Berlin Festtage (3) - Staatskapelle Berlin/Rhorer - Beethoven, 7 April 2023

Philharmonie

Missa solemnis in D major, op.123

Camilla Nylund (soprano)
Anna Kissjudit (mezzo-soprano)

Saimir Pirgu (tenor)

René Pape (bass)

Staatsopern Chor Berlin (chorus director: Martin Wright)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Jérémie Rhorer (conductor)

Image: © Peter Adamik

Thirty years since the release of his recording of Beethoven’s Missa solemnis with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Daniel Barenboim was due to return to the work, conducting it for the first time with the Staatskapelle Berlin. Alas, that was not to be, yet the first performances the orchestras has given since 1962, at the Staatsoper under Franz Konwitschny – the only others since the Second World War in 1952 and 1947, at the Admiralspalast – went ahead. French ‘early music’ conductor Jérémie Rhorer seemed a strange replacement for Barenboim, but there was probably not a multitude of candidates available. Few conductors approach it regularly; many never do. Wilhelm Furtwängler famously declined to conduct it in later years, considering himself unable to do justice to what he continued to believe to be Beethoven’s greatest work. (Many of us, with a gun to our heads, would agree.) It was also a very strange choice for Good Friday, though perhaps that was not foremost in the minds of those assembling the programme. Rhorer’s approach and, more seriously, his command of these distinguished forces proved of variable success. There were nonetheless (aural) glimpses, sometimes more than that, of what this extraordinary work might in the right hands still be. 

The Kyrie, like much of the work, was taken swiftly. It sounded almost cheerful, at times as if a setting of a different text by a lesser pupil of Haydn. At least the ‘Christe’ section suggested a little more strain, more effort, more difficulty, the four soloists richly expressive on their own, somewhat operatic, terms—which did not seem always to be the same as Rhorer’s. Balances were at times awry. The lead in to the second ‘Kyrie’, though, went both smoothly and inevitably. Rhorer was certainly not without appreciation of the work’s dynamism, even if that sometimes meant scaling it down to something more digestible, rather than scaling it up to antinomies reconciled, if at all, only at the level of the Divinity. And therein, perhaps, lay the greatest problem. What did this mean? What was Beethoven attempting to achieve? Did he do so? Much was too prettified, all too readily reconciled. 

There was, to be fair, creditable, even ecstatic hyperbole to the opening of the Gloria, from both chorus and orchestra. However, Rhorer’s concern for fluency, not in itself of course a bad thing, again continued to smooth over rather than to expose the implacable. Motivic integrity was (often) present, yet a sense of struggle was only intermittent. The timpani roll (Dominic Oelze) announcing the ‘Quoniam’ was really quite something, as indeed was Oelze’s playing throughout that section. And the sheer strangeness of some of Beethoven’s harmonies, allied to their scoring, told here too. Alas, the race to the finish was only successful in parts. There was again some sense of the cumulative, but majesty was more or less entirely lacking, and balances in the setting of ‘Amen’ were all over the place. 

The Credo was likewise more successful when Rhorer gave it space to announce its strangeness. Transparency allowed hearing of often neglected details: a crucial double bass line, for instance, as well as more general counterpoint. Much seemed rushed, though: a great pity when Saimir Pighu announced ‘Et homo factus est’. Again, what did this mean? Should it not be (almost) everything? It certainly did not sound like it. The ascent of Christ into Heaven (‘et ascendit in caelum’) thrilled, though it was peculiar, even unnerving, to hear it on Good Friday. Moreover, necessary strain on the chorus’s soprano voices could be heard towards the close. Beethoven’s writing is cruel, and should sound so. That it did not add up to much more than the sum of its variable parts was, I am afraid to say, Rhorer’s fault, and his alone. 

The Staatskapelle players offered playing of beautiful gravity to the opening of the Sanctus, ‘as if’ chamber music—and all the better for such intimacy. When solo voices joined, the impression was enhanced rather than effaced. Contrast with all the company of Heaven on ‘Pleni sunt coeli’ was one of the most successful, indeed moving, moments in the entire performance. Vibrato-less archaism, somewhere between an old viol consort reimagined and orchestration of an organist’s liturgical ‘preluding’, prefaced the ‘Benedictus’, which at times approached the Beethovenian sublime – Wolfgang Brandl’s solo violin could not be faulted – and was at least not harried; yet much was too readily tamed, even domesticated. 

A different, yet allied, sort of gravity possessed the first section of the Agnus Dei. Its sadness, first reinforced by René Pape’s bass solo, then by other soloists, Martin Wright’s outstanding chorus shadowing them, permitted a fine unfolding. Ultimately, though, it remained a bit too ‘normal’, as battlefield sounds came and went, pictorial, perhaps even ‘interesting’, yet little more. It was well shaped, yet all the time I longed for some sense that everything, even something, was at stake. One does not hear the Missa solemnis often; nor, probably, should one. For me, just one live performance, from Colin Davis at the Proms in 2011, has aspired to and, for the most part, realised the work’s greatness: of ambition, of humility, of awe, of humanity, and of much else. Whether I shall hear another such performance remains to be seen.

Le nozze di Figaro, Glyndebourne Festival Opera, 8 June 2013

Glyndebourne Opera House

Figaro – Adam Plachetka

Susanna – Laura Tatulescu
Bartolo – Luciano Di Pasquale
Marcellina – Anne Mason
Cherubino – Lydia Teuscher
Don Basilio – Timothy Robinson
Countess Almaviva – Amanda Majeski
Count Almaviva – Joshua Hopkins
Antonio – Nicholas Folwell
Don Curzio – Alasdair Elliott
Barbarina – Sara Lian Owen
First Bridesmaid – Charlotte Beament
Second Bridesmaid – Annie Fredericksson

Michael Grandage (director)

Ian Rutherford (revival director)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Ben Wright (movement)

Glyndebourne Chorus (chorus master: Jeremy Bines)

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Jérémie Rhorer (conductor)

What a pity! On a glorious – well, by recent English standards – summer’s day, there can be few more beautiful English countryside settings than Glyndebourne, with the added bonus, as alas much of the audience appears to understand it, of an opera house attached. Still, they had clearly made the most of their interval picnicking, about which a little more anon. To see The Marriage of Figaro, the first opera staged at Glyndebourne, and the first staged at the new house too (preserved on a wonderful DVD, with Bernard Haitink as conductor) ought to have been the icing on the cake. Of course, it ought to have been the other way round, Mozart and Da Ponte coming first, but Michael Grandage and his revival director, Ian Rutherford had no intention of permitting that to happen. (As shorthand, I shall refer to Grandage, but it may be that Rutherford modified an initial conception to a considerable degree. The curious may consult a DVD from last year now available; I do not think I can bear to see it.)

 

For no apparent reason, the action is shunted into the 1970s, the decade, which, everyone seems to agree, taste forgot, whatever its virtues may have been. It seems a peculiar substitute for the eighteenth-century. No attempt seems to have been made either coherently to re-imagine the action – the intricate comedy based upon a society of orders, let alone the droit de seigneur is, as much as possible, simply ignored – or boldly to present something new. For the former, Jean-Pierre Ponnelle remains a magical DVD bet, aided by Karl Böhm, the Vienna Philharmonic, and a cast, headed by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Kiri Te Kanawa, Hermann Prey, and Mirella Freni, for which the phrase ‘to die for’ might have been made. (The aforementioned Glyndebourne production, directed by Stephen Medcalf, has a fair share of magic too.) Claus Guth’s superlative Strindbergian retelling from Salzburg heads the other camp; it should not work, but it really, really does.

 

Chez Grandage, at best what we have is a pointless updating, with nothing to say either about Figaro or about the 1970s. Much of the time, however, the situation is far worse; this most perfect of operas – give or take a Così – is treated as fodder for a variety of slapstick at which even the lowest common denominator might cavil. With a few design hints of the original Spain – it seems no more specific than that – what we see resembles a particularly un-amusing episode of the little-lamented British sitcom, Duty Free. The Overture endures the arrival of the Count and Countess in a sports car – presumably, because the budget can. Hideous outfits, sometimes with a vague ‘Spanish’ air, sometimes not, come and go. No context is suggested for the coexistence in a villa-like location of alternatingly strange and uncharacterised people. Even an ill-behaved audience thought it beneath itself to laugh – perhaps the sitcom custom of ‘canned laughter’ should have been adopted – at Susanna reacting to Cherubino’s malodorous socks.  The nadir, however, was reached when, at the end of the third act, quite deaf to Mozart’s score, some of the most embarrassing disco dancing I have ever witnessed – and even if ‘embarrassing’ were the point, that does not excuse it – was foisted upon the work. As if that were not enough, some sections of the audience started clapping along, albeit with a disturbing lack of rhythm. We seemed to have moved from Duty Free to Hi-de-Hi! (For those innocent of the ‘heyday’ of the British sitcom, Youtube may well have clips; I should recommend spending the time with Ponnelle and Böhm instead.) It was well-nigh impossible to hear the orchestra for such loutish behaviour: doubtless encouraged by the staging, but nevertheless the responsibility of the perpetrators.

 

And, just to make things even worse, the surtitles alternated between the embarrassingly demotic (Susanna again, being compelled to comment approvingly on Cherubino’s ‘moves’); the absent (far too much of the recitative); and the often wildly inaccurate (why a ‘signature’ for the army officer’s seal?) Whoever is responsible needs to address the problem, since it is not an exception; the titles for Ariadne auf Naxos made almost as much a mess of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s exquisite text. It is a problem that can readily be corrected, and certainly ought to be.  

 

Musically, things were better, though far from what we all know Figaro can be, whether from great recorded performances or memories in the theatre. To be fair, the production did its best to overshadow the music, so there was little scope for outstanding assumptions of almost any role. Adam Plachetka seemed a little neutral as Figaro to start with, but warmed up; Laura Tatulescu, whom I admired in ENO’s Castor et Pollux, similarly as Susanna, in a lively performance. Much the same could be said of the Almavivas. Joshua Hopkins offering genuine rage without bluster in his third-act aria, and Amanda Majeski sang well enough, if not quite in style: either a little bland, or a little tremulous. Lydia Teuscher’s Cherubino was fine as far as it went, but was not helped by certain tempo choices and suffered somewhat from a lack of tonal richness; it was difficult to believe in her as a boy. I should not, however, be surprised if performances improved considerably during the run; they often do, and there was in any case nothing really to complain about here. In this context, it was perhaps unsurprising that the stock buffo characters came off best, Anne Mason’s Marcellina and Luciano Di Pasquale’s Bartolo particularly noteworthy.

 

Jérémie Rhorer’s conducting of the London Philharmonic Orchestra had its moments, but they were moments. There was little sense of Mozart’s tonal architecture, so crucial to delineating the drama; moreover there were a good few perverse choices of tempo, whether considered in themselves or in context. I do not think I have heard ‘Non più andrai’ taken either so lightly or so quickly; it is certainly not an experience I wish to repeat. Another problem, in some ways still more serious, was of general listlessness, the music swimming along somewhat aimlessly; it often seemed genuinely uncertain whether this were what Rhorer had insisted upon, or whether it were what he had fallen into. A related issue was that of far too many cases in which stage and pit fell apart. The odd instance might be ascribed to a singer, but not a persistent problem. When it was permitted to do so, the LPO played with spirit and with warmth, provided one could take the rasping of natural trumpets (though not horns). How one longed, though, for this fine orchestra, with so splendid a pedigree in Mozart, to be reunited with the likes of Haitink. One longed still more, of course, for a staging that began to do justice to the work.

 

This is a co-production with Houston and the Met. It will be interesting, to say the least, to see how it goes down across the Atlantic.