Salzburg Mozartwoche (5): Kremerata Baltica/Lupu - Mendelssohn, Mozart, and Weinberg, 31 January 2016

 

Images: (c) ISM Wolfgang Lienbacher

 

 

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

 

Mendelssohn – String Symphony no.7 in D minor

Mozart – Piano Concerto no.27 in B-flat major, KV 595
Weinberg – Sinfonietta no.2 in G minor, op.74
Mozart – Piano Concerto no.23 in A major, KV 488

Kremerata Baltica

Radu Lupu (conductor) 

 

My visit to this year’s Salzburg Mozartwoche ended in style with Kremerata Baltica, augmented for the Mozart works by wind players from Concerto Budapest, and Radu Lupu. The festival’s Mendelssohn theme was honoured with a stunning performance of his Seventh String Symphony, in D minor, quite the best I have heard of any of these absurdly early works. Was Mendelssohn perhaps an even greater prodigy than Mozart? The musical equivalent of the nouveau riche loves to disparage Mozart’s juvenilia, keen to show that it can tell the difference between Bastien und Bastienne and The Magic Flute. Yes, thank you; we all can. Nevertheless, despite the riches to be found by those with ears to listen in Mozart’s early works, Mendelssohn’s achievement is at least as extraordinary. The players (led by Džeraldas Bidva) captured to a tee, in all its excitement and life, the strange and delightful blend of Baroque and Mozart to be heard here in the first movement. (One would not necessarily want to hear many of these ‘symphonies’ together, but as an extended overture, there is much to enjoy.) Clarity and dynamism were as one. The key of D minor was surely recognisable from Mozart’s own writing; Gluck’s Don Juan came to mind too. Mozart was also strongly echoed in the Andante, even if here the echo is slightly bland. Intelligently phrased, with its modulations relished, it is difficult to imagine the movement coming off better. There is greater originality in the minuet and trio, not least in the lower strings, and so it sounded, even if it does not sound like the mature composer. A few parts of the finale do, I think, even if most still do not. At any rate, the performance was excellent, highly convincing throughout. Mendelssohn’s contrapuntal learning served him and the players well.

The absolute highlight of the concert for me was Mozart’s final piano concerto, for which, of course, the players were joined by Lupu. Despite an ever-so-slightly shaky opening bar or two, the performance soon settled down. The opening ritornello sounded more vernal than autumnal; here and throughout, there was a true sense of chamber music writ large. Lupu ornamented his line from his first entry, but it never sounded anything other than ‘natural’. And what a touch he has, having one feel humane depth as well as melodic delights. Lupu showed how his playing can twinkle without sacrifice to the harmonic implications of Mozart’s score. The oscillation between tonic major and minor, so crucial to much mature musical Classicism, and never more so, surely, than in this work, proved so in performance too. If the orchestra offered spring, Lupu’s playing seemed more of an Indian summer; at times ghostly, yet always gorgeous of tone and characterful too. One very noticeable fluff (if I remember correctly, a wrong bass note) perturbed no one, likewise a slip at the end of the cadenza. This was very much a tale of an elder sage and his younger disciples. The opening to the slow movement registered divine simplicity, the warmth of the orchestral response enchanting and consoling. That major-minor oscillation sounded, and yes felt, truly heartbreaking. I do not think I have heard the piano line sound so simple and yet so inimitable as here: as close, it seemed, to unmediated Mozart as one would ever hear. And that was despite considerable ornamentation, to which it was a delight to hear the woodwind soloists respond in kind. The sheer ‘rightness’ of the opening piano statement in the finale, likewise the orchestral response, set the tone for what followed. Every note in Lupu’s part sounded both properly weighted and yet integrated into the longer line. Is there anything sadder than to know that this would be Mozart’s final essay in the genre? Well, yes: the sadness of his major-mode smiling through tears, here captured to perfection. One felt the fragility of happiness, of beauty, of song, of harmony: yet, onwards Mozart continued.

Kremerata Baltica in rehearsal

I had previously been less than bowled over by the music of Mieczyław Weinberg, although I know he has his fervent admirers. This performance of the G minor Sinfonietta, op.74 (1960) came closer to winning me over than any other has done. I think it was a matter both of work and performance, the latter rarely, save, perhaps for the third movement Adagio, overstaying its welcome, the performance as committed as the work will surely ever receive. The first movement opened in vehement, even frightening mode, the string orchestra sound making me think of wartime Honegger (the Second Symphony). The second movement sounded close to Shostakovich and, more interestingly, Prokofiev in ghostly clockwork mode. Kremerata Baltica’s strings really dug in throughout, perhaps still more so in the third and fourth movements. Solos were splendidly taken, but it was the ensemble as a whole that impressed most of all.

The performance of KV 488 was again very much on a chamber scale, but that did not mean that it lacked orchestral contrast. Tutti passages were not only beautifully played but were possessed of a kenn, unforced sense of drama. Lupu sounded much as before, which is not in any sense intended to convey a lack of enthusiasm, simply to indicate that I am in danger of running out of superlatives. Occasionally, orchestral phrase endings were a little abrupt, but that should not be exaggerated. Again, it was sheer ‘rightness’ that ruled for the most part in this first movement. Lupu’s opening solo in the Adagio straightforwardly compelled one to listen. It was a proper Adagio too; one often hears this movement taken too fast. Orchestral chiaroscuro was spot on throughout, contributing beautifully to a dignified sadness that felt no need of histrionics. Lupu’s awareness of the ways in which the piano line both is and is not ‘vocal’ impressed; perhaps surprisingly, given his way with KV 595, he left it without ornamentation. The finale was playful, spirited, but of course not without sadness. Again, there was not the slightest sense of performance imposing itself upon the music. This was a delight from beginning to end.

Berlin Festtage (5) - Kremer/Kozhukhin: Weinberg, Brahms, and Franck, 1 April 2015

Philharmonie, Berlin

Weinberg – Sonata no.2 for solo violin, op.95

Brahms – Fantasies, op.116

Weinberg – Sonata no.3 for solo violin, op.126

Franck – Sonata in A major, for violin and piano

Gidon Kremer (violin)

Denis Kozhukhin (piano)

 

1 April: I suppose the date should have given it away. Perhaps I am being unduly cynical, but this was the fifth time I had booked to hear Martha Argerich, and the fifth time she had cancelled. At any rate, a ‘feverish flu’ led to her replacement with Denis Kozhukhin and consequent rearrangement of the programme. Out went a Beethoven sonata (op.30 no.3) and one of Mieczysław Weinberg’s sonatas for violin and piano; in came Brahms’s op.116 Fantasien and a second of Weinberg’s sonatas for solo violin.

Frankly, one would have been more than enough, not least given the sometimes shocking performance offered by Gidon Kremer of Weinberg’s op.95. It took until the sixth of its seven movements for the performance to sound like a performance at all; a friend commented that Kremer had often sounded as if he were someone practising in his bedroom, and it was difficult to dissent. Maybe he had been as irritated by the rearrangement of the programme as many others. The poverty of Weinberg’s invention nevertheless came through, the first movement, ‘Monody’, made of the sort of banal figuration with occasional wrong notes Shostakovich would offer with (in a generous reading) irony. With this piece, however, irony was difficult to discern. Likewise, the third movement seemed characterised by sub-Shostakovich impotent anger. Kremer’s somewhat fuller tone – before, only thinness had been striking – was welcome in the final two movements, but that did not, most likely could not, disguise the sense of straining and failing to achieve profundity.

The one-movement Third Sonata, with which the second half started, was much more of a performance, certainly more urgent. Indeed, it was in this that Kremer sounded at his best. Weinberg, perhaps, shows at times a slightly less reactionary language and, more to the point, a stronger sense of development. At best, at least at the beginning, there are some mildly attractive ideas, whose development was over-extended. That, I am afraid, is the greatest enthusiasm I can muster. I think it is time to say that, as with some of the Entartete Musik composers and, more often than not, Shostakovich that an undeniably moving personal story and political persecution do not guarantee convincing, let alone compelling, music.

Denis Kozhukhin’s contributions proved to be stronger than Kremer’s. Kozhukhin’s Brahms is not for me the most appealing; I simply – or perhaps not simply – hear and understand the music differently. However, on its own, Romantic, ‘grand manner’ terms, it worked very well. It is perhaps too easy to describe it as ‘Russian’ Brahms, but there was more than a hint of that. The opening Capriccio showed a great dynamic range: ‘big’ tone, which can certainly be scaled down. If the following Intermezzo might have been intimate in conception, especially to begin with, it was admirably flexible; this remained, however, very ‘public’ Brahms. (One might well argue that a large hall such as the Philharmonie invites such a conception.) A stormy third movement had little sense of Brahms as progenitor of Webern, but certainly held the attention. The succeeding Intermezzo was slower than is perhaps fashionable, but none the worse for that. It was played beautifully, if at times the sound edged a little close to Rachmaninov. Moreover, the central section achieved a beautiful sense of half-lighting. The next Intermezzo, the fifth movement, was meaningfully voiced, though not in a modernist fashion. Its successor was bracingly fast, at least according to pianistic ‘tradition’, but arguably – just about – an ‘Andantino’ nevertheless. Such a reading is preferable to a sentimental one, but was the piece’s heart perhaps lost? The final movement needs to be fast, and it was; it was certainly ‘agitato’ too. Voicing again was a particular strength. And how the poverty of Weinberg’s inspiration was shown up!

As for the Franck Sonata, the only piece in which violinist and pianist appeared together, it was Kozhukhin’s playing that proved by far the more compelling. Even relative understatement, as at the beginning of the first movement, drew one in. Kremer’s wiry tone was disappointing, his poor intonation rather more than that. The performance did not conceal the truth of Debussy’s jibe about Franck as a ‘modulating machine’; the best can. In the second movement, Kozhukhin’s tone, recognisable from his Brahms, offered much to admire, Kremer’s only rarely. Much the same could be said of the very different third movement. Kozhukhin’s legato was pleasing, but in itself could not paper over the cracks of the composer’s vaunted cyclic method. More of the same in the finale – with some breathtaking pianism from Kozhukhin. In replacing Argerich, he saved the day in more than one sense.

 

The Passenger, English National Opera, 24 September 2011

Coliseum

Annaliese Franz – Michelle Breedt
Marta – Giselle Allen
Walter – Kim Begley
Tadeusz – Leigh Melrose
Katya – Julia Sporsén
Krystina – Pamela Helen Stephen
Vlasta – Wendy Dawn Thompson
Hannah – Carolyn Dobbin
Yvette – Rhian Lois
Old Woman – Helen Field
Bronka – Rebecca de Pont Davies
SS Officers – Adrian Dwyer, Charles Johnston, Gerard O’Connor
Steward/Elderly Passenger/Kommandant – Graeme Dandy
SS Officer/Kapo – Vanessa Leagh-Hicks

David Pountney (director)
Rob Kearley (associate director)
Johan Engels (set designs)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Fabrice Kebour (lighting)
Ran Arthur Braun (director)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Merry)
Sir Richard Armstrong (conductor)

This is not to be taken in any real sense as a review but rather just as a few observations. ENO’s season, as so often, is a far more interesting prospect than that of its big brother across Covent Garden (three – or four, depending on how one counts – runs for La traviata!) Mieczysław Weinberg’s The Passenger, based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Auschwitz survivor Zofia Posmysz, receives its British premiere, in a staging by David Pountney first seen at Bregenz. It is in excellent company, alongside works by Wolfgang Rihm, Detlev Glanert, and ENO’s first ever staging of a Rameau opera, Castor et Pollux (to be reviewed next month).

The problem, I am afraid, is that, on the basis of what I heard, Weinberg’s music is catastrophically inept. It is not merely that it adds nothing to the story; its aimlessness and weirdly arbitrary inappropriateness detract from what ought to be a harrowing tale of Holocaust remembrance. The Passenger is not offensive in the way that Terry Gilliam’s narcissistic Damnation of Faust was – an ignorant anti-German rant that also managed to posit genocide as entertainment – for it is clearly meant well, but the best, or at least most arresting, of Weinberg’s music seems to be heard in the couple of minutes or so before the voices enter, and it is still not very good. Some loud kettledrums at least have an effect. Whatever is one to make of the xylophone runs interpolated later on, though? It is difficult to imagine either musical or dramatic motivation for them: they just come and go. Influences or at least strong likenesses come thick and thin: perhaps most oddly, Shostakovich in jazz mode whilst Annaliese informs her diplomat husband of her wartime activities in the SS. Weill this is not, though it seems pretty clear that there is influence there. Most glaring is a passage – we are on a ship, so I suppose it is deliberate – that sounds lifted straight from Peter Grimes. Hindemith and Busoni might also be present, though the likeness may be coincidental rather than anything else. Otherwise, voices declaim, sometimes break into aria-like writing, whilst thin, irrelevant instrumental lines fill in the space below. Male SS officers veer dangerously close to the unintentionally comic: this does not appear to be an ironic commentary upon their repellent desire to burn human bodies more quickly, merely a product of the composer’s inability to compose appropriate music. A female officer unfortunately reminds one, both in appearance and delivery, of Helga from ‘Allo ‘Allo! What might work in depiction of Occupied France is not, to put it mildly, necessarily the best thing for an extermination camp.

Pountney’s production seems as good as the work is likely to get – and better than it deserves. There would have been a far greater sense of claustrophobia and naked terror, had they not been undermined by the music. Designs (Johan Engels’s sets and Marie-Jeanne Lecca’s costumes) and lighting (Fabrice Kebour) do everything one might have asked of them. Sir Richard Armstrong’s conducting is incisive, the ENO orchestra on excellent, truly responsive form, generating a volume that surprises in the vast expanses of the Coliseum. The singers again make the strongest possible case, Michelle Breedt’s Annaliese properly conflicted and vibrant, insofar as the music will permit that, Kim Begley’s delivery as heedful of text as one would expect, and so on. However, as I said, this is not really a review. For one thing, I left at the interval, unable to drag myself back into the theatre. Perhaps the second act would have proved a revelation. Perhaps not.