BPO/Gilbert - Honegger, Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 8 June 2024

Philharmonie

Jeanne d’Arc (spoken) – Marion Cotillard
Brother Dominique (spoken) – Eric Génovèse
Narrator (spoken) – Christian Ganon

La Vierge – Elsa Benoit
St Marguerite – Adèle Charvet
St Catherine – Anna Kissjudit
Porcus, Voice, First Herald, Priest – Valentyn Dytiuk
Voice, Second Herald, Peasant – Alex Rosen

Stage direction – Côme de Bellescize
Production – Ony Sarfati
Costumes, stage equipment – Colombe Lauriot Prévost

Lighting – Thomas Costerg  

Vokalhelden Children’s Choir (directors: Johannes David Wolff, Judith Kamphues)

MDR Radio Chorus (director: Philipp Ahmann)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 

Alan Gilbert (conductor).

Arthur Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher is an unusual work, seldom encountered in performance, though its duration at about seventy-five minutes makes it good for both concert and CD. It is generally classed as an oratorio, but the designation mystère lyrique arguably makes better sense, bringing it closer to a mystery play and reminding us that the work, with spoken dialogue and three central spoken roles, is at least as much Paul Claudel’s as Honegger’s. It has been fully staged, even filmed; here, it was given in what we might call a ‘concert staging’ from a team led by Côme de Bellescize, with vivid use of costumes and lighting, as well as excellent, integrated acting in spoken and, where appropriate, sung roles alike.

The work presents Joan of Arc’s final moments before burning at the stake, punctuated by flashbacks to her childhood visions and to her show-trial, reaching an ecstatic apotheosis in departing this world that musically, as well as dramatically, seems to partake more of Claudel’s French Catholicism than Honegger’s Swiss Protestantism. In the title role, first taken (and danced) by Ida Rubinstein, Marion Cotillard gave a memorable, charismatic performance in startling red, touched by a strange fanaticism that resisted temptation to sentimentalise, whilst alert to situational and personal injustice. (Perhaps that is residual Englishness on my part, and I should feel differently if I were French, though I suspect a strong distaste for many manifestations of popular piety also affects my response to this peculiar figure.) Eric Génovèse gave us a sympathetic and enabling, yet ultimately ambiguous Brother Dominique. Christian Ganon was very much the showman, even conjurer, as Narrator, in a neat conception bringing to life the tale from a book he read to the splendid, colourfully arrayed children’s choir, Vokalhelden, called upon to act as well as sing. 

Their adult counterparts, the MDR Chorus, brought heft and agility to their part, underpinning, elucidating, and battling in so much of the action, Honegger’s debt to Bach as apparent as his undoubted originality. Vocal soloists, often assuming multiple roles, all impressed, Elsa Benoit, Adèle Charvet, and Anna Kissjudit positioned in appropriately heavenly positions by the organ as the Virgin and Saints Marguerite and Catherine, vocal delivery enhancing that visionary quality. Valentyn Dytiuk’s roster of tenor roles, not least the pig, Porcus (Claudel’s play on words between cochon and Pierre Cauchon, Bishop of Beauvais), was delivered with a fine sense of theatre, as well sung as they were characterful; so too were those of rich-toned bass Alex Rosen. 

Alan Gilbert’s leadership of these forces and spirited, idiomatic playing from the Berlin Philharmonic proved adept in imparting a proper sense of unity to what might on paper – and doubtless in a lesser performance – pose a danger of the unduly eclectic. Here, the powerful prologue, added de profundis by Claudel and Honegger in 1944, cast its dark shadow over the proceedings to come, as did the later rigour of Honegger’s counterpoint, without detracting from the Prokofiev-like sardonicism of the scene with Porcus and its seemingly fond return to the relatively carefree 1920s. One certainly felt the work’s Janus-faced quality, placed somewhere in between, as well as its resonances of an historic French nationalism, folksong and all. Ominous orchestral tolling and reimaginations of ‘early music’ led us through hallucinatory recreations of the girl’s visions, to the terrible fiery flame that would be her wedding dress, and beyond to the closing ensemble hymn and haunting reprise of an earlier, wandering flute solo. It was full of incident, for instance in the ondes Martenot’s suggestion of howling dogs, but also of quasi-cinematographic direction and reflection.

Tragedy and Modernity: Honegger and Brahms

Notions of the tragic have changed greatly since the Golden Age of Attic drama and its posthumous codification by Aristotle. Some have claimed that, in Shakespeare’s wake, what we now call tragedy is something entirely different. A (post-)Christian need for redemption as heard, however equivocally, in Honegger’s Third Symphony seems incompatible with tragedy’s iron rule of Fate. Even Wagner, with the exception of Lohengrin, tended to offer redemption rather than catharsis in the ancient sense. Indeed, minor-mode symphonies that do not turn ‘affirmatively’ to the major are rarer than we might expect. Yet those tragic notions, their representation too, have also remained surprisingly close to their source, of which we still speak, in Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. Would it have seemed strange to ancient writers of tragic drama and verse to speak of symphonies as participating in the tragic and even, in the case of Brahms’s Fourth Symphony, of embodying tragedy itself? Doubtless, but then to them the very notion of a symphony would have seemed equally strange.

New Life to Everlasting Themes

Born out of Paris in January 1945, Honegger’s Symphonie liturgique came to life in the strange atmosphere of French ‘liberation’. The end of war’s tunnel, amidst privation, bitterness and general settling of scores, was yet tantalisingly close. The future might, must be better than the recent past, but there was little reason to think it would be devoid of further pain and even tragedy. As if to symbolize life’s dualities more generally, the Symphony was written during wartime and peacetime, in France and Switzerland, where this singularly atypical member of ‘Les Six’ remained a citizen.

It is not intended for liturgical purposes, but rather takes a subtitle for each of its three movements from lines in the Latin (Roman Catholic) liturgy: ‘Dies irae’ (Day of wrath) from the Requiem; ‘De profundis clamavi ad te’ (Out of the deep have I called unto thee) of Psalm 130, recited prior to burial; and ‘Dona nobis pacem’ (Grant us peace) from the Agnus Dei of the Ordinary of the Mass. Each movement, Honegger said, attempted to express ‘an idea, a thought which I should not wish to call philosophical – that would be pretentious – but which represents the composer’s personal feeling’. His intention, he said, had been ‘to symbolize the reaction of modern man against the morass of barbarism, stupidity, suffering, machine-mindedness and bureaucracy’. Herein was ‘a drama played out between three characters, whether real or symbolic: misery, happiness and man [:] everlasting themes. I have tried to give them new life.’

The idea of the ‘Dies irae’, Honegger thought, would pose no problem to audiences who had all lived through ‘years of war and revolution’. Its dark opening, ‘de profundis’ avant la lettre, scurries and snarls by turn. In diabolical, malevolent grotesquerie, it comes close to Prokofiev’s Third Symphony (and thus his opera The Fiery Angel). A militaristic storm, again like Prokofiev, brimming with melody came, Honegger recalled, ‘suddenly, in its entirety, on the short train journey from Basel to Bern’ and was swiftly notated in draft before retiring to bed that evening. A ferocious energy framing wind intonation of the dread words ‘Dies irae, dies illa’ is the driving force of a movement, like its successors, in sonata form. Here that form proves to be principally exposition and developmental yet ultimately reversed recapitulation, subsiding into the opening darkness.

The prayerful second movement represents the tendency of ‘everything remaining of purity, clarity, and confidence in humanity […] toward that force we feel to be above us’. That might be God, or perhaps something from within, borne by each of us ‘in the most secret part of his soul’. Considerably more ambiguous in ‘message’, not least in the inconclusive climaxes to and from which Honegger builds and retreats, the music seems to float in a state of purgatorial suspension. Early responsorial exchanges between string and wind choirs recall the organ (or even Bruckner). If, to an English ear, there sounds an Elgarian nobility to the lower strings, such correspondence is doubtless mere coincidence. A seraphic flute solo evokes religious iconography of old, in flight above the ruins of modernity.

From its title, we might be a little surprised by the realm of the third movement: not that peace which passes all understanding, but the ‘inescapable rise of stupidity in the world: nationalism, militarism, red tape, administration, customs duties, taxes, wars, everything humanity has invented to persecute and degrade him, to transform him into a robot’. It is that stupidity, however, which has finally provoked ‘the cry of despair: “Dona nobis pacem”’. A goose-stepping march of idiocy, ‘la thème de la c…rie humaine’, gathers pace, forces and followers – ‘mechanical geese’ – over lengthy pedals, erupting in terrible ‘pesante’ cries of revolt from the oppressed. A rapt wind choir sings the closing Adagio, ‘pianissimo sempre e dolce’. Above divided strings, melismatic instrumental solos – flute joined by piccolo, violin and cello – take us to celestial C sharp major for ‘a brief meditation on what life could be: calm, love, joy – a bird’s song, Nature, peace’. And yet, the final chord’s ambiguity – what to make of its added notes? – suggests only a temporary peace. Nagging, gnawing doubt remains.

 

Tragedy that Brooks No Dissent

Brahms conceived his Fourth Symphony in very different circumstances, on an Alpine holiday in the Styrian village of Mürzzuschlag in 1884 and 1885. ‘It tastes of the climate here’, he wrote to Hans von Bülow, comparing it to the local cherries’ stubborn unwillingness to ripen: ‘you would not eat them!’ Like Beethoven’s works with similar opus numbers, the Symphony stands on the cusp of the composer’s unquestionably ‘late’ period and puzzled certain early listeners, though it has been long since assimilated into the repertoire. Few symphonies speak with a voice and direction so unambiguous in its Classical tragedy: Mozart’s 40th, Mahler’s Sixth, perhaps a handful of others. Brahms’s Fourth it seems, will always stand among them; defiant, unbending, if no longer incomprehensible as it initially seemed to some listeners, Eduard Hanslick and Clara Schumann among them.

The wistfulness of the first theme perhaps suggests the E minor opening of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. We can sense the melancholy shadows cast by those falling thirds, even when they rise to foretell added sixth harmonies that will colour the entire work. What follows, though, is tighter of structure – no criticism of Mendelssohn, for he and Brahms attempt and accomplish very different things. This was not Brahms’s first musical construction from a chain of falling thirds; the development section of the Finale of his Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor op. 60 is another example. But to place them first, without introduction, is a further refinement, even declaration of (proto-serial) intent. A recent fashion in Brahms studies has been to emphasize his Romanticism as opposed to a modernist legacy, reflected in replacement of images of the older, bearded composer – forbidding, avuncular, or somewhere in between – with his fresh-faced counterpart. However, an either/or misses the point. This opening could barely stand closer to both Mendelssohn and Webern. This is Brahms’s only symphonic first movement not to repeat the exposition: testament to what Schoenberg would extol as the ‘developing variation’ of ‘Brahms the Progressive’. It is again to Mendelssohn that Brahms stands closest in recapitulating at a point of exhaustion rather than triumph, ‘with all the majesty’, to quote Donald Tovey, ‘of the Norns prophesying the twilight of the Gods’. We move inexorably to Tovey’s ‘grim Amen’. So complete is the sound, we might fancy a larger orchestra were employed; this false tutti is, however, voiced without trombones, held in reserve for the Finale.

The second movement develops likewise by variation. It is heralded by horn calls whose strong hints at C major refer back to intervals and harmonies from the first movement, and forward both to the Phrygian mode of this movement’s close – horns again – and to the Scherzo. Once the home key has been established, the music is warmer, more redemptive, its later ‘sumptuous eight-part string texture’, to quote Malcolm MacDonald, ‘the most gorgeous assertion of the “himmlischer Trost” [heavenly consolation] of E major in Brahms’s output’. The composer of Ein deutsches Requiem and the Vier ernste Gesänge is the most devout of agnostics. Epiphany is enabled by shadows that follow and precede, modal inflections with roots in late Beethoven as well as Brahms’s early-music scholarship.

Brahms’s Scherzo is formidably iron-clad, even for a work so firmly in Beethoven’s tradition. Sonata-form concision both propels and questions the mood of celebration, though certainly not its coiled-spring energy. Intimations of the Finale abound, perhaps only recognized as such in retrospect. Brahms’s celebrated use of the triangle needs no defence, yet received a splendid one from Tovey, who pointed to combination with piccolo and contrabassoon in ‘grotesque poetic aptness to […] bacchanalian fury’.

The idea of the Finale dates back several years. In a conversation around 1880 with Siegfried Ochs and Hans von Bülow, Brahms lamented how little most musicians, then present company included, knew of the treasure trove of Bach’s cantatas. He played on the piano the final movement of Nach dir, Herr, verlanget mich (Cantata No. 150), of which he owned a copyist’s manuscript, a gift from Bach biographer Philipp Spitta. Bülow objected that voices would not bring out Bach’s climax with necessary force, at which point Brahms asked, ‘what would you think of a symphonic movement written on this very theme one day?’. It was, however, he admitted, ‘too chunky, too straightforward. One would need somehow to alter it chromatically.’ Brahms thus added a chromatic A sharp – prepared in the first group of the first movement – to the simple theme, heightening tension in transition to the dominant. He also stretched out Bach’s theme to eight bars and had it appear anywhere in the texture, not only in the bass, thereby composing what, Brahms’s own nomenclature notwithstanding, is considered a passacaglia rather than a chaconne.

In immediate departure from Bach, the theme is heard first not in the bass but over a bass line characterized once more by falling thirds. 30 variations ensue, taking us through intervals, tonalities, other musical qualities and relationships new and old. At the beating heart of this world of musical tragedy, invited by the 12th variation’s Orphic flute, sings Harmoniemusik patently longing for a Classical paradise no longer attainable. Trombones solemnly summon the All Souls ‘aequale’ tradition of communion with the dead. The grandeur of the final variation’s ritardando necessitates, like Fate itself, volcanic eruption. And so there is heralded a magnificent ‘Più Allegro’ coda in which, released from passacaglia confinement, music can again freely modulate. The destination to which it storms is never in the slightest of doubt. There is no nagging doubt here. No more than Aeschylus, Sophocles, nor, for all his Christianity, Bach does Brahms in his tragedy brook dissent.

(This essay was originally published to accompany a Salzburg Festival performance by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and Herbert Blomstedt.)

Proms Saturday Matinee no.2 – Hardenberger/Lapland CO/Storgårds: C.P.E. Bach, Birtwistle, Honegger, Davies, and Sibelius, 9 August 2014

Cadogan Hall

C.P.E. Bach – Symphony in B minor, Wq 182 no.5

Birtwistle – Endless Parade

Honegger – Pastorale d’été

Davies – Sinfonia

Sibelius - Rakastava

Håkan Hardenberger (trumpet)

Lapland Chamber Orchestra

John Storgårds (conductor)

 

A principal theme of this year’s Proms has been the greater-than-ever variety of ensembles from across the world, many of them making their debuts here, whether at Cadogan Hall or a short walk away at the Royal Albert Hall. This Saturday Matinee offered the Proms debut of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, the most northerly orchestra in the European Union, conducted by its Artistic Director, John Storgårds, with trumpeter Håkan Hardenberger joining for Birtwistle’s Endless Parade.

 

To hear an orchestral work – or indeed any work – by C.P.E. Bach is a rare treat. Unfortunately, the performance of his ‘Hamburg’ Symphony in B minor, Wq 182 no.5 (a Proms first), was not the most ingratiating; indeed, the first movement proved downright abrasive, and not only on account of some dodgy intonation. The strangeness of Emanuel Bach’s orchestral tessitura registered, as did the disjunctures – a canny programming presentiment of Birtwistle? – but there is more to the composer than that. A slightly fuller tone was permitted to the small orchestra (4.4.3.2.1, expanded for the following works) in the slow movement, and the finale was frenetic in a good sense. Still, it is sad to reflect that, on the few occasions when modern orchestras feel able to perform this music, they nevertheless so often feel constrained to ape ‘period’ mannerisms. If you have modern strings, make use of them!

 

Birtwistle’s Endless Parade offered what the composer, in a brief conversation with Clemency Burton-Hill, called a ‘piece of permanent discontinuity’, after Cubism, and more particularly after Picasso. The orchestra now sounded more at home, doubtless helped by the virtuosity and musical understanding of Hardenberger. Indeed, it would be little exaggeration to speak of ‘supreme command’ in his case. The piece was played as chamber music writ large, material tossed between soloist and various orchestral instruments. In its syncopation, it even approached ‘swing’, though jazz enthusiasts would probably beg to differ. It is, of course, a typically perspectival work, but I was struck – as was my companion, new to Birtwistle’s music – at the continuity that yet dialectically emerged from discontinuity. As Birtwistle commented, Beethoven is a true master in such matters, working, however, with the disadvantage (!) of tonality. Birtwistle’s language, technique, and for much of his career, eschewal of goal-orientation might seem to make him and Beethoven odd bed-fellows, but the comparison is well worth reflecting upon. As ever, of course, there was a keen sense not only of drama and landscape, but of drama through landscape, and of landscape through drama.

 

Another great English musical knight, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, was represented by his early (1962) Sinfonia, one of the works he wrote after – in one sense or another – Monteverdi’s Vespers, which, in a performance under Walter Goehr, had so inspired him and many others. (What a pity no recording seems to exist of any of Goehr’s performances! If anyone knows differently, I should be delighted to hear.) Davies admitted that he had not heard the piece since having conducted it during the 1980s with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and that he would take a red pencil to it now. I was interested to hear it, but should not necessarily rush to do so again. The opening clarinet solo was properly ‘recitando’, the first movement being marked ‘Lento recitando’, and that movement as a whole was full of expectant energy. None of the piece, though, seemed especially characteristic. The slow onward tread of the last of the four short movements came across very well in performance.

 

I could not bring myself to become excited about the other two pieces on the programme. Honegger’s Pastorale d’été ideally needs a greater cushion of strings than was available here. However, the essence of the music was well conveyed, greatly helped by steadiness in the rocking movement upon which it rests. Woodwind playing especially impressed – as indeed it had in Birtwistle. Sibelius’s Rakastava, the third of the pieces receiving its first Proms performance (Sinfonia having been the second) received an idiomatic, committed performance, if with smaller forces than it would doubtless often receive. (In this hall, it did not seem to matter.) Despite the characterful muted playing in the second movement, and especially fine solo cello playing throughout from Lauri Angervo, it remained for me a largely bland work. The encore, a Romance by Nils-Eric Fougstedt, was pleasant enough in a generic film-music sort of way.

Prohaska/Schneider - Song of the Sirens, 4 March 2012

Wigmore Hall

Debussy – La Mer est plus belle
Haydn – The Mermaid’s Song, Hob.XXVIa/25
Lawes – Slide soft, you silver floods
Schubert – Der Fischer, D 225
Am See, D 746

Szymanowski – Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess, op.31: ‘Song of the Waves’ and ‘Dance’

Mahler – Phantasie aus Don Juan
Wolf – Nixe Binsefuss
Schumann – Die Meerfee, op.125 no.1
Mendelssohn – Schilflied, op.71 no.4
Schubert – Des Fischers Liebesglück, D 933
Fauré – La Fleur qui va sur l’eau, op.85 no.2
Honegger – Trois Chansons de la Petite Sirènes, H 63 : ‘Chanson des Sirènes’ and ‘Berceuses de la sirène’
Dowland – Sorrow, stay, lend true repentant tears
Dvořák – Rusalka: Song to the Moon


Wigmore Hall debuts do not come much more impressive than this: a beautifully programmed ‘Song of the Sirens’ from Anna Prohaska, splendidly partnered by her regular pianist, Eric Schneider, in which the soprano’s heavy cold could happily be written off. (One really would never have known.) Not only were we treated to a stunning variety of works, whether considered in terms of language, style, or chronology, that variety proved to be the flip side of the coin to as impeccably selected and intelligently ordered a survey of the siren in song as could be imagined. Fortunately, one did not have to imagine, for a mere hour in the stalls took us from Debussy to Dvořák via Haydn, Schubert, Szymanowski, Honegger, Dowland, and many others.

It was Schneider who announced himself first in Debussy’s 1891 Verlaine setting, La Mer reste plus belle. His announcement was vigorous rather than pastel, much to the sea’s – and to Debussy’s – benefit. The same could be said of Prohaska’s voice, richer in timbre than one might expect from a high soprano: again much to the benefit of the music, and with excellent French (often, alas, a problem with singers). ‘Un soufflé ami hante la vague, et nous chante: “Vous sans espérance, mourez sans souffrance!"’ The first but far from last of our siren calls proved ravishingly sensuous. ‘Plus belle que tous, meilleure que nous!’ Who could resist? Haydn’s Mermaid Song was playful, yet seductive in its own way. The change of language – this is one of the composer’s English canzonettas for Anne Hunter, still far too little known – posed no more problem than any subsequent shift. Echoes of earlier eighteenth-century English style – Handel and Arne, perhaps – were certainly present, providing a winning link to the earlier, more serious English writing of Henry Lawes, in his lute song, Slide soft, you silver floods. The performance from both artists was not only stylish, but more importantly, highly alert to the composer’s harmonic shifts and their implications. It is perhaps inevitable that with hindsight one would think of Purcell. Two Schubert songs followed. The insouciance of Der Fischer nicely set up the dissolution of any easy opposition between ‘reality’ and ‘unreality’. Who, after all, is a siren? And for whom is she whatever we might think she is? Goethe’s voice, moreover, shone through, the sheer quality of his verse relished in its rendition. Am See conveyed a sense of the metaphysical without any need for portentous exaggeration; it was all the more powerful for that.

The ‘Song of the Waves’ (‘Pieśń o fali’) and ‘Dance’ (‘Taniec’) from Szymanowski’s Songs of a Fairy-Tale Princess were especially welcome, both for their inclusion – what wonderful songs these are, and how rarely we hear him – and for the manner of their performance, imperceptible union of eroticism and exoticism combining in a properly Szymanowskian magic carpet, harking back to the Debussy of the first song, to be sure, but the composer’s personal voice unmistakeably present. We stood close to the world of King Roger, and rightly so. Prohaska presented a combination of Carmen, Zerbinetta, and Stravinsky’s Nightingale, in ‘Dance’, and above all, seemed both to experience and to enjoy both music and text. Schneider navigated the difficult piano part with ease, teasing out the inviting ambiguities of Szymanowski’s harmonies. Already a noted Zerlina (Salzburg and La Scala, the latter under Daniel Barenboim), Prohaska then turned to a very different Don Juan fantasy, that of Mahler – although, of course, Da Ponte’s predecessor, Tirso de Molina is the writer. It is a tribute to both artists, as well of course as to Mahler himself, that the composer’s own voice, even in a song from the early 1880s, should sing out so clearly. His bitter irony is present even here, emerging from the magical world of Das klagende Lied. Haunting indeed, not least in terms of Schneider’s voicing of Mahler’s harmonic language. Wolf’s Nixe Binsefuss was properly sprite-like, capricious and not without menace, leading into a rare opportunity to hear one of Schumann’s late songs, Die Meerfee, the performance at one with the composer’s deceptive ‘simplicity’. Mendelssohn’s Schilflied, a setting of Nikolaus Lenau, not only benefited from a sense of the metaphysical, reminding us of the earlier Schubert Am See; it also showed that Prohaska, even when indisposed, could sustain a long line, musical as well as verbal virtues to the fore.

The last of the three Schubert songs featured was Des Fischers Liebesglück. Prohaska and Schneider rightly took their time, imparting a dolorous sense of longing that long haunted the imagination. Schneider’s voicing of apparent simplicity enabled detail, both in his and the vocal part, truly to stand in relief. Again, one wondered, what is reality? Should we even care, when we might more profitably, or at least pleasurably, be ensnared? Fauré’s La Fleur qui va sur l’eau showed a more tempestuous side to the composer than one often hears, both artists displaying a fine sense of dramatic narrative and metaphor. It was a delight thereafter to sample two – alas, only two – of Honegger’s 1926 Trois Chansons de la Petite Sirène, ‘Chanson des Sirènes’ perfectly placed in the programme to have one relish its relative harmonic astringency. It brought in its wake a real sense of dissolution in the waves and ultimately of the siren’s unanswerable call. ‘Berceuse de la sirène’ thereafter allowed one to luxuriate in its dangerous lullaby. Dowland’s Sorrow, stay, lend true repentant tears not only reminded one of Prohaska’s roots in early music, but crucially distilled the essence of one of our most extraordinary song-writers: sorrow, despair, and of course, melancholy. The falling ‘down’ and ‘down’ truly tugged at the heart-strings. So, in its different way, did the operatic climax, the ‘Song of the Moon’ from Rusalka, at present receiving its first staging at Covent Garden. (Prohaska sang in that production’s first outing, at the Salzburg Festival in 2008.) Once again, musical and dramatic gifts were united, in a reading poignant to a degree, a fitting finale to a fine recital, rounded off with a delightfully ambiguous encore of Wolf’s Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens.


See also the review on Classical Iconoclast.