Strauss – Die Frau ohne Schatten (excerpts)
Zemlinsky – Eine florentinische Tragödie, op.16
(concert performance)
Bianca – Heike Wessels
Guido Bardi – Sergei
SkorokhodovSimone – Albert Dohmen
This made for a
disappointing opening to the LPO’s season, not the fault of the orchestra, but
in many respects to be attributed to Vladimir Jurowski. The failure of the Frau ohne Schatten excerpts, despite
some fine orchestral playing, may be ascribed to two principal factors:
problems with Jurowski’s direction and, more gravely, the very idea of
extracting parts here and there from the orchestral score, without voices, and
trying to present them as some sort of coherent whole. Some people have done
something similar with Wagner’s Ring,
with a similar lack of success, but here Jurowski might have taken note that
Strauss himself failed to make his ‘Symphonic Fantasy’ cohere. One wills
it to do so, but even in the hands of Kempe, or more recently Christian
Thielemann, it simply does not. At least it is shorter than this meandering
hotch-potch. It opened as the operas itself does, but in Jurowski’s hands,
rigid, metronomic, merely loud rather than resplendent. At times, it sounded
almost like a parody of Stravinsky – and that takes some doing. Soon, moreover,
the tension began to sag. Without the voices, too much of the score sounded as
if we were in rehearsal rather than in concert. Moreover, a good part of it
lacked a keen sense of harmonic grounding and motion, increasingly a problem
from many conductors in the core Austro-German repertoire, especially when they
sound superficially ‘exciting’. There was a fair bit of orchestral uncertainty
too to balance against the pinpoint, almost brutal, precision of other
passages, such as the opening. At least we managed to hear some impressive solo
work, for instance from leader Pieter Schoeman and principal cello, Kristina
Blaumane. Even the grinding dissonances just before the close failed properly
to register, whilst the closing bars were merely sugary, nauseating in the
wrong way. It would have been difficult to come up with a greater contrast with Bernard Haitink’s recent Vienna Philharmonic Prom performance of the Alpine Symphony. But the very
premise of this performance was flawed. Perhaps Stokowski might have made
something of the idea; one can imagine a time-travelling Liszt doing so on the
piano. Jurowski did not.
He made a better job of
Zemlinsky’s Florentine Tragedy, in
itself a welcome visitor to a London concert hall, though sadly not to a London
stage. The obvious Straussian inspiration for Zemlinsky’s version of Wilde’s A Florentine Tragedy was of course Salome, which Zemlinsky had conducted
for the first time in 1910. Both operas are in one act, though Eine Florentine Tragödie, composed between
1915 and 1916, is considerably shorter. Moreover, the nauseating headiness of
Strauss’s opera cast a shadow over a number of ‘late Romantic’ or ‘early
modernist’ – whatever we wish to call them – operas, Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten a fine example. The links
between biography and art are rarely as clear as some would like to make them,
even when ironised as in a number of Strauss’s works, but the congruence of
plot between opera and Mathilde Schoenberg’s affair – yes, the wife of that Schoenberg and sister of Zemlinsky
– with the painter, Richard Gerstl, who then took his life when Mathilde
returned to Schoenberg, is difficult to ignore. There is no love-scene as such
at the opening, though there is later on, evocatively coloured by whole-tone
harmonies. However, the Prelude, like that to Act I of Der Rosenkavalier, makes all clear, albeit in darker tones than
Strauss had employed (though not necessarily darker in this performance).
Guido, Prince of Florence, and Bianca have been indulging their passion and,
upon the appearance of the merchant Simone, Bianca’s husband, hardly succeed in
quieting his suspicions. It takes a dissonant duel – and Guido’s death – to
have Bianca appreciate her husband, and then for his strength.
Though the Prelude was driven
and perhaps too bright – a little more nausea would have been to the good – we heard
that this was recognisably the composer of the Lyric Symphony, surely Zemlinsky’s masterpiece. If there were
times, especially early on, when Jurowski proceeded too audibly bar-by-bar, at
least the basic structure of the work was apparent. (Imagine, though,
Thielemann taking on such repertoire!) Slower sections in particular fared
better than they had in Strauss, where they had often simply dragged. Indeed,
it was generally orchestral climaxes that came off best. The real problem here
lay with the singers. Whilst Heike Wessels showed occasional bloom as Bianca,
both Albert Dohmen as Simone and Sergei Skorokhodov as Guido struggled to make
any real impression. More often than not one could barely hear the latter above
the orchestra, and the same was true too often of the former. There was no
charisma, no sense of who the characters might be, of why we might care about
them. At best, the score emerged as a symphonic poem with voices, something of
an irony given the ill-fated Strauss first half. And
so, the ominous ostinato when Simone bids Bianca spin came across with more
foreboding, more frighteningly even, than one might have expected. Something of
the score’s claustrophobia registered too, as did the brief – ironic? –
transfiguration at the end when the remaining couple hymn each other’s strength
and beauty. I suspect the opera needs a staging, perhaps of the Von heute auf morgen variety. It
certainly needs a superior vocal contribution.
