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.

 

Philharmonia/Salonen - Schoenberg, Gurrelieder, 28 June 2018

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.

Philharmonia/Salonen - Gurrelieder, 28 February 2009

Royal Festival Hall

Waldemar – Stig Andersen
Klauss-Narr – Andreas Conrad
Tove – Soile Isokoski
Wood-dove – Monica Groop
Peasant – Ralf Lukas
Speaker – Barbara Sukowa

City of Birmingham Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Simon Halsey)
Philharmonia Voices
Philharmonia Orchestra
Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

This was a wonderful opening to the Philharmonia’s series: ‘City of Dreams: Vienna 1900-1935’. A performance of Gurrelieder could hardly fail to be an occasion but the performance was excellent in pretty much every respect. I was reminded me quite how much I love this extraordinary work. It certainly evinces its composer’s unswerving integrity, even if the Wagner references in the choral writing can draw a little close for comfort. It is the most heartfelt of farewells to the nineteenth century yet it also looks forward, especially in the Speaker’s melodrama, to so much of what is to come. Indeed, the work’s progress, marked by its increasingly ‘modern’ orchestration – Schoenberg broke off that work between 1903 and 1910 – enables us to experience an ongoing critique of its earlier self, without any cost to our appreciation of the sheer gorgeousness of Part I.

Esa-Pekka Salonen’s performance with the Philharmonia captured perfectly the ever-shifting balance between late Romanticism and early modernism, without ever so much as hinting at the temptation to become duly astringent. We have all, I am sure, heard passionless, anti-septic performances of music from the Second Viennese School, which might have put us off for life. The point is not that Schoenberg’s modernist music becomes less ‘emotionally’ intense, quite the contrary; the sheer concentration of such intensity is what some listeners still find difficult to cope with. Rather to my surprise, the opening was a little shaky, the woodwind – especially flute – figures not sounding fully integrated and exhibiting a certain rhythmic insecurity. Yet there was barely another weakness to the performance. The Philharmonia was on good form as I can ever recall, perhaps even better. Certainly the warmth and silkiness of its strings would have put many Continental orchestras to shame, whilst the orchestral blend was, following that initial uncertainty, almost faultless. To marshal such huge forces is an achievement in itself but Salonen’s true achievement was to go beyond such ‘traffic control’ to engage musically with the work. After the bitter disappointment of Monday’s Flying Dutchman, in which the conductor had proved unable or unwilling to maintain any musical line, this was an object lesson in how to do so. Tempo variations were all successfully integrated into a varying, supremely flexible pulse. Orchestral detail, for instance the beautiful harp figurations, was highlighted, but never too much. And, in the balance, or rather dialectic, between symphonic cohesion and motivic definition, Salonen proved himself as true a Wagnerian as a Schoenbergian. I do not think I have ever heard, in the Wood-dove’s lament, the ’cellos’ evocation of the monk’s sounding of the Angelus so beautiful and so closely integrated into the dove’s narrative. Yet it never stood out as ‘mere’ pictorialism; it contributed to the ‘purely’ musical development rather than detracted from it. What Willi Reich called ‘the work’s infinitely subtle motivic cohesion’ was superlatively served on this occasion. Now I want to hear Salonen in Wagner.

The singing was throughout of a very high standard. Stig Andersen and Soile Isokoski proved sure interpreters of their parts. One might at times have thought them just a little ‘safe’, but it is no mean achievement to have presented so musical and coherent a reading. Isokoski’s experience in Lieder-singing shone through; thought had clearly gone into every word and its relationship to the music. Andersen’s slightly elderly-sounding Heldentenor sounded quite appropriate to Waldemar; unlike so many of his ilk, he can sing the part and never resorted to barking. I do not think I have encountered a better Wood-dove than Monica Groop, her lament as plangently moving as it is possible to imagine and her storytelling impeccable. Ralf Lukas was an admirable Peasant, whilst Andreas Conrad was a truly Mime-like Klaus-Narr, bringing home the similarity to an extent I do not recall previously having appreciated. Barbara Sukowa was at least as excellent a Speaker as she was on Claudio Abbado’s superlative Vienna recording. Her text was so internalised that she could deliver it with a freedom, always intimately connected to the music, which apparently transcended any impression of rehearsal. It was a great pity, though, that the use of microphones was not only so clearly audible, but so crass that she sounded as if she were almost in an entirely different acoustic. Perhaps it is necessary, or advisable, to use microphones here, although I doubt it; if so, however, it really needs to be handled better. The choral singing was equally excellent, the Wild Hunt duly terrifying and ghostly – shades of the Dutchman, mediated very heavily by Götterdämmerung – whilst the sheer honest exultance of Schoenberg’s final hymn to the sun was captured ecstatically.

It was a good idea to provide surtitles, rather than have everyone spending half the time at following the programme – often a line or two behind. However, the translation left more than a little to be desired, not so much in terms of accuracy as with respect to strange infelicities of style, unsure whether it was aiming at archaism or efficient modern rendering. The appearance of ‘Gurre-on-Sea’ was unfortunate, to say the least, evoking images of Clacton rather than Teutonic mystery. And the audience was sadly on typical form when it came to shuffling and coughing. Sometimes the latter is unavoidable, I know, but surely the woman sitting next to me could have waited a little longer than the end of the second bar. The shifting impressionistic textures of the Prelude suffered particularly in this regard. Yet such irritations remained minor in the face of so movingly assured a performance. If the rest of the series lives up to the expectations now engendered, London and various other European cities are in for a rare treat. Next stop: Verklärte Nacht and Zemlinsky’s Lyric Symphony.