Royal Festival Hall
Gurrelieder
Waldemar – Robert Dean Smith
Tove – Camilla Tilling
Wood-dove – Michelle DeYoung
Peasant – David Soar
Klaus-Narr – Wolfgang
Ablinger-Sperrhacke
Speaker – Barbara Sukowa
Philharmonia Voices
Choirs of the Royal Academy of Music
Royal College of Music, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and Trinity Laban Conservatore of Music and Dance (chorus director: Aidan Oliver)
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)
Opportunities to hear, let
alone to conduct, Gurrelieder do not
come along very often. Simon Rattle must have had more of the latter than most.
What a way, then, for Esa-Pekka Salonen to approach his sixtieth birthday, with
a work he had conducted so successfully with this same orchestra, the
Philharmonia, in this same hall, not
far off a decade ago. (That performance was recorded, and released on
Signum Classics.)
The opening Prelude glistened,
lacking nothing in warmth or almost pointillistic potential. Salonen was no
more likely to wallow than Boulez might have done, and all the better for it.
Here one heard – almost saw – water and
ice. It flowed, ran, even stood with commendable flexibility, suggestive of a
tone poem (which, in a way, it is, even when words intervene). Particularly
intriguing was his orchestral balancing, subtle yet telling, highlighting yet
never exaggerating the music’s darker undercurrents: pitch, timbre, harmony.
The later Schoenberg is not so far away: one only has to listen. This was music
after Götterdämmerung as well as
after Tristan: unquestionably ‘after Wagner’, in
far more than the most obvious ways.
Alas, Robert Dean Smith’s
Waldemar often proved something of a trial. An older-sounding Waldemar is fine,
repeated uncertainty of pitch rather less so. For much of the first part in
particular, he was at best effortful, an especial pity when Salonen proved so
adept at balancing those tone-poem, even symphonic tendencies (Pelleas und Melisande often came to
mind) with the music’s roots in the song-cycle tradition. (Schoenberg’s first conception had been of a shorter
cycle for voice and piano. Zemlinsky would recall that the songs ‘were wonderfully beautiful and truly novel – however we
both had the impression that, on that account, they had little prospect of
winning a prize.’) There was no denying the through-composed nature of
Schoenberg’s writing, but nor is there, after all, in what we generally
consider the very first song-cycle, An
die ferne Geliebte. Fortunately, Camilla Tilling proved far more able than
Dean Smith not only to ride the orchestra but also to make something of the
words and phrases, although, to be fair, when foretelling his haunting, this Waldemar
proved more convincing. There was plenty elsewhere to ravish: not least the
combination of delicacy and splendour from Tilling and upper strings as Tove
bade her love join her in raising golden goblets, Tristan-like, albeit with a
decidedly æstheticist twist, to mighty, beautifying
death (dem mächtig verschönenden Tod).
It seemed telling and indeed touching, perhaps indicative of Salonen’s plans
for the Ring, that the chords
presaging and indeed furthering Tove’s departure from the stage echoed so
clearly in combination of harmony and timbre the magnificent, malevolent world
of Hagen.
Michelle DeYoung entered stage-right as if a figure from Klimt. (I
know it is far too obvious an association, but demeanour and dress were so
strongly suggestive that I shall indulge myself.) Jill Crowther’s English horn recalled
to us an alte – or perhaps better, an
ältere – Weise. Yet even before the Wood-dove sang, Schoenberg’s interlude
had proved a kaleidoscopic realm of love and terror, love as terror; she only
put it into words – but how! – what we (mostly) already knew. DeYoung offered a
song variegated dramatically as well as tonally, almost a little – well, not so
very little – cantata in its own right. Her richness of tone against the
darkness of harmony and orchestral colour both reminded us of Salonen’s and
Schoenberg’s presentiments at the opening, whilst leading us to a shattering
climax. Tod/death: after that, life
could only fade away – or could it?
The opening of the Second Part quite rightly sounded as if a
digest of what had gone before – only, as it would in one of Wagner’s
narrations, be it verbal, orchestral, or both, with difference of detail, of
standpoint, of import. Dean Smith proved more imploring than angry, but that
worked in its way. The aftermath of Waldemar’s outburst was shockingly
prolonged – in the best way – by Salonen. Monumental was the word for it.
Variegation again proved the key to the Wild Hunt. Neither here
nor elsewhere was there any absence of power to the outstanding massed choral
forces, but heft is not enough, nor did it have to be. Salonen ensured an array
of colour, even when Schoenberg apparently confronted him and us with blocks of
sound. The terror of the first ghostly cry, in reaction to, or perhaps
oblivious to, the handsomely dark bass-baritone observations of David Soar’s
Peasant, proved quite something: several leagues beyond anything to be heard or
even imagined in Der Freischütz. The
proper entry of the chorus sounded like nothing so much as Götterdämmerung on acid – which it essentially is. It was, however,
the aftermath that truly chilled. So much is in Schoenberg’s scoring here, yet
I do not think before now I had quite realised how much. Dean Smith at last recaptured
something of Tristan’s delirium, movingly so, as the orchestra seemed to engage
in act of self-dissolution – again, as much in timbre as in harmony, before reconstituting
itself for what was yet to come.
Wolfgang Ablinger-Sperrhacke’s
Klaus-Narr perhaps inevitably suggested
Mime: even his orchestral ‘introduction’ seemed to do so. This seemed,
however, a more ambiguous ‘character’ still, transformations in mood and/or
self-projection of mood disconcertingly yet, in their way, honestly quicksilver.
His reflections on – mocking of? – salvation rightly left one uneasy yet
wanting to know more. ‘Dann muss ich eingehn im Himmels Gnaden… Na, und dann
mag Gott sich selber gnaden.’ Sepulchral chorus and brass alike soon eerily set
against piccolos, set the stage, so it seemed, for another orchestral
rebirth, now very much an ensemble straining towards Pierrot lunaire. Nothing would ever be
the same again – and perhaps, just perhaps, such had been the work of this ‘fool’.
Step forward Barbara Sukowa, as
spellbinding as she had been for Salonen in 2009 – or indeed for Claudio Abbado
on his Vienna recording. This Speaker was delirious, yet delightful; or was
that our æstheticising something too close for comfort? Not only Pierrot, but a whole century’s worth of
music thereafter flashed before our ears. ‘Still! Was mag der Wind nur wollen?’
Did these hallucinations, if that be what they were, speak of a bad or a good
trip? Schoenberg, as so often, resisted the either/or. Violin and clarinet acknowledged
Wagner once again, now the Siegfried-Idyll,
paving the way to Schoenberg’s final, glorious, yet ultimately never quite
convincing paean to the sun(god). We revelled in that final chorus, yet,
whether or not we wished to do so, could never quite shake off those
intimations of the ‘air of another planet’. The future was both upon us and
not. Schoenberg’s time had come.
