Press freedom? Think of Benjamin Britten. Apart from the old homoerotic witch-hunt, still raging, the composer found himself an innocent cold war pawn. "I was sickened by Pravda getting me wrong," he wrote in 1963 following a trip to the Soviet Union, adding for good measure that British code word of dismissive opprobrium, "the blighters".
His music had been well received, but in an interview with the communist mouthpiece, Britten remarked: "between the arts of our two peoples there are no barriers". The ideologues grinned and western commentators groaned. The Stalinist mantra, still upheld, was that art was strictly for the service of the party agenda. Britten sounded as if he had swallowed their dogma in one bark. Yet his Russian friendships, with the composer Shostakovich and the cellist Rostropovich, were among the most fruitful, and ironically liberating, in his life.
Riding lightly into the Britten centenary, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra initiated a short series called Soviet Patriots, performed in Poole and Bristol, with Britten as the link. This is ideal repertoire for this increasingly ambitious orchestra, which covers a huge swath of the south and south-west, amounting to 10,000 square miles. Ticket sales are strong, audiences loyal. ("And which row do you sit in?" a dedicated subscriber asked by way of conversation. She was flummoxed to find I had no idea.)
Under its charismatic young music director, the Ukrainian-born Kirill Karabits, the orchestra has developed a new authority in Russian-Soviet music. In Prokofiev's Seventh Symphony they demonstrated their keen affinity for this score, part of a current recording project. Karabits drew from his players a vivid communication of the work's dual nature. The warm, Elgar-like melody of the slow movement was offset by the spiky, playful angularity of the finale, performed with the composer's original quiet ending. The boisterous, optimistic alternative coda he added later for political expediency was offered as a brief encore. Five months after its completion, on 5 March 1953, both Prokofiev and his oppressor, Stalin, were dead.
Britten was represented by an early work, the happy, hoedown-ing Canadian Carnival (1939). Fanfares, clashing tonalities and plenty of local lumberjack colour showed Britten working with ideas which would find entirely different, darker expression in his Sinfonia da Requiem.
The heart of the concert was an extraordinary performance of Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No 1 with the brilliant James Ehnes as soloist. Apparently encountering no technical problems in this hazardously difficult work, Ehnes transmitted its mood of bitter melancholy and dry-eyed grief with alert, responsive support from the orchestra. Soloist and orchestra are recording the Shostakovich – in Poole's Lighthouse, today – together with Britten's Violin Concerto. Look out for the CD (on Onyx) early next year.
András Schiff has already played severally, as well as recorded and lectured on, the 32 sonatas of Beethoven. Their mystery and genius still enthrals him – and us. At Wigmore Hall last Monday, in a complete cycle which continues next year, he played seven from the early period, culminating in Op 27 No 1 "Quasi una fantasia" and No 2 "Moonlight", as well as the deceptively lyrical but dense "Pastoral" Op 28.
In this Hungarian-born master's hands, each phrase, each bar, sounds new. No repeat passage sounds like a repeat. Ornaments are introduced spontaneously, growing out of the music rather than merely decorating, and never the same twice. Inner voices burst with character, taking on the colours of instruments – a bass-note drone may sounds like a timpani, a chorale passage takes on the timbre of a brass ensemble.
You forget for a moment that it is all done by one man, two hands and a piano – in this case a C Bechstein grand, manufactured in 1921 and played by the great Wilhelm Backhaus (1884-1969). Schiff may empathise with Backhaus because they have the same sort of side-parting and bushy hair but I suspect the real reason was that each pianist cherishes objectivity, expressing emotion through an analytic approach rather than via a rush of subjective feeling. Compared to some, Schiff is unexciting to watch: he does not put his nose to the keyboard, or sway, or sigh, or mop his brow much. Nor does he raise his eyes in prayer before the first note or wear red braces. For all of which, praise be.
Stalin, yes him again, haunted the Royal College of Music's new staging, by James Conway, of Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea. I rather wish he hadn't. Updating the court of Nero to a world of Red Army commissars, with Seneca as a Tolstoy-style, smock-wearing intellectual and the old nurse as a fretting babushka (Matthew Ward), was just about tolerable. Putting Poppea into a blond wig, flower-sprigged frock, carrying a teddy bear, was perverse.
But conservatoire productions are not about the director's ideas as much as the talent on offer. The RCM International Opera School is flourishing. There was plenty of promising singing, under the baton of Michael Rosewell, even if at times still more rigour and rehearsal were needed. In one of two casts, Katherine Crompton (Poppea), Annie Fredriksson (Nerone), Fiona Mackenzie (Ottavia), Hannah Sandison (Drusilla) and Bradley Travis (Ottone) led the large ensemble. The 10-strong orchestra, dominated by the sensuous yet glittering sounds of theorbo and triple harp, was first rate. This is the opera, you may recall, through whose duplicitous web immorality wins the day. Why do we always have to borrow the French to say plus ça change?
