to beathe and live.

Over lunch we talked to Alexander about his sensitive accompanying defined as being alongside, about listening (of course he does; she's his fiance) about his career so far from a music degree at Cambridge, moving to Hamburg, meeting Simone Young, becoming her repetiteur and conducting protege, conducting opera and the enormous value of the transition from accompanist through opera work to symphonic conducting so that the conductor lets each phrase breathe. His career so far and his appointments were of a great musician in his own right.

Soon the lunch chatter turned to the Melbourne Recital Centre and Elizabeth Murdoch Hall; a wonderful place to start an Australian recital tour. Soon! Please?

Natalia Goldmann, Joachim Kjelsaas Kwetzisky

Varkonsert
Munch-museet
Oslo
24 May 2012

l heard Natalia Goldmann play a cello today. No, I hadn't heard of her either. She was practising the Rach. opus 19 sonata with Joachim Kjelsaas Kwetzinsky just before lunch so I sneaked into the back of the hall and hoped I would not be thrown out . I had no idea - except that it was late Romantic - what I was listening to so I had to ask. I felt pretty stupid when the other half of the program - the clarinet - told me.

There was talent here. Lots of talent. Natalia was clearly in control of the piece, so much so that I wanted to wander up the front,  close her score and say, "You don't need this".

I stayed to hear the recital because it's good to hear what young people are doing with music.  I heard all the joy then the pathos then the excitement and the Russia romanticism of Rachmanninov that came from the end of her bow.

Natalia and Emilio are Masters students at the Norgesmusikkholehe. Emilio Borghesan, the clarinetist, played Francaix, Widman and Brahms with pianists Per Arne Frantzen and Sigstein Folgero.

Natalia will regret strangling the last note of the third movement (a bowing problem) but she won't do that again. Other than that she demonstrated a wondeful understanding of the soul of the music and how to sing it.

Romantic concertos - and sonatas - are sometimes said to be a (thematic) duel between soloist and orchestra - or piano. In this performance Joachim won the (aural) duel - even though he was technically superb - hands down for most of the sonata. "Down a couple of notches from fff to f, my son!" He was a brilliant pianist but as an accompanist he was not always with her by a millionth of a second. (Perhaps she was simply in the wrong place. Perhaps he could not see her well.) That is, until half way through the last movement when he relaxed enough to catch sight of her bow out of the corner of his eye, then they sang together right through to the gut-grabbing end.

Simply superb!

I sat out in the warm Oslo sun because the others had gone to look back-stage at the opera house and ate a shrimp open sandwich under the pink crab-apple trees in flower and thought how much I had enjoyed the recital, how much talent and musicianship I had heard. My eye caught a dried flower floating in the breeze on a spider thread. I thought about the little stars in life that we stumble on by chance.

I was in Oslo on a Renaissance tour led by Mairi  Nicolson, an ABCFM presenter. I  had been supposed to be looking at Mr Munch's paintings and lithographs at the the time of the recital but music is much more my passion. No contest!

I managed to buy a Metro ticket and get back to the hotel without a map. Not bad for an old bloke.

Victorian Opera: Midnight Son

Midnight Son

Victorian Opera 

6 May 2012

What a complete sleaze he was. And absolutely convincing. The voice – in other circumstances, a beautiful first-class baritone - or is it a rich tenor? But in this part, Byron Watson’s voice had an edge of hardness and cruelty even in the last (ie, “first”) scene. 

In any successful narrative the reader must warm to or identify with one major character. Ray was not that character even in the extremity of his self-convinced innocence. In a word, the part worked both musically and dramatically.

Midnight Son was always going to be a risky venture especially in conservative Melbourne. Gordon Kerry’s score is contemporary and certainly not melodic but it is very accessible and it works superbly with Louis Nowra’s text. It seems to me that Nowra’s awful rhymes serve not to lighten the whole sordid affair but drive it deeper into awfulness.

A clever libretto, a clever score and soloists who were the part – not acting/singing the part – Midnight Son was a winner. The orchestra knew what the word “accompany” meant and the knew what the word “dramatic” meant.

Dimity Shepherd was an absolutely convincing fool to be sucked in by Ray’s sex appeal. He gave her enough hints, for goodness sake. “Will you swing for me?” and she thought he meant groupie parties where the ropes were not around her neck. But the sell-out aria was Antoinette Halloran’s torch song. I mean, are you sure she’s an opera singer? Poor Marisa/Maria/Juliet. The Good Catholic Girl for whom “swinging” meant something you do in the park on a sunny afternoon with your kids. But underneath that GCG was the luscious, warm woman that Ray apparently never found.

The first-night audience response was not terribly warm. But some elderly ladies – a straw poll of two – assured me that they really liked it, that the score did not put them off and that they were glad the plot was reversed because it gave them "something nice to go home with". 

This production is opera with balls. Big balls!