Salzburg Mozartwoche (1): Melnikov/Camerata Salzburg/Langrée - Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Dutilleux, 30 January 2016

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Mozart – Symphony no.1 in E-flat major, KV 16

Mendelssohn, Piano Concerto no.1 in G minor, op.25
Dutilleux – Mystère de l’instant
Mozart – Symphony no.39 in E-flat major, KV 543

Alexander Melnikov (piano)

Salzburg Mozarteum Orchestra

Louis Langrée (conductor)

 

This year’s Salzburg Mozartwoche has allotted a special place to Mendelssohn, present in three of the five concerts I have attended or will. The centenary of Henri Dutilleux’s birth was also celebrated in this concert from the Mozarteum Orchestra and Louis Langrée. His Mystère de l’instant (1986, revised 1989), for twenty-four strings, cimbalom, and percussion – a clear echo of Bartók, unsurprisingly given its status as a Sacher work – received what seemed to me an impressive performance. I have rarely proved responsive to Dutilleux’s music, rather to my disappointment, given the number of people I know who admire it greatly. This, however, proved an exception. In ten (very) short movements, we experienced a vividly pictorial, albeit not only pictorial, drama-in-miniature. Balances were well judged throughout, all of the solos (be they cimbalom, percussion, or string) well taken. Rhythms were not only precise, but propulsive. The appearance of the SACHER cipher in the tenth movement, ‘Métamorphoses’, inevitably put me in mind of another, slightly younger French composer, whose music I know much better.

 

Alexander Melnikov had joined the orchestra for Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto. It is not a work I feel wild about, yet I have heard more compelling performances than this, especially from the soloist. A turbulent opening to the first movement had promised well. If very fast indeed, pretty hard-driven, the score arguably suggests that. Melnikov’s approach, however, seemed curiously static, a series of episodes that did not lead anywhere. His tone was a strange mixture of grand, old-style Romanticism, and inconsequential skating across the keys. I should have preferred everyone to calm down a little, but it was the lack of direction from the soloist that especially troubled me. That said, Melnikov handled the transition to the second movement well, although his strange detachment soon again had the upper hand. The Salzburg cellos, however, sounded gorgeous. The finale was even more po-faced, at least so far as the pianist was concerned. He efficiently despatched everything, with considerable tonal variegation; I was never moved, though, in a performance that seemed serious in the wrong way.

No one would claim Mozart’s First Symphony to be a masterpiece, but by virtue of being his first symphony, it holds an undeniable interest for many of us. This was a less warm performance than Karl Böhm used to give, but anyone would surely have expected that. It pulsed with life, the highly contrasting figures of the first movement given their due. Langrée’s smiles suggested he was enjoying himself. The slow movement was well-shaped, its textures well-balanced. What it lacks above all is melodic genius, but that is no one’s fault. A joyful and ebullient performance of the finale brought this first item on the programme to an impressive close, the movement over in the twinkling of an eye.

 

Anyone, however, who did not consider Mozart’s final E-flat major Symphony to be a masterpiece would be well-advised to give up on music completely. The opening E-flat chords inevitably brought The Magic Flute to mind, although equally, the development thereafter reminded us this was a very different work. The first-movement exposition clearly grew out of the introduction. (That should, but alas does not, go without saying.) Langrée had a few rather irritating agogic touches (especially upon repetition), but nothing too grievous. For the most part, direction was clear, the concision of the development section truly a thing of wonder. The concluding bars did what they should: properly triumphant, thematically integrative, resounding with an inevitability that would surely have made Haydn proud. The slow movement was well-shaped, taken at a relatively swift tempo, the minor mode episodes making a strong impression. Langrée was sometimes prone to exaggerated tapering off of phrases, but I have heard far worse. A graceful yet vigorous minuet made a strong case for being taken one-to-a-bar. Orchestral detail was always finely etched. The trio flowed nicely, whilst offering proper relief. Langrée’s tempo for the finale sounded effortlessly right, allowing everything to slot into place (which is not, of course, to minimise the achievement of that happening). It was full of Haydnesque purpose, whilst, in its characterisation and sheer drama, never permitting us to forget that this was the composer of the Da Ponte operas. I could find no fault whatsoever in this delightful finale.

Festival d'Aix en Provence: Zaide, 5 July 2008

(Images - copyright: Elisabeth Carecchio)

Théâtre de l’Archevêché

Zaide – Ekaterina Lekhina
Gomatz – Sean Panikkar
Allazim – Alfred Walker
Sultan Soliman – Russell Thomas
Osmin – Morris Robinson

Peter Sellars (director)
Georges Tsypin (designs)
Gabriel Berry (costumes)
James F. Ingalls (lighting)

Ibn Zaydoun Chorus (director: Moneim Adwan)
Camerata Salzburg
Louis Langrée (conductor)

I had been looking forward to this: my first Zaide in the theatre, a controversial but undeniably talented director, and the open air of the courtyard to the archepiscopal palace in Aix. What unfolded was the stuff of nightmares: a production as crass as – if doubtless more well-meaning than – Jonathan Miller’s appalling travesty of Così fan tutte for the Royal Opera, albeit without the extraordinary musical redemption of Sir Colin Davis and his superlative cast.

That Zaide is a problem piece, no one would deny. The music is far too good to lie unperformed but it is frustratingly incomplete: something clearly must be done. It seems to me that there are three principal paths one could take. One could make a virtue of the incomplete nature of the ‘work’ as it stands, either by taking up and developing the theme of fragmentation. One might commission some new music and either provide it with a companion-piece (as the Salzburg Festival in 2006 did) or transform it into a new work. Or one could attempt to make it cohere as it stands, perhaps by adding further music by Mozart. The incidental music to Thamos, King of Egypt is a favoured candidate for this approach, and this is what happened here. Except that it did not. There was at root a glaring contradiction, perhaps resolvable or perhaps not, but certainly not resolved in this particular case, between a quasi-traditional path of Mozartian completion and Sellars’s understanding of the work.

There is nothing wrong in principle with providing a work with a new or modified message, although it needs to be done well – and rarely is. Sellars, however, actually seems to believe that Zaide itself is about what he decided to put on stage. I can say this with some confidence by virtue of his comments in the programme. Take the following extract from his ‘synopsis’, informing us what is going on in that most celebrated of the work’s arias, ‘Ruhe sanft’: ‘From her sewing machine above, Zaide (a Muslim) hears Gomatz struggle. She sings a lullaby to ease his pain and lowers his ID card to him, hoping her picture will bring him comfort and strength…’ Or this commentary on Osmin’s ‘Wer hungrig bei der Tafel sitzt’: ‘This escape is not a problem for Osmin. As a slave trader, his speciality is outsourcing and there is an endless supply of desperate people who will work under any conditions. From his point of view, Soliman is behaving like one big fool. Modern management techniques offer a huge profit from a disposable work force. The lesson is: if there is food, eat your fill.’ For Mozart, Sellars tells us, ‘belonged to a generation of artists, activists, intellectuals, and religious leaders who dedicated an important part of their œuvre to the abolition of slavery.’ This, apparently, is what the Enlightenment was about. Except it was not – and nor is Mozart’s unfinished Singspiel. Mozart was not the egalitarian Sellars explicitly calls him. A little while after composing the music to Zaide, Mozart dismissively reported to his father of Joseph II’s inclusion of the ‘Viennese rabble’ (Pöbel) at a Schönbrunn ball. Such rabble, he wrote, would always remain just that. This does not place Mozart at odds with the Enlightenment; it places him at its heart, along with Voltaire’s plea to his guests not to discuss the non-existence of God in front of the servants, lest the latter should forget their place. And as for the American plantations… The Enlightenment in general and Mozart in particular are far more complex than a modern, liberal American mind – or at least this one – appears able to comprehend. Hierarchy is sometimes undermined in Mozart’s operas but never to the extent of threatening the social order. Le nozze di Figaro is, after all, but a ‘folle journée’, from which most of Beaumarchais’s menacing rhetoric has been expunged.

It gets worse however, when Sellars comes to staging this misunderstanding. (Some misunderstandings can be fruitful, but not this.) Zaide takes place in a modern sweatshop, replete with the ‘ID cards’, ‘modern management techniques’, and so on, which I quoted above. Somehow the issue of Palestinian liberation becomes embroiled in this issue and that more broadly of modern slavery; it is all about ‘freedom’, I suppose. I hope that it should not need saying that I abhor all forms of slavery, ancient and modern, including the repression of Palestine, but that does not in itself make the issue relevant to an unfinished work which is about something quite different, nor to a production which, through its generally ‘right-on’ contradictions, could not make up its mind what it was really about. We therefore had a ‘chorus’ of six modern slaves traipse on to stage following the appropriated ‘overture’, for an oud – I think – to strike up by way of introduction to the harmless little song they presented. Mozart was then permitted to return, providing different music to what I believe were the same words. We never heard again from the Ibn Zaydoun chorus, associated with the admirable organisation Esclavage Tolérance Zéro, nor from the chorus’s director, Moneim Adwan. Their inclusion was offensively tokenistic and added nothing to the botched drama on stage; they sang well enough in an amateur fashion. The Aix audience was made to suffer ever so slightly by the turning on of glaring strobe lighting at the ends of musical numbers: irritating enough to be discourteous, and obscene if the suggestion were that we could in any sense thereby participate in the very real agonies of modern slavery, be it in a sweatshop or the Gaza Strip. East-West tension might fruitfully have been addressed in a work such as this, but here it was not.

Camerata Salzburg sounded as it generally does nowadays, post-Norrington. Sándor Végh would turn in his grave to hear the low-vibrato, short-bowed, small-in-number (7.6.5.4.2) string contribution, although there were moments when the section was allowed greater musical freedom. The opening bar confronted us with the perversely rasping sound of natural brass and with the ‘authentic’ bashing of hard sticks upon kettledrums. It was left to the superlative woodwind section to provide Mozartian consolation. Louis Langrée drove the score quite hard, sometimes with dramatic flair, often with a harshness that has no place in Mozart. He was able, however, to provide considerable dramatic continuity both within and between numbers. Perhaps surprisingly, the Thamos items often fared better.

There were some promising young voices on stage, although they had a tendency to present excessively broad-brushed, unshaded interpretations – and were sometimes just far too loud. Sean Panikkar possesses a winningly ardent tenor, which impressed more in the first than in the second act. Thankfully he had more to do in the first. Alfred Walker was dignified earlier on but subsequently unfocused. What were we to make of Ekaterina Lekhina in the title role? She delivered her second act arias rather well, but was all over the place in ‘Ruhe sanft’: tremulous and out-of-tune in an almost caricatured ‘operatic’ fashion. More worryingly, why was she, a Russian soprano, included in what was otherwise clearly a purposely-selected non-white cast? I cannot for one moment imagine that this was the intention, but I almost had the impression that here was a white woman, threatened and surrounded by coloured men. Whatever the actual intention was, I am afraid that it entirely eluded me. The impression of abject incoherence was nevertheless intensified still further. I think that I have now said enough.

Mostly Mozart Festival, opening concert, Friday 13 July 2007

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

Piano Concerto no.17 in G major, KV 453

Mass in C minor, KV 427/417a

Stefan Vladar (piano)

Susan Gritton (soprano)
Lucy Crowe (soprano)
Thomas Walker (tenor)
Iain Paterson (bass)

Mostly Mozart Festival Chorus

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Louis Langrée (conductor)

The Barbican's Mostly Mozart Festival began, bravely and/or confidently competing with the First Night of the Proms, with one of the most ravishingly beautiful of all Mozart's piano concertos and one of his two great unfinished choral masterpieces, the Mass in C minor. Louis Langrée, whom I had last encountered collapsing during a Glyndebourne performance of Don Giovanni, conducted those dependable old Mozart hands, the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, the orchestral mainstay of the festival. With the exception of an occasional slight dullness in the string tone – which one cannot imagine ever having occurred under Sir Neville Marriner – the Academy sounded much as it always has done: a small orchestra (strings were proportioned 8:6:4:4:2) of soloists, led by Kenneth Sillito, evincing a mostly exquisite polish and great clarity of tone. Signs of influence from the 'authentic' brigade were few and far between.

Stefan Vladar was a fine soloist in the concerto. His pearly tone stood closer, thinking of renowned Mozart pianists, to Murray Perahia's than to that of Daniel Barenboim, which was fitting for a Classical rather than a Romantic reading. An especially delightful facet of his performance was the ease with which he made those frequent horn-like figures in the left hand truly sound like a pair of horns; the orchestral pair of horns also shone in their antiphonal responses to the piano. At the end of the magical second movement's cadenza, beautifully played if a little distended, Vladar's lingering provided for an extra beat in the bar in which the orchestra returned: not a disaster, but a little odd to hear. Elsewhere, I occasionally felt that Vladar and Langrée underlined the Classical proportions a little too emphatically, with audible pauses between sections that might profitably have been dovetailed, but no one would have been able to claim a lack of structural understanding. Vladar adopted the fashionable practice of playing, continuo-style, during some of the orchestral tuttis. I find that, particularly in the first instance, this detracts from the contrast when the soloist makes his entry, but if 'performance practice' says that it ought to be done, many will automatically follow suit. The woodwind sounded divine, imparting a truly Mozartian wind-band sound to the many passages in Mozart desires just that, and a melting command of line – what a happy combination! – whenever required to do so for their solos. The strings soon recovered from the slight dullness I mentioned at the very beginning. Vibrato was varied intelligently rather than dogmatically, for instance to heighten the darkness of the slow movement's daring chromaticism. There is more than one way to do this, of course, but this was a method which, for the most part, proved effectively. The exhilirating antics of the finale's variations met with a keen response from soloist and orchestra, to bring a welcome foretaste of Papageno to the proceedings.

The last occasion I had heard the Mass in C minor in concert was in the Abbey Church of St Peter in Salzburg. With the best will in the world, the Barbican Hall could hardly substitute for the extraordinary Baroque interior decoration, nor for the historical connection. This then, not unreasonably, was a performance in which Langrée stressed athleticism and vigour over 'rococo-operatic sweets-of-sin' (Stravinsky on Mozart's masses). On its own terms, it worked very well, even if I should have been far from unhappy to have a little more of the quality from which Stravinsky, in his neo-Classical puritanism, recoiled – and a little more mystery too.

Langrée used his own edition of the work. It was difficult for me to tell how strongly it differed from others, save that it was a torso rather than a Robert Levin-style completion. There were some passages in which the brass sounded more prominent, and the strings less so; I even fancied that some of the brass notes may have been different from other editions. However, this may simply have been a matter of the conductor's orchestral balancing, bringing out certain parts more strongly than has often been the case.

Speeds were brisk, though never eccentrically so. There was little in the way of tempo variation, save for the very end, where Langrée's rallentando was somewhat laboured. (Perhaps this was partly a product of having to draw to an end that was never intended to be the end.) The ASMF's strings really dug into their double-dotted figures with a vigour complementing that of the conductor and the chorus. Woodwind was once again of the highest quality: Jaime Martin's magic flute sounded truly beguiling, and fiendishly fast bass lines were shaped by the bassoons as if this were the easiest thing in the world. The solemn intonations of the trombones sounded both archaic and Mozartian: just as it should be, and inevitably pointing forward to the Requiem. The timpanist certainly made his presence felt, although his hard sticks – which may well, of course, have been the conductor's choice – jarred with the rest of the orchestral blend. This was the only real concession to the 'period' lobby, and one we could well have done without.

The vocal soloists all acquitted themselves well. Susan Gritton's performance was surprisingly operatic, in an almost nineteenth-century sense during the Christe eleison. Indeed, Verdi did not sound so very far away, yet Gritton remained just on the side of what would have worked stylistically. Her willingness to forgo anything redolent of Meissen china provided a most welcome instruction in full-blooded Mozart singing. Lucy Crowe was a splendid late replacement for the indisposed Cora Burggraaf. Her coloratura was spellbinding, not to mention note-perfect and unblemished in its articulation. Thomas Walker's rather English tenor was never too much so, and Iain Paterson shone in his restricted role. The nicely contrasted voices stood out from each other during ensembles, yet provided a well-judged harmonic blend too, for which I am sure part of the praise must be attributed to the conductor. Paterson's resonant bass made Walker's tone sound a little bleached during the Benedictus, but this is a minor point.

The chorus was also very fine. If it lacked the great corporate personality of established choirs, it complemented the orchestra well as a parallel collection of soloists. Forty-strong, it was a little on the small side, but made up for this in musical expertise. Lines were distinct in fugal passages, without sounding mannered. In the homophonic doxological sections, this really did sound like a throng of angels praising the Almighty, never more so than in the Gloria, with its resounding Handel quotations on 'in excelsis'. There would have been little point in trying to imitate the sound of an Austro-German choir, and these singers did not.

Indeed, whilst my preference, speaking more generally, undoubtedly leans towards a performance such as that of the Wiener Singverein and the Berlin Philharmonic under Karajan, or the Berlin Radio Choir and the same orchestra under Abbado, this was a very good – and in some cases, excellent – performance of its kind: on a relatively small scale, using modern instruments. It augured well for the rest of the Barbican's festival and for the future success of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields.