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| Image: © Monika Rittershaus |
Royal Festival Hall
Lachenmann – Tableau
Mahler – Symphony no.2 in C
minor, ‘Resurrection’
The British Press – well, a
section thereof – has gone into overdrive concerning the visit of Simon Rattle
and the Berlin Philharmonic to London, not least on account of Rattle’s recent
sixtieth birthday and his knowing, hugely welcome contribution to the
all-too-nascent debate over a new concert hall for London. The coverage neither
disturbs nor especially interests me; for me, there are many more interesting
cultural events than a cycle of Sibelius symphonies, but, by the same token, it
is not an entirely unpleasant change to see mention of Helmut Lachenmann in
place of Harriet Harman, her ‘pink bus’, and other such high political trivia. Yes,
of course journalistic quality has been at best mixed. A piece
in The Observer has its author, pretending to knowledge
of Berlin, place Daniel Barenboim at the helm of the Deutsche Oper, call Rattle’s
first wife ‘Elaine’, and bizarrely claim that Rattle recorded Sibelius’s ‘symphonies
… in Birmingham to a level no one has since achieved.’ Moreover, I initially wondered whether this
piece in the Daily Telegraph were an inept attempt at
parody, so numerous were its solecisms, so risibly unsubtle its laboured attempts
at name-dropping. What else would we
expect from our newspapers, post- or, to all intents and purposes, pre-Leveson?
However, for those of us who care about music rather than inaccurate tittle-tattle,
our principal concern should remain the state of Furtwängler’s old orchestra
under its outgoing – if not for a while – artistic director, something that has
received little attention beyond wearisome hagiography.
The good, indeed very good
news first: Rattle’s commitment to new music remains distinguished, likewise
his commitment to interesting, meaningful programming. The more one hears
Lachenmann’s music in conjunction with that of the great Austro-German
tradition, the more he appears not just as its undertaker, not even just as its
eulogist, but also as one of its ablest custodians. No more than his sometime æsthetic
antagonist, Hans Werner Henze, can he break entirely free of that tradition;
nor, one increasingly suspects, does he wish to. Rattle has previously paired
the 1988 Tableau with Kurtág’s Grabstein für Stephan and Beethoven’s
Ninth Symphony; here, we seemed to go beyond Lachenmann’s celebrated affinity
with Strauss’s Alpine Symphony to a
pairing with Mahler’s Second Symphony which, as a prospect, offered new vistas
that were metaphysical as well as physical. That said, my (perhaps fanciful)
identification of certain phrases with those in Strauss’s giant tone-poem
persisted in this excellent performance from Rattle and his Berlin forces. Hans
Zender’s Saarbrücken recording may sound more sharply focused at times, or that
may have been a matter of recording versus the Royal Festival Hall’s acoustic,
but there was no doubting the ‘sense’ of the piece conveyed.. Post-Messiaen(ic)
percussion thrilled. Stillness and resonance – not least Lachenmann’s
extraordinary sustained notes – thrillingly accomplished the work of a born dialectician
and musical dramatist, the work’s continuities as revelatory as
twinkling-of-an-eye shifts of perspective. The large orchestra – not as large
as Mahler’s or Strauss’s, but even so – showed Rattle not as someone who
miraculously brought new music to Berlin; we hear such nonsense too much, as if
Abbado, Karajan, Furtwängler, et al.,
had not done a great deal in that respect. (It was, of course, the latter who
conducted the first performance of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra with this very ensemble.) But it showed
him at his best, as a curator, to use the fashionable modern term, of orchestral
and compositional traditions that would die, were they not constantly
reinvigorated.
If the pairing promised much,
the performance of the Mahler symphony, long a Rattle ‘signature work’, alas
only rarely delivered. Perhaps that long familiarity was part of the problem;
Rattle nowadays often seems determined to highlight, to pull around, even to
distort, as if he has grown tired of letting works at least appear to speak for
themselves, for art to conceal art. The temptation to ‘do things’ must be all
the greater with an orchestra such as the Berlin Philharmonic. That said, much
of the first movement proceeded well enough, without both the (acoustical?)
pin-point precision of a 2010 performance I heard in Berlin’s Philharmonie, but also without the more
extreme distortions – at least until the close, when, sadly, any sense of
formal unity was casually thrown away. It seemed less a dialectical strategy
than a hint, or more, of ennui. Rubato
and other tempo fluctuations veered, here and in subsequent movements, between
the all-too-predictable – holding back the end of a phrase, then pushing
forward – to the unfathomable (‘because he and they can’?) The Ländler’s charms were likewise soon dissipated
by persistent lingering. That, despite some unearthly beauty in the woodwind
solos. The strings, disturbingly, had a tendency to sound unduly generic, to an
extent that even previous performances had not revealed. (Again, maybe the
acoustic was partly the villain, but I doubt that it can have been entirely
responsible.) The scherzo emerged more listless than sardonic, puzzling
distended pauses suggesting little more than perplexity – though whose: the
fishes’, St Anthony’s, or ours?
Urlicht, however, marked for me the low point. Magdalena
Kožená is an artist I have often greatly admired, and I am sure I shall do so
again, but her self-consciously ‘operatic’, even blowsy, delivery seemed
entirely out of place with Mahler’s (admittedly artful) simplicity. Rattle’s
direction of the orchestra seemed determined to divest Mahler’s score of its
magic, again of its wonder. Kožená, meanwhile, emoted and wildly exaggerated
her consonants. Perhaps that, though, was at Rattle’s insistence, since, in the
final movement, I noted similar exaggeration from the chorus, which, despite
Rattle’s pedantic, note-by-note direction, otherwise sang very well indeed. Such
insistence, if indeed insistence it were, had clearly not extended to Kate
Royal’s contribution, much of which may as well have been in Swahili. There
were, of course, moments during the finale when the orchestra sounded as
impressive, or almost as impressive, as it should, although even then, there
was a tendency to sound as if Rattle were turning up the audio volume. But all
in all, the sound, whatever its volume (and again, the acoustic almost certainly
did not help), rarely sounded grounded; where was the harmonic sense, either of
the moment or in the movement’s – and the symphony’s – great span? Daniel Harding’s recent Proms performance had been preferable in almost every way:
ideas of its (his) own, yet coming together as a whole that was far more than
the sum of its parts. For me, though clearly not for the greater part of the
audience, this was a disappointing performance, which edged frighteningly close, and not in a good way, toward incoherence.
