Essential food for the soul from the Belcea Quartet

In a world apparently going – if not having already gone – completely mad, food for the soul is essential to keep one going, and the Queen Elizabeth Hall on London’s South Bank provided the setting for just that on Tuesday evening.

The Belcea Quartet opened with Haydn’s String Quartet in G, Op33 No5. Sometimes nicknamed How do you do? for the curtseying, four-note opening phrase at the beginning and end of the first movement, it’s a light piece with a sense of wit.

In other words, it's somewhat unexpected if what you're expecting is the polite formality of early Classical chamber music.

But written in 1781, it was one of a series of pieces that Haydn advertised to potential subscribers as being very new. And in breaking that polite formality, they were.

My knowledge of chamber music from the Classical periodc is far, far from being encyclopedic – and certainly not when it comes to the man known as the ‘Father of the Symphony’ and the ‘Father of String Quartet’ – but this was toe-tapping stuff.

Indeed, I've arguably avoided Haydn over the years because I find him so formal. It's equally no coincidence that my favourite Classical composer is Beethoven, who heralded in the Romantic era.

The quartet’s repertoire doesn’t often include Haydn: Krzyysztof Chorzelski, the viola player – who had run astonishingly run the London Marathon a couple of days previously for a pancreatic cancer research charity – has said that this is partly because Haydn’s music was never intended for public performance in large concert venues.

With this work, they apparently feel more liberated – and, indeed, it was a wonderful performance, free yet controlled.

Next up was Janáček’s String Quartet No2. This is known as ‘Intimate Letters,’ because of the composer’s passion for Kamila Stösslová, who he met and became besotted with in 1917. The quartet, written in 1928 (the year of his death), enshrines the sentiments of the hundreds of ardent letters and messages he sent her.

Overflowing with a sense of passion, with Romantic passages and the clear influences of folk music, it’s a wondrous piece – light years away from any concept of chamber music as essentially stuffy.

I know very little about Janáček’s music: this made me want to know a lot more.

After the interval, the Belcea were joined on stage by pianist Piotr Anderszewski for Shostakovich’s Quintet in G minor for piano & strings, Op57.

The nods back to Beethoven are clear in the first movement, but elsewhere it is impish, sometimes dark and sometimes light.

I wasn’t familiar any of the works before hearing them live – but what a programme.

The big question is whether to watch the musicians closely or to close your eyes and let the music itself take centre stage. I moved between the two, but the latter has definite advantages: it’s as though the music itself takes on a whole new dimension.

The Belcea are all exceptionally fine musicians: founder and violinist Corina Belcea stands out, as does Antoine Lederlin on the cello. But when the music gives them the opportunity, Chorzelski and Axel Schacher on violin show just how much they can shine too. Anderszewski, too, is a musician of very high calibre.

When you get the chance to hear musicians like this live, the results can be utterly uplifting. Thank goodness that The Other Half had spotted that this concert was on – it was brilliant.

The only surprise was that the hall was barely half full. The audience that was there, however, more than made up for numbers in its appreciation.

On The Nose – a brilliant ROH debut for Kosky

It’s entirely possible that the greatest sight at a London theatre this year is that of a chorus line of 13 giant noses, tap dancing across the stage of the Royal Opera House.

It might not be what many Covent Garden aficionados expect, but the reception at last night’s premiere of a new production of Shostakovich’s The Nose would suggest that, whatever some of the more culturally po-faced might imagine, opera goers in London enjoy a farce as much as anyone else.

Shostakovich’s first opera, completed in 1928, is just bonkers.

But there’s a simple reason for that – because it is based on Gogol’s short story of the same name, which is, err, three stops short of Upminster.

To precis: Kovalev is a pompous bureaucratic who wakes up to find that he has lost his nose. Looking for it, he finds that it has become rather larger and, indeed, overtaken him in terms of social standing.

His nose does not want to return to its former position. The police are no help. He advertises with a local paper after being ridiculed by the journalists – but then the nose itself gets caught up with populist sentiment and is almost lynched, before being returned to Kovalev.

Initially, he cannot re-attach it, but that happens miraculously over night. And that's it – or maybe not.

A chorus line of tap dancing, err, noses

There is neither logic nor sense here – it is entirely surreal. And entirely hilarious.

Or is it?

The scene I mentioned at the top is one that director Barrie Kosky has inserted into the piece, but it’s a perfect fit. The audience absolutely fell about.

Kosky is currently the artistic director go the Komische Oper in Berlin and has something of a reputation of being an operatic enfente terrible. 

In this, his ROH debut, he proves his maxim that no movement is ever pointless and presents the house with a wonderful first production of the piece. There is so much movement – but none is simply indulgent.

Now it flags in the middle (the whole is just over two hours, with no interval) – but that’s less Kosky and more the young composer. However, so much else is good that one forgets that by the end.

The house band, under Ingo Metzmacher, is first rate with a varied score, from very modern (at the time) to folk and conventionally melodic, – it even includes a balalaika accompaniment to one song from Ivan, Kovalev’s servant, delightfully sung here by tenor Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke (making his ROH debut). 

Martin Winkler as Kovalev

David Pountney’s translation to English helps to make it an immediate feel, and just adds enough to give us a sense of the transgressive nature of the work that the first audiences must have felt. 

It’s a superb ensemble cast, but special mentions go to renowned buffo performer Martin Winkle in the role of Kovalev, while Sir John Tomlinson as Kovalev’s barber reminds us (should we need it) just what a great bass he is – and how he really can still do it, vocally and in terms of the acting.

There are moments when you feel that Kosky was channelling the Weimar era of his now home city of Berlin – but that works well here, along with Russian Keystone cops and corruption at all levels, because we’re looking at a decaying, corrupt society. Yet within the church scene, before Kovalev challenges his wayward nose, it is both musically and emotionally beautiful and powerful.

And ultimately, beneath the farce, there is a sense – and it is a sense, but this is part of what I think makes the production so good – of both the vodka-soaked Russian tragedy, and indeed, the perverse insanity that threatens even now to engulf us all.

The obvious satire nods to a decaying society obsessed with the insignificant; to social standing and form, even as the pillars of that society crumble corruptly around it.

The Nose is subtle even at the same time as being quite the opposite: but there is also a darkness here that we can see in the world around us right now. And an element of ‘fuck you’ about a piece that perhaps gives us the hope that, having survived such possible apocalypses before, we can do so again.

I would also like to take this opportunity to point out that, while I am now a friend of the ROH, our tickets – with fab view and even fabber sound – were under £30 each. The ROH is NOT beyond the pocket of all but a few in this country.

Anyway, to find out more about The Nose and more, visit www.roh.org.uk.