Hall One, Kings Place
Wagner
– Siegfried-Idyll
Beethoven - Septet in E-flat major, op.20
Henry
Goodman (Wagner)
Dame Harriet Walter (Cosima)
Aurora Orchestra
Nicholas Collon (conductor)
In typically imaginative style, the Aurora Orchestra prefaced its performances of
Wagner’s Siegfried-Idyll and
Beethoven’s Septet with introductory monologues, sometimes shading into
dialogue, sometimes tellingly at cross-purposes, between Richard and Cosima
Wagner. Barry Millington ensured their historical accuracy, though I could not
help wondering whether that preceding the Siegfried-Idyll
was a little on the lengthy side. There was, of course, a great deal of
information to impart: how they met, the progress of their relationship, and
the events of that first, Tribschen staircase performance. Moreover, I suspect
that those less well-versed in Wagner biography would have welcomed the
opportunity to set the work in context. One theme that certainly shone through,
as it does from even the most cursory glance at Cosima’s Diaries, was the
crucial aspect of nineteenth-century gender relations, taken, as it were, to
the extreme by Cosima’s extraordinary marriage of self-abnegation and sheer
stubbornness. Henry Goodman summoned up a degree of Wagner’s protean nature,
though the assumption too often shaded into mere arrogance; as so often, the
charisma to which Wagner’s friends and acquaintances attested was less
apparent. Harriet Walter penetrated more deeply – perhaps, ultimately, it is a
more achievable task? – into the strengths and, in modern terms, ‘passive-aggressive’
contradictions of Cosima.
Nicholas
Collon conducted the excellent Aurora players in the Siegfried-Idyll. Their soloistic skill combined with the Hall One
acoustic to permit an uncommon degree of clarity, so much so that the birdsong
seemed to point to Mahler, and even beyond, to Webern’s pointillism. Earlier
on, there were a few occasions when I thought Collon might have yielded more,
but the performance grew more flexible through its course. If anything, there
was perhaps a little indulgence at the end, though it was readily forgivable.
If it seems invidious to single any player out, I shall still do so, mentioning
Oliver Coates’s especially sensitive turning of the crucial cello line; one
might almost have listened to it in itself. Taken as a whole, this fine performance
granted us the opportunity to hear that in one far from negligible sense,
Cosima was right to view herself as the most fortunate of women, for who else
has received a birthday present such as this?
Beethoven’s
glorious Septet was played as true chamber music, Collon wisely leaving the
players to themselves. In every movement the very particular marriage – not only
Richard and Cosima deserve that epithet – of Mozartian serenade style with
thematic working born of Haydn shone through, as sunny as the music itself. (Mozart’s
wont was always to impart greater sadness, implied or otherwise.) Whatever
tempi were settled on were made to work, and never, even when swift, to turn
brittle, such was the sense of life in performance. The quiet dignity of the Adagio, for instance, contrasted
tellingly with the swing of the following Minuet: so tricky to capture, yet
effortlessly, or seemingly effortlessly, achieved on this occasion. Haydn’s
influence certainly pervaded the fourth movement variations; I thought in
particular of his late F minor/major set for piano. Above all, there was joy,
which was just as it should have been.
