Wagner – Parsifal: Prelude to Act III and ‘Good Friday Music’
Berg – Violin ConcertoStrauss – Suite: Der Rosenkavalier (attrib. Artur Rodziński)
Ravel – La Valse
There is probably no finer Parsifal conductor alive than Daniele
Gatti. It was once again a privilege to hear his shaping of music from Wagner’s
final drama, even if I find it difficult to reconcile myself with the practice
of performing ‘bleeding chunks’ as the ‘Good Friday Music’, and remain a little
surprised at conductors with a deep understanding of Wagner’s works performing
such snippets out of context in this way. (That is not, I hasten to add, a
matter of ‘purism’, simply a feeling that the experience remains insufficient.
There is nothing wrong, for instance, with performing the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger as a curtain-raiser.
If it works, it works; but if it does not...) At any rate, there seemed
something a little odd about starting with the opening to the third act.
Nevertheless, the performance was of such dramatic intensity that one expected
to hear Kundry groaning, and felt a little disoriented by a transition of sorts
into the ‘Good Froday Music’. The Gustav Mahler Youth Orchestra’s woodwind
solos were especially fine, reminiscent of the Siegfried-Idyll. Gatti’s varied pacing proved unerring, some though
by no means all of it unerringly slow; the crucial thing was the unbroken
communication of Wagner’s melos.
It was perhaps noteworthy
that, as with all the music on this programme, Gatti conducted the Berg Violin
Concerto from memory. Gatti has a distinguished track-record in the music of
the Second Viennese School; there could certainly be no doubting either his or
Frank-Peter Zimmermann’s knowledge of the score. The GMYO woodwind again played
with great intensity throughout, though Zimmermann’s account began in somewhat
subdued fashion. (Perhaps it was partly a matter of the Royal Albert Hall’s
dreadful acoustic.) I wondered whether it were too subdued, despite the apt
impression of the ‘angelic’ thereby imparted, but it came to life during the Allegretto section of the first part.
Gatti’s understanding of Berg’s twelve-note writing was abundantly clear in his
shaping of woodwind lines in particular, pointing the way to the Bach chorale
that would be fully sounded in the second part. There was, moreover, a winning
Viennese lilt, rubato and all, to be
heard to the rhythms. The second part opened with a vehemence previously
lacking; there could be no doubting Zimmermann’s virtuosity here either.
Moments of Mahlerian stillness were just as striking, the vistas (Carinthian?)
that opened up as striking as anything in the music of another composer with
whom Gatti has long exhibited a particular affinity. Zimmermann’s working out
of serial processes, and more generally Berg’s motivic development, was as
impressive as Gatti’s. The Andante
from Bach’s A minor Sonata, BWV 1003, made for an apt, wonderfully intimate,
encore.
If I continue to harbour
doubt about performing extracts from Parsifal,
feelings about the Rodziński (allegedly his work) suite from Der Rosenkavalier go beyond any
conceivable understanding of reasonable doubt. Yes, of course it is always a
pleasure with a fine orchestra and conductor to hear this music, but it could
surely have been better put together; indeed, one sometimes wonders whether it
could have been worse put together. It was all wonderfully performed, making
one long to hear Gatti and indeed the orchestra in the work as a whole. The
opening horns resounded with such magnificence that I had to check first that
we remained in the Royal Albert Hall, and second that there were only four of
them. (We had remained there, and there were only four.) Masses strings could
barely have sounded more Straussian in the Act I Prelude, but the melying away
after Strauss’s initial flourishes was every bit as impressive. Gatti pointed
up echoes of Elektra without
overdoing them; this was less a determinedly modernistic Rosenkavalier selection than a Romantic performance with a sense of
alternatives. Throughout tone and textures were subtly variegated, even when
the allocation of vocal lines to instrumentalists, however splendidly played,
proved a little difficult to take. I was left wondering how much, if any, sense
the selection would have made to someone unacquainted with the opera as a
whole, but that was not the fault of the performance.
For that reason alone, La Valse proved more satisfying. I was
struck from the outset at the ‘French’ quality of the sound Gatti drew from the
orchestra, not unlike that which one would expect from his own Orchestre
National de France. Ravel’s score sounded as if a painterly, Cézanne-like,
phantasmagoria. It seemed to be taken faster than usual, though not excessively
so, and the tempo was certainly not unvaried. The vortex into which the
Viennese waltz whirled itself had a mechanistic, Stravinskian quality: Ravel
viewed through the prism of The Rite of
Spring. There was something finer to come, however, and despite my
reservations concerning ‘bleeding chunks’, a rapt account of the Prelude to Act
III of Die Meistersinger, the
orchestra’s strings offering a challenge to any permanent opera or symphony
orchestra. Again, one longed to hear Gatti in the complete work.
