Gay/RSB/Jurowski - Telemann, Boismortier, Ravel, Ibert, and Strauss, 12 October 2023

Konzerthaus

Telemann: Bourlesque de Quixotte, TWW 55:G10
Boismortier: Don Quichotte chez la duchesse, op.97: ballet music
Ravel: Don Quichotte à Dulcinée
Ibert: Quatre chansons de Don Quichotte
Strauss: Don Quixote, op.35

Paul Gay (bass-baritone)

Alejandro Regueira Caumel (viola)

Konstanze von Gutzeit (cello)

Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowksi (conductor)

Images: Robert Niemeyer

‘Wie klingt “Don Quijote”?’ was the question posed by (and in) the programme to this splendid tour through musical depictions of Cervantes’s would-be knight-errant. To answer the question, we discovered that Don Quixote sounds in various ways, yet always colourfully and, aptly enough, endearingly too. Vladimir Jurowski’s gift for programming, so strong a feature of his time as Music Director of the London Philharmonic Orchestra, has not deserted him in Berlin. The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra/Rundfunksinfonieorchester Berlin (RSB) is clearly thriving under his leadership, here in music ranging from Telemann to Ravel. 

Telemann’s turned twice as a composer to Cervantes’s novel, in 1761 writing a one-act opera on an episode from it: Don Quijote auf der Hochzeit des Camacho. (The young Mendelssohn would also turn to this same episode.) This ‘burlesque’ orchestral suite from 1739 takes in different episodes over the course of its seven movements and proved in performance both splendidly enjoyable and vividly theatrical. Its opening French overture might indeed have been the curtain-raiser to an opera of its own, here driven in fine balance between rhythm and harmony. We heard – and may have felt we saw – horses hooves in our hero’s celebrated tilting at windmills, Sancho Panza’s bruising and his donkey’s gallop, dragging and then absurdly accelerating, and much more, the final movement a well-earned sprint to the finish. Well-chosen percussion effects from triangle to tambourine added to the pictorial jollity. 

Joseph Bodin de Boismortier write his ‘comédie lyrique’ Don Quichotte chez la Duchesse on an episode in which Telemann found courtly repose and perhaps a greater emotional depth than elsewhere in his suite. Here we heard only some of the orchestral (ballet) music: the overture, a sequence of march, two tambourins, and second march, and a chaconne. (An old BBC broadcast with splendid cast may be found here for the eighty minutes or so of the entire work.)  Another arresting overture, this time actually written for the theatre, had us all but see the curtain and its rise. Notes and drama, even in this purely instrumental music, fairly flew off the players’ pages. Jurowski and the orchestra, moreover, conveyed the composer’s voice, close in some ways to Rameau yet quite different in others, with great élan, the conductor himself leading from tambourine in the first march. Oboes, bassoons, and harpsichord offered a fine Gallic contrast in the second tambourin. The chaconne proved piquant and full of surprises, from its opening gong stroke onwards. Through its twists and turns of mood and material, Jurowski never forgot this was a single dance; nor did we. 

Bass-baritone Paul Gay joined the orchestra for two sets of songs intended for Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film starring Feodor Chaliapin. Ravel’s short song-cycle, his final completed work, was written too late for inclusion, but Jacques Ibert’s four songs were sung both in the film and in a recording made by Chaliapin and Ibert. Neither composer sets Cervantes: Ravel opted for contemporary texts by Paul Morand, whereas Ibert’s selection mixed old and new with Pierre de Ronsard and Alexander Arnoux. Both composers, even with small orchestra, Ibert’s (saxophone included) somewhat larger than Ravel, could offer a more varied instrumental palette; yet one could readily fancy one heard something of a ‘French’ ear for colour continued from their eighteenth-century predecessor. Gay presented resolutely unsentimental, communicative performances, relishing the melismata in third of Ravel’s three songs, the ‘Chanson à boire’, in which the composer’s ‘Spanish’ voice comes to the fore one last time, as much as the keen narrative of Ibert’s ‘Chanson à Dulcinée’ and the undeniably filmic qualities of the farewell, ‘Chanson de la mort de Don Quichotte’. 

And so we came to Strauss’s tone-poem, the excellent Alejandro Regueira Caumel and Konstanze von Gutzeit stepping forward as ‘soloists’, yet acting collegially as much as highlighted leaders of their sections. The RSB’s versatility, on show throughout, was certainly evident here, immediately sounding, for want of a better word, Straussian. Jurowski’s way with the score was fascinating, more modernistic, even strangely Stravinskian, than I can recall having heard. Generally brisk and admirably clear, I could not help but feel there was loss as well as gain, but we shall always have Karajan, Kempe, and others to return to when we wish. His trademark formalism certainly paid off in delineation of the work’s variation form and sharp individual characterisation of each episode. In any case, as the mood darkened, the orchestra’s colours, especially from the RSB brass, spoke increasingly for themselves. Quite a storm was whipped up, not only via the wind-machine. In the later duet of two bassoons it was, strangely, Stravinsky who once again came to mind. Woodwind in general were pleasingly rumbunctious. If this were ultimately a somewhat distanced performance, Caumel and Gutzeit notwithstanding, like the rest of the programme, it had me think—and, in a number of ways, reconsider.

Pahud/ORF SO/Brönnimann - Boulez, Ibert, Pintscher, and Debussy, 1 June 2017

Grosser Saal, Konzerthaus

Boulez – Figures-Doubles-Prismes

Boulez – Mémoriale (… explosante-fixe … Originel)

Ibert – Flute Concerto

Pintscher – Osiris

Debussy – La Mer

Emmanuel Pahud (flute)

ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra

Baldur Brönnimann (conductor)

My present visit to Vienna helpfully – and quite unwittingly, at least at the version of initial planning – takes in the second half, roughly speaking, of the 38^th International Musical Festival of the Wiener Konzerthausgesellschaft. A good number of the concerts I shall review here will be part of that festival; and a good number of those will feature music by one of the Konzerthaus’s Honorary Members, the late Pierre Boulez. This concert from Emmanuel Pahud, the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Baldur Brönnimann most certainly did, although I was not entirely convinced that the Boulez pieces themselves were the performative highlights. Not, I hasten to add, that they were not good performances. Perhaps that is actually in itself, ironically, an encouraging sign, for the incorporation of Boulez’s music into the core repertoire now seems unstoppable. We hear these works much more often, nowadays; many more musicians perform them; we grow used to finer discrimination between performances, just as we are used to exercising when it comes to Beethoven or Brahms.

At any rate, I do not wish to exaggerate. The opening éclat of Figures-Doubles-Prismes made its proper impression, as did the following orchestral music, de profundis, and the exquisite tapestry of delights that followed that – all in less than a minute. There was a keen sense of non-linear, or not-only-linear, time, of expansion, although I wondered whether there might have been a little more of the latter. (Perhaps it was the acoustic.) A good few seeds of the much later world of the orchestral Notations seemed to be sown here, in a way I do not recall having noticed before, likewise the proliferating tendencies of the later music. Messiaen also seemed to hover in the background, even in the foreground occasionally, as if we were hearing secularised birdsong. The slightly, but only slightly, earthbound impression persisted into Mémoriale, Pahud and the small ensemble offering admirable clarity as figures bounced from soloist to others, almost as if they were a shadow, not quite taking on a life of its own, but nevertheless possessed of autonomy. Pahud’s flute playing was so admirably clear that one might have taken dictation. Both Boulez pieces, bizarrely, were met with outraged booing and shouted obscenities from one member of the audience. Quite what he had been expecting, I have no idea; the woman with him looked mortified, still more so when the rest of the audience turned and laughed at him. Pahud’s gentle mocking when the man simply would not shut up was just the thing: he cupped his ear as if to say ‘I’m sorry; I can’t hear you.’   

It was noteworthy that our fascistic friend did not react similarly to the Ibert Flute Concerto which, somewhat oddly, followed. I should never dream of booing any performance and look very dimly on those who do, but for me, at least, the excellence of the performances notwithstanding, it was a bit of a trial, a slight piece of note-spinning that overstayed its welcome. There was no gainsaying Pahud’s virtuosity, nor indeed that of the rest of the orchestra, the leader included (her slow movement solos ravishingly played). Pahud’s range of articulation and dynamic range proved equally impressive, and he came as close to winning me over to this music as I imagine anyone could. Oh well, no one responds equally well to everything.

Matthias Pintscher’s Osiris, on the other hand, proved something of a revelation. It was premiered by Boulez in Chicago in 2008, but the kinship seemed to run deeper than that: kinship, I stress, certainly no mere imitation. Fantastical arabesques – again, truly exquisite high string writing – seemed to come into contact with, be changed by, and in turn transform, a more Germanic post-expressionist sound world: not so overt as, say, in Wolfgang Rihm or Jörg Widmann, perhaps all the more intriguing for its relative distance and its mediation of competing tendencies. It sounded, with the strong narrative pull of the work, as if this were a somewhat unexpected (that is, to say, not merely neo-Romantic) rapprochement with the tone poem. A Schoenbergian wind, as if from planet Gurrelieder, blew through the score at one point, the message seemingly more metaphysical than material. A trumpet solo, wonderfully played, sang and dazzled as if it represented a ‘character’; perhaps it did. Splendidly stereophonic tuned percussion playing inevitably recalled Boulez. This, I am sure, is music that needs rehearing; I look forward to doing so.

Finally, with La Mer, we heard an undisputed repertoire classic, one not only strongly associated with Boulez, but one performed at the 1958 premiere of Doubles, as it then was. I found Brönnimann’s reading, and the ORF SO’s performance thereof, utterly compelling: fresh, neither hidebound to tradition nor novel for the sake of it. ‘De l’aube à midi sur la mer’ veritably teemed with life – and, like the sea, the more so the more carefully one looked (or listened). A strong sense of quasi-symphonic line prepared us well for the great climax of midday. The fantastical scherzo of ‘Jeux de vagues’ offered obvious connections with Boulez’s own music, yet spoke very much for itself too. Phrases were finely turned, yet never narcissistically so. It was impossible to ignore, though – and why would one try? – the seductive colours from the strings; silver, gold, all manner of shades in between and beyond. Now, in a reversal of the stakes in Mémoriale, it was wind that offered the shadow; until, of course, Debussy turned the tables time and time again so as to make a nonsense of such pedantry. There was, quite rightly, much that remained ineffable, not to be grasped. The wind that blew in ‘Dialogue du vent et de la mer’ was a stormy one. Balances again shifted before our ears; so much comes to us from Debussy, as Boulez would have been the first to admit. Wagner, too, seemed to hover behind the score – as indeed, with the exception of the Ibert, he had all evening. But he hovered, flickered; all remained fruitfully uncertain, even the final climax. Boulez would surely have nodded in agreement.