LPO/Gardner - Schoenberg, Gurrelieder, 24 September 2022

 

Royal Festival Hall

Waldemar – David Butt Philip
Tove – Lise Lindstrom
Wood-dove – Karen Cargill
Klaus-Narr – Robert Murray
Peasant – James Creswell
Speaker – Alex Jennings

London Philharmonic Choir (chorus director: Neville Creed)

London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Edward Gardner (conductor)

Image: London Philharmonic Orchestra

The pandemic is not over. But I remember thinking, when some sort of minimal concert life was intermittently starting up again—socially distanced concerts at St Martin-in-the-Fields with a maximum audience of thirty, the first and second series of Spotlight Chamber Concerts at St John’s Waterloo, and so on—what resumption of a full range of musical life would entail for me. I chose three examples, which have remained in my mind ever since: a large-scale work by Richard Strauss, a full staging of Die Meistersinger, and a performance of Gurrelieder. Strauss came a little while ago, in a performance of the Alpine Symphony—though I await a Frau ohne Schatten. Meistersinger is yet to come. On this Wagner-and-Strauss-starved island, we should probably not hold our collective breath. Nevertheless, even if accompanied by precious little other Schoenberg, Gurrelieder has returned.

It was, if truth be told, a somewhat mixed performance we heard from Edward Gardner and the LPO: well sung and played, Gardner’s conducting more variable yet growing in stature, with one major, well-nigh catastrophic miscalculation for the closing melodrama. The Royal Festival Hall is far from ideal for this work, yet Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Philharmonia performances in 2009 and 2018 had seemed far more at home. Contrast was glaring in the opening bars. Both Salonen and Gardner achieved great clarity; whatever the Festival Hall’s shortcomings, it probably helped in that respect. Gardner and the LPO, however, sounded oddly mechanical, as opposed to pointillistic; the strange impression was of oddly balanced strings and flutes out of sync, even when they were not. And even once the music had settled, Gardner imparted an oddly regimented quality to it, moving bar-to-bar rather than via paragraph. There were, though, some inviting, dangerous, Tristan-esque sounds from the LPO that prepared the way splendidly for David Butt Philip’s first entry.

Butt Philip showed himself, without exaggeration, to be one of the finest Waldemars I have heard. His way with words and shaping of vocal lines were beyond reproach. As the first part progressed, his emotional range widened to encompass, as does the work, the impetuous, the angry, and also greater dynamic range. The ardent lyricism as he told of Waldemar’s pride, likened unto that of Christ seated once more next to His father, was an object lesson in dramatic delivery that yet retained a Lieder-singer’s attention to detail. Lindstrom offered a womanly Tove with Nordic steel: no false purity, and again a performance that took its leave from the verse. The LPO generally sounded gorgeous. Earlier on, Gardner might have lingered to advantage. Greater flexibility did come, though, whether in the coital stillness of Tove’s response or the ghostly, again Tristan-like brass of ‘unsel’ger Geschlechter’ foretold, developing via frightening double basses into something more ominous. Waldemar’s words ‘Unsere Zeit ist um’ offered ecstatic contradiction, already tinged with irony concerning fate and the future. Yet the sweetness of the interlude introducing Tove’s last words consoled, as it should. Could Lindstrom’s delivery here have been more lyrical? Probably. Her care for verbal expression nonetheless offered compensation enough, and the climax on ‘Kuß’, her final word, sent shivers down the spine, with credit due to all concerned: soloist, conductor, and orchestra.

The Wood-dove’s song was, quite simply, outstanding. Karen Cargill’s deep, rich tone furthered an interpretation once more unquestionably rooted in the text. Rising out of the orchestra, this was a forest messenger one knew one could trust, however much one wanted her words not to be true. Gardner here captured to a tee the crucial role of rhythm, not least in relation to harmony. It made for a gripping conclusion to the first part, the strange decision to break for an interval all the more regrettable.

That said, the brief Part Two plunged us, orchestrally and vocally, straight back into the action. Butt Philip showed anger, increasingly blasphemous, without hectoring. Crucially, he continued to sing, never shouting, and in highly variegated fashion too. Gardner communicated well the fulfilment of those early ghostly sounds in the opening of Part Three, Butt Philip and the LPO audibly responding by taking us on a journey to new, more bracingly modernist sounds, though the direction of travel rightly remained unclear, a veritable Götterdämmerung Hallowe’en from male chorus and James Creswell’s Peasant alike highly impressive. Robert Murray’s Klaus-Narr was nicely animated, communicating like Cargill’s Wood-dove with evident sincerity and truthfulness. Again, this was music that was sung, here in Straussian fashion, albeit more grateful for the tenor. Meistersinger-ish tendencies in the orchestra were welcome and revealing, preparing the way for that extraordinary experience in the prelude to the Speaker’s appearance of material transformed before our ears, almost against our (even Schoenberg’s?) will. History’s demand, the material’s, or the drama’s? Why choose?   

And then, talk about spoiling the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar. The Speaker entered, perversely miked, and in English translation. One can perform Gurrelieder in English, I suppose, but then it should surely be the whole thing. The ‘effect’ was alienating in quite the wrong way, exacerbated by laboured, ac-tor-ly delivery on the part of Alex Jennings. The idea, it seems, was Gardner’s own; someone should have dissuaded him. For however sardonic, at times even vicious, the LPO sounded, this was a conceptual miscalculation that torpedoed the performance as a whole. How I longed for the inimitable Barbara Sukowa, icing on the cake for both of Salonen’s performances (as well as Claudio Abbado’s Vienna recording). Even the strange, choral climax, sincere in its way yet knowing that such tonal sounds can no longer truly convince, failed through no fault of the chorus to salvage matters. A great pity indeed.

 

Turandot, Royal Opera, 19 September 2013

Royal Opera House

Mandarin – Michel de Souza

Liù – Eri Nakamura
Timur – Raymond Aceto
Calaf – Marco Berti
Ping – Dionysos Sourbis
Pang – David Butt Philip
Pong – Doug Jones
Turandot – Lise Lindstrom
Emperor Altoum – Alasdair Elliott
Soprano Solo I – Marianne Cotterill
Soprano Solo II – Anne Osborne

Andrei Serban (director)

Andrew Sinclair (revival director)
Sally Jacobs (designs)
F. Mitchell Dana (lighting)
Kate Flatt (choreography)
Tatiana Novaes Coelho (choreologist)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Henrik Nánási (conductor)

 

The thawing of the Princess Turandot is somewhat more abrupt than mine, but I think it is fair to say that I am rather more favourably inclined towards Puccini than once I was. (Not that I was ever entirely hostile.) This was, however, the first time I had had, or rather had taken, the opportunity to see Turandot in the theatre. In such circumstances, it is more likely than not that there will be something to enjoy, and here there was, but it would be difficult to claim that pleasures – if that be the right word for this nastiest of operas – extended beyond the musical.

 

It was a pity that there had not been something theatrically to occupy one’s mind, however small; I could not help but think that, had this been one’s first encounter with Puccini, or indeed with opera at all, one might well have been so bemused by the ludicrous nature of what one saw, that that would have been the end of that. A friend, who I had not realised was also present at this performance, informed me that he had left after the first interval, longing for some Regietheater; one does not have to be Frank Castorf to understand why. I spent much of the first act vainly hoping for a sign of irony. Maybe it looked different thirty years ago, or was looked at differently. But even if Sally Jacobs’s designs – understatedly described by the Royal Opera as ‘colourful’ – are somehow left on one side, even if one somehow erases one’s mind of anything relating to Edward Said, let alone to subsequent orientalist theory, even if one overcomes the strange feeling that what one sees has more in common with a decidedly politically-incorrect Russian book of fairy-tales than with anything meaningfully ‘Chinese’, the rest of the direction, whether this be Serban’s or Andrew Sinclair’s doing, lies so far beyond the merely ‘dated’ that it seems older than the opera itself.  ‘Older’, that is, not in the sense of evoking something ancient, but because one wonders how much more restoration the sets and costumes can take before they simply collapse. Otto Schenk seems almost avant-garde by comparison. The dance routines threaten to make Puccini’s score sound like a model of multicultural sensitivity. As for the weird procession at the end...

 

My fear, however, would be not so much that this is a dinosaur that has managed to evade extinction that must come any day soon, but rather that it is being presented as a sop to a decidedly non-critical audience, who might find Wagner’s accusation against Meyerbeer of ‘effect without cause’ less challenging than bothersome. Visible – and audible – sitting back in seats for ‘Nessun dorma’  tended, sadly, to support that view. Once again Boulez’s ‘solution’ to the problem of opera houses sprang to mind.

 

The orchestra, however, was on good – good, rather than excellent, but nevertheless good – form.  Henrik Nánási’s conducting was strong in some respects: the extraordinary radicalism, at least for a composer of Italian opera, of Puccini’s harmony and orchestration shone through. Nánási was willing to linger, without losing track of where the musical drama was heading. There was often, though, a lack of sharpness, which would have lifted the performance and offered something more keenly responsive to the viciousness of the work. That is not, of course, to say that one wishes for something hard-driven or soulless, however much one might wonder whether that might be precisely what Turandot deserves, but there were times when this veered towards the listless. Choral singing was excellent throughout, yet another credit to the Royal Opera Chorus and Renato Balsadonna.

 

Much of the solo singing was to be admired too. Save for slight unsteadiness – quite pardonable, given the cruelty of this entry – upon her first phrase or two, Lise Lindstrom proved more or less beyond reproach as the ice princess. I use the cliché, since the final melting was a masterclass in how to present what I hesitate to call development of character, so shall settle for Puccini’s manipulative genius, breathtaking here even by his standards. The cold strength of much of the performance finally revealed a beating heart: too late, of course, for Liù, or indeed for any semblance of humanity within the work as a whole. Eri Nakamura gave the best performance I have heard from her as the slave girl, often exquisitely shaded; again, try as one might, it was more or less impossible not to be moved, even as one knew one was being shamelessly manipulated. (Strauss almost seems to have a conscience in such matters when compared with Puccini.) Marco Berti’s voice is of the type considered almost de rigeur for Calaf. There is, to be fair, considerable dynamic shading, yet I could not help but wish for something a little less rigid, whether in vocal or stage terms, though the latter may of course have been someone else’s fault. One would have to search far and wide for a more irritating and indeed offensive trio than the ghastly Ping, Pong, and Pang, but Dionysos Sourbis, David Butt Philip, and Doug Jones did what they could to bring their words to life. (Their stage business I cannot really bring myself to describe.) Alasdair Elliott certainly sounded like an elderly emperor, though was perhaps a little too much on the frail side. Still, the audience appeared to love the melodramatic – I fear that is far too weak a word – descent of his throne from the ceiling.

 

Alfano’s wretched ending was employed, though I suppose Berio and Serban might have made for odd bedfellows. If, however, there was little to be gleaned from the staging beyond avid connoisseurship of shameless kitsch, the performance arguably did its job in reminding one quite how wondrously repellent this opera is. One may, arguably should, disapprove, but it certainly holds the attention more than the last opera I had seen staged at Covent Garden: Britten’s deathly Gloriana. There are different ways to lie, as Michael Tanner’s perspicacious review of this Turandot would have it, beyond redemption; better, surely, for the problem to lie with morality than competence. To conclude, a plea that will doubtless fall upon deaf ears: next time might we not have a Turandot that proffers both  musical and ethical redemption? Busoni would be our man.