Kampe/BPO/Thielemann - Wagner and Strauss, 5 December 2019

Philharmonie

Wagner: Lohengrin: Prelude to Act I

Strauss: Sonatina for sixteen wind instruments in F major, WoO 135, ‘Aus der Werkstatt eines Invaliden’

Strauss: Drei Hymnen, op.71

Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier: Suite, op.59

Anja Kampe (soprano)

Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra

Christian Thielemann (conductor). 

First came an unscheduled tribute to Mariss Jansons: the first-act Prelude to Lohengrin. In Jansons’s honour, the Berlin Philharmonic offered a glowing, performance of such translucency that even Wagner, at the height of his Young Hegelianism, might have accepted ‘transcendent’ as description in this case. Certainly that pulsating shimmer from the Berlin violins more than hinted at a Grail rendered immanent. Only toward the close did a little excessive moulding from Christian Thielemann suggest the presence of ego. Otherwise, all was much, I fancied, as Jansons might have dreamed of.

A rare opportunity to hear Strauss’s late Sonatina ‘Aus der Werkstatt eines Invaliden’ followed: so rare, indeed, that this was the first Berlin Philharmonic performance. For much of the opening and closing movements, alas, I could not help but wish that the excellent players—just think of those wind soloists—had played without a conductor, Thielemann seemingly insistent on making a meal of, even becoming bogged down in, phrases and paragraphs that need to sparkle as a knowingly late tribute to Mozart: Sekt rather than champagne, yet the very best Sekt. That said, he and they from the outset conjured to perfection a post-Capriccio harmonic soundworld. Moreover, the first movement’s climax and retreat therefrom proved wholly convincing. The central ‘Romanze und Menuett’ worked better overall, enabling one to take joy in sheer beauty of sound—how to choose between the likes of Emmanuel Pahud, Albrecht Mayer, Andreas Ottensamer, Stefan Dohr, Daniele Damiano, et al.?—without losing sight of wood for trees. If it sounded as conducted chamber music, that is arguably the point. If direction was not always clear during the finale, it became less effortful as time went on. There was, in any case, no doubting the outstanding quality of the playing.

Nor was there in the rest of the concert, concerning which I had no reservations whatsoever. These were outstanding performances in every respect, Thielemann, Anja Kampe, and this magnificent orchestra truly in their Straussian element. Why the three op.71 Hölderlin settings are so rarely performed, I have no idea. This was the first time I had heard them in concert, knowing them entirely from a radiant recording by this orchestra (which gave the 1921 premiere), Karita Mattila, and Claudio Abbado. They are hymns as much to Strauss’s absolute mastery of craft as to love and Heimat. It is difficult to imagine this performance, as rich in orchestral detail as it was revealing of form and line, being bettered any time soon. The opening ‘Hymn an der Liebe’ proved equally memorable for Kampe’s vividly communicative verbal presence and for the detail and direction of orchestral interludes, that after the third stanza sounding as a condensed passage from the Alpine Symphony or Die Frau ohne Schatten. Riding the crest of Strauss’s orchestral waves held no fear for Kampe and surely would not have done with less variegated ‘accompaniment’, yet Thielemann’s understanding of and consideration for the voice proved just as crucial. And yes, the pay-off was ultimately hymnal. ‘Rückkehr in die Heimat’, spun like a magic tapestry, and the similarly phantasmagorical delights of ‘Die Liebe’ followed, the latter resulting in a musico-verbal transformation that would surely have satisfied Hugo von Hofmannsthal himself. Strauss may deny transcendence, yet, with his ability to transfigurate, he scarcely needs to.

And so we moved to the familiar if still, in provenance, slightly mysterious 1944 Rosenkavalier suite. In a dashing, frankly coital Prelude, Thielemann appeared to be making up for lost time. Hand on heart, I have never heard this music better played, be it in Vienna, Dresden, or anywhere else. Here, Thielemann could play the orchestra as his instrument, as Strauss’s too, in the very best way. Shaping and detail emerged as one. Lightly (rightly) worn dignity and nobility lay at its heart: deeply moving. Ochs’s torment proved vivid in materialist fashion, as grotesque as anything in Ein Heldenleben, orchestra ‘speaking’ in absence of word and gesture. His waltz and others were played with evident love; in return, they effortlessly charmed us. A theatrical Luftpause before the Trio music could readily be forgiven. Likewise the very, very slow tempo of a section built with such mastery as to banish any slight lingering doubt. At the last hurrah, just as before curtain rise, orchestra, conductor, and composer sounded as one. Wonderful!

Salzburg Festival (5) – The Queen of Spades, 25 August 2018

Grosses Festspielhaus

Vladislav Sulimsky (Count Tomski / Plutus), Stanislav Trofimov (Surin), Alexander Kravetz (Chekalinsky), Igor Golovatenko (Prince Yeletsky), Gleb Peryazev (Narumov), Pavel Petrov (Chaplitski), Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Ruth Walz

Hermann – Brandon Jovanovich

Count Tomsky, Plutus – Vladislav Sulimsky

Prince Yeletsky – Igor Golovatenko

The Countess – Hanna Schwarz

Lisa – Evgenia Muraveva

Pauline, Daphnis – Oksana Volkova

Chekalinsky – Alexander Kravets

Surin – Stanislav Trofimov

Chaplitsky – Pavel Petrov

Narumov – Gleb Peryazev

Governess – Margarita Nekrasova

Master of Ceremonies – Oleg Zalytskiy

Masha – Vasilisa Berzhanskaya

Chloë, Prilepa – Yulia Suleimanova

Sheep – Imola Kacso, Márton Gláser, Joan Aguila Cuevas

Hans Neuenfels (director)
Christian Schmidt (set designs)

Reinhard von der Thannen (costumes)

Stefan Bolliger (lighting)

Nicolas Humbert, Martin Otter (video)

Teresa Rotemberg (choreography)

Yvonne Gebauer (dramaturgy)

Salzburg Festival and Theatre Children’s Choir (chorus master: Wolfgang Götz)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberfer)

Angelika Prokopp Summer Academy (stage music)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Mariss Jansons (conductor)

© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

The Queen of Spades is a curious work. I do not mean that in a negative sense; there is nothing intrinsically wrong with curiosity and often much right with it. How we consider the opera will doubtless – and rightly – remain a matter of debate. There is rarely ‘one way’: how boring it would be, if there were. Or, as Schoenberg once put it, only the middle road does not lead to Rome. What, however, seems to me crucial is to remember what one would have thought a very obvious point, namely that this is an opera. It is not a musical ‘version’, or ‘translation’, or anything else, of Pushkin. Of course it has roots in Pushkin’s story, just as Elektra does in Sophocles; it is, however, a free-standing piece of work, in which music plays the most important role of all.

Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann), Alexander Kravets (Chekalinsky), Stanislav Trofimov (Surin)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

In his New Grove article on the opera, Richard Taruskin writes, in characteristically combative style: ‘For these deeds the Tchaikovsky brothers have been castigated many times over by guardians of literature, second-guessed by a Soviet production team under Meyerhold (their attempted “repushkinization” of the opera was shown at the Leningrad Malïy Theatre in 1935), and rebuked by puritanical but unimaginative critics who cannot hear the music to which the cannily adulterated libretto gave rise. What critics have been slow to recognize is precisely what the composer meant when he wrote with such uncharacteristic confidence about his originality: Tchaikovsky’s penultimate opera is the first and possibly the greatest masterpiece of musical surrealism.’ My only real cavil lies with the ‘but’; whoever heard of an imaginative puritan? Otherwise, although one may or may not agree with every word, therein lies the basis of an understanding.

Hans Neuenfels differs from Taruskin in a number of ways. He is also doing something different: mounting a production, not writing an essay or encyclopædia article. He is quite clear, though, as we learn both from an interview in the programme booklet and, more important, from the staging itself, that the ‘great achievement’ of Tchaikovsky’s brother, Modest, ‘was to turn the material into an opera libretto. This means that he augmented the story, adapting the narrative in a way that gives rise to a musical setting.’ A contrast between public and private is not particular to this opera, nor is a concentration on development by – or even juxtaposition of – scenes; one might say that Eugene Onegin does the same, more successfully and/or conventionally, according to taste. But a sense of listening to the music, of drawing us in to listen to it too, is strongly apparent both in the designs, from longstanding Neuenfels collaborators, Christian Schmidt and Reinhard von der Thannen, and in the action they frame, interpret, even incite.

Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

Place is crucial. The Countess’s room is surprisingly spare, brilliant in its whiteness, most likely not at all as one had expected. Why? It is certainly elegant, part of a visual style to which we might have become accustomed through stagings such as Neuenfels’s celebrated Bayreuth Lohengrin. There is surely an element of kinship there; after all, there is an experimental basis to the action of both works, both productions: failed, tragic experiments in both cases, although that failure seems questioned by Neuenfels too. Perhaps there is something in that, but I think the point is more specific. As Neuenfels explains, ‘This is connected with the climax of the opera, when it reaches a point of maximum clarity. It’s the clearest scene and at the same time it’s blank. Although it appears to be the vaguest scene, it’s the most realistic one. It also has the palpable consequences. Things will be decided there.’ So it seemed – and, equally important, so it sounded.

Evgenia Muraveva (Lisa)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

It would be difficult, perhaps even in the wrong sense absurd(ist), to rid oneself entirely of Fate here. It is surely, however, a good thing to interrogate or at least to examine, rather than meekly to accept so amorphous and, frankly, unhelpful a concept. When the Countess’s face reappears on huge video screen above the action in the final scene, when she winks – knowingly, of course, but to what end? Is her ‘role’ meaningful or a red herring? – we are free, within limits, to make what we want of it. Hermann’s decision, perhaps even society’s decision, has been made. That is as much a beginning as a close. Her lust for the young stranger in her room was clear; maybe he actually gave her there what he wanted. We continue to think – as she continues to appear. Is she, however, noticed any more? Was she ever? Hermann’s dismissal of Lisa, cruel, heart-rending (from her standpoint) is very much in that line. We need not commend it; it would be odd to do so, although there is perhaps something almost of Crime and Punishment to the ‘act’. There is no denying, however, his purpose, born out of an extreme loneliness, alienation, and disaffection. The blackness of much of the space on stage, within which stark, sharp costumed action takes place renders that visually clear: a visual clarity born within libretto, music, and performance. When Lisa, clad in white, finally crosses the threshold to join her silhouette, it is both her tragedy and Hermann’s dismissal of her. This scarlet Nutcracker-prince will once again enact his own tragedy.

© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

The other side to that, at least an other side to that, is in the Imperial Russia of the story. Mixing periods, stitching them together is too often a recipe for an ‘anything goes’ post-modernism unworthy of the name: nowhere more so than in middle-of-the-road, would-be fashionable opera stagings. Here, however, the stylised – nothing is real? everything is surreal/hyper-real…? – evocations of a late-nineteenth century looking back to the eighteenth (Mozart and Catherine the Great) and forward to our own time prove tight and yet also allusive and elusive enough for the question never to arise. Details stick, point one in the right direction, without detracting from the wide open space, musical as much as scenic, of the broader ‘picture’. Take the unforgettable image, during the Mozartian pastiche of a pastoral wedding entertainment, of sheep flunkeys knitting their own wool: societal cannibalism of a degenerate aristocracy, or rather, more tellingly still, of its immediate underlings. It is, after all, neither Yeletsky nor Tomsky who ‘loses’; it is Hermann. Or is it? Time, the one thing he does not have here, will tell. Or the arrival of Catherine the Great: a brittle, black madonna: manipulated or manipulative? Why choose? Her crowd of followers, bowing and scraping, is also her crowd of creators. Just as it has been of the river: men and women in boaters and swimwear transformed into the Neva itself. Scenery, like Fate, is constructed in dialectical materialism. So too is the ‘drama’ itself.

© Salzburger Festspiele / Monika Rittershaus

Or is it? In one sense, presuming one assents to those broadly Marxist terms, yes, of course. It would be meaningless to claim that it were not, even if it were ‘mere’ ideology. That applies to the music as much as the libretto, the performance as much as the staging. Yet, for all but the most vulgar of Marxists – and surely even for them – there is relative autonomy too. There is grit to the oyster. This is, we remember, an opera; it is neither Pushkin nor a treatise. The blazing, yet far from soft-edged Romanticism – a problematic word, I know, yet let us leave that on one side for now – we heard from Mariss Jansons and the Vienna Philharmonic added its own level of complexity, or perhaps better, laid the foundation for most of that which came on top. Public and private, Fate and autonomy, cynicism and love: these and so much else found their roots in the bubbling cauldron of Tchaikovsky’s score in its own mediated nineteenth-to-twenty-first-century presentation and reinvention. Dynamic and tempo contrasts took us further to the edge than anything merely seen – and rightly so. This is, we remembered once again, an opera.

 Brandon Jovanovich (Hermann),
Hanna Schwarz (Countess)
© Salzburger Festspiele / Ruth Walz

Which brings us, last yet anything but least, to the singers, above all to the towering performance of Brandon Jovanovich as Hermann. His clarity and strength of purpose, portraying yet never fatally (as opposed to fatefully!) partaking in doubt, offered an object lesson in tortured heroism and anti-heroism. One both believed in him and did not, rooted for him and did not: everything, it seemed, that the Tchaikovskys asked of him. Evgenia Muraveva’s Lisa, sweetly, intelligently sung, with collegiate agency such as to mark her out yet not to overpower, was equally well-judged: no easy thing in such circumstances. Hanna Schwarz truly captured the essence, an essence at least, of the Countess, nowhere more so than in the hushed, nostalgic intimacy, finely balanced between ‘she still has it’ and ‘soon she might not’ of the Grétry air, ‘Je crains de lui parler la nuit’.  Igor Golovatenko and Vladislav Sulimsky made the most of their role as Yeletsky and Tomsky respectively: again contributing to, furthering the drama, vocally excelling, without a hint of grandstanding. The same might be said of the rest of a tightly-knit cast and of the chorus, from whom more often than not one might have taken dictation. They had clearly been well prepared by Ernst Raffelsberger, well directed by Neuenfels and his team, but granted agency too, individually and en masse. Is that not what opera in general and this opera in particular should be? It is certainly, I think, what we in the audience too should be aiming for too. In that, as in much else, work, performances, and production should be accounted a great success.

VPO/Jansons - Dvořák, Strauss, and Stravinsky, 17 June 2017

Goldener Saal, Musikverein

Dvořák – Symphony no.8 in G major, op.88

Strauss – Tod und Verklärung, op.24

Stravinsky – The Firebird: Suite

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Mariss Jansons (conductor)

On paper, this was perhaps a rather strange programme; I am not sure it quite added up in practice either. Yet, with such fine performances of three individual works, I am not sure that that mattered too much really. To hear the Vienna Philharmonic under a conductor it loves – and it clearly loves Mariss Jansons – in the Musikverein is always something special; and so it was here.

Dvořak’s Eighth Symphony has some lovely music, although, like the programme as a whole, it is difficult to discern ultimate coherence in it. The problem, at least for me, lies in the outer two movements, especially the finale. Jansons and his players gave as fine a performance as I have heard, whether in the concert hall or on record, and if they could not turn it into something that it is not, that is hardly their fault. The opening of the first movement sounded almost as if it were an introduction to just how good an orchestra can sound: dark lower strings, magical woodwind, golden violins, and eventually mellow brass too combining with the fabled acoustic of the hall (and its visual aspect too) to create something such as those who have never been here will never know. There was craft, indeed art, in Jansons’s construction of the exposition from what might otherwise seem rather disparate elements. The movement as a whole winningly suggested the world of the operatic overture: perhaps not so bad a way to think of music that does not always bear close formal scrutiny. The Adagio immediately took us into a different world, more profound, more meaningful; it was as if we were entering a dark Bohemian forest, which, as one’s eyes – or ears – adjusted revealed itself to be full of a myriad of colours one might never initially have expected. The forest came to life around or in front of us, sonorities and harmonies seemingly revealing themselves rather than being revealed. Again, that takes performing mastery to do so. The tempo to the third movement sounded just ‘right’, not only in itself, but in the way it appeared to enable all other aspects of the music, its rhythmic lilt, its melodies, its harmonies, to come to life.  Jansons left us in no doubt concerning both its structure and its dynamic form. As for the finale, the playing was magnificent, and the audience clearly loved it. Perhaps I am missing something.

I doubt that anyone, by contrast, would question Strauss’s absolute mastery of the tone poem in Tod und Verklärung – even those who uncomprehendingly decry works such as his Alpine Symphony. (The loss is entirely theirs.) I must admit that I rarely think overtly of the programme, or at least of its potential detail, when hearing this work; on this occasion, however, I did, entirely without sacrifice to the experience of the whole. Jansons shaped the latter so surely, so ‘naturally’ – which, again, disguises a great deal of art – that the flicker of a heartbeat there, the potential song of a ‘soul (how ironic, given Strauss’s materialism) there acquired just enough prominence of their own. Even as music that was at least Tristan-esque was sung, one heard the difference, the strangely Nietzschean liberation from thoughts of redemption. (Wagner, Mahler, or, yes, Schoenberg would doubtless ensnare us again, as soon as we heard their music, but that is another story.) A slight pause – a comma, if you will – might attract attention, but never in a self-regarding way. To make the narrative, musical or otherwise, reveal itself in this way is no mean achievement. Orchestral balances were well-nigh perfect, so much so that one did not recognise them as such, hearing only the music – and, of course, the Vienna Philharmonic playing it to the manner born. Likewise, the unforced nature of climaxes proved an object lesson in Strauss performance.

Strauss and Stravinsky always make for interesting comparison and contrast. Just when one thinks they might have something in common, experience proves one wrong once again. Hearing the 1919 Firebird Suite in this context, one naturally latched on to an occasional melodic tag here, even an orchestral colour, that might suggest similarity, only to be shown that the two composers, and the two works, come from very different worlds. Such was the case despite their respective debts to Wagner, freely acknowledged in Strauss’s case, far less so in Stravinsky’s, even via Rimsky-Korsakov. The opening bars, dark, yet, like Strauss’s, never quite inchoate, were but the first case in point. Full, golden orchestral tone meant something different here, and rightly so; an almost Gallic transparency was also most welcome. Not that that was accomplished with any loss to precision. The Infernal Dance would have woken any slumbering audience member: not through excessive volume, but through musical urgency alone. Even to hear the tone of the bells was a thing of wonder. I rarely long to hear the entire ballet; on this occasion, I should happily have heard it as an additional item to the programme.

Mørk/Concertgebouw/Jansons - Haydn and Bruckner, 4 April 2014

Barbican Hall

Haydn – Cello Concerto in C major, Hob.VIIb/1

Bruckner – Symphony no.7 in E major

Truls Mørk (cello)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

Mariss Jansons (conductor)

 

It was the Haydn C major Concerto, which, despite the massed ranks of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in the Bruckner symphony and the radically smaller ensemble deployed before the interval, received the more compelling performance in this, the second of three Concertgebouw concerto-and-Bruckner programmes. There were occasional slight irritations to be endured in the orchestral performance: a little more string vibrato and longer bows would sometimes have been desirable (too much time with Nikolaus Harnoncourt?), and the odd tapering-off at the end of phrases edged towards mannerism. In the present climate, however, such shortcomings could readily be coped with; moreover, there was nothing whatsoever about which one might complain with respect to Truls Mørk’s performance. The first movement in his hands was naturally phrased, taken at a sensible tempo; every line was shaped so beautifully that it did not sound ‘shaped’ at all, art concealing art. Inflections were meaningful, never unduly emphatic. Mariss Jansons was a sensitive ‘accompanist’, though sometimes one might have wished for a little more than that. (Think of Britten for Rostropovich in this concerto.) What I suppose one might call ‘period’ tendencies – though they have nothing to do with the eighteenth century, and everything to do with latter-day puritanism – were a little more marked in the slow movement: in the orchestra, that is, for there was no sign of such influence in Mørk’s performance. That tapering off of phrases detracted from the overall line, and left for some peculiar near-silences. Again, one hears far worse, but it seemed a pity. There was certainly a great contrast with the richness of solo cello tone, and also with the generally aristocratic tenor of Mørk’s account: clearly from the heart, without a hint of undue emoting. The finale proved an unalloyed delight: dashing without descending into a mere dash. Darker currents – almost proto-Mozartian – were not absent, but nor were they exaggerated. It was a true delight to see and to hear Mørk respond so vividly to the first violins. Best of all, this really had the character of a finale. The Sarabande from Bach’s D minor Cello Suite made for a rapt encore, the single line so all-encompassing, so brimming with perfectly-judged harmonic implication, that it would have been worth attending for that alone.

 

Sad to say, Jansons’s performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony disappointed – and the orchestra was on less than top form too. (Much of the audience seemed to disagree.) There were passages when the Concertegbouw Orchestra sounded gorgeous, but others when string tone was decidedly anonymous; maybe the trials of touring have proved too much. At the beginning of the first movement, there was certainly a warm, febrile sound, but neither the orchestra nor, more noticeably, Jansons’s direction seemed quite able to settle. Moreover, here and elsewhere, the brass blared, rather than blended; this was overpowering in a most unfortunate sense: more a caricature of, say, Chicago, than what one expected from Bernard Haitink’s old orchestra. There was ultimately too much stopping and starting; though not, I suspect, slow by the clock, the music felt drawn out. One longed for Furtwängler – or indeed, Karajan. The slow movement was much the same. Later on, there was a greater sense of inevitability, but much of the movement’s progression had little sense of overall line. There was a cymbal clash, for those who care about such things; my sense was that that climax was very well-prepared and well-executed. It was a pity, that one could not say the same of everything else.

 

The scherzo was better. If it still lacked the dramatic and spiritual tension of a great performance, then it cohered, making musical sense. Once again, though, the brass proved too much: straightforwardly too loud at times, but also lacking in blend. The trio, alas, was too relaxed, almost somnolent at times. It was not so much a matter of speed as such as of lack of tension. Jansons’s rubato, moreover, sounded merely arbitrary. The return to the scherzo came as a relief in quite the wrong sense. And it was difficult not to ask oneself: what does this mean, what is at stake? In some senses, the finale, that most incongruous of movements – whatever was Bruckner thinking of, placing it there? – came off best. I have heard performances with a better sense of line, but there was at least an impression of thematic blocks in friction that was generative rather than a non sequitur. There were a few cases of conductor’s moulding which would have been better left undone, but there was on the whole a greater sense of forward thrust. Alas, it was rather too late for the symphony to emerge as more than the sum of its parts.
 

 

Concertgebouw/Jansons - Strauss, 12 May 2012

Barbican Hall

Also sprach Zarathustra, op.30
Metamorphosen
Der Rosenkavalier – Suite (1945)

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Mariss Jansons (conductor)


I fear that I am about to be grossly unfair, so shall at least try to explain why I am being unfair, or at least grumpy. By all but the most exalted standards, and I suspect that many would say even by exalted standards, this was a fine concert, featuring one of the world’s greatest orchestras and one of the world’s most esteemed living conductors in music which they performed very well indeed. Had this been a run-of-the-mill orchestra, directed by a Kapellmeister-ish sort, I should doubtless have rushed for superlatives. However, that was not who was performing, and I felt just a little disappointed, at least for two of the three items.

Also sprach Zarathustra does not seem to be performed as often as one might expect. I am not entirely sure why. Though I am far from considering it to be Strauss’s finest symphonic poem – if pushed, I should probably opt for Tod und Verklärung – I should have expected it, for a variety of reasons, some good, some less so, to be popular with audiences. Maybe it is, and is less popular with conductors; it is certainly a very difficult work to bring off convincingly. There was nothing really for which I could fault the Concertgebouw Orchestra; its cultivated yet sumptuous sound suits Strauss very well, even if I might long for something a little more closer to Dresden or Vienna. And the feeble organ is a general Barbican curse. (Even for musical obsessives, there would surely be many more pressing cases concerning which one might wish to purloin funds-cum-compensation from the Corporation of London. But it would be a nice gesture all the same, were the hall to be granted a decent example of the King of Instruments instead of having to rely upon a terrible little electronic thing.) However, I did not feel that Mariss Jansons really succeeding in welding the sections into a convincing whole, symphonic or otherwise. Rudolf Kempe, as so often, is a splendid model in that respect. There was little sense either of belief or of irony; one can opt for one or the other, perhaps even both, but I am not sure that ‘neither’ is a compelling option. There was, of course, much to enjoy, and I appreciated the subtlety of programming, the music for solo strings cleverly anticipating the second half’s Metamorphosen. Leader Vesko Eschkenazy’s rendition of the solo violin part was exemplary. And yet, as I tend to do in all but the best performances, I found that the work somewhat outstayed its welcome.

The problem, or rather reservation, I had with Metamorphosen, was rather different. Jansons opted not to conduct it at all. The Concertgebouw strings are wonderful musicians, of course, and do not need someone to beat time. It is, moreover, an interesting idea to assess this work in chamber music terms. There were certainly gains. No one could doubt that they were listening to each other; nor could anyone surely have missed the clarity with which Strauss’s counterpoint was projected. However, the performance ultimately fell between two stools. At times, it was directed from the first violin by Eschkenazy. The passages he directed tended, almost but not quite paradoxically, to sound more ‘conducted’, slightly squarer of rhythm, than if there had been an expert conductor on the podium. On the other hand, there were times when the chamber approach led rise to a slight interpretative anonymity, when I at least longed for more of an ‘idea’ to the performance. Perhaps the idea was to treat this as ‘absolute’ music, to steer clear of difficult wartime associations. I am sure it was not intentionally evasive, but by the same token, I am unsure that it is the best idea for a performance of Metamorphosen. It felt a little like a typical performance of the ‘Indian summer’ Duo concertante, which needs an inspired performance to avert suspicion of note-spinning. Anger and other passion were somewhat lacking, and the Eroica quotation went for surprisingly little. It was nevertheless a pity to have a respectable performance besmirched by some attention-seeking idiot shouting ‘Bravo’ as the final chord still resonated. (He had done the same at the end of Also sprach Zarathustra too, presumably desperate to have his voice heard before applause began.)

The Rosenkavalier suite is a dreadful thing, of course, whoever concocted it. (So, incidentally, is Strauss’s own Symphonic Fantasy on ‘Die Frau ohne Schatten’; one desperately wants it to work, but it never does.) Still, I am sure if I were a conductor I should not be able to resist programming it, and as an audience member I certainly cannot bring myself to avoid listening to it. Here Jansons and the Concertgebouw truly struck gold, or perhaps better, silver. No one plays this music quite like the Viennese, but this was a perfectly valid different tone, cultivated, precise, and warm yet never indulgent. The woodwind section was utterly outstanding, its fluttering in the Overture perhaps the best I have ever heard, whether in terms of the suite or the opera. Alexei Ogrintchouk may have been first amongst equals when it came to his oboe solos, but first he certainly was. Jansons loved the music without smothering it, not only alert to its changing temperament but almost convincing in some of the (non-)transitions. Christian Thielemann doubtless seduces more in this music, but Jansons has its measure as well as anyone else. Even this curmudgeon came away from the Barbican joyfully singing to himself those gorgeous waltz tunes.

BRSO/Jansons - Beethoven, Strauss, and Ravel, 29 March 2009

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven – Symphony no.3 in E-flat major, op.55, ‘Eroica’
Strauss – Vier letzte Lieder
Ravel – Daphnis et Chloé: suite no.2

Anja Harteros (soprano)
Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra
Mariss Jansons (conductor)

On paper, this seemed rather a perplexing programme; it did not make a great deal more sense in practice. Placing the Eroica symphony in the first half of a programme might occasionally have something to be said for it, maybe with other carefully chosen Beethoven, or a Romantic or twentieth-century work both influenced by it and of standing such that it would not be overshadowed: perhaps the Symphonie fantastique or Ein Heldenleben. There might be other possibilities; there is certainly no point in being prescriptive. However, I do not think Strauss’s Four last songs and the second Daphnis et Chloé suite, masterpieces though they may be, would even have made much sense as companions to the Eroica had they preceded rather than followed it.

The performances were mixed too. This was certainly not an Eroica to grab one by the scruff of one’s neck, to make one recognise it as probably the most revolutionary chapter in the entire history of the symphony. Mariss Jansons had little truck, thankfully, with ‘authenticity’, but nor was this a performance of old-school drama or monumentality. That ruggedness characteristic of the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra under Eugen Jochum, Rafael Kubelík, and Sir Colin Davis, seemed to have vanished. The first movement in particular glid past, pleasantly and musically. But what did it mean? As I remarked recently, with respect to Daniele Gatti’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth, one might not be able to answer such a question in words, but one should at least try with music. And, I might add, with music, which, pace Stravinsky, most certainly can express something, however directly or indirectly, other than itself. Toscanini notoriously claimed: ‘Is not Napoleon. Is not Eroica. Is Allegro con brio.’ That, minus a little brio, is what it sounded like here, although with an infinitely greater sense of musical ebb and flow than the Italian conductor ever mustered.

The Funeral March was on its own, somewhat reduced terms rather impressive. One could have wanted more gravitas. Jansons nevertheless summoned up a cumulative, apparently ‘purely musical’ flow, which, backed up by the French Revolutionary resonances of prominent wind, here beautifully performed by his Munich players, imparted an almost Grecian note to proceedings, even if the note struck were more of personal sadness than world-historical tragedy. . I was also much taken with the scherzo, fleet yet never trivial, and the marvellous trio, in which the Bavarian horns played their part to perfection. The finale was good in parts, yet I never had the sense one does from, say, Furtwängler (inevitably) or Klemperer (ditto), that the variations came together as an absolute whole. I have heard some utter nonsense spoken about this movement; any fault lies with less than great performances rather than with Beethoven. Philippe Boucly's flute solo was especially well taken, indeed mesmerisingly so. Jansons is, of course, a marvellous conductor, but I am not sure that Beethoven shows him to his greatest advantage. Consider the following programme note to this very symphony from Wagner in 1851:

… the term ‘heroic’ must be taken in the widest sense, and not simply as relating to a military hero. If we understand ‘hero’ to mean, above all, the whole, complete man, in possession of all purely human feelings — love, pain, and strength — at their richest and most intense, we shall comprehend the correct object, as conveyed to us by the artist in the speaking, moving tones of his work. The artistic space of this work is occupied by … feelings of a strong, fully formed individuality, to which nothing human is strange, and which contains within itself everything that is truly human …

Such ambition might or might not prove realisable; here, despite considerable musical qualities, it was never on the agenda.

The Strauss songs were in many ways rather similar. I certainly have heard Jansons impress in Strauss but not so much here. Im Frühling was taken at a faster pace than I have ever heard, which might make some sort of sense, I suppose, in distinguishing spring from the all-pervasive autumnal mood of its successors. It merely sounded hasty, however, peremptory even, and ‘tradition’ is surely right to consider this a retrospective, autumnal view of spring. Other tempi were relatively brisk, especially when compared with Karajan’s recording with Gundula Janowitz, which has made so indelible a mark upon my consciousness. Orchestral soli were wondrously taken, the violin and horn especially noteworthy, but the orchestra as a whole sometimes sounded a little routine: Karajan on an off-day, yet, for better or worse, without the sheen. The final sunset was beautiful, if a little overtly pictorial; for my taste, suggestive metaphor should be more to the fore than actual birdsong. Anja Harteros was good without in any sense proving memorable. Her diction improved as time went on; perhaps that was a matter of adjusting to the acoustic. I found her tone a touch glamorous, rather than meaningful; surely the trick here is to understand that Strauss’s writing for his favourite instrument, the soprano voice, is both ‘instrumental’ and acute in its response to the texts. It is not necessary to ‘respond’ in such minute detail as Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, although that is certainly one route to follow, but this is so much more than mood music.

For me, the best performance was of Ravel’s suite, which left me wishing we had heard the complete ballet. Here, even if I were inclined to do so, I should be able to find nothing to fault. The BRSO sounded superlatively French in timbre, precision, and warmth, rather in the way that the Boston Symphony Orchestra did in its heyday, without any of the thinness of tone that has often bedevilled actually existing French orchestras. Once again, the flute solos in particular (Boucly) were outstanding. Jansons conjured magic from every bar, granting each movement its particular character yet never forgetting that, even as a suite, there is a greater unity to consider. Ravel’s peerless orchestration was truly given its head, with blend as important as, but not more important than, individual timbres; the two aspects sounded in quite perfect balance. The sunrise was an object lesson in how to portray such ‘natural’ – actually nothing of the sort – phenomena, quite a contrast with Strauss’s sunset. And the concluding Danse générale was, quite rightly, both sensuous and rhythmically exciting.

Such virtues were maintained in the two encores: ‘Solveig’s Song’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt and ‘The Wild Bears’ from Elgar’s second Wand of Youth suite. The former contrasted chasteness with revealing hints of Tchaikovsky, whilst the latter proved an object lesson in rhythmic and colouristic scintillation. One might never have guessed that it was by Elgar...