Royal Festival Hall
Andris
Dzenītis: Māra (United Kingdom premiere)
Tchaikovsky:
The
Queen of Spades, op.68: ‘I
am worn out with grief’
Tchaikovsky:
Eugene
Onegin, op.24: Polonaise
and Letter Scene
Mahler:
Symphony no.1 in D major
Kristine Opolais (soprano)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Andris Nelsons (conductor)
After the relative
disappointment of the first of these two Leipzig Gewandhaus concerts, that
disappointment relating to Andris Nelsons’s conducting rather than the
orchestra itself, there came a second chance. I wish I could say that I had
responded more warmly. There were, as before, sections of the concert to which
I could – and did. However, Nelsons’s Mahler ultimately proved no more
convincing than it had before, the final movement of the First Symphony as
vulgar and uncomprehending a display as I have heard for a long time. An audience
that once again seemed to value excellence of orchestral execution and sheer
volume of sound rather than formal, interpretative coherence clearly felt
otherwise. Again I thought of Beecham: ‘the English may not like music, but
they absolutely love the noise it makes’. Perhaps Nelsons qualifies as an
Englishman too, at least when it comes to Mahler.
His taste in new music seems
odd too. Try as I might, I could not make anything much of Andris Dzenītis’s Māra – although, as ever, with a new
work, that may well just have been my fault. Its first performance had been
given by the same forces in Leipzig five days earlier; this performance
certainly sounded committed and incisive. The title apparently refers to a
notion of divine omnipotence: according to the programme note, ‘the
entire physical, visible, audible and tangible world, the materialisation of
all spiritual power’. Dzenītis can certainly write for an orchestra in a ‘traditional’,
more or less Franco-Russian way: the quarter of an hour or so piece proved ‘colourful’,
‘ritualistic’, ‘pictorial’, ‘dramatic’, and so on, in predictable, generic
fashion. Certain passages grabbed the attention: repeated pitches redolent of
Morse Code, repeated figures that briefly offered something intriguingly hypnotic.
What it all added up to, though, I could not say. ‘Eclectic’ would be one way
of putting it, so too ‘at least twice as long as it need have been’. A solo
bass clarinet solo at the close may or may not have held some programmatic
meaning. According to the note, the piece allowed ‘runes to become visible in
the score’. Perhaps they were audible too; I am afraid I have no idea.
Tchaikovsky made much more sense
to me, Kristine Opolais on superlative form. In Liza’s third-act arioso from The Queen of Spades and the Letter Scene
from Eugene Onegin, she truly brought
to life her characters, without context, scenery, or titles. One knew and felt
what Liza and Tatiana meant, what their plight was – and could have taken
dictation, verbal or musical, from her. Hers were fully gestural performances too,
very much those of a classic singing actress. The Gewandhaus Orchestra ‘spoke’
splendidly too: this, after all, is an orchestra that plays for the Leipzig
Opera as well as the concert hall (and the Thomaskirche). If only Nelsons
and/or Opolais had not indulged in quite so extreme gear changes towards the
end of the Letter Scene, and if only he had not driven the Polonaise so hard,
these would have been ideal performances. No one, however, would have been
seriously disappointed.
The first movement of the
Mahler symphony opened with great promise: opening string harmonics (and their
later repetition) spot on, without sounding clinical, woodwind full of colour
and character, offstage brass as well balanced as I can recall. There was first-rate
audience bronchial interjection too, for which many thanks. Later on, an
overall freshness of spirit was apt, winning, invigorating. Antiphonally placed
first and second violins worked a magic that was little short of revelatory,
whilst the tender tone of the Leipzig horn consort was simply to die for. Soon,
however, Nelsons began to mould the music excessively, leaving one longing for
the ideal of a Kubelík. (Few are the occasions when that conductor proves
anything but ideal!) Climaxes grew more and more brash, in quite un-Mahlerian
fashion, once again suggestive of a conductor more at home with Shostakovich.
Formal coherence had soon gone quite out of the window too.
The Ländler likewise opened well: as vigorous, as earthy as I have
heard, the Leipzig strings digging deep indeed. As it progressed, however, it
seemed too determined by rhythm, too little by harmony: this should not be a
zero-sum game. There was alienation in the Trio, if not quite enough, the
material often sounding oddly close to Bruckner. Irony does not seem Nelsons’s
strong suit. Nor was it so in the third movement, its weird echoes of
Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
apparently in spite of the conductor rather than on his account. There was no
gainsaying, however, the excellence of the Gewandhaus Orchestra’s soloists
here. It was a pity that Nelsons pulled around the Klezmer and other contrasting material so wildly; soon it made no
sense at all, a mere succession of moments. One could hardly have wanted a
louder, more emphatic opening to the finale; many of us indeed might have
wished for something less ear-splitting. Such, however, was to be the order of
the day, with extreme contrast that had the audience ‘excited’ in its seats. I
felt merely bludgeoned. Had there been something in the way of formal coherence,
it would not have been quite so bad; in its absence, this glorious movement
felt interminable. Bizarre tempo changes added further frustration. What a
waste of a great orchestra.
