RSB/Brabbins - Mendelssohn and Stravinsky, 16 March 2024

Konzerthaus

Mendelssohn: Symphony no.4 in A major, op.90, ‘Italian’
Mendelssohn: Hymne, op.96
Stravinsky: Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Stravinsky: Symphony of Psalms

Denis Uzun (mezzo-soprano)

Berlin Radio Chorus (chorus director: Philipp Ahmann)

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Mendelssohn and Stravinsky might not seem the most obvious bedfellows, but this Berlin Radio Symphony (RSB) concert, originally planned with Andrew Davis but conducted by Martyn Brabbins, offered pause for thought as well as enjoyment. Both composers had fraught relationships either with Wagner or his music—and, by extension, with that strain of musical Romanticism. (Even Liszt, that most generous spirited of composers, could refer dismissively to the ‘opposition’ as ‘leipzigerisch’.) The nature of their (neo)classicism is far from the same, but it offers an interesting perspective, even when the music performed is not so markedly in that mould. One could certainly spill a good deal of ink in discussing the relationship of the two Stravinsky works here to ideas and practice of neoclassicism. That, you will doubtless be relieved to know, must await another day, but such initial thoughts offered a frame through which to hear the works concerned. 

The RSB played Mendlessohn’s Italian Symphony with irresistible élan, string sheen and sunny woodwind a delight throughout. Brabbins was surely on the fast side for ‘Allegretto vivace’, but many conductors are.  Throughout, he imparted a proper sense of development to Mendelssohn’s writing, nowhere more so than in the featherlight counterpoint of the development section proper, though that certainly continued in the recapitulation. There was Abruzzo-like heat too in a reading full of colour and incident, aptly foreshadowing the processional of the second movement, which similarly benefited from transparent textures and a keen sense of direction. A graceful minuet, replete with trio that went properly beyond it in more than one direction, led to a saltarello both disciplined and wild, its contagion as impressive as its chiaroscuro. 

The op.96 Hymne, ‘Three Spiritual Songs’ (as they are known in the version with organ) plus a concluding ‘Fuga’, received a winning performance, mezzo Deniz Uzun and the Berlin Radio Chorus joining Brabbins and the orchestra. Telling detail could be heard without exaggeration, variety in scoring (the opening of the second, an especially lovely ‘hymn’, setting solo voice against woodwind consort) registering in every case. A lively third, with growing sense of jubilation, revealed once again what a fine chorus this is: ideal in weight, balance, and clarity. Much the same could be said of the concluding fugue. 

Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments sounded as seductive and rebarbative as ever, a perfect objet trouvé that find itself somehow chiselled to still further perfection. Apparently ossified lines suggestive of The Rite of Spring were imbued with radically new life, the performance as a whole splendidly alive: a liturgy in itself, to which we were permitted audience if not participation. If Boulez was an ideal interpreter (celebrant?) of this hieratic music, I could not help but think Stockhausen must have loved it too. At any rate, it made for a splendid introit to the Symphony of Psalms, whose similar strangeness registered visually in orchestral layout (famously, no violins and violas, nor clarinets) before a note had been heard. 

It proved another labyrinth, as full of incident in its way, above all in the first movement, as Mendelssohn’s Symphony. Glorious choral sound was well complemented by the orchestra; if there were occasions when the two threatened to go their separate ways, it never quite happened. More to the point, the inscrutability of Stravinsky’s musical devices – utterly characteristic ostinato in the first movement, the double fugue of the second – proved once again to pass all ‘expressive’ understanding, the composer’s ever-surprising ear made musically manifest. What a strange ‘response’ to the text Stravinsky offers in the words from Psalm 150 in the third movement. He would doubtless have said he was not responding at all, but simply setting them. That can readily become play with words, for ‘expression’ here, if hardly Romantic, was no less powerful for being what it was: quite the contrary. Brabbins took the opening daringly slow, providing all the greater contrast with what was to come. Music seeming at times to circle the worlds of the Symphony in Three Movements and even the Circus Polka never seemed remotely incongruous; roots and essence led to a hypnotic, even sanctified close.

Eugene Onegin, Komische Oper, 15 December 2023

Schillertheater

Eugene Onegin – Günter Papendell
Tatiana – Ruzan Mantashyan
Olga – Deniz Uzun
Lensky – Gerard Schneider
Mme Larina – Stefanie Schaefer
Prince Gremin – Tijl Faveyts
Filipievna – Margarita Nekrasova
M. Triquet – Christoph Späth
Zaretsky – Ferhat Baday
Captain – Jan-Frank Süße
Guillot – Alexander Kohl

Barrie Kosky (director)
Werner Sauer (revival director)
Rebecca Ringst (set designs)
Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Simon Berger (dramaturgy)
Franck Evin (lighting)

Orchestra and Chorus (chorus director: David Cavelius) of the Komische Oper

James Gaffigan (conductor)

Images: Iko Freese / drama-berlin.de

I first saw Barrie Kosky’s Eugene Onegin, premiered in 2016, in 2019, a few months before the theatres closed. Then it was at the Komische Oper’s permanent home on Behrenstraße. Now, the building having closed for several years for renovation, this latest revival may be seen across town in Charlottenburg’s Schillertheater, conducted by the company’s new music director James Gaffigan. The cast is a mix of old and new, Günter Papendell, Stefanie Schaefer, Tijl Faveyts, and Margarita Nekrasova survivors from 2019, the rest new (at least to me). 

Memory, though, is a strange thing; or rather, ‘memories’ are, since even one’s own will come into conflict with one another. Although I remembered liking what I saw, what I saw on this occasion did not always correspond to my recollections, which may indeed have been of other productions, real or imagined. Much the same might be said of what unfolds here (in many dramas, no doubt, yet it seems or seemed more than usually germane here). For there are certainly misunderstandings, missed opportunities, ‘bad timing’, and the rest in the relationships, not only Onegin and Tatiana’s, of Eugene Onegin. That of Tatiana and Prince Gremin may be an exception; yet if so, it is dependent on the failures of another. It is, in any case, hardly the central relationship; it serves as a contrast to what might have been, an antidote of reality to fantasy. Kosky’s setting the entire action in the same place, with one partial exception, brings with it some loss, not least in the inevitably lesser contrast between public and private, whose portrayal therefore becomes still more a matter for the orchestra. Yet its dramaturgical function here also brings with it considerable gain, anchoring character’s differing understandings, memories, and decisions in Rebecca Ringst’s almost pastoral, outdoor setting that yet takes in threatening woods behind. (It is not as if the libretto suddenly vanishes when all stage directions are not adhered to literally.) Although real enough – it is not abstract – it imparts something of a dream-like quality, in which not only memories but, at least as important, objects bind everything together.

 

Jam and jam-jars, for instance: when the opera opens, Mme Larina and the nurse Filipievna are making jam, readily eaten by Tatiana and Olga. When Tatiana sends her letter to Onegin, it is inside a jar sent as a gift. And so on, until the close, when it is there in what seems to be the same place: where it all (tragically?) began. There is something would-be bacchanalian to the ball scene, when it takes place outdoors. This, one feels, is as far away from civilisation as these characters, this society, dare travel. And, of course, it leads to the frozen, pointless misery of the duel scene. Onegin, moreover, does not face the decentring he sometimes can. There is plenty of and for Tatiana too, but we feel – and, I think, have suggested to us – more of his miserable wandering, his downward spiral than usual. Helplessly drunk when he arrives for the duel, he shows that it is already too late for him, let alone for Lensky. His early stiffness is probably a self-defence mechanism; at any rate, we feel its relationship to what is to come. All the while, subtle transformations in Franck Evin’s lighting aid the transformations, both gradual and sudden, in the drama itself. And when a room in Gremin’s palace appears, for the first St Petersburg scene, Onegin by now a sad, destroyed outsider, it is only to be dismantled onstage shortly after, in preparation for the ’return’ to a past which may or may not have ‘actually’ existed for the final scene.

 

Kosky’s conception remains the guiding one. The Komische Oper’s new music director, James Gaffigan, conducting his first production in the role, would appear to have been presented with certain challenges, not least among them caesuras when all stops, hearts included, all falls silent. On this, the first night of Werner Sauer’s revival, Gaffigan integrated these and other ‘givens’ to excellent effect. His reading, like Kosky’s, seemed to gain pace and depth as the evening progressed, the orchestra responding with eagerness to the vision with which it was presented. Almost chamber-like in scale to begin with, its Petersburg grandeur was undeniable, both in itself and in contrast. Choral contributions were likewise as well acted (and blocked) as sung.

 

Papendell’s Onegin follows and, to an extent, leads that trajectory too. It was a compelling portrayal in 2019 and is in 2023, his brokenness in the third act deeply moving. Ruzan Mantashyan travelled on a different, related journey as Tatiana, convincingly the shy, bookish girl at the outset, very much a woman at the close, albeit one struggling to keep herself in one piece. This she accomplished through musical and gestural means alike—as well as fine costuming (Klaus Bruns) and make-up. If I sometimes wished Gerard Schneider would adopt a less Verdian approach as Lensky, his was an undoubtedly committed performance, greatly superior to what I had heard from another singer four years ago. Deniz Uzun’s extravert Olga was a joy—and a telling contrast with her more complicated sister. Faveyts and Nekrasova at least matched memories of their excellent portrayals last time around: not a bad summary of the evening as a whole. The company may be on the move physically, but not aesthetically, whether that be in direction or quality.