Philharmonie
Missa solemnis in D major, op.123
Camilla Nylund (soprano)
Anna Kissjudit (mezzo-soprano)
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| Image: © Peter Adamik |
Thirty years since the release of his recording of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim was due to return to the work, conducting it for the first time with the Staatskapelle Berlin. Alas, that was not to be, yet the first performances the orchestras has given since 1962, at the Staatsoper under Franz Konwitschny – the only others since the Second World War in 1952 and 1947, at the Admiralspalast – went ahead. French ‘early music’ conductor Jérémie Rhorer seemed a strange replacement for Barenboim, but there was probably not a multitude of candidates available. Few conductors approach it regularly; many never do. Wilhelm Furtwängler famously declined to conduct it in later years, considering himself unable to do justice to what he continued to believe to be Beethoven’s greatest work. (Many of us, with a gun to our heads, would agree.) It was also a very strange choice for Good Friday, though perhaps that was not foremost in the minds of those assembling the programme. Rhorer’s approach and, more seriously, his command of these distinguished forces proved of variable success. There were nonetheless (aural) glimpses, sometimes more than that, of what this extraordinary work might in the right hands still be.
The Kyrie, like much of the work, was taken swiftly. It sounded almost cheerful, at times as if a setting of a different text by a lesser pupil of Haydn. At least the ‘Christe’ section suggested a little more strain, more effort, more difficulty, the four soloists richly expressive on their own, somewhat operatic, terms—which did not seem always to be the same as Rhorer’s. Balances were at times awry. The lead in to the second ‘Kyrie’, though, went both smoothly and inevitably. Rhorer was certainly not without appreciation of the work’s dynamism, even if that sometimes meant scaling it down to something more digestible, rather than scaling it up to antinomies reconciled, if at all, only at the level of the Divinity. And therein, perhaps, lay the greatest problem. What did this mean? What was Beethoven attempting to achieve? Did he do so? Much was too prettified, all too readily reconciled.
There was, to be fair, creditable, even ecstatic hyperbole to the opening of the Gloria, from both chorus and orchestra. However, Rhorer’s concern for fluency, not in itself of course a bad thing, again continued to smooth over rather than to expose the implacable. Motivic integrity was (often) present, yet a sense of struggle was only intermittent. The timpani roll (Dominic Oelze) announcing the ‘Quoniam’ was really quite something, as indeed was Oelze’s playing throughout that section. And the sheer strangeness of some of Beethoven’s harmonies, allied to their scoring, told here too. Alas, the race to the finish was only successful in parts. There was again some sense of the cumulative, but majesty was more or less entirely lacking, and balances in the setting of ‘Amen’ were all over the place.
The Credo was likewise more successful when Rhorer gave it space to announce its strangeness. Transparency allowed hearing of often neglected details: a crucial double bass line, for instance, as well as more general counterpoint. Much seemed rushed, though: a great pity when Saimir Pighu announced ‘Et homo factus est’. Again, what did this mean? Should it not be (almost) everything? It certainly did not sound like it. The ascent of Christ into Heaven (‘et ascendit in caelum’) thrilled, though it was peculiar, even unnerving, to hear it on Good Friday. Moreover, necessary strain on the chorus’s soprano voices could be heard towards the close. Beethoven’s writing is cruel, and should sound so. That it did not add up to much more than the sum of its variable parts was, I am afraid to say, Rhorer’s fault, and his alone.
The Staatskapelle players offered playing of beautiful gravity to the opening of the Sanctus, ‘as if’ chamber music—and all the better for such intimacy. When solo voices joined, the impression was enhanced rather than effaced. Contrast with all the company of Heaven on ‘Pleni sunt coeli’ was one of the most successful, indeed moving, moments in the entire performance. Vibrato-less archaism, somewhere between an old viol consort reimagined and orchestration of an organist’s liturgical ‘preluding’, prefaced the ‘Benedictus’, which at times approached the Beethovenian sublime – Wolfgang Brandl’s solo violin could not be faulted – and was at least not harried; yet much was too readily tamed, even domesticated.
A different, yet allied, sort of gravity possessed the first section of the Agnus Dei. Its sadness, first reinforced by René Pape’s bass solo, then by other soloists, Martin Wright’s outstanding chorus shadowing them, permitted a fine unfolding. Ultimately, though, it remained a bit too ‘normal’, as battlefield sounds came and went, pictorial, perhaps even ‘interesting’, yet little more. It was well shaped, yet all the time I longed for some sense that everything, even something, was at stake. One does not hear the Missa solemnis often; nor, probably, should one. For me, just one live performance, from Colin Davis at the Proms in 2011, has aspired to and, for the most part, realised the work’s greatness: of ambition, of humility, of awe, of humanity, and of much else. Whether I shall hear another such performance remains to be seen.
