Osborne/LPO/Gardner - Coleridge-Taylor, Tippett, and Elgar, 25 January 2023

Royal Festival Hall

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Solemn Prelude (London premiere)
Tippett: Piano Concerto
Elgar: Symphony no.1 in A-flat major, op.55

Steven Osborne (piano)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)

Image: London Philharmonic Orchestra

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s B minor Solemn Prelude was written, at Elgar’s recommendation, for the Three Choirs Festival in 1899. It then went unperformed until a revival, likewise at Worcester Cathedral, for the same festival in 2021. It has now finally reached London, Coleridge-Taylor’s own city, in a fine performance from the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Edward Gardner. Its opening, in melody, harmony, scoring, and indeed the LPO’s performance sounded rather Tchaikovskian: surely a case of influence, though at the same time not to be reduced to that. Indeed, it was Russian symphonism more generally that came to my mind, Borodin too, than say the ‘solemnity’ of Wagner or Bruckner, one progression’s passing resemblance to Parsifal notwithstanding. It certainly qualifies as solemn, though, albeit in an amiable sort of way: a thoroughly professional piece of writing, that merits performance, especially with string sheen and generally rounded orchestral tone such as was heard here. 

Michael Tippett’s Piano Concerto followed: a welcome outing for a piece rarely heard, yet likewise worthy of revival. Gardner, the LPO, and soloist Steven Osborne took us immediately to an imaginary landscape, in an imaginary (quasi-dramatic) context. Its first movement sounded very much as if a scene from an opera without words, yet not necessarily without action. The Midsummer Marriage naturally came to mind, but it was a world of its own we heard, inviting and full of fantasy. The piano part is anything but easy, yet rarely if ever showy; this is not the conventional (post-)Romantic battle of piano against orchestra, and did not sound that way. One delighted instead in the scene painted, almost as much by woodwind and celesta as by the undeniably brilliant soloist, celesta and piano almost equals in the cadenza. The slow movement was equally well-shaped, playing out in a related yet different world, as if a scene that followed. It was darker, a notturno given with an apt air of mystery, even ritual. Bearing in mind Tippett’s inspiration for the work as a whole, Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto (which he heard Walter Gieseking rehearse), it was difficult not to think of Tovey’s evocation of Orpheus taming the Furies. The finale meanders at times, perhaps, but I doubt anyone minded much. It was sharp, bright, ultimately decisive—and it danced. 

The onward tread to the opening to Elgar’s First Symphony, hesitant then sure(r), ever imbued with ineffably Elgarian sadness and nobility, can be traced in many ways. Gardner’s way convinced, as did the response to it. A degree of Brahmsian sentiment could be perceived through a related yet different orchestral kaleidoscope; crucially, sentiment was never confused with sentimentality. Passages of hushed inwardness, especially in this first movement, combined with wounded swager to captivate and propel. If an occasional rough edge intruded, as with Tippett, it was nothing of importance. Far more important were liminal passages of an almost Straussian, yet more subtle phantasmagoria—and where they took us. The second movement’s opening material, somewhere between diabolical and furious, was followed by a lifting of clouds closer to the new vistas of Mahler than one might have expected. Music between these poles combined their tendencies as well as having them do battle: a matter of performance almost as much as of composition. A rich, even ripe Adagio was perhaps a little indulged for my, arguably also for Elgar’s, taste, yet it was difficult to resist the glorious LPO sound. Inflected by other material that yet did not deflect the music from its path, there remained much to admire here. Ghostly unease and lost recollections laid bare the compositional mastery of the finale. It was a turbulent journey, in search of a home that was perhaps never quite reached. The ‘cyclical’ qualities of Elgar’s writing were vividly communicated here by Gardner, bringing it closer to César Franck than often one hears. Was it ultimately a little hard-driven? Perhaps, but arguably it held to its own logic.

LPO/Gardner - Schoenberg, Gurrelieder, 24 September 2022

 

Royal Festival Hall

Waldemar – David Butt Philip
Tove – Lise Lindstrom
Wood-dove – Karen Cargill
Klaus-Narr – Robert Murray
Peasant – James Creswell
Speaker – Alex Jennings

London Philharmonic Choir (chorus director: Neville Creed)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

Image: London Philharmonic Orchestra

The pandemic is not over. But I remember thinking, when some sort of minimal concert life was intermittently starting up again—socially distanced concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields with a maximum audience of thirty, the first and second series of Spotlight Chamber Concerts at St John’s Waterloo, and so on—what resumption of a full range of musical life would entail for me. I chose three examples, which have remained in my mind ever since: a large-scale work by Richard Strauss, a full staging of Die Meistersinger, and a performance of Gurrelieder. Strauss came a little while ago, in a performance of the Alpine Symphony—though I await a Frau ohne Schatten. Meistersinger is yet to come. On this Wagner-and-Strauss-starved island, we should probably not hold our collective breath. Nevertheless, even if accompanied by precious little other Schoenberg, Gurrelieder has returned.

It was, if truth be told, a somewhat mixed performance we heard from Edward Gardner and the LPO: well sung and played, Gardner’s conducting more variable yet growing in stature, with one major, well-nigh catastrophic miscalculation for the closing melodrama. The Royal Festival Hall is far from ideal for this work, yet Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia performances in 2009 and 2018 had seemed far more at home. Contrast was glaring in the opening bars. Both Salonen and Gardner achieved great clarity; whatever the Festival Hall’s shortcomings, it probably helped in that respect. Gardner and the LPO, however, sounded oddly mechanical, as opposed to pointillistic; the strange impression was of oddly balanced strings and flutes out of sync, even when they were not. And even once the music had settled, Gardner imparted an oddly regimented quality to it, moving bar-to-bar rather than via paragraph. There were, though, some inviting, dangerous, Tristan-esque sounds from the LPO that prepared the way splendidly for David Butt Philip’s first entry.

Butt Philip showed himself, without exaggeration, to be one of the finest Waldemars I have heard. His way with words and shaping of vocal lines were beyond reproach. As the first part progressed, his emotional range widened to encompass, as does the work, the impetuous, the angry, and also greater dynamic range. The ardent lyricism as he told of Waldemar’s pride, likened unto that of Christ seated once more next to His father, was an object lesson in dramatic delivery that yet retained a Lieder-singer’s attention to detail. Lindstrom offered a womanly Tove with Nordic steel: no false purity, and again a performance that took its leave from the verse. The LPO generally sounded gorgeous. Earlier on, Gardner might have lingered to advantage. Greater flexibility did come, though, whether in the coital stillness of Tove’s response or the ghostly, again Tristan-like brass of ‘unsel’ger Geschlechter’ foretold, developing via frightening double basses into something more ominous. Waldemar’s words ‘Unsere Zeit ist um’ offered ecstatic contradiction, already tinged with irony concerning fate and the future. Yet the sweetness of the interlude introducing Tove’s last words consoled, as it should. Could Lindstrom’s delivery here have been more lyrical? Probably. Her care for verbal expression nonetheless offered compensation enough, and the climax on ‘Kuß’, her final word, sent shivers down the spine, with credit due to all concerned: soloist, conductor, and orchestra.

The Wood-dove’s song was, quite simply, outstanding. Karen Cargill’s deep, rich tone furthered an interpretation once more unquestionably rooted in the text. Rising out of the orchestra, this was a forest messenger one knew one could trust, however much one wanted her words not to be true. Gardner here captured to a tee the crucial role of rhythm, not least in relation to harmony. It made for a gripping conclusion to the first part, the strange decision to break for an interval all the more regrettable.

That said, the brief Part Two plunged us, orchestrally and vocally, straight back into the action. Butt Philip showed anger, increasingly blasphemous, without hectoring. Crucially, he continued to sing, never shouting, and in highly variegated fashion too. Gardner communicated well the fulfilment of those early ghostly sounds in the opening of Part Three, Butt Philip and the LPO audibly responding by taking us on a journey to new, more bracingly modernist sounds, though the direction of travel rightly remained unclear, a veritable Götterdämmerung Hallowe’en from male chorus and James Creswell’s Peasant alike highly impressive. Robert Murray’s Klaus-Narr was nicely animated, communicating like Cargill’s Wood-dove with evident sincerity and truthfulness. Again, this was music that was sung, here in Straussian fashion, albeit more grateful for the tenor. Meistersinger-ish tendencies in the orchestra were welcome and revealing, preparing the way for that extraordinary experience in the prelude to the Speaker’s appearance of material transformed before our ears, almost against our (even Schoenberg’s?) will. History’s demand, the material’s, or the drama’s? Why choose?   

And then, talk about spoiling the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar. The Speaker entered, perversely miked, and in English translation. One can perform Gurrelieder in English, I suppose, but then it should surely be the whole thing. The ‘effect’ was alienating in quite the wrong way, exacerbated by laboured, ac-tor-ly delivery on the part of Alex Jennings. The idea, it seems, was Gardner’s own; someone should have dissuaded him. For however sardonic, at times even vicious, the LPO sounded, this was a conceptual miscalculation that torpedoed the performance as a whole. How I longed for the inimitable Barbara Sukowa, icing on the cake for both of Salonen’s performances (as well as Claudio Abbado’s Vienna recording). Even the strange, choral climax, sincere in its way yet knowing that such tonal sounds can no longer truly convince, failed through no fault of the chorus to salvage matters. A great pity indeed.

 

Kožená/Staples/LPO/Gardner - Birtwistle and Mahler, 6 May 2022

Royal Festival Hall

Birtwistle: Deep Time
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde

Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)
Andrew Staples (tenor)

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)

London Philharmonic Orchestra, Edward Gardner (c) Mark Allan 

 

For many, the greatest English composer since Purcell and the greatest English composer of opera tout court, Harrison Birtwistle died little more than a fortnight before this concert. Even for those more sceptical, or with other candidates, his was a titanic presence not only in English and British music, but in the music of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries. With the partial exception of Elgar, here, rightly or wrongly, was the first major composer from this island viewed in his lifetime with equal esteem by the rest of the world. Was anyone ever disappointed by a Birtwistle work? Some were repelled, true, yet they were usually those who knew nothing of music and cared less, wishing simply to strike a reactionary pose. The claim that Britten walked out of the premiere of Punch and Judy seems almost certainly untrue—why would he?—though it does not stop the story being repeated. (I suppose I am at least part-guilty here.) The sheer quality—and individual quality at that—of each work was breathtaking. It was, then, a fitting albeit unexpected tribute, in a programme long planned, to have this concert dedicated to Birtwistle’s memory. 

Deep Time has gone deeper, I think, but Edward Gardner’s performance with the LPO nonetheless gave a good sense of its essence, of ‘how it goes’. A typical and typically unique opening, dark and ominous, growled, formed, developed, layers of geological sediment, both material and metaphorical, beginning to overlap, punctured and once again formed by shafts and shards of light. Processes, ‘natural’ and ‘mechanical’, the latter not a million miles from the clocks as well as the heavier industry of northern historical landscapes, had us ask initially whether the strange yet familiar musical juggernaut passing before us were animate or inanimate: Harrison’s Clocks or Minotaur? Or, as Birtwistle himself pointed out: ‘geologic time,’ as ‘first proposed by the eighteenth-century Scottish geologist James Hutton,’ involving ‘a perpetual cycle of rock erosion, sedimentation and formation for which there is “no vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end”.’ 

Process, however, and drama—and colour, what colour! Birtwistle and Brahms probably do not have much in common, though their CDs sit close, alphabetically, on my shelves—likewise those of Britten and Boulez, contributing to a host of difficult relationships, sometimes shading into antipathies. Nonetheless, music by Birtwistle and Brahms shares a characteristic in that, though sometimes decried as lacking in colour compared, say, to fantastical creations from French and Russian schools, as soon as one listens, a myriad of colours opens up beneath the surface, in fact coming together to form that surface. In Brahms’s case, I once heard that likened to the magic of a pond: not meant unkindly, far from it. Here, it is a slice of geological landscape and its ecosystem. How does it fit together? It is difficult to say, though hocket appears to provide both glue and dynamism: continuity in discontinuity. Vertical shocks and after-shocks help form its beauty, but as so often, so does the landscape behind: changing, yet probably on account of our shifting standpoint, rather than its. Birtwistle’s memorial for Peter Maxwell Davies, premiered in 2017 by Daniel Barenboim, continued his own endless parade. 

Das Lied von der Erde can be understood, or at least experienced, as a memorial too, though it should no more be reduced to that than should Deep Time. For me—others may differ—Mahler ideally requires a firmer view; it is ‘conductor’s music’ in an emphatic sense, though certainly not only that. It can take many views, from Boulez to Haitink, Klemperer to Bernstein, but here Gardner seemed too ready to act, at least until the final song, as ‘accompanist’. This was a performance, at any rate, that, again until that long, final farewell, sounded very much as song-cycle rather than symphony. Fair enough, one might say; is that not a view in itself? And nowhere, after all, does Mahler call Das Lied a symphony. True, though surely there is an implicit call for greater continuity than we heard here. On the performance’s own terms, though, we heard estimable contributions by Magdalena Kožená, Andrew Staples, and the LPO, and were mercifully not subjected to a perverse standpoint, to a determination to do things to Mahler’s score, which can all too readily prove the obverse side to the ‘personal’ coin. 

Staples opened the cruel (to the tenor) first song not only valiantly, but with great success, a supportive Gardner doubtless drawing on his long operatic experience to unsure that the singer could be heard. If the orchestra sounded at times a little harsh—beyond, I think, the demands of sardonic mood—that was probably more a matter of the Festival Hall acoustic, especially in the Stalls, than a mark of interpretation. Its performance, like that of Staples, was in any case admirably clear and pointed, teeming (perhaps not entirely unlike Birtwistle’s piece) with life/death. ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod.’ The difference between ice and fire was mediated on a knife-edge by sweet LPO violins. 

Kožená’s approach, ineffably sincere, unquestionably rooted in the verbal text, had an instrumental quality to it too, especially in the second song, ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’, as if her voice were another woodwind instrument, perhaps a chalumeau, joining the LPO consort. Ambiguity between twin needs for peace and refreshment (‘Ja, gib mir Ruh’, ich hab’ Erquickung not!’) was fundamental, the contrast with a bright-eyed ‘Von der Jugend’ (Staples) clear and meaningful. Nicely etched—one could well-nigh hear the brushstrokes—it was in turn succeeded in contrast by an expressive ‘Von der Schönheit’ from Kožená. A vivid orchestral parade could have been a little sharper, but resonances with earlier works made their point: another ‘endless parade’. Within the song, moreover, Kožená characterised with keen sense of drama contrasts between outer sections and more volatile middle, the steed’s mane tossed in frenzy. Staples and Gardner forged a sense of touching intimacy in ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’, as if the forest Siegfried had finally attained the capacity to reflect. Throughout, we heard intriguing contrasts and much lovely detail; slightly lacking, whether by default or design, was that symphonic guiding thread. 

The dark opening chords of ‘Der Abschied’ brought, in context, momentary remembrance of Deep Time, but more so, a sense of fate so as necessarily to introduce oboe and other solos. It was time for a long farewell, Kožená’s entry thoughtfully heralded by the arrival of a text message somewhere in the audience. Even that, however, could not stop the sun sinking as flute and mezzo sang. Kožená painted the landscape beautifully, not least the floating moon, ‘wie eine Silberbarke’. It was a world of silver and shadows, of moonlight, like Birtwistle’s very different landscape both physical and metaphysical. With the crucial new vista between ‘letzten Lebewohl’ and ‘Ich sehne mich’, as with subsequent return to darkness, not only did Kožená’s voice bloom, but the performance turned decisively to symphonic mode; via Schopenhauerian metaphysics, fate was proclaimed the order of the day. On that latter turn, the aural sky turned crimson; and so began the inexorable tread to eternal peace. ‘Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz.’ And so it felt, woodwind barbs notwithstanding. For this might be death, but it was no longer dark; that had been life. A radiant, deeply moving, final farewell was heard and felt. With the fragile, ineffably touching advent of the mandolin, tears began to flow, reflected in heavenly (celestial) arpeggios from, yes, the celesta. ‘Aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen!’ A glimpse, then, of eternity: ‘Ewig … ewig…’.

Terfel/LPO/Gardner - Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Schoenberg, 19 March 2022

 

Royal Festival Hall

Mendelssohn: Overture: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, op.21
Brahms, orch. Karl Michael Komma: Vier ernste Gesänge, op.121
Schoenberg: Pelleas und Melisande, op.5

 
Bryn Terfel (bass-baritone)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

Chaste, yet ravishing, LPO woodwind announced Mendelssohn’s Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture as they meant to go on, combining precision and spirit like the orchestra as a whole. Edward Gardner’s account, sometimes hard-driven in the manner of Toscanini, yet not without flexibility, indeed increasingly so, had a strong sense both of harmonic rhythm and dramatic incident. The (apparently) effortless tension of the development, subsiding into touching exhaustion at its close, attested to fine understanding of Mendelssohn’s structure and form. Then magic was reignited. Above all, it made me smile.

 Bryn Terfel joined the orchestra for Brahms’s Four Serious Songs, singing from memory. The programme note oddly had nothing to say of the orchestral arrangement by Karl Michael Komma. Nor did it so much as mention Komma himself, a Sudeten German composer whose record during the NS-Zeit, writing a cantata to celebrate the Nazi annexation of Czechoslovakia and a pamphlet ‘against’ Mahler, might have warranted a mention. I say that not to argue for proscription, nor for or against anything else, but silence seemed a questionable tactic. What we heard was a perfectly decent orchestration that lacked the intrinsic interest of true recreation—think, say, of Berio’s Brahms—but permitted the work more readily to enter a large hall. It was not unimaginative, variegated lower strings setting the scene well for the first song, a wandering clarinet solo at the close of the fourth both fitting in itself and testament to wider knowledge of late Brahmsian idiom. If ultimately, it shed no particular light and had me missing the piano, nor did it truly get in the way, though perhaps it encouraged a more hectoring side to some of Terfel’s delivery than might otherwise have been the case.

There was, in any case, no gainsaying the vividly communicative aspect of Terfel’s art, still very much that of a prophetic Elijah, as for instance in the agitated central stanza of the opening ‘Denn es gehet dem Menschen’. Terfel’s attention to detail, with short, sharp crescendo, followed by finely controlled, longer decrescendo, on the preceding ‘denn es ist alles eitel’ was never pedantic, always at the expressive service of his performance. There were other such instances aplenty. A finely shaded ‘Ich wandte mich’ and stentorian ‘O Tod, wie bitter bist du’ were likewise well judged, as was the change of tone for the final song, still serious yet less dark. Strength in knowledge and in world-weariness too was the order of the day.

Schoenberg would not, I think, have been impressed by the evasiveness of that programme note. Whether he would have been impressed by this performance of Pelleas und Melisande, I honestly do not know. I suspect his response would have depended on the fluctuating condition of his relationship with Richard Strauss. For Gardner’s imperative here, aided by scene-setting, including quotation, in titles above the stage (oddly not used for the Brahms), was very much that of event and incident. A duly questing opening, lines curled as if from a Jugendstil sketch, tending already towards the counterpoint of the First Chamber Symphony, ensured that motivic density registered, For the most part, though, Brahmsian inheritance was not where emphasis lay. Propelled both by the performance’s insistence and by visual cues above, I found myself imagining a silent film, replete with exaggerated, expressionist gestures. The LPO strings ‘spoke’ in almost operatic, or rather Wagnerian, fashion, attesting to their deep experience in that repertoire.

A resplendent phantasmagoria—again, Strauss would surely have been impressed—announced the ‘scene’ at the tower, looking forward also to Schoenberg’s later orchestration of the third part of Gurrelieder. The pool in the castle vaults was stagnant indeed, drawing its aural stench from the world of Götterdämmerung. And there was true pain, in (non-emancipated) dissonance as the lovers bade each other farewell. Tumultuous, terrifying chaos prior to Melisande’s final rest emerged as a dark, even sick transformation of Wotan’s putting Brünnhilde to sleep. The story, for that emphatically is what it was, oozed with malevolence, though not exclusively. It was all very much a youthful reading, far less forbidding than often one hears. That is not to say that it was jejune, only different—and, after all, Schoenberg was young when he wrote the piece. Such may not be the whole (meta-)story of this extraordinary work, but perhaps no single performance can be. It certainly seemed to gain converts to Schoenberg’s cause, which can only be a good thing.

LPO/Gardner - Haydn and Bartók, 6 November 2021

Royal Festival Hall

Haydn: Symphony no.90 in C major, Hob.I:90
Bartók: Bluebeard’s Castle

Ildikó Komlósi (soprano)

John Relyea (bass)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

Image: Mark Allan

Intelligent programming, this, the C major of Haydn’s Ninetieth Symphony prefiguring one of the most jaw-dropping moments in all opera, indeed in all music: Bluebeard’s revelation of his kingdom in all its glory as the Fifth Door of his castle is flung open. There is ultimately greater difference, of course, than similarity between Haydn’s exploration of his Classical tonal universe and his tricks with our ears and expectations, and Bartók’s grandiose use of a C major chord as luminous, associative tonal centre; yet that in itself could be understood and, more important, perceived to be the point.

A broadly germinal introduction to Haydn’s first movement proclaimed just such a voyage of exploration. Under Edward Gardner, the LPO sounded lively and variegated, if also a touch hard-driven. For better or worse, such is the way of much Haydn performance today, perhaps an excessive if understandable reaction to clichés of geniality. More important was the strong sense of motivic development, not only in the ‘development’ section itself, but also in a recapitulation sounding on the cusp of Beethovenian second development. In that context, I could live with certain ‘period’ affectations, which did little harm, save for sometimes obscuring, more so later in the symphony, a longer term sense of line. 

The second movement flowed as one would expect in such a reading, its stern contrasts traced not without yielding. Again, Haydn’s score was finely articulated and variegated, albeit sometimes at that expense of traditional line, though with a welcome mystery to the course it would take (again prefiguring Bartók?) Solo lines, for instance flute (Juliette Bausor) and cello (Kristina Blaumane) were without exception very well taken. Gardner presented the minuet nicely on the cusp of one- and three-to-a-bar, its symphonic nature and individuality relished and communicated. A dainty reading of the trio, led by Ian Hardwick’s fine solo oboe, was given to a smaller ensemble, the return of full orchestra for the minuet’s reprise grandly moving. The finale blazed like fireworks outside (this was the sixth of November). Arguably, it too was a little hard-driven, though Gardner’s tempo had a sense of rightness, and the general yet particular character of a Haydn finale was undeniably present. The false ending caught out many—understandably. 

Following the interval, music emerged—not as in the Haydn’s introduction, yet in a way that could perhaps be associated with it—from words, from bardic verse, in the guise of the recorded spoken Prologue to Bluebeard’s Castle. The orchestra spoke, it seemed, doubtless in part testament to Gardner’s operatic experience, especially with orchestral recitative. Song, ineffably Bartókian rhythm, equally ineffable post-impressionist harmonies, and of course Bluebeard and Judit took centre (aural) stage. There was a sense of awe, of wonder, and of foreboding to our first encounter with the castle—listed by Bartók as a ‘character’—that never left us. Ildikó Komlósi’s request for the keys because she loved Bluebeard chilled, as shifting orchestral colours reoriented and disoriented us as equally helpless spectators to Fate’s progress (and regress). ‘Because I love you’: terror spoke, above all through the orchestra. All the while, John Relyea as Bluebeard remained implacable, until he too bowed, with a hint of brokenness, to what seemed to be—but is it?—the inevitable.   

Treasures glistened, eliciting audience wonder; likewise at timbre and tonality when, at the Fourth Door, the sun finally shone in, Bluebeard’s garden revealed. There was blood on the flowers’ petals, though, and we felt it. The opening of the Fifth Door would, in a half-decent performance, send shivers down the spine at any time, yet now, after all this waiting, it truly felt as though the symphony orchestra, here underpinned by organ (Richard Gowers) had returned in all its glory. Relyea was magnificently ecstatic beholding and introducing his kingdom. Judit, however, knew already that the game was up. The sheer horror we heard in the orchestra as the Seventh Door was opened, Bluebeard’s former wives present, Judit now bound to join them, was only furthered by the tenderness that followed. There was something beautifully elegiac, not entirely un-Straussian, to Bluebeard’s introductions here: not quite regretful, for he was certain, but resigned. The final, wordless climax told us night would now last forever.

The Midsummer Marriage, LPO/Gardner, 25 September 2021

Royal Festival Hall

Images: Mark Allan

Mark – Robert Murray
Jenifer – Rachel Nicholls
King Fisher – Ashley Riches
Bella – Jennifer France
Jack – Toby Spence
Sosostris – Claire Barnett-Jones
She-Ancient – Susan Bickley
He-Ancient – Joshua Bloom
Dancing Man – John Findon
Half-Tipsy Man – Trevor Bowes
A Man – Robert Winslade-Anderson
A Girl – Sophie Goldrick

London Philharmonic Choir (artistic director: Neville Creed)

ENO Chorus (chorus director: Mark Biggins)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

It would have been a work with which to make one’s mark for the opening of any Principal Conductorship. Following the LPO’s Festival Hall silence for the past year-and-a-half, it became, as Edward Gardner acknowledged in a brief spoken welcome, all the more so. Ambition imperfectly realised is in many ways more impressive than passing a lesser challenge—of the estimable qualities one associates with Michael Tippett, perfection is rarely one—but such was not a concern here. Edward Gardner’s gamble in presenting a concert performance of The Midsummer Marriage paid off handsomely, and was gratefully received by a London audience largely starved of sustained Tippett advocacy since the death of Colin Davis.

 

The orchestral opening was vivid, precise, variegated, as if the orchestra had never been away, likewise when the joint choral forces of the London Philharmonic Choir and ENO Chorus joined. Diction from chorus and soloists alike was excellent, which really helps in an opera whose word-setting does not always privilege verbal understanding. This first act, ‘Morning’, the dawn on Midsummer Day, felt as though it were just that; figuratively, a musical body, it seemed, greater than the sum of its parts, had awoken and was stretching, limbering up. ‘Music? What’s that?’ That and many questions and allusions had acquired new connotations during our recent travails. Tippett’s allusions to Elizabethan music appeared to speak not only of that past but of a nearer past, a ‘new Elizabethan era’ in English music his opera had helped inaugurate, and in which the hall around us, once again open, played so crucial a role (if ever so slightly predating it). Gardner’s—and Tippett’s—presentation of the score in time delineated the work’s dramatic as well as musical form, characters stepping forward as if themes in a giant sonata exposition. In a sense, that is precisely what they are. Against or rather in tandem with that, there was a strong impression, led by Gardner and the orchestra yet certainly including the cast, of revealing a protean imagination, twists and turns never awkward but rather distinctive. They were communicated with conviction, meaning, and what appeared—which cannot always have been the case—of ready familiarity.

 

Of many highlights, the majestic and, yes, laughing conclusion to the first act, the effervescence of the primal, sometimes dark, yet often touchingly naïve Ritual Dances and their madrigalian choral writing, and a final daybreak as moving as it was atmospheric stand out in my memory. If Tippett would doubtless have pointed to Jung, one did not buy in to that psychology to experience wonder of another sort. Likewise, if King Fisher’s consultation—if that be what it is—with Madame Soristris does not speak to us all in precisely the way intended, there was plenty of alternative in so evocative an exchange as we heard between a dark and dangerous Ashley Riches and a rich-hued Claire Barnett-Jones. For the working through of events or analysis continued to captivate musically throughout the third act, which brought a radiant reunion between Rachel Nicholls’s Jenifer and Robert Murray’s Mark. The versatility of Nicholls’s voice in particular struck me, phrasing always excellent, different colourings and moods always on dramatic point, and the extraordinary coloratura with which Tippett blesses or saddles her despatched without fear. Jennifer France and Toby Spence made for an outstanding ‘second’ couple, in reality no more secondary than their Mozartian model, at least if one imagines a greater role for Papagena than she actually receives. All impressed, but I shall give final mention to the dignity of Susan Bickley’s mysterious yet ineffably human She-Ancient.

From dim recollection of the only other performance I have heard, the 2005 Royal Opera revival under Richard Hickox, I should say this was more incisive, colourful, and generally impressive, though it may simply have been that I was more receptive this time around. My preference for Tippett’s King Priam has not been dislodged, but I think I have come to appreciate the great merits of this ambitious and engaging work as well as its more peculiar singularities. Above all, I felt that something might truly be at stake, and that part of that something was the gift of music.

Katya Kabanova, Royal Opera, 9 February 2019

Royal Opera House

  

Tichon (Andrew Staples) and Katya (Amanda Majewski)
Images: Clive Barda/ROH

Katěrina Kabanova – Amanda Majeski

Marfa Ignatěvna Kabanicha – Susan Bickley

Varvara – Emily Edmonds

Boris Grigorjevič – Pavel Černoch

Váňa Kudrjáš – Andrew Tortise

Tichon Ivanyč Kabanov – Andrew Staples

Savël Prokofjevič Dikoj – Clive Bayley

Kuligin – Dominic Sedgwick

Glaša – Sarah Pring

Fekluša – Dervla Ramsay

Woman – Amy Catt

Passer-by – Luke Price

Richard Jones (director)

Antony McDonald (designs)

Lucy Carter (lighting)

Sarah Fahie (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Edward Gardner (conductor)

Janáček is surely the perfect, or at least a perfect, composer with whom to introduce someone to opera. Starting with From the House of the Dead or The Adventures of Mr Brouček might be a little odd, if hardly disastrous. However, Jenůfa, The Makropulos Case, The Cunning Little Vixen, and Katya Kabanova all boast compelling, readily comprehensible stories, strong characters (especially female ones), and textbook demonstrations of what might be accomplished by musical drama, even in something that might superficially seem close to a sung play (in itself no bad thing for a beginner). Last but not least, they are not a second too long, showing unerring mastery concerning what need be depicted, even lingered over, and what may be assumed or suggested, without the slightest chance of having anyone wonder ‘when will this be over?’ Loving them, one might wish that they were longer, but one also knows that they should not be. For devotees of late-nineteenth-century literature, Jenůfa and Katya would seem the most obvious choices. (Not that Wozzeck would do any harm: it gripped this sometime schoolboy for life…!) Setting, narrative, and character stand in well-nigh perfect relation to one another: familiar, yet fresh.

Kabanicha (Susan Bickley) and Katya

Why, then, have London houses seemed so reluctant recently to stage these operas? Xenophobic audiences, bizarrely lacking in curiosity? Most likely, alas; we live, after all, in the age of ‘Brexit’. Whatever the reason, we have all the more reason to cheer the Royal Opera’s commitment, following years of silence, to staging a number of Janácek’s works. Last year’s From the House of the Dead, in a striking, duly provocative staging by Krzysztof Warlikowski, was unquestionably a highlight of the London musical year. (If, later in the year, Munich’s offering from Frank Castorf went further, all the better for us. How fortunate we were to have both.) Richard Jones’s new Katya is not at that level: a ‘safer’ choice, no doubt; nor is it so well conducted. Nevertheless, a cast as strong dramatically as vocally brought out the best in work and production alike.

Varvara (Emily Edmonds)

Without really getting in the way, Jones’s staging is mildly puzzling: a mix of good ideas, oddly undeveloped ideas, and all-purpose Richard Jones, almost as if it were an early sketch rather than a finished production. We begin and end with a portrait of a girl, Katya presumably, and there is something intriguingly doll-like to her appearance onstage, even to some of her gestures. Three men from the community – beyond that, it is barely a community – leer through the windows at her. It is sketchy, though: neither subtle nor thought through. The 1970s Eastern bloc setting is fine, if hardly original, but not much is done with it. Nor is it clear why abstraction is occasionally the order of the day: budget limitations seem more plausible as an explanation than dramatic motivation. Auditorium strobe lighting for the storm that opens the third act is an odd touch: neither in keeping with what has preceded and what will follow it, nor productively in contrast. A degree of stylisation on stage works much better, cinematic ‘still’ moments suggestive of contrasting chaos and a moment of fateful decision. That particular aspect of the setting, too, is excellent – a wonderfully ‘real’ bus shelter, which again has much to offer in metaphorical suggestion. More along such Brechtian lines might work well; all too soon, however, it is gone.

Boris (Pavel Černoch) and Katya

Sadly, Katya’s talk – song – of sin is left to fend for itself. It still moves, of course, but would have done so far more in a production that deigned to notice it. For, despite the ‘updating’ – the slightly retro term seems apt here – socio-cultural context is barely present, at least as anything more than backdrop. It is perfectly possible, I am sure, to present a Katya Kabanova with something to replace the theology, just as it would be with Don Giovanni. Whether it is a good idea remains an open question, for here, as so often with Mozart’s deeply Catholic opera, the issue is simply ignored – or, worse, is not even noticed. Likewise, Kabanicha’s terrible words of thanks at the close could hardly fail to register; they could – should – nonetheless readily register far more strongly, set in social and theological context; or, alternatively, in its provocatively avowed absence. As Schoenberg once noted, it is only the middle road that fails to lead to Rome.

That such crucial moments did register was the cast’s achievement (as well as Janáček’s!) Amanda Majeski’s Katya was a towering performance: fearful, compassionate, human, with as impressive and moving an emotional as a dynamic range. Pavel Černoch fully lived up to the expectations I had from his Munich Makropulos Case (as Albert Gregor), his romantic ardour as genuine as his courage was but flickering, a properly compromised portrayal. Andrew Staples drew out the still more compromised, indeed downright cowardly nature of his not-even-rival, Tichon. Susan Bickley rescued her Kabanicha from mere caricature, hinting at a constraining force of social propriety that might – just might – explain or at least contextualise a little of her monstrous, constructively murderous behaviour. Clive Bayley’s Dikoj offered a quality cameo as Dikoj. If only the sado-masochism in his relationship with Bickley’s Kabanicha hinted at here had been taken further by Jones, there might have been illumination such as that gleaned from Christoph Marthaler’s production for Paris. Emily Edmonds and Andrew Tortise gave lively performances as Varvara and Váňa respectively, the latter’s second-act song winning in its diegetic naïveté.

Edward Gardner’s conducting had its moments. They tended, though, to be moments – at least until the third act, undeniably possessed of great narrative thrust. The intricate, complex relationship between continuity and discontinuity in Janáček’s score is not at all easy to bring off. Mark Wigglesworth did so magnificently at ENO nine years ago. Here, whatever its warmth, there was something soft-focused to too much of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House’s playing. Rhythmic bite was not quite what it might have been, nor were underlying harmonic motion and tension. If the achievement of that final act could have been read back into the first two, something more taut and stark in its tragedy could well have resulted. In a way, then, it complemented Jones’s staging. Vocally, however, this was the real thing.

BBC SO/Gardner - Berlioz, L'Enfance du Christ, 17 December 2018

Barbican Hall

Karen Cargill (mezzo-soprano)

Robert Murray (tenor)

Etienne Dupuis (baritone)

Matthew Rose (bass)

Members of the BBC Singers
BBC Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Neil Ferris)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

L’Enfance du Christ is not an Advent work, but since most of this country’s musical institutions shut down over Christmas, Advent is probably the only chance we shall have to hear it – and even then, only on occasion. But then Messiah is a Lenten work, and yet… There was certainly much for which to be grateful in this BBC SO performance. An initial tendency, heard for instance in the first scene’s Marche nocturne, for Edward Gardner to drive Berlioz’s music too hard, was mercifully not maintained. Indeed, as time went on, Gardner’s tempi relaxed more, greatly to the music’s benefit. The BBC Symphony Chorus’s singing, at the outset a little woolly, sharpened up too. If orchestral colours tended to be stronger on individuality then on blend, that was only a tendency, with plenty of exceptions, not least the opening woodwind recitative, in which the orchestra, Robert Murray, a fine Narrator, drew us in, his entry and that of the strings having the drama gather pace nicely and without exaggeration.

There is something enduringly and endearingly strange to any ‘sacred’ or perhaps better ‘religious’ work by Berlioz. Just as much as with the Requiem, it is perfectly clear, without his needing to say so, that he does not believe a word of it. If that stands very much in a grand, public, ceremonial tradition ultimately as empty as Robespierre’s Cult of the Supreme Being, this becomes an illustrated children’s story that is yet not for children. The vividness of the writing and, one hopes, the performance too has characters, scenes, even locations stand out from the pages, but the lack of belief – not hostile, just ‘as it is’ – remains. That presents its own very particular challenges to the performers, challenges to which they rose very well. Herod’s Aria, for instance, sung darkly and clearly by Matthew Rose, ‘accompanied’ by due orchestral darkness too, might have been sung by a Shakespearean king; it was difficult not to think of parallels in the writer Berlioz loved above all others. In the ensuing scene with the soothsayers, the clarinet first commenting on, then seemingly confirming, the king’s dream, much must be accomplished by instrumental means alone, the ‘stage directions’ acting ‘as if’ there were a stage, written explications to musical ‘illustrations’. Such was certainly the case with the ‘cabalistic’ movements of the soothsayers as they moved to conjure the dark spirits to be ‘appeased’. A dark, Theresa May-like tyrannical resolve was inculcated, heedless of the consequences: infanticide meant infanticide. Just after the Strong and Stable One had flounced out of Parliament ‘in real life’, so too did Herod walk offstage: ‘Malgré les crie, malgré les pleurs de tant de mères éperdues, des rivières de sang vont être répandues, je serai sourd à ces douleurs.’

Pastoral innocence was just what we needed as balm to such malevolence, and so we heard – even saw – it at the Bethlehem stable. Karen Cargill’s beautifully floated lines as Mary remained alert to Berlioz’s idiosyncracies. Joined by Etienne Dupuis, whose suave, stylish, yet heartfelt singing proved very much one of the evening’s highlights, this Holy Family gave us something we might or might not believe in, but which could certainly enchant. Berlioz’s tone-painting did likewise, although it had me think his strictures against Haydn in The Creation not without double standards. Joined by offstage members of the BBC Singers as angels, singing very much in a choral tradition of French semi-archaism, this was a scene not just of contemplation but of readiness to depart. It prepared us as well as the Holy Family well for the short second part: ‘La fuite en Egypte’, its Overture having me wonder again – as I had during Herod’s music – whether Mussorgsky knew the music and unconsciously had it in mind when at work on Boris Godunov. The Russian composer certainly cherished Berlioz’s treatise on orchestration. Sometimes a correspondence is just a correspondence; at any rate, parallels, such as they be, may be worth consideration. The celebrated ‘Shepherds’ Farewell’ flowed nicely, integrated rather than a ‘set piece’. Murray’s narration reminded us how stylish and meaningful his French singing could be; sweet toned too, it was really rather wonderful.

The third part, entitled ‘L’Arrivée à Saïs’, is indeed an arrival in more than a strictly narrative sense. The Holy Family, following malevolent calls, as May would have it, to GO HOME – ‘Arrière, vils Hébreux,’ shout the Roman and Egyptian Tories de leurs jours – nevertheless find shelter with fellow ‘migrants’: an Ishmaelite and his family. And yet – something that came across gently yet strongly in performance – this is not the end of the story. Anticipatory narration, clearly, vividly delivered by Murray and the BBC SO alike, is never quite fulfilled, events and sentiments in the Ishmaelite house – Berlioz’s fugal chorus especially relished – a challenge to us, to the readers of his picture-book to respond or, like many self-styled ‘Christians’, to cross to the other side of the road, with or without ‘citizens of the world’ abuse. Berlioz’s closing chorus, euphonious to a degree, sounded a gentle warning: ‘O mon cœur, emplis-toi du grave et pur amour qui seul peut nous ouvrir le céleste séjour.’ Will any of us heed it?

Prom 22: Gluzman/BBC SO/Gardner - Ravel, Auerbach, and Debussy, 31 July 2016

Royal Albert Hall

Ravel – Ma Mère L’Oye: Suite

Auerbach – The Infant Minstrel and his Peculiar Menagerie (Symphony no.3 for violin, choir, and orchestra) (BBC co-commission: UK premiere)
Debussy (orch. Jean Roger-Ducasse) – King Lear: ‘Fanfare d’ouverture’ and ‘Le Sommeil de Lear’
Debussy – La Mer


Vadim Gluzman (violin)
Nina Bennett, Helen Reeves (sopranos)
Andrew Watts (counter-tenor)
Tom Raskin (tenor)
Andrew Rupp (bass)
Crouch End Festival Chorus (chorus master: David Temple)
BBC Symphony Orchestra
Edward Gardner (conductor)




(L-R) Chorus-master of the Crouch End Festival Chorus David Temple, composer Lera Auerbach, violinist Vadim Gluzman and conductor Edward Gardner
Image: Chris Christodoulou/BBC Proms

The performance of Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite with which this Prom opened was for me its highlight. Friends with whom I spoke at the interval found it on the slow side; for me, it was perfectly judged. The opening ‘Pavane de la Belle au bois dormant’ showed a beautifully measured tread. Its silky-smooth textures – what wonderful playing from the BBC SO under Edward Gardner! – continued into ‘Petit Poucet’, its chaste, or maybe not-so-chaste, passion impossible to resist, especially with such ravishing woodwind solos as heard here. ‘Laideronnette’, Impératrice des pagodes’ sounded more urgent than usual, rather winningly so. I was reminded of the ‘laid’ in ‘Laideronnette’, but not too much. Colourful contrast came in ‘Les Entretiens de la Belle et de la Bête’: faux-naïve magic! The grave nobility of ‘Le Jardin féerique’, not, of course, without its own sensuality, had me wish that we could have heard the whole ballet.

 

At the close, a woman seated behind me asked the man with her, ‘Was that the modern piece? Have we got that over with now?’ The irony would prove to be that, by comparison, with Lera Auerbach’s new work, The Infant Minstrel and his Peculiar Menagerie, it most certainly was, in all but date. What on earth was the BBC doing co-commissioning such drivel? It was excellently performed, insofar as I could tell, the vocal soloists and Crouch End Festival Chorus singing lustily, even amusingly. Gardner and the orchestra proved equally committed, and a gold medal should go to Vadim Gluzman, whose violin solo (the line of the Infant Minstrel) proved unerringly beautiful of tone and sure of direction. Would that we could have heard him in something more substantial.

 

The programme certainly did not undersell Auerbach, her fellow poet, Thomas McCarthy writing of her as ‘an artist for whom music is as wide as exile and as intimate as a line of poetry’, and Scene Magazine quoted thus: ‘To say Lera Auerbach is a Renaissance artist is a bit like saying Leonardo da Vinci could multitask a little bit. Most impressive is the totality of her immense body of work.’ I cannot comment on ‘the totality’, but can say that her middling English verse, or rather that of ‘Erroneous Anonymous’, its debts to Lewis Carroll a little too obvious, was never remotely matched by her derivative, frankly uninspired music. The Overture’s violin solo swiftly invites, or is gatecrashed by, countertenor, soprano, and, mostly, the chorus. There are some reasonably attractive sounds akin to watered-down Szymanowski, but not much else to enjoy in this neo-tonal rambling. The rest is mostly verbal, and I can imagine a child enjoying an edited version of the verse alone, although there is a little sub-Piazzolla writing in an Interlude too; Gluzman and Gardner provided a splendid lilt to the dance rhythms, perhaps more than they deserved. By the time we had reached the fourth number, ‘Lament for a Common Corporant’, and Andrew Watts was informing us of the said corporant – ‘Who likes to rant, to rant, to rant! He rants on all day long! (And it’s a very boring song.)’ – I could only agree, its laboured whimsy notwithstanding.

 

The four-square word-setting is throughout so obvious, so predictable, that it might have come from a reasonably talented schoolchild: excellent in that case, but as a concert work lasting the best part of three quarters of an hour? Even the open goal of a dig at Donald Trump – ‘I had a little husband, no bigger than my thumb. Didn’t know what to call him, so I called him Donald Trump’ – went for relatively little, and that was not the fault of the performers. I hoped that ‘Guacamole Treatment’ might bring a Peter Mandelson reference, but no, although the vocal line is at times slightly less predictable. As for the tedious, well-nigh interminable sentimentalism of the final number, ‘Child-Wanderer’, once we were through its non-ironically cloying harmonies, I could only repeat once again – for it had already been repeated a few too many times on stage – its final line: ‘Infant Minstrel, are you real?’

 

The Debussy of the second half never rose to the heights of the Ravel performance. It was difficult to put my finger on why, but mystery was lacking. Perhaps it was not a surprise, then, that it was the brief Fanfare from the King Lear music that came off best: forthright, yet not without a little of the languor largely missing elsewhere. Lear’s Dream sounded attractive enough, but inconsequential. La Mer had plenty of drive, and often welcome clarity – although one would hear far more in, say, a Boulez performance of old. Motivic development, in ‘De l’Aube à midi sur la mer’ was admirably clear, yet in Debussy, one needs to experience the magic with which clarity and ambiguity are revealed to be two sides of the same mystical coin. That first movement’s great climax fell oddly flat, Gardner’s pacing seemingly awry. Orchestral balances proved problematical in ‘Jeux de vagues’, brass too often overpowering the strings. There was a splendid sense of the elemental to ‘Dialogues du vent et de la mer’; thereafter, however, the dialogues’ progress was disconcertingly disjointed. Maybe we should have been better off with more, or all, Ravel.

Tristan und Isolde, English National Opera, 9 June 2016

Isolde (Heidi Melton), Brangaene  (Karen Cargill), Tristan (Stuart Skelton), Kurwenal  (Craig Colclough)

 

 

Coliseum

Tristan – Stuart Skelton

Isolde – Heidi Melton
King Marke – Matthew Rose
Kurwenal – Craig Colclough
Melot – Stephen Rooke
Brangäne – Karen Cargill
Shepherd – Peter van Hulle
Steersman – Paul Sheehan
Young Sailor – David Webb

Daniel Kramer (director)
Anish Kapoor (set designs)
Christina Cunningham (costumes)
Paul Anderson (lighting)
Frieder Weiss (video)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Stephen Harris)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Edward Gardner (conductor)

My first Tristan, indeed my first Wagner, in the theatre was ENO’s previous staging of the work, twenty years ago, in 1996. The experience, as it should, as it must, although this is alas far from a given, quite overwhelmed me. Whether it would now is beside the point: I have no way of knowing and could not, would not go without a considerable number of Tristan- and Wagner-experiences in between. ENO’s new Tristan has its faults, but it also has far from negligible virtues. If the acid test might be said to be whether it reminds one that Tristan is, will surely always be, the greatest musical drama of all – with, that is, the possible exception of the St Matthew Passion, depending on how one considers Bach’s supreme masterpiece – then ENO succeeded not so very far off triumphantly. Given the strength of the company’s enemies within and without, that success deserves trumpeting loudly.

There are certainly some very good things in Daniel Kramer’s production. I use that somewhat limp phrase deliberately, for the overriding impression, or at least an overriding impression, is that it would benefit from revision, from a strong hand that would enable greater coherence and ruthless elimination of the irrelevant. (The latter is perhaps the worst foe of all in Tristan: remember Christof Loy? If not, do keep it that way.) In retrospect, it is the first act that stands out as seemingly from another production. Give or take the division of the stage into Isolde’s world and Tristan’s, strongly reminiscent of Herbert Wernicke’s excellent Covent Garden production, absurdly dispensed with in order to prepare the way for Loy, it seems really to be a straightforward, almost ‘traditional’ staging. I have no problem with that; it lets the work speak, and there is much to be said for that. Whatever one does with Tristan, one is ill-advised indeed to do something to it. Its status as an almost entirely metaphysical drama renders it curiously, almost uniquely, impervious, to such Konzept­-driven treatment. (Or at least it has done so in my experience: it is foolish and indeed absurd to rule things out ‘in principle’.)  Alas, Kramer has a bizarre mini-concept, or whatever we want to call it, concerning Kurwenal. Of any character in opera, I find it difficult to think of a less camp specimen. Undoing or undercutting conventional views of masculinity might be an interesting project here, but simply turning him into a camp monstrosity, dressed, like Brangäne, as if he were a refugee from a highly stylised presentation of Alice in Wonderland, is bizarre and, frankly, extremely irritating. He spends a good deal of time and energy spraying perfume, or air-freshener, or something at Tristan before the latter’s confrontation with Isolde. To what end? I am afraid I have no idea. Something, I think, to be eliminated from the revival I hope will come. The very peculia costumes (in themselves well designed by Christina Cunningham, but again, to what end?) would benefit from rethinking en masse.

 

In the second and third acts, Anish Kapoor’s striking designs do a great deal – perhaps a little too much? – of the work. The lack of specificity is no bad thing. Tristan is certainly not about Cornwall. (Imagine a Tory-UKIP production, in which the whole problem never arises, because Cornwall’s borders are ‘secure’ and our ‘migrants’ are never able to disembark thanks to Theresa May’s ‘tough’ stance on immigration. Or rather, do not.) The love duet takes place in something not so very far removed from what Wagner stipulates; the landscape supplies its own, neo-Romantic (quasi-lunar?) magic and ‘beauty’, without becoming ‘the thing’, which is surely as it should be. The death-wish, that sickest Romanticism-cum-Schopenhauerism, which pervades the whole work is intelligently brought out in Kramer’s vision of neurotic self-harm. It certainly convinces far better than the unbearable dullness – it might work as Konzept, but in the theatre, with this most particular, resistant of works? – of Christoph Marthaler’s Bayreuth production. If the hospital beds and physical restraining of the final scene are perhaps a little too overt, I did not find them unforgivably so. For English audiences, notoriously resistant to modern musico-dramatic theatre, there is sometimes something to be said for spelling things out (although preferably not in this particular work). Again, the costumes are weird: here almost Dr Who-like. Again, rethinking for a revival, so as to bring out more strongly what matters? We can but hope.

 

Brangaene, Isolde, Tristan, and King Marke (Matthew Rose)
 

The central ideas of the third act are strong too, Kapoor’s designs and Frieder Weiss’s video providing an æsthetically inviting setting and a necessary visual confrontation with the sapping away of Tristan’s life force respectively. One would hardly be able to avoid, in the case of the latter, Tristan’s loss of blood; the way in which it both horrifies and yet remains a thing of compelling beauty is surely quite in the spirit of the work. It complements the score without overshadowing it, very much what is required. Paul Anderson’s lighting, excellent throughout the evening, offers just the right mixture of subtlety and night-day contrast. The neo-Beckettian direction Kramer offers seems far more appropriate than the strange distractions of the first act. If the attempt at transfiguration does not entirely succeed, that is at least in part Wagner’s fault. He almost gets away with it, but the rupture with tonality, with reality, with pretty much anything and everything should have been so extreme during Tristan’s monologue that Isolde’s Verklärung both enraptures and misses the point. I have yet to see a production that took quite such an Adornian line, although Peter Konwitschny arguably comes close at times, whilst also veering in completely the opposite direction; here, in a broadly traditional sense, Kramer characterises the act pretty well as a whole.  

 

Tristan, his blood draining away

Edward Gardner led a largely successful, often highly ‘theatrical’ account of the score. Its metaphysical basis might have suffered somewhat, but does it not always when Furtwängler, or at least Carlos Kleiber, cannot make it? On its own terms, whilst sometimes considerably driven (echoes perhaps of Böhm, if not quite with his symphonic, post-Beethovenian grounding?), there was considerable give and take, a sense of melos much stronger than his Meistersinger, and a well-judged balance between the requirements of the moment and those of the greater line. If the orchestra sounded at times a little thin, especially in string sound, during the first act, it played for the most part magnificently. Even earlier on, there was to the playing a productive, ever-surprising physicality, a true sense of bow touching string and sparking off something one cannot, should not put into words. The offstage (in-theatre) brass at the end of the first act was a mistake: far too loud, far too much a distracting ‘effect’, but such things are worth trying, at the very least. Some outstanding woodwind playing was greatly valued, not least, of course, the expert English horn solo in the third act (Helen Vigurs).

Tristan and Kurwenal

 

Stuart Skelton’s performance in the title role showed just how much this generous artist has to give in Wagner (and not just in Wagner). He made everything he could out of the words, out of the notes, and out of the mysterious alchemy Wagner here achieves between them. If he seemed a little tired onstage, although not vocally, later on during the third act, that may readily be forgiven; indeed, it offers its own dramatic justification. I have said this before, and fear that I shall have to say it again: it is frankly beyond belief that Covent Garden offers Skelton nothing, especially when one considers the Wagner tenors it has continued to inflict upon us. Heidi Melton was strongest during the first act. Again, she made much of the words, although some of her vowels were decidedly peculiar; however, some of her singing later on was distressing in quite the wrong way. She seemed miscast, unduly stretched by the role. Karen Cargill, on the other hand, made for a lovely Brangäne indeed, despite the bizarre nature of her treatment by the production. This was someone in whom one would readily confide, beauty of tone part of the dramatic assumption rather than a thing-in-itself. I wondered whether we might have been better off with her as Isolde. Craig Colclough suffered more from the production than anyone else, but his Kurwenal managed vocally to rise far above such limitations. His third-act Beckettian best-friend portrayal, true nobility of tone again very much part and parcel of what we saw and felt dramatically, was one of the most moving aspects of the entire performance. Likewise Matthew Rose’s dignified – if oddly, coldly treated by Kramer – King Marke. It is, I think, a more difficult thing to sing this part, arguably any of these parts, in English than in German. Rose, like the rest of the cast, but perhaps more so still, made one of the best cases in practice for performance in the vernacular I can recall hearing. Here, for once, was that vaunted dramatic immediacy, with the outstanding diction it requires. The smaller roles were all taken very well indeed, David Webb’s Sailor song setting the scene with considerable distinction. All in all, this is a Tristan that deserves to be seen, still more to be heard.