Tuesday 29 October 2013
Wozzeck: Karl Böhm's Bergian reminiscences
Wozzeck, to my mind the very greatest opera of the twentieth century, opens at Covent Garden on Thursday. Here Karl Böhm, a great champion and interpreter, rarely matched and most likely never surpassed, discusses his first encounters with the work and with Berg himself:
Sunday 27 October 2013
Tharaud/LPO/Nézet-Séguin - Poulenc and Prokofiev, 23 October 2013
Royal Festival Hall
Poulenc – Piano Concerto
Prokofiev – Symphony no.7 in
C-sharp minor, op.131Poulenc – Stabat mater
Wednesday 23 October 2013
Greek, Music Theatre Wales, 22 October 2013
Linbury Studio Theatre
Gwion Thomas and Sally Silver as Eddy's parents Images: Clive Barda |
Eddy – Alastair Shelton-Smith/Michael
McCarthy
Eddy’s Mum/Waitress/Sphinx –
Sally SilverEddy’s Sister/Waitress who becomes Eddy’s Wife/Sphinx – Louise Winter
Eddy’s Dad/Café Manager/Chief of Police – Gwion Thomas
Michael McCarthy (director)
Simon Banham (designs)Ace McCarron, Jon Turtle (lighting)
The Music Theatre Wales Ensemble
Michael Rafferty (conductor)
Sally Silver and Louise Winter as the Sphinx |
Tuesday 22 October 2013
Madama Butterfly, English National Opera, 21 October 2013
(sung in English)
Coliseum
Cio-Cio San – Mary Plazas
Suzuki – Pamela Helen StephenPinkerton – Timothy Richards
Sharpless – George van Bergen
Goro – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Prince Yamadori – Alexander Robin Baker
The Bonze –Mark Richardson
Yakuside – Philip Daggett
Imperial Commissioner – Paul Napier-Burrows
Official Registrar – Roger Begley
Mother – Natalie Herman
Aunt –Judith Douglas
Cousin – Morag Boyle
Kate Pinkerton – Catherine Young
Anthony Minghella (director)
Sarah Tipple (revival
director)Michael Levine (set designs)
Hang Feng (costumes)
Peter Mumford (lighting)
Blind Summit Theatre (puppetry)
Chorus of the English
National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English
National OperaGianluca Marciano (conductor)
Monday 21 October 2013
Book review: KM Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna
KM
Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the
Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Ashgate: Farnham and
Burlington, 2010), ISBN 9780754663720, pp. xiii + 201, £55.
Die Muskete, 10 January 1907 |
Gustav
Mahler’s time has come, the anniversary years 2010 and 2011 (150 years since
his birth and 100 since his death) having intensified the ubiquity of his
music. Orchestras and conductors treat it as a calling-card. Even Beethoven has
been eclipsed as the concert hall’s favourite symphonist. Yet, not so long ago,
things were very different. Mahler’s years in the doldrums have been
exaggerated, especially by those anxious to claim that Leonard Bernstein’s direction
of the New York Philharmonic catapulted Mahler into the spotlight, a dubious
proposition even in the Western Hemisphere. Mahler had numerous earlier,
influential advocates. Nevertheless, his music long faced ignorance and disdain.
Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance, opined: ‘Intimate acquaintance with the
executive side of music made even [!] Mahler a very
tolerable imitation of a composer.’ Why might this have been? Did anti-Semitism
play a role?
A
study of Mahler’s early critics should have much to offer here. As KM Knittel
argues in her conclusion (p.168), ‘if there is even the slightest possibility
that we have taken over a way of thinking about Mahler and his music from a
culture that could not deal with his Jewishness … we owe it to ourselves to
rethink what makes Mahler’s music unique, thought-provoking, and valuable.’
Such rethinking, alas, lies without her study. No matter: we can rethink for
ourselves. The real problem with Knittel’s book, rather, is that it fails to
make a cogent case for anti-Semitic coding of early Mahler criticism: oddly,
given the endemic nature of anti-Semitism in Mahler’s Vienna and many of the
attacks he suffered as Director of the Court Opera. Despite occasional
disclaimers that texts may be read variously, the tunnel-vision of Knittel’s
readings counter-productively renders one suspicious of reasonable
interpretations in such a vein. She misses an open goal.
The
first chapter proper opens promisingly, surveying artist Alfred Roller’s verbal
portrait of Mahler. It is good to have Roller’s original German quoted in
footnotes, though Knittel appears throughout to have used Norman Lebrecht’s
existing translation rather than furnished her own. That may seem pedantic, but
when dealing with the nuances of linguistic transmission, reference to words actually
used will help. When interpretation commences, claims immediately become
questionable. Roller’s ‘failure to address the obvious issue of circumcision
inadvertently emphasises its association with castration’. Perhaps, but
assertion replaces argument. Moreover, it is odd, in discussion of the body, to
lack reference, explicit or implicit, to writers such as Foucault, Lacan, and Žižek.
An oft-acknowledged progenitor, however, is Marc Weiner’s ‘brilliant’ (p.160) Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic
Imagination. Weiner’s inability or disinclination, during discussion of Parsifal, to distinguish between
circumcision and castration does not augur well.
Moving
on to discussion of Mahler’s wife, Alma, it is doubtless revealing that she
writes (p.41), ‘So much irritates me: his smell, the way he sings, the way he
speaks,’ but failure to consider words such as ‘I don’t believe in him as a
composer,’ as possessing weight of their own or other possible justifications
almost renders one sceptical concerning anti-Semitism undoubtedly present. Alma’s
descriptions are surely more interesting when ambiguity is permitted, indeed
explored. That she decided to marry Gustav in order to ‘cure’ him of Jewishness
is asserted (p.43) without a shred of evidence. In its absence, many will
follow Mahler’s near-definitive biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange,
considering documented dedication of a performance of Die Zauberflöte to Alma and her mother’s attempted dissuasion to
have played some role. Roller’s positive physical descriptions most likely
betray (p.47) ‘his unconscious absorption of … cultural markers of difference’.
Such is lost, however, in a morass of implausible assertions. Doubtless a considerable
part of such work will have to remain highly speculative; it is not thereby
invalidated. Consideration of alternatives might nevertheless prove fruitful.
The
villain, bizarrely, is Wagner. Weiner et
al. at least make him the villain of his own story. Here, echoing Joachim
Köhler’s monocausal explanation of the Second World War (Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker), newspaper
critics err on account of, or at least in sympathy with, Wagner’s Das Judent[h]um in der Musik [not ‘Music’,
p.53], unhelpfully conflated by Knittel with his Oper und Drama, so that anything in the latter automatically betokens
anti-Semitism. Wagner’s criticism of Berlioz’s ‘mechanical means’ of
orchestration is read as anti-Semitic, though Berlioz was never thought to be
Jewish and Francophobia seems a better candidate – as well, perish the thought,
as misplaced cultural criticism. William Ashton Ellis’s outdated translation of
Wagner is employed, so that we have no opportunity to compare Wagner’s actual
words with the critics’. Is Wagner, even
if one takes the most hostile approach to him, the sole lens through which to
view musical critics’ anti-Semitism? Unlikely, to put it mildly. And yet, we
read (p.108): ‘The juxtaposition of surface versus depth, the implication that
Mahler has nothing to say, and the emphasis on noise or novelty rather than
music and ideas can all be traced to beliefs about the inferiority of Jewish
music, as articulated by Richard Wagner.’ And so, without presenting any
evidence that Max Vansca’s 1907 review of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was indebted
to Wagner or intended anti-Semitically – and both may well have been the case –
why should we heed the forthright ‘moral of Vansca’s review …: Mahler will
reveal himself eventually as a Jew – by writing banal or second-hand melodies’?
Something more than bald assertion is required. On the rare occasion when we
learn something a little more about a critic, Robert Hirschfeld, it is
illuminating, though I remain unconvinced that Hirschfeld’s likening Mahler to
George Bernard Shaw (p.135) in terms of technique and playing with irony
reveals anti-Semitism. More needs to be said about other critics: background,
influences, etc.
Racialist
theories languish unexplored, Knittel near silent even concerning Vienna’s own
leading anti-Semites. Georg Schönerer and Karl Lueger are merely name-checked, declining
comparison of their anti-Semitism with the critics’. When claiming, ‘in a
critical sense, anyone could be a Jew,’ Knittel neglects to invoke Lueger’s
celebrated claim to decide who was a Jew. She does not mention even in passing
the young Hitler’s fervent admiration of Mahler’s Wagner interpretation. Despite
repeated please for contextualisation, anything not incriminating Wagner is
excluded. Gustav Klimt is ignored. When dealing with cultural history and its
politics, other arts, other discourses, will not only provide important
material – no one would claim that music existed in a vacuum here – but also
suggest what may or may not have been unusual about music. Perhaps that helps
explain why strange claims abound, for example (p.49): ‘While Mahler’s Jewish
background may seem unimportant now – or indeed, something to be purposely
excluded from discussion…’. No evidence is given for unimportance or exclusion;
in reality, the contrary would seem to be the case. Knittel then footnotes a
few other studies on Mahler and anti-Semitism, enigmatically commenting, ‘I
will not dwell on the limitations of the other studies’, before confusing
‘infamous’ and ‘notorious’.
What
remains? An interesting selection of extracts from Viennese newspaper critics. An
expanded edited collection of such criticism might have been more helpful than
an argument that probably needed more time to be honed. We never approach the
nub of why Mahler’s (partial) decision to write programme music was understood
to indicate Jewishness, whereas undoubted resolutions to do so by Berlioz,
Liszt, and Richard Strauss were not. Must there not have been something more to
the matter, given that the genre’s foremost practitioners were certainly not
Jewish? Knittel’s reading is not necessarily invalidated, yet complexities
require consideration, not evasion. A chapter on Strauss criticism holds out promise,
but its argument turns out to be: Mahler was Jewish and Strauss was not,
therefore identical criticisms of Mahler and Strauss are and are not
anti-Semitic. As for the claim that Strauss turned his back upon modernism
because it was perceived as Jewish, it is arresting, but where is the evidence?
One can imagine the contrary being claimed, that he was returning to a
comfortable classicism akin to that of Mendelssohn.
It
is a tedious hallmark of reviews that they berate the writer for not having included
something else. I nevertheless cannot help but wonder at the exclusion of discussions
by composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky – Jewish, spurned by Alma – and Arnold
Schoenberg, and musicologists such as Guido Adler and Heinrich Schenker. Stefan
Zweig is dismissed (naïvely?): ‘it must be said, … a rather naïve and
self-centred man’. Such figures would, despite their exceptionalism, have
something to say about prejudices of ‘mere’ critics and reasons for hostility extending
beyond or illuminating anti-Semitism.
Mahler’s
time having come – he predicted to Alma that it would, when Strauss’s had ended
– might even signal acceptance, indeed approbation, of ‘Jewish’ aspects to his
music. Alternatively, even if they exist, that may have little connection to his
present esteem. Our view may depend upon preference for Bernstein’s Mahler as
agent of personal redemption or Pierre Boulez’s Mahler as modernist
godfather. We should not, however,
decide upon the outcome before conducting the investigation.
Friday 18 October 2013
Royal Northern Sinfonia/Zehetmair: Mozart, 18 October 2013
Milton Court
Concert Hall
Divertimento in D major, KV
136/125a
Sinfonia concertante in
E-flat major, KV 364/320dSymphony no.39 in E-flat major, KV 543
A new chamber-size hall for
London as part of the Guildhall-Barbican complex: Milton Court Concert Hall –
which seems already to be abbreviated to Milton Court, though that strictly is
the name of a building including a theatre, a studio theatre, rehearsal rooms,
etc. – certainly showed its worth in this concert. The acoustic is bright,
warm, and detailed. Now if only London could finally get its act together and
build a decent large-scale hall… That, however sad and urgent the case, is,
though, an argument for another day.
Mozart-Divertimento K136 by gpollen
Sixtieth birthday concert for Irvine Arditti, 16 October 2013
Wigmore Hall
Ferneyhough – Intermedia alla ciaconna
Robert HP Platz – strings (Echo VII) (UK premiere)Hilda Paredes – Cuerdas del destino (UK premiere)
Francisco Guerrero – Zayin I + II
Cage – Eight Whiskus
Akira Nishimura – String Quartet no.5, ‘Shesha’ (world premiere)
To say that the world of
contemporary music owes Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet an incalculable
debt, whilst true, somewhat misses the point; we might be better to say that of
the world of music. The Ardittis occasionally venture back even beyond
Schoenberg; indeed, I heard them play Beethoven in Edinburgh, and, in an interview with me shortly before those performances, Arditti referred to
Bach and Brahms too. But it is the twin abilities to present classics, albeit
mostly of the twentieth century, as contemporary, and to present new works in a
manner both excitingly of the moment and with all the insight that one might
expect, say, the Amadeus Quartet to lavish on Mozart, that really counts.
Ferneyhough’s Intermedio alla ciaccona is a classic by
Arditti’s and indeed by anyone’s standards. Twenty-seven years after he gave
its 1986 premiere, Arditti ensured that it remained as visceral and as musical
an experience as ever. Its ‘fictional polyphony’, to employ the composer’s
term, immediately has one think of Bach’s great solo violin example: Bach
refracted, in a sense descended from, or at least relatable to, Webern’s great
orchestration of the Ricercar from the Musical
Offering, yet also quite different, violently so – and of course an
entirely new composition. A kaleidoscope of expression unfurls itself
nevertheless through the means of a single instrument, within a strong, indeed awe-inspiringly
strong, modernist frame. Arditti’s sovereign command as a performer had one
believe this to be an experience akin to what I imagine hearing Milstein play
Bach might have been. For me, this was perhaps the greatest highlight of a
typically exploratory evening.
Robert HP Platz’s 2008 work, strings (Echo VII) received its first
British performance. The quartet members gradually enter, one by one, Arditti
first, the spatial conceit being their placing around the hall, only the first
violin and the cello on stage. In the composer’s words, the piece ‘is a
portrait of the four characters in a string quartet, each in his own space, his
own time, like four galaxies in polyphonic space, four universes of a
meta-universe, to be described by the theory of “strings”.’ I admit that I am
not entirely sure what is meant by ‘the theory of “strings”,’ but anyway. It
opens with relative reticence and indeed it takes the cello’s entry for the
music to turn to what, with doubtless undue Romanticism, I might gingerly call
more a passionate tone. Despite spatial separation, or in a sense through its
offices, the instruments combine even to the extent of completing each other’s
phrases. (Again, I thought of Webern.) It was not quite clear to me what the
spatial element added; not that there was anything to which to object. But it
was not quite Stockhausen either.
Hilda Parades’s Cuerdas del destino (2007-8) also received its British premiere.
From the éclat of its opening pizzicati, via an array of expressive
devices such as glissando tremolo and
harmonics, and a succession of contrasting types of musical material, this made
for a vivid, at times almost, though only almost, pictorial journey. There is a
palpable sense of drama to the work – as there was to the quartet’s committed
performance. The concluding section seemed both old – recognisable material
from what had gone before – and new, that material being employed in different
ways. It registered almost as a translation of a cyclical symphonic principle
to the world of the contemporary string quartet: not entirely unlike the
Arditti Quartet’s very raison d’être.
Francisco Guerrero’s Zayin cycle of seven pieces for string trio, written over the
period 1983 to 1997, has yet to be performed in its entirety in this country.
The first two pieces certainly made a powerful impression, whetting the
appetite for more, the powerful energy inherent in both works and performances
offering something of a revelation. Motor rhythms, post-Stravinskian in the
best sense, offer again an array of expressive possibilities. At one point, the
way in which the instruments seemed, as it were, to be pedalling uphill offered
an analogy with which to grasp the music’s progression, but the best thing
perhaps, especially on a first hearing, was simply to surrender. The virtuosity
and musicality unleashed in performance were second to none.
Arditti then performed a solo work that
could hardly have been more contrasted had it been taken from a much earlier
century; arguably Cage’s Eight Whiskus
is still more contrasted than, say, Bach or Biber. Apparently it follows on from
an original version for voice, which Cage, in consultation with the violinist
Malcolm Goldstein, reworked so that ‘the vowel and consonant qualities of the
poem are transformed into various bowing positions, gradations of bowing
pressure, and forms of articulation’. A fascinating idea, no doubt, yet what
struck me was the apparently disarming simplicity of the piece: probably an
illusion, but maybe not. I do not think, moreover, it was fanciful to glean
some sense of translation from words to violin technique, even when one had no
idea what the original text was.
Finally came the world premiere of Akiraa
Nishimura’s firth string quartet, written to commemorate Arditti’s sixtieth
birthday and dedicated to him. ‘Shesha’ refers, in the composer’s words, ‘to
the name of a gigantic snake with thousands of heads , which appears in the
Indian myth. It lives beneath the ground and supports the earth. Shesha’s
awakening means the earth’s awakening.’ Indeed, without at the time having read
the note, I sensed something of a kinship in the first section, that of Shesha’s
awakening, to The Rite of Spring,
intense and teeming with life. The apparent Romanticism – a relative term, I
admit – of what followed was certainly impressive in terms of the Arditti
Quartet’s performance, but sounded perhaps slightly as a reversion, even if one
could hardly say to what. Perhaps, though, that was the point, as the second
and third sections evoked ‘Samudra manthan’ (the churning of the ocean of milk)
and ‘Amrita’ (the nectar of immortal life). What seemed as though it might be
the still centre of the work actually proved to be its conclusion: an
interesting confounding of expectations, even if those expectations were only
mine. At any rate, the concert left us in no doubt that both Irvine Arditti and
the quartet that bears his name will continue both to exceed and to confound
our expectations.
Tuesday 15 October 2013
Ax/LSO/Haitink - Mozart and Shostakovich, 15 October 2013
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.27
in B-flat major, KV 595
Shostakovich – Symphony no.15
in A major, op.141
No prizes for guessing which
conductor I immediately associate with the LSO and Mozart. Sir Colin Davis’s shoes are impossible to
fill in so many ways, but I was delighted, almost astonished, to hear the
orchestra on as excellent Mozartian form as I can recall. Not, of course, that
I doubt Bernard Haitink’s credentials in this repertoire, but even he would
cede to Sir Colin in my affections in this case – or at least he would have
done before this concert. The orchestra may have been small (ten first violins
down to four double basses), but there was nothing underpowered about its
performance. The opening of the first movement was crisp, with woodwind more
prominent, even adamant, than one might have expected; clearly Haitink was
determined that Mozart should not go excessively gentle into that good night.
It might be exaggerated to consider his reading revisionist, for if it were, it
was with the greatest subtlety, but it was in the best sense refreshing.
Moreover, this movement was definitely heard as an Allegro. Mozartian perfection, then? Alas, not quite. This is the
most unforgiving of all music; every slight imperfection tells and is
magnified, and so it was with Emanuel Ax’s performance. There was much to
admire. From the outset, his tone was clean, and his touch impressively
variegated. Even early on, though, there was some puzzling, ungainly phrasing –
repeated in the recapitulation, so it was no accident. During the development
section, it was the orchestra that providing most of the energy, and also most
of the sensuous pleasure, the woodwind, and particularly Emmanuel Laville’s
oboe, simply ravishing. Returning, as it were, to the recapitulation, Ax badly
smudged one run, but there was ample compensation to be had from the loving,
yet never indulged second subject from the orchestra, somewhat blithely tossed
away, alas, by the pianist. Mozart’s cadenza also had a degree of glibness to
it, if only by comparison with what we heard from the LSO. I longed for a
pianist such as Daniel Barenboim to probe beneath the surface – as, of course
orchestra and conductor did throughout.
Das Liebesverbot, Oper Leipzig, 13 October 2013
Brighella
– Reinhard Dorn
Pontio
Pilato – Martin PetzholdLuzio – Mark Adler
Claudio – Daniel Kirch
Antonio – Dan Karlström
Angelo – Jürgen Kurth
Danieli – Sejung Chang
Friedrich – Tuomas Pursio
Isabella – Lydia Easley
Mariana – Olena Tokar
Dorella
– Magdalena Hinterdobler
Aron
Stiehl (director)
Jürgen
Kirner (set designs)Sven Bindsell (costumes)
Christian Schatz (lighting)
Christian Geltinger (dramaturgy)
Das Liebesverbot, Wagner’s second completed opera, marked
an advance upon his first, Die Feen,
in one respect. It was performed in his lifetime – once, in Magdeburg, on 29
March 1836, in what Wagner, in Mein Leben,
would describe as a ‘totally muddled performance’, such that the ‘material ...
remained utterly obscure to the public’. For the second performance, there
appeared to be only three people in the stalls, ‘Frau Gottschalk with her husband
and a very conspicuous Polish Jew in full costume.’ Drama of a rather different
kind, however, ensued behind the stage:
There, Herr Pollert, the husband of my
leading lady (who was taking the part of Isabella), had run across the second
tenor, Schreiber, a very young and handsome man who was to sing my Claudio,
against whom the offended husband had long nursed a secret rancour born of
jealousy. ... My Cluadio took such a pasting ... that the unfortunate fellow had
to retreat into the dressing-room, his face bloodied. Isabella received news of
this, and plunged after her raging husband in desperation, only to be so
soundly cuffed by him that she went into a fit. The uproar among the ensemble
soon knew no bounds: people took sides, and it wouldn’t have taken much more to
produce a free-for-all, for it seemed that this unhappy evening offered
everyone a suitable occasion to pay off mutual grievances once and for all. It
was soon evident that the two who had been subjected to Herr Pollert’s ‘ban on
love’ were quite incapable of mounting the stage that day. The stage director
was sent before the curtain to advise the curiously select gathering in the
auditorium that ‘owing to unforeseen difficulties’ the performance of the opera
could not take place.
Without
a stronger overall directorial conception, though, a post-modern æsthetic, with
hippyish costumes for the apostles of free(-ish) love, older dress for the
forces of authority, something more ‘timeless’ for Isabella and her friend
Mariana in the convent, and so on, does not necessarily add up to the sum of
its parts, let alone something more than them. For Aron Stiehl, in his
direction of the work, sometimes seems more intent upon ironising it than
engaging with Wagner’s concerns; irony and Wagner are if not quite impossible partners
than bedfellows for whom comfort is of little concern. In what is, perhaps, in
musical terms the composer’s weakest completed opera, he probably needs a
little more help than this. Silly dances for the chorus send up rather than
probe Wagner’s not-entirely-successful attempt at Italianate levity. The score
itself insists that, whatever his would-be libertinism, he cannot let go of the
Germanic roots that had served him so well in Die Feen and would soon do so again. Such is, of course, at odds
with Wagner’s alleged dramatic concerns: Friedrich and German regulation are
very much the enemy. The concluding surprise, in which Friedrich re-emerges,
apparently to take command once again of the situation and meet the King, is an
interesting step, quite at odds with Wagner’s crowd-dispensed justice, in which
the viceroy is permitted by the crowd, far more clement than he, to lose himself
in the carnival celebration. It would, however, register more powerfully as a
questioning of the work – in any case, something of a difficult task, when
relatively few in the audience will know the opera – were it better prepared. It
jars – such, at any rate, was my experience in the theatre, as opposed to my post hoc attempt at explication – rather
than convinces dramatically. Still, Personenregie
is in itself accomplished; one gains a sense that the characters are doing what
they have been asked.
The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra offered a typically deep and burnished sound, though there were moments when ensemble was not as tight as one might have hoped for. Conductor Matthias Foremny may well, however, have been at fault in that respect, for his reading often seemed a little unsure whether to stress the Teutonic or the Italianate, not only falling been two stools, which, given Wagner’s score, might well be fair enough, even fruitful, but hesitant. The (relatively) well-known Overture, in which most of Wagner’s more memorable melodic ideas put in an appearance, was a case in point. It may be unfair to draw a comparison with Wolfgang Sawallisch’s excellent Munich recording (or indeed, his Philadelphia recording of the Overture alone), but the conviction required to harness disparate elements, to channel them into a more-or-less convincing sequence, if not quite an organic whole, was missing here. Foremny’s stopping and starting was to a certain extent overcome as the performance progressed; however, I could not help but wonder what might have come from a less Kapellmeister-ish account, such, for instance, as Ulf Schirmer had offered earlier in the year, for Leipzig’s splendid production of Die Feen.
Christiane Libor had played
Isabella on the first night; for this second-night performance, she was replaced by Lydia Easley. It seemed
to take a little while for Easley fully to get into her stride, and there were
a few questionable moments of intonation when it came to coloratura, but hers
was on the whole an impressive, convincing performance. Olena Tokar made a
fine impression as Mariana, the wronged, abandoned wife of Friedrich,
especially in a beautifully-sung account of her second-act aria. Daniel Kirch
and Mark Adler offered much to admire as Claudio and Luzio; it would be good to
hear more of them in later, more substantial Wagner roles. Reinhard Dorn’s
Brighella (the Sbirri chief) was stronger on comic action than vocal beauty,
but perhaps that was the point. He certainly contrasted well with the more
malevolent and indeed more complex Friedrich of Tuomas Pursio, whose stage
presence and vocal delivery exerted a fascination perhaps beyond the strict
merits of the score. Choral singing was of a high standard throughout,
especially so in the second act. We can safely assume, then, that, whatever
reservations might be voiced concerning the production, the Leipzig audience
had a far better opportunity to see and to hear something approaching Wagner’s conception,
however flawed, than the bewildered citizens of Magdeburg ever did, or Wagner
ever would.
Volodos/Gewandhaus/Chailly - Brahms, 13 October 2013
Neues Gewandhaus,
Leipzig
Symphony no.2 in D major,
op.73
Piano Concerto no.2 in B-flat
major, op.83
Players of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra just prior to the Saturday evening rehearsal for this concert |
Riccardo Chailly’s recent Decca recordings of the Brahms symphonies and assorted other orchestral works are being heavily promoted by symphony-and-concerto cycles – the concertos do not appear in the Decca set – first in Leipzig, and later in London, Paris, and Vienna. I cannot claim to have been a devotee of Chailly’s Beethoven, much though I love the sound of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and so, not having heard the Brahms recordings, approached this concert with some trepidation. Perhaps I should have recalled a Prom a good few years ago, in which Beethoven and Brahms were combined, for I had found the latter far more to my liking. At any rate, if the inevitable list of favourites from the past remains unchallenged, a problem almost as great for Brahms as for Beethoven, this concert offered rewards beyond the undoubted pleasure of this great orchestra’s ‘old German’ sound.
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