Royal Albert Hall
Widmann – Con brio (revised version)
Liszt – Piano Concerto no.1 in
E-flat majorWagner – Tannhäuser: Overture
Götterdämmerung: ‘Dawn’ and ‘Siegfried’s Rhine Journey’
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg: Prelude to Act One
Martha Argerich (piano)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
For once, my precautions paid
off. Having – extravagantly, insanely, whatever you wish to call it – booked to
hear this concert both in Salzburg and at the Proms, I managed to hear Martha
Argerich once. Having cancelled the previous week’s concert, Martha Argerich no
longer had to call upon the services of Daniel Barenboim as substitute pianist.
Barenboim had given, under the circumstances, a fine account of Mozart’s final
piano concerto, but this performance of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto was in
another league. And I think that, if comparisons must be drawn – I have not
looked again at my
earlier review before writing this – that the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
was on even better form in the Wagner extracts too.
I relished the opportunity to
hear Jörg Widmann’s Con brio for a
second time in such close succession. Its performance certainly sounded every
bit as incisive as in Salzburg, the quality of ‘cinematic cuts’, if anything,
still more apparent. Barenboim played new music, as his wont, as repertoire
music, and it benefited greatly from the lack of ghettoisation. Once again, the
West-Eastern Divan’s percussionist proved mesmerising. We heard here a
post-expresisonist soundscape, on which Beethovenian fragments – not quite
ruins – were eerily and yet wittily displayed, or viewed, even set in motion.
Beethoven seemed still more expertly misremembered; we think we recognise what
we hear, but we do not actually. Interestingly, with Liszt to come, the piece
and its progress seemed more akin to a symphonic poem than an overture.
The Liszt Concerto’s orchestral
opening was forthright, Argerich’s piano response quite simply defying any
reasonable – and perhaps unreasonable – expectations. I was quite taken aback, as
I have been before when hearing her play a piano concerto, by the way she
manages to cut through an orchestra; I really do not know how she does it,
especially with an acoustic such as the Royal Albert Hall’s. There were depth
and clarity to rival Sviatoslav Richter on his legendary recording with the LSO
and Kyrill Kondrashin. And how she then yielded, much as one might imagine
Liszt having done so himself. (Just imagine that world premiere, with Berlioz
conducting Liszt’s own orchestra in Weimar!) Barenboim supplied, supported
motivic integrity to remind us how rightful an heir to Beethoven Liszt is, and
there was Wagnerian flexibility from both conductor and soloist. We were
reminded – not that any Lisztian would ever forget – how much of his orchestral
writing is chamber music too, not least by the superlative clarinet solo
against Argerich’s ever-sensitive piano. The slow movement brought nobility and
depth – again echoes of Beethoven – from the opening string utterances onwards.
(I could not help but think there of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto.) Argerich’s
piano soliloquising might have come from one of Liszt’s own solo works; the
example of the Années de pèlerinage
loomed large, and there were even hints of the Piano Sonata. The triangle-led
transition brought us scherzo skittishness from all concerned, the orchestra
notably sardonic, the piano increasingly moving towards something more
devilish, Totentanz-like. The depth
of Liszt’s musical argument was never in doubt as we moved into the finale,
brimming full of musico-theatrical excitement, all courtesy of the composer’s
transformative genius.
As an encore, we were treated
to an intimate duet performance of Schubert’s A major Rondo, D.951. This is not
public music; instead, we felt as if we were eavesdropping on some exalted
music-making en famille. The length
of the piece – which can readily seem repetitive to the listener, as opposed to
the performer – was on this occasion, in Schumann’s all-too-oft-repeated
description, ‘heavenly’ indeed. And Barenboim had practised.
It was, then, again, to Wagner,
Liszt’s musical comrade-in-arms, that we moved for the second half. I recalled
the woodiness of the opening wind from the earlier performance of the Tannhäuser Overture. Strings replied,
initially sounding, as if continuing from Liszt’s example, like an enlarged
chamber group, gradually swelling to become fully, undoubtedly orchestral.
Barenboim’s shaping of this and the subsequent pieces was as expert as ever; he
knew exactly how to provide impetus, how to communicate Wagner’s melos. One could, in this context,
especially in the music of Venus, hear the seductive languor that so attracted
Liszt. The frustrations of attempted climax were frankly sexual; how could they
not be? The final peroration glowed and, prefiguring Götterdämmerung, burned.
Dawn from that opera’s Prologue
(or rather the period just before Dawn) had lugubrious mystery, which yet
remained admirably clear. Muddiness is the last thing this music requires, as
Barenboim’s revered Boulez would always have argued – and more, to the point,
shown us. There was glorious string tone in the approach to the climax,
responded to just as gloriously by the WEDO brass. An excellent horn solo
(taken from the organ) led us to Siegfried’s Rhine Journey. It was graceful and monumental, full of incident, yet
sure of purpose. Gibichung malevolence began to draw us in, before another
brutal close to the first act. The Funeral March’s opening sounded still
darker, still graver than before, prior to the memorial grandeur that so
impressed Thomas Mann, the Volsung genealogy leading us through ‘an overwhelming celebration of memory and
mind, from ‘the longing questions of the boy [Siegfried] about his mother’ to ‘earth-shakings
and thunderings, with the body borne high on its bier’. In Barenboim’s
hands, the music developed from what had gone before, and continued to develop,
before once again descending into potentially nihilistic darkness.
Finally, at least so far as the published programme was concerned, we heard the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger. I think it may have been taken, initially, at a brisker tempo than in Salzburg; it certainly felt that way. At any rate, it relaxed considerably, when appropriate, without damage to an underlying pulse. Tempo variation was, as Wagner demanded, never arbitrary, always meaningful. And here it was often considerable, Barenboim at his most Furtwänglerian. There was nevertheless Mendelssohnian lightness – what delightful woodwind playing! – to be heard in the development, and a general ease to the despatch of the composer’s virtuosic, anything-but-textbook counterpoint. The encores were as in Salzburg; first a darkly noble, later blossoming, Prelude to Act III of the same opera, then a swashbuckling Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin, with a strikingly courtly central section. Magnificent!
