Musikfest Berlin (3) - Lynch/BRSO/Rattle: Hindemith, Zemlinsky, and Mahler, 3 September 2024

Philharmonie

Hindemith: Rag Time (wohltemperiert)
Zemlinsky: Symphonische Gesänge, op.20
Mahler: Symphony no.6 in A minor

Lester Lynch (baritone)

Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Simon Rattle (conductor)

Image copyright: Berliner Festspiele / Astrid Ackermann

In a concert of two unequal halves, the first, shorter part proved the better bet. Incisive accounts of Hindemith’s Rag Time and Zemlinsky’s Symphonische Gesänge sat unfortunately with a performance of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony that suggested Simon Rattle’s lengthy post-Birmingham spell, amply demonstrated in Berlin and London, of pulling music, Mahler’s included, around to no discernible end has some way to go in Munich too. One aspect of interest was of course simply to hear Rattle with his new orchestra, the Bavarian Radio Symphony. There was some excellent playing to be heard. To my ears, though – it was not only the hall, since I have heard Rattle and the LSO sparkle at the Philharmonie – the Mahler sound proved strikingly similar to that from the Berlin Philharmonic during its last, somewhat truculent days with the conductor. This new partnership, enthusiastically acclaimed by many in the audience – as seems to be the case for any old Mahler performance, good, bad, or indifferent – seemed as yet a work-in-progress. 

Hindemith’s Bach-inspired Ragtime made its point without overstaying its welcome. As with much music of the 1920s, the ghost (even when alive) of Busoni hovered over harmony and orchestration. Hard-edged and not a little outrageous, it made for an apt prelude to Zemlinsky’s 1929 settings of texts from the collection Afrika singt. Lester Lynch made for an eloquent, sincere, often moving soloist, sympathetically accompanied by Rattle, in a work that, musically, seemed to take up where the composer’s Lyric Symphony left off, albeit sparer and darker. The first song’s opening woodwind lines, excellently performed by BRSO principals, were a case in point. The deep sadness of one of several Langston Hughes settings (in translation) set the tone for much to come in music whose invention proved thoroughly equal to the task, Zemlinsky’s brass writing (and the BRSO’s playing) in ‘Erkenntnis’ striking indeed. When dark, it was a multicoloured darkness, as in ‘Totes braunes Mädel’; when contrast came, as in the scherzo-like ‘Übler Bursche’ and the defiant menace of ‘Afrikanischer Tanz’, it registered as meet and right. The final ‘Arabeske’ offered Twenties’ Neue Sachlichkeit with a heart, solidarity with a fine intellect, crystallised in performances that exulted without naïveté. 

It was a brisk funeral march that opened the Mahler: nothing wrong with that, although in this symphony, few have matched and surely none will surpass the incendiary results of Pierre Boulez’s more measured opening, both on record and in concert. With Boulez, as with few others, the whole of Mahler’s tragedy is implicit, even inevitable in the first bars. With Rattle, there was certainly much, though the general ‘tone’ seemed odd: a ‘midsummer night’s Mahler’ perhaps. Rattle’s way with the chorale that connects the first and second subjects was truly a thing of wonder, turning mysteriously inward. The aftermath of the second, ‘Alma’ theme, lost all momentum, slowing to the point of exhaustion, although picking up for much of the development. Moreover, the hard-edged, Weill-like sonorities that had characterised performances before the interval, seemed increasingly out of place here. There was something else missing, though. Once I realised what it was, its fatal precedent the work as a whole could not be escaped: an unwillingness to let harmony in general and harmonic rhythm in particular ground, inform, and incite the music’s progress. What we heard was a series of unconnected passages, some more nightmarish than others, in a somewhat loud and overbearing stream of consciousness. This is a symphony and Mahler’s most Classically conceived symphony at that; lose that and you lose much of its point. 

There was an irony, then, to Rattle’s insistence on placing the ‘Andante’ second: a common pseudo-literalism nowadays, one that rarely if ever convinces. It benefited from excellent solo playing, horn and violin in particular. Quite a head of steam was whipped up at the close, arguably excessively so. What it all might mean, regardless of whether that can or should be put into words, eluded me. Despite its placing third, the scherzo fared better, at least to begin with. Its opening had a stronger sense of rhythm, harmonic rhythm included, and the orchestral playing displayed a broader range of colour. Alas, Rattle’s inclination to pull material around soon got the better of him; the deliberate became merely mannered. 

The finale had its moments, but it needs more than moments. It needs to be heard as a single, unbroken span, or will ultimately be little more than a waste of time. A nightmarish opening augured well, but Rattle failed to establish a fundamental pulse. Listlessness may have been the idea, but general ‘mood’ was no substitute for what was lacking. That might work, or fail to work less badly, for two or three minutes, but for thirty? The movement’s form and structure were simply not there; nor were those of the symphony as a whole. People visibly thrilled to the two hammer-blows and, to be fair, the first for a while seemed literally to have knocked the music into shape, but why was it there? In any case, the old listlessness soon reasserted itself and the second went for less. A pity.

The Cunning Little Vixen, English National Opera, 22 February 2022

Coliseum

 

Images: Clive Barda

Forester – Lester Lynch
Vixen – Sally Matthews
Forester’s Wife, Owl – Madeleine Shaw
Schoolmaster, Mosquito – Alan Oke
Priest, Badger – Clive Bayley
Poacher – Ossian Huskinson
Innkeeper, Cock – John Findon
Fox – Pumeza Matshikiza
Innkeeper’s Wife, Chief Hen – Gweneth Ann Rand
Dog – Claire Barnett Jones
Pepík, Woodpecker – Alexandra Oomens
Frantík, Jay – Ffion Edwards
Harašta – Ossian Huskinson
Dragonfly – Joy Constantinides
Frog – Robert Berry-Roe
Cricket – Ethan James
Grasshopper – Kavya Kutsa

Jamie Manton (director)
Tom Scutt (designs)
Lucy Carter (lighting)
Jenny Ogilvie (movement)

Children’s Chorus (chorus director: Patrick Barett)
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus director: Mark Biggins)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Martyn Brabbins (conductor)

Failure to love the operas—more generally, the music—of Janáček would be a strange, soulless thing indeed. It seems more to be opera companies, strange, incomprehensible entities, than opera-goers, be they casual or more seasoned and committed, that accomplish that strange, incomprehensible failure. Fortunately, since opera returned to London, we have had opportunity to see a Janáček opera at Holland Park, Covent Garden, and now at the Coliseum too, with Glyndebourne adding to the tally not so far away. Holland Park’s Cunning Little Vixen last summer makes ENO’s claim that the opera is ‘rarely staged’ especially peculiar, but arts advertising is another strange and incomprehensible world. We can and should be grateful for Janáček wherever we find his works staged; that is surely the important thing, not least at a time when humanity stands in danger of extinction from so many catastrophes at once.

The idea of Jamie Manton’s new production seemed to be that the human world aged more readily and found itself less capable of regeneration, perhaps in light of its incomprehensible despoliation of Nature, than the natural world of animals, to the detriment of the slow-witted former and probably the quicker-witted latter too. Deforestation was, I think, part of that tale, felled logs across the stage, living wood turned dead at the hand of man. Silent child and/or adolescent versions of certain characters—the Forester, his Wife, the Vixen, and the Dragonfly—heightened the sense of cyclical, generational narrative, freer than their elder selves, without merely getting in the way. Just as important, they and other silent roles gave opportunity to child performers, as of course did the children’s chorus. Vivid, painterly impressions of human life and the seasons were unfurled: always a dramatic reminder that what we think of as Nature, or at least what we can ever know of it, will always remain an uneasy compromise with the natural world 'itself'. 

There was also an intriguing sense of the story, or at least the human part of it, lying closer to earlier Janáček works such as Jenůfa and Katya Kabanova. When the Forester took the Vixen home, it was indoors, to a claustrophobic setting that would not have been out of place in a typical ‘contemporary’-minded production of either of those. This Moravia was far from a rural idyll, though it arguably had more in common with the stage of life at which Janáček wrote his opera, memories of his relationship with Kamila Stösslová colouring the Forester’s strange love for the Vixen and ultimately that sense of transcendental communion engendered by that love.

Martyn Brabbins led a loving—perhaps in the third act, a little too loving—musical account, especially strong in conveying not only the metrical implications of Janáček’s use of Czech speech rhythms, but how evidently felt they might be by performers and audience alike (even in English translation). Here was a score clearly internalised, whether its moments of rapture or its (often overlooked) harder edges, chiming nicely with what we saw on stage. By the nature of the work, a Vixen performance needs to be a company effort. That was certainly what we saw and heard here.

Sally Matthews shone in the title role, her bell-like soprano emotionally adaptive to a variety of situations, Pumeza Matshikiza’s Fox similarly likeable and (strangely?) relatable. The journey of Lester Lynch’s Forester offered a crucial dramatic counterpoint, ably supported and brought into relief by a host of sharply drawn cameos. It would ultimately be a little pointless to go through the large cast, but Madeleine Shaw’s Forester’s Wife and Ossian Huskinson’s Harašta seemed to me particularly vivid portrayals, in stage and vocal terms. Storm Eunice, the natural world in notably hostile guise, may have put paid to the premiere, but there will always be more to come, further opportunities. Like the Forester, we human beings must learn better how to take them—before it is too late.

Doktor Faust, Semperoper Dresden, 19 March 2017

Semperoper

Images: Jochen Quast
Faust (Lester Lynch) in front of an image of Helen of Troy

Doktor Faust – Lester Lynch

Wagner – Michael Eder
Mephistopheles, Night Watchman – Mark Le Brocq
Duke of Parma, Megäros – Michael König
Duchess of Parma – Manuela Uhl
Master of Ceremonies, Gravis – Magnus Piontek
Soldier (Girl’s Brother), Natural Scientist – Sebastian Wartig
Lieutenant, Beelzebuth – Jürgen Müller
Students from Krakow – Eric Stokloßa, Bernhard Hansky, Allen Boxer
Theologian, Levis – Tilmann Rönnebeck
Asmodus, Jurist – Stephan Klemm
Students from Wittenberg – Gerald Hupach, Khanyiso Gwenxane, Alexandros Stavrakakis, Aaron Pegram, Benjamin Glaubitz
Tenor Solo – Aaron Pegram
Shy Person – Friedrich Darge
Women’s Voices – Roxana Incontrera, Angela Liebold, Ewa Zeuner
Dancers – Juliane Bauer, Marianne Heubaum, Nicole Meier, Björn Helget, Dennis Dietrich, Dominik Strobl
 

Keith Warner (director)

Anja Kühnhold (assistant director)
Tilo Steffens (set designs)
Manuel Kolip (video)
Julia Müer (costumes)
John Bishop (lighting)
Karl Alfred Schreiner (choreography)

Juliane Schunke (dramaturgy)

Sächsischer Staatsopernchor Dresden (chorus master: Jörn Hinnerk Andresen)

Säschsische Staatskapelle Dresden

Tomáš Netopil (conductor)

 

Wagner (Michael Eder) and Faust

One of the greatest twentieth-century operas, scandalously neglected, by a great twentieth-century composer at least as scandalously neglected as any other. We knew that already, of course, or many of us did, but no one could have been in any doubt after this excellent Dresden performance. Whatever minor cavils I might have – mostly concerning the edition used – they will not seriously detract from that. Doktor Faust received its premiere here at the Semperoper in 1925; this premiere of a new production by Keith Warner, conducted by Tomáš Netopil, proved a worthy successor.

 

Warner is a serious, thoughtful director: just the thing, one would have thought, for Busoni in general and Doktor Faust in particular, and so it turns out to be. Busoni insisted on a distinction – did not almost all interesting composers of his time? – between his own musical drama, its epic quality perhaps looking forward to that of Brecht and Weill (Busoni’s pupil), and Wagnerian music drama, which he considered incapable of greater intensification. That is clear enough, although on certain occasions, I found myself intrigued by aspects of the performance that brought Busoni closer to Wagner than one might have expected. In his Sketch for a New Aesthetic of Music, Busoni had declared that ‘the greater part of modern theatre music suffers from the mistake of seeking to repeat the scenes passing on the stage’. Its ‘proper mission’, rather, was to interpret ‘the soul-states of the persons represented’, which might actually stand in opposition to the action. Warner respects the particular qualities of Busoni’s work, not least that distinction between the role of words and music (much, perhaps ironically, as many directors would now also do with Wagner) and, quite rightly, has staging interpret them and mediate between thereby. The assembled company thereby offers a rebuke to Schoenberg’s frankly silly (wilful?) misunderstanding, quite some time later, of what Busoni had said:

 

I remember how Busoni was the first to claim that music in opera must not express what is expressed by the action. The opera is principally the product of four factors: the text, the music, the stage, and the singer. If one of these constituents is allowed to disregard what the others do, why should they not also enjoy the same privilege? For instance, the singer? Could not Monastasos ask Sarastro to dance a ‘pas de deux’ with Pamina? Or could not Lohengrin immediately after his arrival sell the swan to a butcher and start auctioning his gondola?

 

Not that such reading against the grain would necessarily be a bad thing, if done intelligently; far from it. However, it is not in play here.

Faust, the Duchess of Parma (Manuela Uhl), and the chorus

 

What is in play is a staging that successfully navigates the interplay between such opposing and/or complementary features of Busoni’s work, to which we might add (again, not unlike Wagner, if with different means) tragedy and comedy, temporal and eternal, continuing and formally delineated, and not least, the ideal and the ‘merely existing’. As lain out in the (here unspoken) Prologue, the opera’s distinctly non-Goethian origins – like Wagner, Goethe is a figure from whom one might well decide to keep one’s distance here – in earlier puppet theatre remind us that there is more than one route to selling one’s soul and indeed to enlightenment. We have been led to think for ourselves, though, before the formal beginning of the performance, when we see a group of students (dancers, as we later discover, offering intelligently choreographed commentary and dramatic incitement) perusing their books, what they are reading or thinking (presumably) projected onto the curtain. And so, when the curtain rises during the ‘Symphonia’, we see hints at earlier historical attempts at solving the eternal riddles of existence, parading ancient philosophers and Christ (I think) amongst them, the twin roots of our (and Faust’s) Western tradition. He, not unreasonably, seems very much weighed down by it all at his desk, the bargain he strikes in some sense a response to a depression that is perhaps both personal and collective.

Mephistopheles (Mark Le Brocq), Faust, and the chorus

 

The fateful journey through which Mephistopheles takes our hero has elements again both of history and eternity. Indeed, even before the appearance of the final spirit, Faust has opened the book, Clavis astartis magica, to find a modern laptop. What might just seem a time-travelling gimmick, however, has a real dramatic point, increasingly so as the evening progresses. We place our faith in new methods of communication, new route to enlightenment, but do we thereby lose our diminish our critical faculties? Of course Faust would choose the sixth spirit, the one who travels as quickly as the thoughts of man (wonderfully double-edged!), just as we sit here writing and reading online. But what trickery is there in the Mephistophelian magic that enables the brutal murder of the girl’s (Gretchen’s) brother, the glittering seduction of the Duchess of Parma, and most glaringly here, the apparition of Helen of Troy? The action has taken us forward, through the age of Einstein to that of Warhol (amongst others featured). In the Wittenberg tavern, transposed to a transatlantic flower-power joint, Mephistopheles provides Faust with the requisite hallucinatory drug to smoke. The apparition then is real, in the quotidian sense, but is it real in the Hegelian, philosophical sense? Perhaps, then, as with Wagner again, the scene is very well set for the (relative, at least) victory of Schopenhauer in the final scene, Busoni at least as explicit here as his great predecessor in the crucial importance of the philosophy of the Will. Too much metaphysics, or not enough? The production is open enough to have us wonder.

Mephistopheles

 

I wondered, though, in that vein, whether we might have been better off with Philipp Jarnach’s edition, as premiered in Dresden all those years earlier, rather than the more recent version by Antony Beaumont. Beaumont’s version, incorporating material not used by Jarnach, is undoubtedly fascinating and closer to Busoni’s intentions. There remains, however, a nagging doubt, and I say this without wishing to posit a philistine distinction between ‘scholar’ and ‘composer’, that Jarnach’s punchier solution actually, in its relative infidelity (or, if you prefer, insufficiency), offers the better theatre. We should lose a good deal of the explicitly Schopenhauerian conclusion, yet the admittedly melodramatic final bars do their work so brilliantly that I missed them greatly. ‘Sollte diese Mann verunglückt sein?’ when spoken, offers an ending that is both teasingly ironic and recognisably tragic. Whether one wants that is, I suppose, largely a matter of taste. I had never heard the Beaumont ending in the theatre, and do not begrudge it. Might there, perhaps, though, be in the future some possibility of combining the best features of both? This is not, after all, Don Giovanni (about which more soon, also from Dresden).

 

The arguments are finely balanced, I accept. Ultimately, it was far more important that Netopil and the Staatskapelle Dresden offered so expert an account of the score. The orchestra’s strengths were just as strongly in evidence as if they had been playing a repertoire work by Wagner or Strauss: perhaps a little darker of hue than they would have been in the latter, again suggesting a greater, despite-himself, kinship between Wagner and Busoni than many of us might have expected, but also harking back to the great (despite the cuts) recording by Rafael Kubelík with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. (Kent Nagano in Lyons offers an account textually preferable and, on that account absolutely necessary, yet by dramatic comparison, a little more bloodless.) There was heft and there was light; there was mahogany and there was gold; and so on and so forth. Everything was well-paced, with excellent momentum. If there were a few occasions on which I thought the demonic sardonicism might have been played up a little more (notably the Flea Song), emphasising the closed nature of the form as well as its integration, then that stands at least on the verge of nitpicking.

The end

 

Lester Lynch gave a fine portrayal of the title role, which went from strength to strength. It is by any standards a big part, and there were a few moments before the interval (during the Parma scene) when he sounded a little tired, if only relatively speaking, but as his anguish, weighed down by his conscience (personal and collective, as mentioned earlier?) came to the fore, there was no faulting the intelligent and ultimately deeply moving quality of his response. Mark Le Brocq’s Mephistopheles was very much in the mould of Kim Begley (for Nagano), a Loge on steroids, with a weird, unearthly tendency to camp that chilled rather than merely amused. I was a little surprised at some of the strange German heard from Manuela Uhl as the Duchess of Parma, but hers is a thankless role, and she generally did what she could with it. Aside from Michael Eder’s somewhat underpowered Wagner (no, not that Wagner), the rest of the cast was thoroughly impressive, not least collaboratively, proving much more than the sum of its parts. So too was the chorus, not just vocally, although it was little short of outstanding in that respect, but in stage business too. Warner, Netopil, and the assembled company presented us, then, with a true company achievement: just what opera should be. Whatever Schoenberg might have said…