Royal Albert Hall
Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin, op.24: Polonaise
Tchaikovsky: Violin Concerto in D major, op.35
David Robert Coleman: Looking for Palestine (2017-18)
Scriabin: The Poem of Ecstasy, op.54
Elsa Dreisig (soprano)
Lisa Batiashvili (violin)
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)
Can music lie? Conversely, can it
tell the truth? Are those meaningless questions, confusions of category? Most
of us, I think, would agree that music can mislead and that it can also lay
claim to truth content. It was certainly a relief to spend a couple of hours
away from the lies that infest our political and ‘media’ life, to experience
the truthfulness of great musicianship.
A late addition to the printed programme
was the Polonaise from Eugene Onegin.
It made for just as splendid an overture as it might have done an encore.
Daniel Barenboim has a splendid
history with this opera and with Tchaikovsky more generally. With his
West-Eastern Divan Orchestra too I heard perhaps the best live performance I
have yet to experience of the Sixth
Symphony. Moreover, the first time I heard the orchestra live, at the LRB’s
Edward Said Memorial Concert in 2004, the Fifth was on the programme. Here
heard – almost saw – the swagger of St Petersburg: for once with an unashamedly
large, generous orchestra. There was seductive intimacy too: those stolen
glances, aural and almost visual, telling us much. And those cellos…
The Violin Concerto took off,
so it seemed, from where the Polonaise had left us: stylistically, even developmentally,
there was much in common, yet also of course much to distinguish. Barenboim
provided an almost Beethovenian sense of purpose to take us up to Lisa Batiashvili’s
entry. Her tone struck me throughout as akin to a fine red Burgundy: rich yet
never too full-bodied, cultivated, always hitting the spot – and the dead
centre of the notes, single – or double-stopped, without so much as a hint of
the clinical. Rubato was perfectly judged as a tool of expression, as were
Barenboim’s variations of tempo. The cadenza might have been written, as well
as performed, ‘in real time’, such was the sense, however illusory, of
spontaneity. Freshness of woodwind solos was just as striking, each and every
one of them revealing a star in the best, collegiate sense. Likewise in the Canzonetta,
in which Batiashvili’s duetting with them proved the magical highlight of
highlights, and the finale. Even in a performance such as this, I cannot say
that Tchaikovsky’s invention, or lack thereof, quite convinces. There is surely
a good deal of note-spinning. It came closer than I can recall, though, and
this was exquisite spinning of notes, with all the character of a great finale.
David Robert Coleman’s Looking for Palestine sets passages from
Najla Said’s – that is Edward’s daughter’s – one-woman play Palestine. First she bears witness to
the vicious Israeli onslaught upon Lebanon in 2006 – vigorously supported, you
may remember, by Tony Blair and New Labour. ‘You can spend your life being a
humanist, a pacifist … treating them the same way you wish to be treated BUT
when you are being attacked, when bombs are falling … your life is in danger
and you are scared, it is so easy to look up at the sky and scream at the top
of your lungs’. Later, in New York City, she discovers a group protesting for
Palestinian rights – her rights – without being able to contribute: ‘ME, I am
this Palestinian walking by them all with my mouth slightly open, because I
want to do, say, give, something, SOMETHING, and I’m thinking how I can’t, and
shouldn’t at that what WOULD I do, say? And I’m thinking that words are so
powerful, Palestine … Palestine … that word … that word … that word …’
Words are indeed powerful, as
is music; so too is their combination. Here, the oud sets up the musical
setting – and, in a sense, the words to come too. Its intervals, in the solo
introduction, seem generative, leading to more non-verbal speech – or is it? is
that to render things too easy, to sentimentalise? – from the fine WEDO brass
section. As well as the oud, piano, harps, percussion seem to incite the rest
of the orchestra – perhaps to look for Palestine too. The soprano’s introduction
in turn – ‘And though I have never returned to Palestine, Palestine always
returns to me. Tuesday, July eleventh, I am in Beirut.’ – incites both action
and remembrance. (Remembrance, we may reflect, is sometimes all we have, for
better or worse.) Coleman’s setting here, Elsa Dreisig complemented, perhaps
even questioned by, electronics, came closer to Nono than anything I had yet
heard Barenboim conduct. It would be quite a thing were he to take up those
particular cudgels now from his erstwhile friend and colleague, Claudio Abbado.
Like Nono, Coleman, in the three short ‘scenes’ that follow, evinces a keen
sense of that ineffable thing we call ‘vocal style’. It may or may not
correspond to anything we have heard before; yet, even if we cannot explain it,
we know it – at least in a fine performance, which this certainly seemed to be.
There was, perhaps, also a sense of post-Bergian writing for voice and
orchestra – certainly harmony – as the first scene went on. Amplified speech at
the opening of the second came across as reimagined recitative. Was there a bit
of the easy film score towards its close? Perhaps, but one might well argue
that the words suggest such an approach.
An amplified ‘stage whisper’, in
the introduction to the third scene – ‘I think’ – called into question even the
identity Said/Dreisig had established for herself, post 9/11, as an ‘Arab
bridging the gap between two worlds that don’t understand each other’. Ligetian
scurrying and swarming, a whip that – if only to me – evoked Alberich in
Nibelheim, traffic whistles: all this and more went to suggest the aural urban
landscape of Manhattan, even what Nono would have called his ‘provocation’. Was
the final, vaguely ‘Arabic’ vocal line a sign or an indictment of Orientalism?
That such a question, clearly presented, was left hanging was perhaps the most
telling aspect of all.
Finally, at least on the
programme, came Scriabin’s Poem of
Ecstasy. Barenboim and his orchestra proved once again very much in their
element. Work and performance opened somewhere between Wagner and Debussy, and
immediately headed somewhere beyond them – whatever one thinks of that
particular ‘beyond’. Yes, I thought, he ‘gets’ Scriabin. An urgent, undeniably
hot-house performance, founded on rhythmic progression and above all on the
progression of harmonic rhythm, seemed in just the right sense to ‘go with the
flow’, or better, to ride the crest of these strange, even gaudy aural waves.
Until languor set in, that is, and how, Michael Barenboim’s sweet toned violin solos
very much the icing on that particular cake. Overloading with metaphors seems
inevitable here, even in stylistic keeping. Immediacy of colour, initial Tannhäuser-like frustration of climax,
trumpets and brass more general with old-fashioned ‘Russian’ vibrato, all led
us up to a series of final climaxes which may or may not be ludicrous – but which
are surely what Scriabin ‘meant’.
After that, the unforced
nobility of a generous ‘Nimrod’ spoke more clearly and, yes, more truthfully
than any words could. Now it was over to us, but would Elgar’s countrymen
listen?
