Royal Festival Hall
Beethoven – Overture: Fidelio, op.72c
Schoenberg – Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op.41
Schoenberg – A Survivor from Warsaw, op.46
Nono – Julius Fučik (United Kingdom premiere)
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in
C minor, op.67
Robert Hayward (narrator)
Omar Ebrahim (Fučik)
Malcom Sinclair (Voice in Julius Fučik)
Annabel Arden (director)
John B. Read (lighting)
Pieter Hugo (protographer)
Annalisa Terranova (video)
Gentlemen of the London
Philharmonic Choir (chorus master: Neville Creed)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)
Vladimir Jurowski said all
the right things during a brief address at the opening of the concert.
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony should not be regarded as the climax of the
performance, but as the fifth movement in a single work, whose theme was human
suffering and the strength of the human spirit, never quashed by the former. It
was, moreover, a rare pleasure to experience such bold and coherent
programming. The problem, alas, was that performances of these works – or performance
of this ‘work’ – were not always convincing; it was, perhaps predictably but no
less sadly, Beethoven who suffered most. Two of the other ‘movements’,
Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw
and Nono’s Julius Fučik received
excellent performances. A curate’s egg, then, which was hardly the intention.
The Fidelio Overture opened proceedings. It was hard driven, though to
be fair, I have heard worse. Odder was the strange, almost balletic lightness
of tone, strange until one realised that it arose from a fatal lack of harmonic
grounding. I was put in mind of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s recent Philharmonia performance of
the Fifth Symphony, which ended up sounding more like Delibes than
Beethoven; it too had inspired programming, the symphony prefacing Dallapiccola’s
Il prigioniero, yet was let down in
Beethoven’s case by inferior performance. And so, Beethoven’s music merely
floated along. It was all efficiently despatched by the London Philharmonic Orchestra;
the problem lay in Jurowski’s conception. Once again, moreover, Jurowski
indulged his odd penchant for mixing modern horns, which, give or take the odd
split note, played splendidly, and natural trumpets, whose rasping certainly
did not help matters.
Schoenberg was next up. First
came his Ode to Napoleon, given in
its version for narrator, piano, and string orchestra. I have never been
especially convinced by the orchestral version; a string quartet works far
better. Sadly, this performance did nothing to alter that judgement. Part of
the problem is – and was – that the piano does not blend well with the strings
and ends up sounding like a concertante instrument rather than a member of a
chamber ensemble. Despite excellent playing from Catherine Edwards, the effect
was unconvincing. Robert Hayward contributed an excellent rendition of Byron’s
poem, relishing text and subtext alike to chilling effect. Jurowski did not
help matters for at least the first half of the performance. Once again,
harmonic depth was lacking and direction was disturbingly metronomic. There was
little or no sense of the score’s roots in German tradition, not least that of
Beethoven. Having said that, Jurowski’s reading improved considerably. By the
time we reached the words, ‘If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, ‘Tis worth
thy vanish’d diadem!’ the summoned ghosts of Romanticism duly haunted. The
stanza, ‘Thou Timour...’ accomplished, perhaps for the first time with respect
to this performance, speed without (the wrong sort of) brutality. Schoenberg’s
furious inverse ode to Napoleon/Hitler ended with just the right sense of false
triumph, the final E-flat cadence – an ironic echo of the Eroica – falling flat as it must. Sadly, a performance that really
gathered pace and conviction was blighted by some appalling audience behaviour,
not least a French-speaking – yes, literally ‘speaking’ – person in the row in
front of me, who flashed around his Blackberry for most of the time.
A
Survivor from Warsaw
completed the first half. It suffered even worse from the Blackberry wielder,
who proceeded not only to type messages throughout the performance, but to
chatter to his companion and even to fondle her. Such a reaction to
commemoration of the Holocaust would have been obscene enough, but he actually
seemed turned on not so much by genocide as by his indifference to it. (I
should lay odds that he was a ‘beneficiary’ of ‘corporate hospitality’.) A Survivor survived, just about, but
such behaviour ought to lead to a life-time ban. This work is less garrulous
than the Ode to Napoleon and seemed
to inspire Jurowski less fitfully. It received a more properly modern and
focused performance, with less of the agitprop to it. Richly expressive and
rhythmically alert, this was at last a reading that justified the hopes of the
programme. Ghosts of Mahler and of Schoenberg’s earlier self pervaded work and
performance alike. Hayward’s narration was once again excellent, a case in
point the combination of brutality and beauty – Nazi æstheticisation of
politics brought to mind – in Schoenberg’s setting of the Feldwebel’s words.
The horrific race, quickly a stampede, into the chamber was such even before
the word ‘stampede’. Militancy, inspired and terrifying, of the male chorus and
its hymn, ‘Sh’ma Yisroel’ brought echoes of Bach as well as Beethoven, a
spirited rejoinder to the vile ‘Aryanisation’ of German culture official policy
had brought. (Even the text of Mozart’s Requiem had had to be altered, ‘Te decet
hymnus Deus, in Sion et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem,’ rejected in favour
of ‘Te decet hymnus Deus, in coelis et tibi reddetur votum hic in terra,’ in
Bruno Kittel’s celebrated or notorious 1941 recording.)
The British premiere of Nono’s
1951 Julius Fučik opened the second
half, wisely instructed to be performed without a break. (Not that that stopped
some applauding the end of the first movement of the Beethoven...) Incomplete,
it was first performed – posthumously – at the 2006 Munich Biennale (not almost
sixty years ago, as Jurowski claimed, perhaps thinking of composition) and
offers another of Nono’s tributes to the memory of the Czech communist and
literary critic, hanged following captivity in Berlin in 1943 and an
official hero for socialist Czechoslovakia. Fučik’s words – and ‘Voice’ – are
employed in Intolleranza 1960 (dedicated to Schoenberg), and Nono’s
Composizione per Orchestra no.1, also from 1951, offered another
as-yet-secret memorial – programme music hardly the thing for Darmstadt – to
Fučik. It was a pity we could not hear the Composizione
as well, but perhaps that is just being greedy or plain unreasonable. A strange
mini-biography awaited us on the screen as we returned from the interval. I
hope that the problematic sentence was a matter of translation – though surely
that could have been attended to’ since ‘sadly,’ as in ‘Sadly, the Nazis
executed him in 1943,’ really is not the mot
juste. The house lights went down so as to focus attention upon the stage
and the searchlit interrogation of Fučik. (Still worse now, Blackberry man
resumed its activities, lighting up a good part of the stalls with his screen
and flashing red light.)
Jurowski captured to a tee the pointillistic post-Webern violence of Nono’s
opening, likewise its lyricism that marks the composer’s music even at this
stage as quite different from that of Stockhausen. The score blossomed – both in
work and performance – into something perhaps surprisingly Schoenbergian, but
then Nono never shared Boulez’s resolve
to parricide, despite posthumous elevation as Schoenberg’s son-in-law. (It is
rather misleading, by the way, to speak of him at this stage in that light,
since he had yet to meet Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria, let alone to marry her.
Their meeting had to wait until the 1953 premiere of Moses und Aron.) Obar Ebrahim and Malcolm Sinclair offered
excellent performances. This excellent account, antiphonal drumming and all, exuded
brutality, psychoticism, and yet inviting, spellbinding beauty – not unlike the
interrogation in Intolleranza. It was
somehow not unlike a Bach cantata, though Fučik’s last words – ‘Believe me, this
has taken nothing, absolutely nothing, from the joy that is in me and that
heralds itself each day with some Beethoven theme or other .... – inevitably brought
one’s focus, insofar as it was not distracted by Blackberry antics, towards
another great predecessor. Nor was Schoenberg forgotten. I could not help but
think of Helmut Lachenmann’s transcription of a 1960 lecture Nono gave on A Survivor from Warsaw at Darmstadt. It
was, Nono, said (my translation):
... the
musical-æsthetic manifesto of our era. What Jean-Paul Sartre says in his essay,
What is Literature?, about the
problem ‘why write?’, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in Schoenberg’s
creative necessity:
‘And if
I am presented with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it
coldly, but ... with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its
nature as injustice and abuse.’
...
And
further, should someone refuse to recognise Schoenberg’s [here Nono makes
reference to a previous quotation from Arnold Schmitz on Bach] docere and movere, above all in his A
Survivor from Warsaw, he should know that the words which the
nineteen-year-old student, Giacomo Levi, wrote in his last letter before
execution by the Fascists in Modena in 1942, are also addressed to him: ‘Do not
say that you no longer wish to know anything about it. Consider this, that all
that has happened is because you no longer wished to know anything more about
it.’
Finally, then, the Fifth
Symphony. The odd-numbered movements fared better than the even ones, but this
was not, alas, a performance to justify the hopes placed in it. (Most
infuriating or even obscene of all was Blackberry man sitting back to ‘enjoy’
what he presumably thought of as the ‘real’ music. He managed to wait until the
first movement coda before checking for messages again.) Jurowski took the first movement fast but not
entirely unreasonably so. If hardly the last word in profundity, then at least
there was a much stronger sense of line than there had been in the overture.
One had to put up with those dreadful rasping trumpets though. Beethoven’s
extraordinary concision came through, if not the necessary weight of tone and message.
It was good to have the opening of the slow movement greeted by a mobile
telephone, but in truth, there was little of consequence to be disrupted here.
Predictably swift, this is doubtless what passes for a Beethoven slow movement,
even one marked Andante can moto, in the
fashionable circles of an age seemingly incapable, a few Barenboim-like exceptions
aside, of responding to the symphonic Beethoven. It sounded more like an
intermezzo with unpleasant and arbitrary brass interventions than the unfolding
of an inevitable musical narrative. The LPO very much seemed to be going
through the motions – and I could not entirely blame them. It was genuinely sad
that, following the two previous performances, this music should go for so
little, but at least Jurowski’s tempo ensured that it was over relatively
quickly.
Rather to my surprise, the
scherzo fared better. It was full of menace, not least since melody, harmony, and rhythm
now once again seemed to be related to one another. The counterpoint of the
trio was irrepressible as well as clear, the ghostliness of the scherzo’s
reprise not merely colourful but also chilling. Alas, the opening of the finale
was marred by the plodding parade-ground sound of natural trumpets. The horns,
by contrast, sounded glorious. It was full of incidental ‘moments’ – not quite
in the Stockhausen sense: that might
have been interesting... – yet the great sweep of Beethoven’s imagination seemed
quite to elude Jurowski. This performance remained stubbornly earthbound, for
all its superficial highlighting in apparent attempts to generate ‘excitement’.
The drama has to come within; it cannot be appliqué.
A message for our time indeed. Whilst I was greatly moved by A Survivor and by Julius
Fučik, Beethoven – and this is less sad than tragic – elicited no such
reaction. Jurowski’s programming was
estimable, but it needed a Gielen or a Barenboim – or, imagine! a Klemperer or a
Furtwängler – to carry it off.
