Would Harnoncourt ever choose to perform them? He answers with a quiet but emphatic “no”.”And I can tell you exactly why,” he adds. “When music is so obviously autobiographical, when the message `me, me, me!’ jumps so forcefully from the score – I really cannot stand that. Schubert’s music is also autobiographical, but with him you glean the results of his experiences rather than observe the process of personal suffering. All this business of showing your skin and your innards in public, these endless confessionals – I can’t take any of it, I would personally hate to expose everything about myself.”He adds Berlioz to his hit list of musical autobiographers “I cannot touch his music,” he confesses I ask him why. Is Berlioz, like Mahler, too “neurotic”?”But don’t you also hear some neurosis in Schubert’s music?” he asks Not really Fright, terror, perhaps – but not neurosis. “Maybe,” he shrugs, “but I can tell you that those important composers who I do not perform, I cannot perform at all. For example, I have never done Wagner, although I have made several attempts, going through the scores of Tristan, Parsifal, Die Meistersinger – and being thrown back after the first act of Meistersinger.” And yet next June he will incorporate music from Tristan and Tannhauser into a programme that deals with the subject of love and that also includes music by Mendelssohn and Schumann.”This is the only Wagner I will do,” he announces with typical resolve and his reasons make historical sense.
“There is a connection with Schumann: the two composers knew each other. Wagner commented on Schumann’s opera Genoveva; Schumann commented on Wagner’s work; Wagner hated Mendelssohn and wrote all those terrible things about Jews – the connections are meaningful, they make sense.”As to the future, and the works that we might expect to hear under Harnoncourt’s baton, there are some definite surprises in store. An ongoing love affair with Bruckner (“for me, he is a miracle”) will lead to performances of the Seventh, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies – towering masterpieces all of them. Harnoncourt traces an unexpected creative lineage from Bruckner, through Johann Strauss to Alban Berg, whereas “my most interesting connection to Mozart – and here you may laugh, like I do – is Offenbach. I would also connect the clear pencil drawings of Offenbach with those of Stravinsky. I have already done Offenbach’s operettas La Perichole and La Belle Helene, as well as a few pieces by Alban Berg.”All this is a far cry from his typecasting as an “early music” specialist. In a sense, the ever-radical Harnoncourt serves as the ideal creative symbol for our changing attitudes to the future of standard musical repertoire.
But how does he view the coming divide between the centuries?”I feel we are now floating in the middle of some new development,” he says guardedly, “and we don’t know where our ship will finally find a port. There is also widespread fear that it might all go terribly wrong, and that if the wrong kind of materialism really does take hold – it’ll all be finished… I am a pessimist by nature, but somehow I am also optimistic I don’t know the reason, but it is true: I have hope.”. PERFECT DAYS HAMPSTEAD THEATRE LONDON
BARBS, A 39-year-old celebrity hairdresser is draped upside down over the sofa in her stylish Glaswegian loft having her toe-nails painted by Brendan, her gay best friend. Time was when there’d be no more here than meets the eye; attractive, lonely, middle-aged woman with partner problems being fussed over by a camp consolation prize. The Nineties twist is that now such a couple may well be trying to make babies together.
The syringe of semen waggled invitingly, is fast becoming the staple that the sherry bottle waved at the vicar once was in our drama. Barbs is upside down because she doesn’t want Brendan’s precious seed to dribble out.
Perfect Days by Liz Lochhead, was a sell-out hit at this year’s Edinburgh Festival and John Tiffany’s traverse production has now transferred to Hampstead. A strenuous heart warming piece designed to have you brushing away a tear while splitting your sides, the play gives the impression of having been written on a bet to see how many Zeitgeisty angles on motherhood can be crammed into 150 minutes. A series of increasingly predictable duologues in the first half make Siobhan Redmond’s marvellous Barbs, who is as garrulous and profligate with the one-liners as a stand-up comedienne, all the more cruelly aware of the ticking biological clock. Her estranged husband (Vincent Friell) reveals that he’s impregnated his new 22-year- old girlfriend. Her sister-in-law (Anne Kidd) has been tracked down by her dishy long-lost illegitimate son.
