LPO/Jurowski - Beethoven, Schoenberg, and Nono, 28 November 2012

Royal Festival Hall

Beethoven – Overture: Fidelio, op.72c

Schoenberg – Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, op.41
Schoenberg – A Survivor from Warsaw, op.46
Nono – Julius Fučik (United Kingdom premiere)
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Robert Hayward (narrator)
Omar Ebrahim (Fučik)
Malcom Sinclair (Voice in Julius Fučik)

Annabel Arden (director)

John B. Read (lighting)
Pieter Hugo (protographer)
Annalisa Terranova (video)

Gentlemen of the London Philharmonic Choir (chorus master: Neville Creed)

London Philharmonic Orchestra
Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

 

Vladimir Jurowski said all the right things during a brief address at the opening of the concert. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony should not be regarded as the climax of the performance, but as the fifth movement in a single work, whose theme was human suffering and the strength of the human spirit, never quashed by the former. It was, moreover, a rare pleasure to experience such bold and coherent programming. The problem, alas, was that performances of these works – or performance of this ‘work’ – were not always convincing; it was, perhaps predictably but no less sadly, Beethoven who suffered most. Two of the other ‘movements’, Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw and Nono’s Julius Fučik received excellent performances. A curate’s egg, then, which was hardly the intention.

 

The Fidelio Overture opened proceedings. It was hard driven, though to be fair, I have heard worse. Odder was the strange, almost balletic lightness of tone, strange until one realised that it arose from a fatal lack of harmonic grounding. I was put in mind of Esa-Pekka Salonen’s recent Philharmonia performance of the Fifth Symphony, which ended up sounding more like Delibes than Beethoven; it too had inspired programming, the symphony prefacing Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero, yet was let down in Beethoven’s case by inferior performance. And so, Beethoven’s music merely floated along. It was all efficiently despatched by the London Philharmonic Orchestra; the problem lay in Jurowski’s conception. Once again, moreover, Jurowski indulged his odd penchant for mixing modern horns, which, give or take the odd split note, played splendidly, and natural trumpets, whose rasping certainly did not help matters.

 

Schoenberg was next up. First came his Ode to Napoleon, given in its version for narrator, piano, and string orchestra. I have never been especially convinced by the orchestral version; a string quartet works far better. Sadly, this performance did nothing to alter that judgement. Part of the problem is – and was – that the piano does not blend well with the strings and ends up sounding like a concertante instrument rather than a member of a chamber ensemble. Despite excellent playing from Catherine Edwards, the effect was unconvincing. Robert Hayward contributed an excellent rendition of Byron’s poem, relishing text and subtext alike to chilling effect. Jurowski did not help matters for at least the first half of the performance. Once again, harmonic depth was lacking and direction was disturbingly metronomic. There was little or no sense of the score’s roots in German tradition, not least that of Beethoven. Having said that, Jurowski’s reading improved considerably. By the time we reached the words, ‘If still she loves thee, hoard that gem, ‘Tis worth thy vanish’d diadem!’ the summoned ghosts of Romanticism duly haunted. The stanza, ‘Thou Timour...’ accomplished, perhaps for the first time with respect to this performance, speed without (the wrong sort of) brutality. Schoenberg’s furious inverse ode to Napoleon/Hitler ended with just the right sense of false triumph, the final E-flat cadence – an ironic echo of the Eroica – falling flat as it must. Sadly, a performance that really gathered pace and conviction was blighted by some appalling audience behaviour, not least a French-speaking – yes, literally ‘speaking’ – person in the row in front of me, who flashed around his Blackberry for most of the time.

 

A Survivor from Warsaw completed the first half. It suffered even worse from the Blackberry wielder, who proceeded not only to type messages throughout the performance, but to chatter to his companion and even to fondle her. Such a reaction to commemoration of the Holocaust would have been obscene enough, but he actually seemed turned on not so much by genocide as by his indifference to it. (I should lay odds that he was a ‘beneficiary’ of ‘corporate hospitality’.) A Survivor survived, just about, but such behaviour ought to lead to a life-time ban. This work is less garrulous than the Ode to Napoleon and seemed to inspire Jurowski less fitfully. It received a more properly modern and focused performance, with less of the agitprop to it. Richly expressive and rhythmically alert, this was at last a reading that justified the hopes of the programme. Ghosts of Mahler and of Schoenberg’s earlier self pervaded work and performance alike. Hayward’s narration was once again excellent, a case in point the combination of brutality and beauty – Nazi æstheticisation of politics brought to mind – in Schoenberg’s setting of the Feldwebel’s words. The horrific race, quickly a stampede, into the chamber was such even before the word ‘stampede’. Militancy, inspired and terrifying, of the male chorus and its hymn, ‘Sh’ma Yisroel’ brought echoes of Bach as well as Beethoven, a spirited rejoinder to the vile ‘Aryanisation’ of German culture official policy had brought. (Even the text of Mozart’s Requiem had had to be altered, ‘Te decet hymnus Deus, in Sion et tibi reddetur votum in Ierusalem,’ rejected in favour of ‘Te decet hymnus Deus, in coelis et tibi reddetur votum hic in terra,’ in Bruno Kittel’s celebrated or notorious 1941 recording.)

 

The British premiere of Nono’s 1951 Julius Fučik opened the second half, wisely instructed to be performed without a break. (Not that that stopped some applauding the end of the first movement of the Beethoven...) Incomplete, it was first performed – posthumously – at the 2006 Munich Biennale (not almost sixty years ago, as Jurowski claimed, perhaps thinking of composition) and offers another of Nono’s tributes to the memory of the Czech communist and literary critic, hanged following captivity in Berlin in 1943 and an official hero for socialist Czechoslovakia. Fučik’s words – and ‘Voice’ – are employed in Intolleranza 1960  (dedicated to Schoenberg), and Nono’s Composizione per Orchestra no.1, also from 1951, offered another as-yet-secret memorial – programme music hardly the thing for Darmstadt – to Fučik. It was a pity we could not hear the Composizione as well, but perhaps that is just being greedy or plain unreasonable. A strange mini-biography awaited us on the screen as we returned from the interval. I hope that the problematic sentence was a matter of translation – though surely that could have been attended to’ since ‘sadly,’ as in ‘Sadly, the Nazis executed him in 1943,’ really is not the mot juste. The house lights went down so as to focus attention upon the stage and the searchlit interrogation of Fučik. (Still worse now, Blackberry man resumed its activities, lighting up a good part of the stalls with his screen and flashing red light.)

 

Jurowski captured to a tee the pointillistic post-Webern violence of Nono’s opening, likewise its lyricism that marks the composer’s music even at this stage as quite different from that of Stockhausen. The score blossomed – both in work and performance – into something perhaps surprisingly Schoenbergian, but then  Nono never shared Boulez’s resolve to parricide, despite posthumous elevation as Schoenberg’s son-in-law. (It is rather misleading, by the way, to speak of him at this stage in that light, since he had yet to meet Schoenberg’s daughter, Nuria, let alone to marry her. Their meeting had to wait until the 1953 premiere of Moses und Aron.) Obar Ebrahim and Malcolm Sinclair offered excellent performances. This excellent account, antiphonal drumming and all, exuded brutality, psychoticism, and yet inviting, spellbinding beauty – not unlike the interrogation in Intolleranza. It was somehow not unlike a Bach cantata, though Fučik’s last words – ‘Believe me, this has taken nothing, absolutely nothing, from the joy that is in me and that heralds itself each day with some Beethoven theme or other .... – inevitably brought one’s focus, insofar as it was not distracted by Blackberry antics, towards another great predecessor. Nor was Schoenberg forgotten. I could not help but think of Helmut Lachenmann’s transcription of a 1960 lecture Nono gave on A Survivor from Warsaw at Darmstadt. It was, Nono, said (my translation):

... the musical-æsthetic manifesto of our era. What Jean-Paul Sartre says in his essay, What is Literature?, about the problem ‘why write?’, is witnessed in utterly authentic fashion in Schoenberg’s creative necessity:  

‘And if I am presented with this world and its injustices, then I should not look at it coldly, but ... with indignation, that I might expose it and create it in its nature as injustice and abuse.’

...

And further, should someone refuse to recognise Schoenberg’s [here Nono makes reference to a previous quotation from Arnold Schmitz on Bach] docere and movere, above all in his A Survivor from Warsaw, he should know that the words which the nineteen-year-old student, Giacomo Levi, wrote in his last letter before execution by the Fascists in Modena in 1942, are also addressed to him: ‘Do not say that you no longer wish to know anything about it. Consider this, that all that has happened is because you no longer wished to know anything more about it.’

 

Finally, then, the Fifth Symphony. The odd-numbered movements fared better than the even ones, but this was not, alas, a performance to justify the hopes placed in it. (Most infuriating or even obscene of all was Blackberry man sitting back to ‘enjoy’ what he presumably thought of as the ‘real’ music. He managed to wait until the first movement coda before checking for messages again.)  Jurowski took the first movement fast but not entirely unreasonably so. If hardly the last word in profundity, then at least there was a much stronger sense of line than there had been in the overture. One had to put up with those dreadful rasping trumpets though. Beethoven’s extraordinary concision came through, if not the necessary weight of tone and message. It was good to have the opening of the slow movement greeted by a mobile telephone, but in truth, there was little of consequence to be disrupted here. Predictably swift, this is doubtless what passes for a Beethoven slow movement, even one marked Andante can moto, in the fashionable circles of an age seemingly incapable, a few Barenboim-like exceptions aside, of responding to the symphonic Beethoven. It sounded more like an intermezzo with unpleasant and arbitrary brass interventions than the unfolding of an inevitable musical narrative. The LPO very much seemed to be going through the motions – and I could not entirely blame them. It was genuinely sad that, following the two previous performances, this music should go for so little, but at least Jurowski’s tempo ensured that it was over relatively quickly.

 

Rather to my surprise, the scherzo fared better. It was full of menace,  not least since melody, harmony, and rhythm now once again seemed to be related to one another. The counterpoint of the trio was irrepressible as well as clear, the ghostliness of the scherzo’s reprise not merely colourful but also chilling. Alas, the opening of the finale was marred by the plodding parade-ground sound of natural trumpets. The horns, by contrast, sounded glorious. It was full of incidental ‘moments’ – not quite in the Stockhausen sense: that might have been interesting... – yet the great sweep of Beethoven’s imagination seemed quite to elude Jurowski. This performance remained stubbornly earthbound, for all its superficial highlighting in apparent attempts to generate ‘excitement’. The drama has to come within; it cannot be appliqué. A message for our time indeed. Whilst I was greatly moved by A Survivor  and by Julius Fučik, Beethoven – and this is less sad than tragic – elicited no such reaction. Jurowski’s programming was estimable, but it needed a Gielen or a Barenboim – or, imagine! a Klemperer or a Furtwängler – to carry it off.   

Ode to Napoleon and Il Prigioniero, Opéra National de Paris, 15 April 2008

Palais Garnier

Schoenberg: Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, Op.41

Dale Duesing (reciter)
Frédéric Laroque, Vanessa Jean (violins)
Laurent Verney (viola)
Martine Bailly (’cello)
Christine Lagniel (piano)

Dallapiccola: Il prigioniero

La Madre – Rosalind Plowright
Il Prigoniero – Evgeny Nikitin
Il Carciere, Il Grande Inquisitore – Chris Merritt
Due Sacerdoti – Johan Weigel and Bartlomiej Mlaluda

Orchestra and Chorus of the Opéra National de Paris
Alessandro di Stefano (chorus-master)
Lothar Zagrosek (conductor)

Llula Pasqual (director)
Paco Azorin (designs)
Isidre Prunés (costumes)
Albert Faura (lighting)

It was an excellent idea to preface Il prigioniero, Dallapiccola’s one-act opera – strictly, ‘un prologo e un atto’ – with Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon. The last time I had seen Il prigioniero it had represented almost the only adventurous selection for the English National Opera’s 2000 ‘Italian season’, combined with Berio’s Folk songs – which just about worked and absolved ENO from having to stage a Berio opera – and, bizarrely, Nino Rota’s film score, La strada. Paris made far more sense, offering two fiercely immediate responses to European fascism (assuming that we count National Socialism as such).

It has generally been considered, although I do not think the composer ever explicitly made the connection, that Schoenberg had Hitler in mind as he set Byron’s sardonic ‘ode’ from his American exile in 1942. Many on the English side of the Channel, whilst they would not go so far as to identity Napoleon and Hitler, would still consider the former to have been and certainly to have become a monstrous dictator. Yet such a reaction is far less common in France, where Bonapartism dies hard. This Anglo-Austrian onslaught therefore gained an extra frisson, to which an additional layer of historical meaning was lent by the location: not the Opéra Bastille, but the old house, the Palais Garnier, ‘in the style of Napoleon III’. The production, however, dwelled upon the era of Schoenberg rather than that of Byron. I have heard Schoenberg’s Ode taken to task for hectoring, which seems rather like criticising Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’ for rejoicing. The combination of subject matter and Sprechgesang more or less guarantees such a characterisation, should one be so inclined. (Incidentally, it has much in common with Schoenberg’s psalm settings and, indeed, with his Moses.)

Llula Pasqual’s production created an illuminating context for such hectoring – ‘ranting’ has been the word more often employed – by introducing the element of cabaret. As the curtain rose, I could not imagine why reciter Dale Duesing was in drag, but the penny soon dropped, not least since the instrumentalists, male and female, of the onstage piano quintet were dressed in black tie à la Weimar. I wondered how far Duesing’s striptease would progress, until it became clear that not only would he perform his dressing-room ablutions, but he would also don pyjamas in preparation for the concentration camp. There was also the suggestion – if only from me – that Napoleon and Hitler were, as Nietzsche would have understood only too well, essentially ‘actors’ themselves. Intriguingly, Duesing appeared to have something of a German accent to begin with. It worked rather well, although was rather puzzling since he is American; perhaps it was more of a response to Schoenberg’s word-setting, or perhaps it was just ‘staged’. In any case, Duesing’s vocal contribution was impressive, although there were just a couple of instances where he seemed to fall very briefly out of sync with the players. Their musicianship was manifest from the opening bars, surely some of the most immediately memorable music Schoenberg ever wrote. (If it is too ‘busy’ quite to be hummable, one can certainly hear it in one’s head after a single audition.) Conducted by Lothar Zagrosek, they expressed not only the fury of Schoenberg’s admonitions, but also the neo-Brahmsian musical integrity of this astonishing score, leading inexorably and shatteringly to the unforgettable E-flat major reference to Beethoven’s Sinfonia eroica, composta per festeggiare il sovvenire d'un grand'uomo. In this performance, ‘hero dust’ was indeed as ‘vile as vulgar clay’.

Il prigioniero was composed at much the same time, although it was not completed until 1948, after the full horrors of wartime experience were known to all. Equally dodecaphonic, and rejoicing in its homage to each member of the Second Viennese School, the score is also undeniably Italian. The opening motif, redolent of a distorted fanfare, is equally suggestive of twelve-note Puccini, and its recurrences are every bit as memorable as one of his melodies. So was the almost unbearable false hope of the three-note ‘fratello’ motif, as we follow the Prisoner in the hope engendered by his gaoler having called him ‘brother’, only to have it dashed by the startling revelation of his would-be-friend as the Inquisitor himself. I was in two minds about the production identifying the two, if indeed this were the intention. It was certainly the effect and in practice the two roles are often sung by the same tenor. It sealed the hopelessness in hope of the Prisoner’s fate and identified, as does the score, the Inquisitor’s ‘fratello’ with the terrible ‘sogno’ (dream) of the Prisoner’s mother, but it made it more difficult for us to hope, through prayer, of freedom (each of these three concepts being symbolically associated with one of the opera’s three note-rows). Either way, this is the ultimate anti-Fidelio. Where Beethoven could still dream of bourgeois freedom in noble fashion, this is now impossible; hope is itself the worst form of torture.

The production certainly scored in its depiction of the prison in which a variety of torture takes place. Paco Azarin’s designs, with their Piranesi staircases, created a suitably labyrinthine setting. Likewise the treadmill effect as the Prisoner edged towards ‘freedom’. Moreover, whilst it might seem wearisome in the abstract retelling, this was an instance of Guantanamo on stage that worked. The parallels between sixteenth-century Europe, torn apart through ‘religious’ strife and our own time are clear, as are those of the responses. Truly shocking was the choral intermezzo between the Prologue and Scene One, in which the chorus was directed on stage to sing the words, ‘Fiat misericordia tua, Domine, super nos,’ as a hanging and other behaviour of ‘our’ troops proceeded. Having witnessed similar scenes very recently in the Komische Oper Berlin’s Iphigénie en Tauride, I noted how immediately relevant they were to two such very different dramas. This was not the shock of épater les bourgeois; this was confronting our world with crimes indistinguishable from those of sixty or more than four hundred years earlier. It is worth adding that the choral singing was superb, both here and later, when its Latin was heard from behind and above, adding a powerful spatial dimension to the drama. The songs of praise when freedom is apparently attained were overwhelmingly chilling.

So too was Evgeny Nikitin as the Inquisitor – and, owing to their identity, as the Gaoler. He exhibited majesty as the former and an horrific ‘compassion’ as the latter. I thought his final deed, administering a lethal injection to the Prisoner, a melodramatic miscalculation, but that was not Nikitin’s fault. Otherwise, he succeeded in projecting the absolute evil so unsparingly depicted in the drama (a rarer accomplishment in terms of artist and work than one might imagine). Hagen came to mind during the final scene. Chris Merritt sang well for the most part as the Prisoner, and certainly gave a powerful stage performance. He appeared to tire somewhat at one point, although in fact this actually worked in terms of the drama. Rosalind Plowright was close to perfect as the Mother. The twin emotion and clarity of her performance precisely mirrored the role and the text. It is a wonderful role, and she was wonderful in it. It would be excessively faint praise to say that the singers were well supported by the orchestra, although they were. For much of the drama lies within the orchestra, not least in the Bergian ricercares, in which that powerful dialectic between expression and precision, both aspects gaining power from the interplay, was searingly brought to the fore. Lothar Zagrosek, who in my experience has always been at his best in twentieth-century music, should be credited for steering a clear line through the score. Lyricism was not overlooked, far from it. Equally crucially, the power of the musical work’s structure and construction was permitted to stand as a sign of resistance. There may not be hope in an administered world, yet, as Adorno signalled, twelve-note music, for all the complexity of its relationship with that world, somehow continues to resist. Now will someone stage Dallapiccola’s Ulisse?

It was, then, certainly worth making a special trip to Paris for an extremely powerful and provocative theatrical experience. Afterwards, having found a restaurant in Montparnasse, I was heartened that the waiter, spying my programme, declared, ‘Le prisonnier – c’est magnifique!’ and proceeded enthusiastically to discuss his experience of the first night with me. I suppose something similar could have happened in London, but suspect that any such hope would be without foundation.