Grosses Festspielhaus
André
Previn: Violin Concerto,
‘Anne-Sophie’: third movement, ‘(from a train in Germany)’
Sibelius:
Violin Concerto in D
minor, op.47
Beethoven:
Symphony no.7 in A major,
op.92
Anne-Sophie Mutter (violin)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
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| Image: Salzburger Festspiele / Marco Borrelli |
For the third and final of the
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra’s Salzburg appearances this year, the players and
Daniel Barenboim were joined by Anne-Sophie Mutter, for one-and-a-third violin
concertos. The third-fraction was the final movement of André Previn’s work,
written for Mutter and named after her, the movement in question a set of variations
on the song, ‘Wenn ich ein Vöglein wär’. She is clearly fond of the work,
although it is difficult to imagine we shall hear much of it from anyone else;
at any rate, performance of a single movement afforded a touching tribute,
without outstaying its welcome. Korngold, Prokofiev, Walton, even occasionally
Berg haunted its pages: rather as one might have expected. It is not so much
reactionary music, as simply what it is, never pretending to be anything else. Mutter
here, as later, was on outstanding form, her tone centred, and focused, the
music knowingly playing to her strengths, supported not only by a gorgeous orchestral
sound, but by players and a conductor who knew where things were heading and
how to get there. The soloist’s final sustained note, fading into nothing, made
for a loving farewell to a mentor, sometime husband, and collaborator.
Sibelius, I am afraid, is a
composer whose music I have never really been able to get on with. My loss,
doubtless. I put the symphonies to one side some time ago, deciding that there
was little point in persistently trying and getting nowhere: better to wait
until they came knocking at the door again. Although I have found many of the
shorter pieces, whether songs or orchestral works, attractive, I have likewise
avoided the Violin Concerto for some time, initially nonplussed by it. If I
cannot imagine it ever being my favourite work in the genre – though who knows?
– I am delighted to report the extent to which I was won over, my reservations
confounded and quite forgotten. Sometimes it pays to wait not just for the
right time, but for the right performers. For me, at least, Mutter, the Divan
Orchestra, and Barenboim proved very much that. Mutter’s tone for the opening
was different: less glamorous, with tighter vibrato, her line nevertheless
built swiftly and surely with evident passion and belief. It was a long line,
yet variegated. Barenboim attended to harmonic rhythm with all the
understanding one would expect. This first movement emerged as not un-Wagnerian
at times: not just the sound, but, in Barenboim’s hands, dramatic timing too.
The depth and vigour of the Divan strings did no harm whatsoever either. Mutter’s
cadenza was as nourishing as it was thrilling, the vehemence of the movement’s
close quite stirring from all concerned. There was more than a little Wagner to
the slow movement’s opening clarinet and oboe duo, Mutter responding with a rich,
yet never thick, solo of her own. It was unashamedly ‘Romantic’, yet with an
awareness that the term meant something quite different from what it might have
done twenty-five or fifty years earlier. The movement spoke ‘for itself’, not
unduly or even noticeable moulded, Barenboim attentive in the best way.
Virtuosity at the service of the score characterised the finale. I doubt one
would hear its opening solo played with greater clarity or understanding today,
the orchestra responding in (darker) kind. And so on and so forth, our
musicians excellent guides. This prior sceptic found himself entirely won over.
With Beethoven we were firmly
on Barenboim’s home territory – and his orchestra’s. The Seventh Symphony’s
first movement introduction can rarely, if ever, have sounded replete with potentiality,
with hope. (How we need that right now!) Haydn radicalised: is that not what
Beethoven is, in many ways? From the outset, harmony was the symphony’s guiding
force. (Why, apparently, do so many conductors fail to realise or at least to
communicate this? As if Beethoven had no harmonic understanding…!) Every new
phrase, every new section of a sequence, was developmental, generative, the
transition to the exposition proper almost responsorial. Barenboim’s great
friend and colleague, Pierre Boulez, would surely have nodded smiling assent.
And the moment of arrival was, paradoxically, or better, dialectically, both
decisive and almost imperceptible. Above all, though, there was meaning; this
was music that mattered: I had shed a couple of tears before the advent of the second
group. All the virtues of the introduction were carried forward, developed,
transformed, Barenboim’s leading of his musicians an object lesson in symphonic
form. Not only did we face the tonal universe in an almost Newtonian sense; we
explored it, as humans do, as humans all will. To have those musicians playing
as if their lives depending on it, a strong, decisive, generative bass line
(ten cellos, eight double basses) reminded us what Beethoven can be, should be,
must be, yet sadly, tragically, in these diminished times of ours, so rarely
is. What struck me once the movement, coda and all, was over was how it had
passed in the twinkling of an eye: as concise, so it seemed, as its opposite
number in the Fifth Symphony.
Taken attacca, the nobility of the second movement, voiced with
surpassing musical excellence and understanding, pursued the humanistic tale. A
requiem for our hopes? No, although perhaps a moment to consider, to
reconsider, to begin to achieve them. This, once again, was awe-inspiring
Beethoven, such as only Barenboim can summon up today. Harmony and counterpoint
alike offered an absolutely necessary coming together: political in every
sense. This is our music; let us
never forget that. Fresh, determined, the scherzo never hinted at outstaying
its welcome, as it can in lesser performances, its trio offering new, yet
related vistas and hopes. Mahler would have understood the marriage, the
interdependence, of physical and metaphysical. And how this music, so often
grimly driven, danced with delight! Much the same might be said of the finale,
albeit with very different material and, ultimately, purpose. It was a
whirlwind in the best sense: all-enveloping, directed, yet embracing us. ‘Seid
umschlungen, Millionen…’ Content and form, style and idea were indissoluble:
dialectically sparring and, yes, mutually embracing. The apotheosis, then, of
human, necessary revolution.
