BPO/Rattle - Lachenmann and Mahler, 15 February 2015

Image: © Monika Rittershaus

 

 

Royal Festival Hall

Lachenmann – Tableau

Mahler – Symphony no.2 in C minor, ‘Resurrection’

Kate Royal (soprano)

Magdalena Kožená (mezzo-soprano)

London Symphony Chorus

CBSO Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

 

The British Press – well, a section thereof – has gone into overdrive concerning the visit of Simon Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic to London, not least on account of Rattle’s recent sixtieth birthday and his knowing, hugely welcome contribution to the all-too-nascent debate over a new concert hall for London. The coverage neither disturbs nor especially interests me; for me, there are many more interesting cultural events than a cycle of Sibelius symphonies, but, by the same token, it is not an entirely unpleasant change to see mention of Helmut Lachenmann in place of Harriet Harman, her ‘pink bus’, and other such high political trivia. Yes, of course journalistic quality has been at best mixed. A piece in The Observer has its author, pretending to knowledge of Berlin, place Daniel Barenboim at the helm of the Deutsche Oper, call Rattle’s first wife ‘Elaine’, and bizarrely claim that Rattle recorded Sibelius’s ‘symphonies … in Birmingham to a level no one has since achieved.’ Moreover, I initially wondered whether this piece in the Daily Telegraph were an inept attempt at parody, so numerous were its solecisms, so risibly unsubtle its laboured attempts at name-dropping. What else would we expect from our newspapers, post- or, to all intents and purposes, pre-Leveson? However, for those of us who care about music rather than inaccurate tittle-tattle, our principal concern should remain the state of Furtwängler’s old orchestra under its outgoing – if not for a while – artistic director, something that has received little attention beyond wearisome hagiography.

The good, indeed very good news first: Rattle’s commitment to new music remains distinguished, likewise his commitment to interesting, meaningful programming. The more one hears Lachenmann’s music in conjunction with that of the great Austro-German tradition, the more he appears not just as its undertaker, not even just as its eulogist, but also as one of its ablest custodians. No more than his sometime æsthetic antagonist, Hans Werner Henze, can he break entirely free of that tradition; nor, one increasingly suspects, does he wish to. Rattle has previously paired the 1988 Tableau with Kurtág’s Grabstein für Stephan and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony; here, we seemed to go beyond Lachenmann’s celebrated affinity with Strauss’s Alpine Symphony to a pairing with Mahler’s Second Symphony which, as a prospect, offered new vistas that were metaphysical as well as physical. That said, my (perhaps fanciful) identification of certain phrases with those in Strauss’s giant tone-poem persisted in this excellent performance from Rattle and his Berlin forces. Hans Zender’s Saarbrücken recording may sound more sharply focused at times, or that may have been a matter of recording versus the Royal Festival Hall’s acoustic, but there was no doubting the ‘sense’ of the piece conveyed.. Post-Messiaen(ic) percussion thrilled. Stillness and resonance – not least Lachenmann’s extraordinary sustained notes – thrillingly accomplished the work of a born dialectician and musical dramatist, the work’s continuities as revelatory as twinkling-of-an-eye shifts of perspective. The large orchestra – not as large as Mahler’s or Strauss’s, but even so – showed Rattle not as someone who miraculously brought new music to Berlin; we hear such nonsense too much, as if Abbado, Karajan, Furtwängler, et al., had not done a great deal in that respect. (It was, of course, the latter who conducted the first performance of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra with this very ensemble.) But it showed him at his best, as a curator, to use the fashionable modern term, of orchestral and compositional traditions that would die, were they not constantly reinvigorated.

 

 

If the pairing promised much, the performance of the Mahler symphony, long a Rattle ‘signature work’, alas only rarely delivered. Perhaps that long familiarity was part of the problem; Rattle nowadays often seems determined to highlight, to pull around, even to distort, as if he has grown tired of letting works at least appear to speak for themselves, for art to conceal art. The temptation to ‘do things’ must be all the greater with an orchestra such as the Berlin Philharmonic. That said, much of the first movement proceeded well enough, without both the (acoustical?) pin-point precision of a 2010 performance I heard in Berlin’s Philharmonie, but also without the more extreme distortions – at least until the close, when, sadly, any sense of formal unity was casually thrown away. It seemed less a dialectical strategy than a hint, or more, of ennui. Rubato and other tempo fluctuations veered, here and in subsequent movements, between the all-too-predictable – holding back the end of a phrase, then pushing forward – to the unfathomable (‘because he and they can’?) The Ländler’s charms were likewise soon dissipated by persistent lingering. That, despite some unearthly beauty in the woodwind solos. The strings, disturbingly, had a tendency to sound unduly generic, to an extent that even previous performances had not revealed. (Again, maybe the acoustic was partly the villain, but I doubt that it can have been entirely responsible.) The scherzo emerged more listless than sardonic, puzzling distended pauses suggesting little more than perplexity – though whose: the fishes’, St Anthony’s, or ours?

 

Urlicht, however, marked for me the low point. Magdalena Kožená is an artist I have often greatly admired, and I am sure I shall do so again, but her self-consciously ‘operatic’, even blowsy, delivery seemed entirely out of place with Mahler’s (admittedly artful) simplicity. Rattle’s direction of the orchestra seemed determined to divest Mahler’s score of its magic, again of its wonder. Kožená, meanwhile, emoted and wildly exaggerated her consonants. Perhaps that, though, was at Rattle’s insistence, since, in the final movement, I noted similar exaggeration from the chorus, which, despite Rattle’s pedantic, note-by-note direction, otherwise sang very well indeed. Such insistence, if indeed insistence it were, had clearly not extended to Kate Royal’s contribution, much of which may as well have been in Swahili. There were, of course, moments during the finale when the orchestra sounded as impressive, or almost as impressive, as it should, although even then, there was a tendency to sound as if Rattle were turning up the audio volume. But all in all, the sound, whatever its volume (and again, the acoustic almost certainly did not help), rarely sounded grounded; where was the harmonic sense, either of the moment or in the movement’s – and the symphony’s – great span? Daniel Harding’s recent Proms performance had been preferable in almost every way: ideas of its (his) own, yet coming together as a whole that was far more than the sum of its parts. For me, though clearly not for the greater part of the audience, this was a disappointing performance, which edged frighteningly close, and not in a good way, toward incoherence.

 

 

LSO/Rattle - Schumann, Das Paradies und die Peri, 11 January 2015

Barbican Hall

Peri – Sally Matthews

Narrator – Mark Padmore
Kate Royal (soprano)
Bernarda Fink (contralto)
Andrew Staples (tenor)
Florian Boesch (bass)
Francesca Chiejina, Eliszabeth Skinner, Bianca Andrew, Emily Kyte (vocal quartet: Peris)
London Symphony Chorus (chorus master: Simon Halsey)
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Simon Rattle (conductor)

 

Simon Rattle clearly has a soft spot for Das Paradies und die Peri, having conducted it with the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as having chosen it as a Desert Island Disc. Each to his own, I suppose. There is some wonderful music here and the work has clearly been treated unfairly; there is certainly no reason to feel anything but gratitude for this rare outing and fine performance. However, I cannot imagine any conceivable circumstances in which I might prefer it over the St Matthew Passion, Tristan, or a host of other works. Thank goodness, though, that Schumann set a text in German some way ‘after’ Thomas Moore, rather than Moore’s own ghastly Lalla Rookh. To describe the latter as ‘flowery’ would be so much of an understatement as to mislead; indeed, when, on occasion, my eye wandered across the programme booklet page to see the English version of the text, it swiftly turned back to the German, far more readily comprehensible, let alone palatable. Even in the German, moreover, it is difficult to bring oneself to care about the rather trite moralism. This is no Tannhäuser, let alone Parsifal, although, to be fair, the poem never sinks to the level of poor Weber’s Euryanthe, let alone Oberon. Fortunately, however, I soon found myself (more or less) able to enjoy the musical setting without troubling oneself too much about the words either way.

Rattle’s direction of his forces was generally astute, the reservations I felt pertaining to points of detail – this conductor’s over-emphasis upon certain ‘interesting’ details so often his Achilles heel – rather than to anything more fundamental. The LSO, as so often, was on excellent form, the dramatic tension of the performance so clearly founded here, just as it should have been. For instance, the orchestral throbbing heard, cellos surely echoing Der Freischütz, in the Angel’s ‘Dir, Kind des Stamms’ proved both attractive and dramatically telling in itself, but also an incitement for what was to come. Flexibility in the Peri’s following ‘Wo find’ich sie?’ was highly commendable too. Echoes of Berlioz were to be heard in the chorus, ‘Doch seine Ströme sind jetzt tot’, reminding us of the orchestra’s second-to-none pedigree in that composer’s music under Colin Davis. (Indeed, I could not help but wonder what Davis might have made of this oratorio; Rattle’s occasional fussiness would surely have been avoided.) I wish that Rattle had not driven so hard in the final number of Part One, especially when the chorus was singing; he proved far more considerate, as has often been his way, as an ‘accompanist’ to the solo singers. But the orchestral playing and the singing of the London Symphony Chorus was outstanding, putting me in mind of the close to the first part of The Creation, another work these forces performed with such distinction under Sir Colin. Brahms, too, seemed to beckon.

 

A point of ‘detail’ in which Rattle’s approach was most welcome was the darkness of the orchestral interlude in the Narration, no.12, following ‘Kein sterblich Aug’ hat je/Ein Land gesehn voll höh’rer Pracht!’ The darkness of the words to come, so strongly in contrast, was tellingly foretold. There was great charm to the chorus with which the third part opens; it came across in a similar vein to spinning choruses such as those in Haydn, Weber, and Wagner. Wagner again, this time Das Rheingold, sounded clearly prefigured following the bass solo, ‘Mit ihrer Schwestern Worten’. It is a sad commentary upon our ‘authenticke’ times that the extraordinary neo-Bachian solo at the opening of Peris’ ‘Es fällt ein Tropfen aus Land’ was met with what was surely Rattle’s conception of minimising, though thankfully not eliminating vibrato; as if what mattered about Bach, let alone about Schumann’s response to him, were some alien form of puritanism. But that did not last long, strings warming as the number progressed. The sharpness of the general ‘dramatic’ trajectory, insofar as the poem permits there to be one, certainly seemed greater as the work progressed, although Rattle again, in the final ‘Chorus of the Blessed Spirits’, seemed to confuse driving hard with ‘drama’ as such. Speeding up throughout the number sounded a little too much like having misunderstood Furtwängler’s lessons. Still, the LSO and Chorus remained on scintillating form.

 

Most of the solo singing was excellent too. The only real exception was Kate Royal, her Maiden as dull and featureless as her disengaged countenance. Many of the words were quite incomprehensible, and her tone proved surprisingly squally. The orchestra, however, remained full of Romantic wonder. Otherwise, there were few grounds for complaint. If, at times earlier on, Mark Padmore’s Narrator sounded a little ‘old’, there was no gainsaying the intelligence of his way with the words. And by the time we had come to his solo just before the end of the second part, ‘Sie wankt – sie sinkt,’ his style seemed to have adjusted, sounding spot on for Schumann. His contributions in the third part were ‘narration’ in the best sense: emphatic, but certainly not overly so. I heard some people complain about Sally Matthews’s diction, but have to say that was not a problem for me. (These things can often be partly a matter of where one is seated.) The sincerity of her contribution and the musicality of her response to the words were for me quite enchanting: certainly the best performance I have heard from her. Bernarda Fink’s Angel solo in the Third Part was almost worth the price of admission on its own, her opening ‘Noch nicht!’ poised and pivotal: putting me in mind a little of the crucial turning-point, albeit given to soprano, in Mendelssohn’s Second Symphony. (That was far from the only point at which Mendelssohn sprang to mind, both that work and A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the second part’s opening number.) Andrew Staples was on fine form, his tenor wonderfully sappy, every inch a Tamino. Florian Boesch, if sometimes a little dry of tone, offered undoubted intelligence in his response to words and music alike. The mixed vocal quartet of the first part brought welcome echoes of The Magic Flute. Last but certainly not least, the female quartet from the Guildhall revealed four singers – Francesca Chiejina, Eliszabeth Skinner, Bianca Andrew, Emily Kyte – full of character, every one of them vastly superior to the bafflingly ubiquitous Royal. I should not be surprised to hear more in the coming years from all of them.

Prom 57 - Swedish RSO/Harding: Mahler, 29 August 2014

Royal Albert Hall

Symphony no.2 in C minor

Kate Royal (soprano)

Christianne Stotijn (mezzo-soprano)

Swedish Radio Choir (chorus master: Peter Dijkstra)

Philharmonia Chorus (chorus master: Stefan Bevier)

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Daniel Harding (conductor)

 

This was, all told, an impressive performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony from Daniel Harding, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, their soloists and choruses. Harding’s direction avoided egotism without becoming faceless, plotted Mahler’s narrative with a keen sense of drama that came nowhere near the vulgar theatrics we too often hear in this music, and, no mean feat this in itself, managed soon enough to rise above the Royal Albert Hall’s dreadful acoustics, in a performance that balanced instruments as well as competing dramatic imperatives.

 

The first movement opened with fine attack from the Swedish cellos and double basses. String tone did not always sound so full in general, but that was probably a matter more of the aforementioned acoustic, to which my ears soon adjusted. Harding attended to detail, whether in terms of dynamic contrasts or rubato, without the mannerism of undue micromanagement. Woodwind were nicely pungent, brass splendidly militaristic, but just as important, indeed probably more so, was the sense of awe and unease in those extraordinary Mahlerian liminal zones. This was not a case of rehashing a performance of a work many of us have perhaps heard too often, at least in mediocre performances or worse; it drew us in to listen. Vistas, both physical and metaphysical, opened up, often subtly, but without shying away from grander gestures, well prepared, when necessary. If there were a few occasions when, in abstracto at least, I might have favoured slightly more gradual shifts of tempo, the well-nigh Wagnerian cut and thrust largely compensated; indeed, I thought more than once of Wagner’s semi-serious desire for an ‘invisible theatre’. There was no denying that a musical mind was at work here – and that is more important than whether everyone might have completely agreed with every decision. In the recapitulation, material sounded properly changed in the light of what had gone before. There was nice violin portamento to savour too: not self-regarding, but still a delight. Rarely have I heard the downward scalic harp passages so charged with menace; Boulez’s performances of this work came to mind.

 

What a pity, then, that an ill-mannered section of the audience decided to talk through the silence that should have followed. Surely, aware of Mahler’s intentions or no, the sign that Harding had sat down rather than left the stage, ought to have given a clue. In any case, the second movement proceeded with a winning lilt, rubato again well judged, and warm strings. A flute as pure as a mountain spring intervened and made its point. There was a lovely sense of a serenading band writ large, though actually not so very large, rendering turbulence all the more eruptive when it came. Pizzicato strings evoked suitably spooky marionettes – yet with good nature too: this was no mere house of horrors.

 

Timpani announced the third movement attacca, in spirit as well as in the letter. Artlessness and artfulness, innocence and guile were splendidly balanced in the twisting turns of what many of us now unavoidably think of as this pre-Berio (Sinfonia) river. Sardonic woodwind helped; so did a fine sense of irony that Harding and his players never sought to overplay. The fishes were relished, but so was the preacher: perhaps a shade here of Ecclesiastes as well as St Anthony of Padua? And crucially, good musical values, not least clarity and direction of counterpoint underlay such ideas. The music sounded more Bachian than we often hear – and to good effect. Not that dreams and phantasmagoria were neglected, but they made their point all the more strongly with countervailing tendencies given their due. Thematic connections with music that had gone and music that was yet to come were apparent and meaningful throughout.

 

In ‘Urlicht’, Christianne Stotijn proved straightforward but never simplistic. Words were crystal clear. The brass response to her opening line sounded as if an ambivalent chorale or even equale: was this death or something else that was heralded? As so often with Mahler, either/or misses the point. The Wunderhorn character of the ‘song’ was not forgotten, but rather sublimated in its new context.

 

The finale emerged ‘naturally’, art concealing art, from its predecessor, whilst also audibly sowing thematic seeds for what was to come. There are, of course, many dissimilarities here with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, but the similarities registered rather strongly, again being permitted to make their own point instead of being underlined. Once more, drama came to the fore, but without sacrificing the more ‘purely’ musical dynamism of form. (The dichotomy is false, but nevertheless merits an occasional heuristic mention.) The interplay between the (otherworldly?) off-stage band and on-stage musicians was truly disconcerting: death and resurrection are, after all, no easy things. Hesitant steps thereafter did not want for awe, finally preparing the way for the chorus’s entry, for the re-entry of the word – and perhaps even for the entry of the Word? We could not be sure, and that, surely, is Mahler’s point. Kate Royal’s diction was initially poor, sounding more akin to an operatic ‘vocalise’ than to the Lieder-like contribution of Stotijn, but, to Royal’s credit, Stotijn’s return had her improve her game considerably. In any case, the Swedish Radio Choir and Philharmonia Chorus were on fine form; one could have taken dictation from them. If I say that the rest took care of itself, that would of course be an exaggeration, but it flowed so ‘naturally’ – that word again – from what had been prepared that it almost seemed to do so. And that chord on ‘Gott’ sent shivers down the spine, as it must.

What a pity, then, that a loutish minority did its best to ruin things by denying even the briefest of silences, competing instead to issue the first farmyard noise in response. Such selfish exhibitionism has as little place in a Mahler audience as in a Mahler performance.

 

 

Tharaud/LPO/Nézet-Séguin - Poulenc and Prokofiev, 23 October 2013

Royal Festival Hall

Poulenc – Piano Concerto

Prokofiev – Symphony no.7 in C-sharp minor, op.131
Poulenc – Stabat mater

Alexandre Tharaud (piano)

Kate Royal (soprano)

London Philharmonic Choir

Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor)

 

 

None of these works is over-exposed in the concert hall, though Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony perhaps comes closer to regular performance. It was only really in Poulenc’s Stabat mater, however, that the performance made a relatively strong case for the work in question.

 

Poulenc’s Piano Concerto is certainly a work that needs an excellent case to be made for it. Here it sounded disjointed and often somewhat lacklustre; indeed, there was an air, whether accurate or otherwise, of under-rehearsal to the performance that emerged. Whilst one could sense an attempt at ‘authentic’ orchestral sonority – whether one really wants that somewhat watery early-twentieth century string sound is another matter – the first movement lacked a sense of overall sweep and was also disfigured by too many orchestral fluffs. Balances were often peculiar too, for no apparent reason. Perhaps an understandable desire on Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s part to avoid sentimentalism had shaded too far into brusqueness. Alexandre Tharaud’s somewhat self-effacing account of the piano part imparted a fluency not always present elsewhere. Certain passages sounded comfortingly Ravel-like, though this is hardly a work to place in such exalted company. The slow movement was more settled: partly a matter of the material, but also of the performance itself. Tharaud offered some gorgeous piano tone to float above the orchestral cushion, but again the LPO’s performance was far from flawless. Quite what the musical connections are between the contrasting material here continues to elude me, but that is either my fault or the composer’s. The succession of melodies was cherished in the finale, probably the strongest section of the performance, and the ending proved splendidly deadpan.

 

Prokofiev’s symphony opened in gravely beautiful fashion, though I could not help but wonder whether Nézet-Séguin’s first-movement tempo was a little fast for Moderato. The LPO seemed more at ease, though there remained cases of tentative playing. An ‘heroic’ idiom familiar from the Fifth Symphony still registered, albeit, rightly so, in more ambivalent fashion, the disquiet of the toyshop equally apparent. Waltz rhythms proved nicely balletic in the scherzo. Unfortunately, the performance seemed rather to lose its way, continuity being lost. Nézet-Séguin made partial amends with a relatively frenzied orchestral climax; the problem remained, however, that it was not quite clear where it had come from. The slow movement, though, was handled in loving fashion, its songfulness imbued with a sense of drama that harked back to its origins in incidental music for Eugene Onegin. A ghost from the Fifth Symphony again haunted the finale, as did reminiscences of Prokofiev’s ballet writing, Nézet-Séguin opted for the original ending, returning us to the mood of the opening, albeit somewhat darkened. Even if the performance as a whole had not lived up to expectations, a properly unsettled mood was engendered at the close.

 

The London Philharmonic Choir did Poulenc’s Stabat mater proud. Indeed, one sensed that Nézet-Séguin’s roots in choral conducting generally lifted the level of performance. Though the choir brought out echoes of Fauré in the opening chorus, there was no mistaking the composer’s individual, if synthetic, voice. Stravinskian echoes (Œdipus Rex) resounded in the orchestra, yet the mood was overwhelmingly one of serenity. Nézet-Séguin highlighted the neo-Baroque dotted rhythms in ‘Fac ut portem’ to telling effect. Choral fury was heard in the ‘Cujus animam gementem,’ but some of the most touching moments were to be found in Poulenc’s a cappella writing, for instance in ‘O quam tristis’ and ‘Fac ut ardeat’. Some of the composer’s response to the text strikes me as peculiar, if not quite on the surreal level of Rossini’s; nevertheless, the performers responded in kind, even if that response necessarily jarred somewhat with the text. Kate Royal sang in an attractive-enough, generically ‘operatic’ fashion; alas, it was well-nigh impossible to discern all but the occasional word of what she sang. There was certainly an embarrassing contrast with the diction of the choir. It was a serious blemish, but ultimately there remained much to admire in the performance as a whole.

Gloriana, Royal Opera, 20 June 2013

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Elizabeth I – Susan Bullock

Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex – Toby Spence
Frances Devereux, Countess of Essex – Patricia Bardon
Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy – Mark Stone
Penelope, Lady Rich – Kate Royal
Sir Robert Cecil – Jeremy Carpenter
Sir Walter Raleigh – Clive Bayley
Henry Cuffe – Benjamin Bevan
Lady-in-Waiting – Nadine Livingston
Blind Ballad Singer – Brindley Sherratt
Recorder of Norwich – Jeremy White
Housewife – Carol Rowlands
Spirit of the Masque – Andrew Tortise
Master of Ceremonies – David Butt Philip
City Crier – Michel de Souza
Concord – Giulia Pazzaglia
Time – Lake Laoutaris-Smith

Richard Jones (director)

Ultz (designs)
Mimi Jordan Sherin (lighting)
Lucy Burge (choreography)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Paul Daniel (conductor)

 

The Royal Opera offered a strong performance and production, for the most part as excellent as we have any right to expect, of what remains, alas, a very weak opera. Aldeburgh fundamentalists, a highly vocal sect that is yet diminishing with age, will maintain that Gloriana’s dreadful initial reception was to be attributed to a philistine audience of coronation dignitaries and the merely prejudiced. (Richard Jarman, General Director of the Britten-Pears Foundation, writes in the programme of a composer ‘whose musical conservatism was attacked by the avant garde in his lifetime but whose reputation has outlived his critics.’ Well, he would, wouldn’t he?) The way some speak of the debacle, one would think that a a masterpiece of the order of Birtwistle’s Mask of Orpheus had been slighted. It is certainly difficult to begrudge the opportunity to find out for ourselves, in what is the first time since the brief 1954 revival that the Royal Opera has staged the work, but the flip side of that opportunity proves to be realisation that many of the criticisms levelled at the work in 1953 were justified after all.    

 

Though not really a criticism of the work as such, it is extraordinary to think that anyone could have thought this an appropriate subject for dedication and tribute to a new queen: it would surely have been far better left to stand on its own feet, appearing a few years later, after the composer had had more time to work on it. La clemenza di Tito, far and away the greatest of all coronation operas, may have been written in breakneck time, even by Mozart’s standards, but, wonderful conductor of Mozart though Britten was, he certainly lacked Mozart’s combination of greatness and incredible facility. The opera is certainly not helped by William Plomer’s dreadful libretto, laden down by unconvincing archaisms and cringeworthy rhymes of which ‘duty’ and ‘beauty’ is far from the worst offender; nor is it assisted by all too formulaic scene-by-scene alternation between ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, which encourages a dramaturgy that barely advances, if indeed it does at all, beyond Verdi. (Half-hearted applause greeted the end of each scene, whilst Richard Jones’s metatheatrical production, about which more below, did its heroic to make the scene-changes of interest.) Schiller or Boris Godunov this conflict decidedly is not. Apart from Elizabeth I herself, and perhaps the Earl of Essex, characters, such as they are, tend to be products of plot situations rather than vice versa.

 

Yet even the manifold dramatic weaknesses do not excuse the weakness of so much of the score itself. Even the mild syncopations of the opening chorus sound shop-soiled: as if drawn from a Britten manual of how to add a little ‘modernity’ without frightening away the horses. Large sections of the orchestral writing seem little more than padding. At their best, there is a kinship in vocal lines to Purcell; much of the time, however, they veer between the merely nondescript and the inappropriately Italianate (as in nineteenth-century Italianate, certainly nothing contemporary). And if Norwich might not always be accepted as a heaving metropolis, does it really deserve the tedium of the ‘masque’? (I could not help but think of those dreadful shows the present Queen and Duke of Edinburgh must sit through when on an official visit, doubtless longing to be taken as quickly as possible to Balmoral or Newmarket.) Dramaturgically, there are signs of hope there: at least Britten is doing something different. Rarely, however, does his formulaic music rise to the occasion; it is actually more interesting when it alludes most strongly to Tudor styles, though the ‘real thing’ would be more interesting still. Matters were not helped by having the first and second acts run together without an interval; it made for a very long time, scene changes included, sitting through pretty insubstantial stuff.

 

That said, there could be no gainsaying the commitment of the Royal Opera’s forces to presentation of the work. If there were times when Paul Daniel might have sped things up a bit, one did not need to know that he had conducted the score before, for Opera North, to hear that he was fully in command of it. Likewise, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House and the Royal Opera Chorus, as ever excellently prepared by Renato Balsadonna, responded with enthusiasm and sensitivity that lay almost beyond the call of duty, regal or otherwise. Casting was of great strength, the only real problem being Susan Bullock’s vocal fallibility in the title role; without too much effort, though, one could accept that as reflecting the fallibility of an ageing monarch. Otherwise, Toby Spence proved as fine an advocate as the Earl of Essex could ever expect: ardent, sensitive, headstrong as required. Mark Stone offered a finely-sung, equally finely-acted, darker-hued foil as Lord Mountjoy. It was an especial joy to hear Patricia Bardon’s true contralto, plaintive and full of tone, as the Countess of Essex, with Kate Royal’s Penelope equally well sung, if less clear of diction. (The weird outburst in the final scene, quite unmotivated by what little character development has previously been offered, is certainly not her fault.) Smaller roles such as Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Bayley), Sir Robert Cecil (Jeremy Carpenter), and Carol Rowlands's splendidly shrewish London Housewife offered ample opportunity for care with words and music, however undeserving. Likewise, Brindley Sherratt made the most of the tediously repetitive part for the Blind Ballad-Singer; again, comparisons with a superficially similar role in Boris Godunov are unfortunate, to say the least.

 

Richard Jones pursued his task as director with palpable relish. The production offers a metatheatrical view of staging a 1953 celebration, framed by a small procession of dignitaries. The idea might have been pushed further; as it stood, it did not really do a great deal other than remind us when the work was written. Perhaps that might have been more than the work could have taken, though Christopher Alden’s superb Midsummer Night’s Dream for ENO suggests bravery in staging may be the way forward for Britten’s slighter operas. Designs by Ultz – just ‘Ultz’, presumably like ‘Jesus’, or ‘Voltaire’, his ‘mystery’ enhanced by the lack of a programme photograph – were handsome, colourful, even witty. If we must have the 1950s on stage all the time, this was a model of how to accomplish the task. Lucy Burge’s choreography and the work of various actors and dancers were equally estimable. I could have done without the cumbersome business of each scene being introduced by a gang of children holding up letters to spell, ‘Nonesuch Palace’, ‘The City’, and so on, but apparently some members of the audience found that side-splittingly hilarious.  

 

It is meet and right that opera houses should grant the possibility to reassess works and indeed composers, lest unfair historical verdicts go uncontested. The production earlier this season of Meyerbeer’s Robert le Diable is a case in point. Yet I suspect that the uninformed vitriol poured upon a flawed yet intriguing grand opéra will be matched this time around by calls of ‘disgracefully neglected masterpiece’. We should all like to find another operatic masterpiece, but wishing does not make it so; for that, we should do better to turn our attention to the future, not least to the new work Covent Garden has commissioned from George Benjamin and Martin Crimp. Works as different as The Minotaur and Written on Skin, masterpieces both, suggest ways forward; yet it does us no harm occasionally to reflect that creation of masterpieces may not only alleviate but also be facilitated by the possibility of failure elsewhere.

Rotterdam PO/Nézet-Séguin - Beethoven and Mahler, 12 December 2012

Goldener Saal, Musikverein, Vienna

Beethoven – Symphony no.2 in D major, op.36

Mahler – Symphony no.4

Kate Royal (soprano)

Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra

Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor)

 

 

12.12.12: some of us thought of it as International Dodecaphonic Day. Still, so far as I could ascertain, and despite my privileged position of working for a fortnight at the Arnold Schönberg Center, I could not discover any music by Schoenberg – or, for that matter, by either other member of the Viennese Holy Trinity – being performed in Vienna. Mahler, then, was as close as one might come, though alas he was not served especially well in this performance of his Fourth Symphony.

 

First, however, and rather to my surprise, came rather a good performance of Beethoven’s Second Symphony. Having visited Heiligenstadt on Saturday evening, it seemed quite fitting to hear a work written at the time of Beethoven’s celebrated Testament, even if the symphony bears little obvious sign of the torment the composer voiced in that heart-rending cry. In this performance, from the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin, both the introduction and the main body of the first movement were taken at a relatively swift pace, yet sounded proportionate to each other; as Wagner long ago pointed out, such proportions are far more important than absolute tempi. The transition between both sections convinced, not least on account of that clear relation between the two. Strings and woodwind proved nicely responsive to each other. And the music sounded with a sense of fun: a young man’s Beethoven, but none the worse for that. Bar an unfortunate horn fluff in the recapitulation, there was little one could reasonably fault here. The slow movement again flowed convincingly, with winning echoes of Haydn not only in the string dialogue but also in the darker hued passages. (Heiligenstadt? Perhaps?) Occasionally the strings would have benefited from less parsimony with respect to vibrato, but that was not a problem to be exaggerated. If one is going to push hard, it is probably better to do so in the scherzo than elsewhere; certainly Nézet-Séguin’s slight relaxation for the trio made its point. The hall at any rate took off some of the edge, and line was well maintained. Beethoven in Haydnesque mode was again a strong characteristic of the finale, articulated with style, the Rotterdam cellos especially gorgeous. A slightly slower tempo might have heightened the humour, but there was much to enjoy. This was not profound Beethoven after Klemperer or Furtwängler – today, Colin Davis or Barenboim – but that may well come; there was a lovely sheen to the performance and much of the music understanding was already in place. In the manner of those irritating Amazon comparisons, ‘If you like Karajan’s Beethoven, you would probably have liked this.’

 

After the swift tempi of the Beethoven, I was somewhat taken aback by the slow pace of the opening bars to the first movement of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. It settled down soon enough – or rather, I thought it had, for the abiding problem of this performance was Nézet-Séguin’s apparent unwillingness to convey a sense of an underlying pulse. Tempo fluctuations were extreme, especially in terms of slowing down, at one point almost grinding to a halt. The moment at which the solo violin entered came like a shot in the arm. If the performance livened up after that, however, the damage had been done, and the recapitulation suffered similarly, though to a lesser extent. One could enjoy the somewhat rambunctious woodwind, but Mahler does not need to be milked; nor does he take well to it. The second movement offered a not dissimilar experience. There is of course nothing wrong with tempo fluctuations – think of Mengelberg! – but one still needs a sense of basic pulse. The solo violin skirted dangerous close at times to the merely unpleasant; edge is good, but by definition, it should not be de trop, and scordatura should not be taken as an excuse for questionable intonation. Here and elsewhere, I missed a more characterful, deeply resonant string section.

 

The resultant lack of harmonic grounding was, however, successfully combated in the slow movement: much superior in every respect. (Odd, that, given that it is arguably the most difficult of the four movements to bring off.) There was a sense of scale, of proportion, here; line, whilst not always perfectly maintained, was much more in evidence. The performance showed that variation of tempo is perfectly possible, indeed often highly desirable, so long as a basic pulse has been established. Climaxes can then tell as they should – and they did. The orchestra and Nézet-Séguin were in lively form for the finale: sometimes too much so, the woodwind in particular proving shrill at times, but at least there was character to their performance. That was more than one could say for the lacklustre Kate Royal – even if one had been able to discern more than one word in five of what she sang. This was neither a child’s sense of heaven, nor something more knowing and sophisticated; it was simply inadequate. (Royal’s poor diction has been a characteristic of every performance of hers I have heard; whatever her strengths may be, they certainly do not lie in Lieder-singing.) However, there was a fine sense of orchestral culmination or arrival at the close, Mahler’s progressive tonality vindicated with love.

Die Zauberflöte, Royal Opera, 1 February 2011

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

(Images: Royal Opera/Mike Hogan)

Tamino – Joseph Kaiser

Pamina – Kate Royal
Papageno – Christopher Maltman
Papagena – Anna Devin
Queen of the Night – Jessica Pratt
Monostatos – Peter Hoare
Sarastro – Franz-Josef Selig
First Lady – Elisabeth Meister
Second Lady – Kai Rüütel
Third Lady – Gaynor Keeble
Speaker – Matthew Best
First Priest – Harry Nicoll
Second Priest – Donald Maxwell
First Armoured Man – Stephen Rooke
Second Armoured Man – Lukas Jakobski
First Boy – Jacob Ramsay-Patel
Second Boy – Harry Stanton
Third Boy – Harry Manton

David McVicar (director)
Lee Blakeley (revival director)
John Macfarlane (designs)
Paule Constable (lighting)
Leah Hausman (movement)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)


Give or take the odd reservation concerning a generally rather good production from David McVicar, I loved this Magic Flute the first time around: the best conducted I have ever had the privilege to hear. Preserved on DVD (see below for a link), it remains a joy of which I have often subsequently availed myself; I often use it for teaching purposes too. Sadly, joy was almost entirely absent from the present performance; it had its moments, but remained for the most part a surprisingly lacklustre affair.

Where McVicar’s direction had been typically lively, it was difficult to detect much meaningful direction at all in Lee Blakeley’s revival. John Macfarlane’s designs remain attractive but, in the absence of sharper direction, they seem increasingly cavernous, a setting awaiting something to happen. I have no fundamentalist desire to see the work in a theatre ‘of the right size’, far from it, but house and stage seemed in this context too large, something one could never have claimed when McVicar had been at the helm. I like the treatment of Papagena no more than I ever did: here she suggested a refugee from the Royal Opera’s forthcoming Anna Nicole, quite out of keeping with the general eighteenth-century setting and to no good reason that I could discern.

What surprised me most of all was Sir Colin Davis’s conducting. Where in 2003 – and on DVD – this had truly been the performance of a lifetime, now there was considerable uncertainty of direction. Too often, tempi sounded less flexible than unsettled and there was a truly alarming number of discrepancies between stage and pit, sometimes unrectified for quite some time. I am all for broad tempi – Klemperer and Böhm spring to mind immediately – but there needs to be a sense of vitality, in which respect Davis has so often provided a magisterial rebuke to those who equate liveliness with speed. Here, much of the first half of the second act sounded listless, the chorus ‘O Isis und Osiris’ resembling a dirge. There remained wonderful moments: I have never heard a more beautifully shaped ‘Ach ich fühl’s’; indeed, in general, sadness fared well. Moreover, the orchestra sounded beautiful on its own terms, though there was some weirdly prominent kettledrum playing. Yet, whilst the second halves, more or less, of both acts showed marked improvement upon their respective first halves, the lack of coherence, especially when one had heard Davis’s previous accomplishment, was disappointing. Perhaps it was just an off-day; let us hope so.


Vocal performances ranged from good to dreadful, the overall impression that of a rehearsal rather than a first night. (This leaves hope, of course, that matters will improve during the production’s run.) Christopher Maltman made a good, vocally-rounded Papageno, his on-stage athleticism a winning contrast to the general impression of lethargy. Yet even he did not seem on top form; of previous, very different Papagenos I have seen, Matthias Goerne, Simon Keenlyside, and Hanno Müller-Brachmann all left a stronger impression. Kate Royal impressed in the role of Pamina. Hers is not the sort of voice I instinctively ‘hear’ when I think of Pamina, but she sang and acted gracefully, and her diction was much improved upon the last time I heard her. Franz-Josef Selig was a good Sarastro, though the lack of stability to the performance as a whole did him no favours. Joseph Kaiser proved a disappointing Tamino, sometimes attaining considerable beauty of tone, but more often sounding inappropriately Italianate and too reliant upon a strangely emoting vibrato. Jessica Pratt’s Queen of the Night was unworthy of a major, or even a minor, house. Davis was clearly making efforts to accommodate her, by slowing down drastically, but to little avail. The succession of aspirates in her first aria is something I have never heard before; nor do I ever wish to hear it again. Otherwise, the Three Ladies were perhaps the best of the vocal bunch: I am glad they were so good, but there is something awry when they surpass almost everyone else. Things may pick up, I suppose, but if they do not, I cannot recommend strongly enough the extremely fine DVD.