Prom 18: Staatskapelle Berlin/Barenboim - Siegfried, 26 July 2013

Royal Albert Hall

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Brünnhilde – Nina Stemme
Wanderer – Terje Stensvold
Mime – Peter Bronder
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fafner – Eric Halfvarson
Woodbird – Rinnat Moriah
Erda – Anna Larsson

Justin Way (director)

Staatskapelle Berlin
Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

The brightest star in this performance proved once again to be the Staatskapelle Berlin, under Daniel Barenboim’s guidance. It is to be hoped that those Londoners who do not travel much – though it remains unclear to me why they could not listen to the odd recording or broadcast – will finally be disabused by this Proms Ring of the strange claim that the sub-standard Wagner they have all too often been served up over the past decade represents anything but a pale shadow of the ‘real thing’. That is crucial not from the standpoint of drawing up some variety of ghastly league table, but because Wagner deserves so much better, as, barring a few noisy miscreants, do audiences. A friend remarked acutely earlier in the week that so much of the chatter concerning last year’s Covent Garden Ring concerned the work as some sort of ‘ultimate challenge’ and congratulated the forces for having (just about) withstood that challenge. Art is not, however, a school sports day; to come anywhere near realising Wagner’s potential requires musicians who understand his (admittedly strenuous) demands, who are as comprehending of his world-view and its implications, historical and contemporary, as possible, and who are expert at communicating his message at as many of its multiple levels as they can. ‘Muddling through’ – or, to put it another way, a self-congratulatory celebration of English amateurism – should never be an option.

 

Barenboim once again had the measure of the score, his understanding of which has deepened considerably over the years, from the outset. The Prelude to Act I opened very slowly, but its hallmark was flexibility, not least when a mini-Furtwänglerian accelerando led us, as the most natural development in the world, into Wagner’s menacing treatment of the no-longer-dormant Nibelung motif. Lesser conductors would simply present one thing after another, perhaps with the odd ‘shock’ effect imposed upon the meaningless progression; Wagner’s drama needs to be simultaneously communicated and reinforced through a tightly woven web of motivic interconnection. As Carl Dahlhaus put it, ‘the decline in importance of the symphony as a genre represented the obverse of an inexorable expansion of the symphonic style in other genres.’ It is inconceivable that a great Wagnerian would not also be a great Beethovenian.

 

The dark orchestral phantasmagoria, inevitably bringing to mind Adorno’s Versuch über Wagner, conjured up by Barenboim and his orchestra as Mime initially struggled to forge the sword told of dark forces, dramatic and musical, at work; one was drawn into the drama in the very best way, by the score ‘itself’. And yet, there was plenty of life: Siegfried’s music quite rightly evoked the world of a Beethoven scherzo, transformed into musico-dramatic material. Barenboim showed that lightness does not preclude depth; indeed, it often relies upon it. And depth one certainly heard from the Staatskapelle’s strings, heart-rendingly when Siegfried casually knocked the food Mime had prepared out of his hands; we empathised with Mime and his misery through Wagner’s extraordinarily sympathetic portrayal. Likewise, in the third scene, Barenboim – and Wagner, of course – conjured up the sheer horror of Mime’s predicament just as truthfully as the other, unconscious, heroic side of the coin. Competition between soundworlds, distinct and yet dialectically related, was very much the stuff of this first act. The dark Staatskapelle brass, never brash in the way sections from Anglophone orchestras might often be, told during the Mime-Wanderer scene of the darkness still cast by Alberich’s Nibelheim curse – even when the Wanderer was ostensibly talking of himself. Schwarz- and Licht-Alberich continued their dialectical dance of death (even though we never discover quite what becomes of the former).  

 

Act II opened in similarly magisterial fashion. Marking by kettledrums of that crucial tritone – the giants’ motif darkened, perverted, from its initially diatonic form – was effected to musico-dramatic perfection; that interval, that sound would hang over the act for at least as long as it took Siegfried to slay Fafner. A febrile undergrowth, scenic and harmonic, would soon find itself conjured up – that phantasmagorical phrase again – by composer, conductor, and orchestra together. The orchestra, moreover, gained a real spring to its step during those extraordinary exchanges between Mime and Siegfried, when the former, despite all his efforts, betrays his true intentions, Wagner’s sardonicism conveyed with the darkest of comedy. And that Feuerbachian moment of hope – love, revolution, love in revolution might yet emerge the victor – at the end of the act was captured to perfection, only to be contrasted, at the beginning of Act III, by a very different variety of dramatic urgency, the Wanderer’s dismissal of Erda (and thus of Fate itself) upon us.

 

Barenboim’s deceleration as Erda rose from the depths told of far more than mere handling of the score; this was an attempt to hold back history itself – likewise at the end of his confrontation with Siegfried in the following scene. The Wanderer’s urgency with Erda, rhythms buoyant and generative, would emerge victorious, but at what cost, and for how long? Questions rather than answers were proffered. His silence following ‘Weisst du, was Wotan will?’ was made to tell in a fashion not entirely unlike a silence in Bruckner, and yet, with its very particular musico-dramatic import, quite unlike it. By contrast, the transformation to the final scene was perhaps the most ecstatic I have heard, the orchestra revelling in Wagner’s wizardry, Barenboim ensuring that such revelry retained dramatic motivation. There were moments when one heard, for instance, the fresh air of Johannistag – ‘Ach! Wie schön!’ as Siegfried loosened Brünnhilde’s helmet – or delectable violin femininity, as Siegfried lifted the breastplate. But they never stood out, self-regarding, for their own sake; the drama was the thing.

 

Peter Bronder’s Mime was excellent. He wheedled without falling into caricature, projected a strong command of his line throughout, and even proved a dab hand pretty with his (small) hammer. There was real anger, moreover, as well as self-pity, when he dubbed Siegfried ‘dankbares, arges Kind!’ Lance Ryan is not possessed of a beautiful voice, but he showed the necessary tirelessness not simply to ‘get through’ the role, but also to shape its progress. If vocal lines were often less than mellifluous, one could hear pretty much every word. He had a nice – or rather nasty – line in cruelty of delivery, for instance when telling of how he longed to seize Mime’s neck, though there were undoubtedly occasions when he erred on the side of crudity, not least during the forging of Notung, and  clowning around over the horn was probably overdone. Johannes Martin Kränzle once again contributed an attentive reading of Alberich’s part, words, music, stage manner welded into something considerably more than the sum of its parts. Eric Halfvarson’s Fafner (from the organ) was properly evocative of the rentier as dragon: what he lay on, he owned. One even felt a degree of sympathy at the moment of death. Terje Stensvold’s Wanderer was not as large of life as some, but his solemnity told its own tale; this was, after all, a Wotan two generations on from Das Rheingold, scarred by events, working his way towards renunciation of the Schopenhauerisn Will. Whether that were actually how Stensvold thought of it or no, one could certainly understand his portrayal that way. His Norwegian way with Wagner’s words harked back to the the old sagas: perhaps not ideal in abstract pronunciation terms, but again opening up other associations for those willing to listen. As in Berlin, Rinnat Moriah proved a bright-toned Woodbird, perfectly contrasted with the deep contralto of Anna Larsson’s wonderful Erda, her tiredness and fading powers conveyed musically rather than by default. Nina Stemme’s Brünnhilde gave an excellent impression of awakening, and handled very well this difficult transition from Valkyrie to woman. She more than whetted the appetite for what is now to come.

Siegfried, Staatsoper Berlin, 18 April 2013

Schiller Theater, Berlin

Siegfried – Lance Ryan

Mime – Peter Bronder
The Wanderer – Terje Stensvold
Alberich – Johannes Martin Kränzle
Fafner – Mikhail Petrenko
Erda – Anna Larsson
Brünnhilde – Iréne Theorin
The Woodbird – Rinnat Moriah

Guy Cassiers (director, set design)

Enrico Bagnoli (set design, lighting)
Tim van Steenbergen (costumes)
Arjen Klerkx, Kurt D’Haeseleer (video)
Michael P Steinberg, Detlef Giese (dramaturgy)
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui (choreography)

Staatskapelle Berlin

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

Image: (c) Monika Rittershaus

 

And so, the Berlin State Opera’s Ring nears completion. Nothing has changed with respect to the bafflingly vacuous production served up by Guy Cassiers and his colleagues from the Antwerp Toneelhuis. It is not that ideas are banal or underdeveloped; rather, there seem to be no ideas at all, a truly extraordinary state of affairs when it comes to Wagner, of all dramatists. The production apparently aspires to the condition of something one might see or have seen at New York’s Metropolitan Opera, whether Otto Schenk or the still worse Robert Lepage, albeit with refined visual taste. Quite why anyone would think tasteful Wagner desirable is quite beyond me. There are pretty stage effects, sometimes from video, sometimes not, but effects without cause they remain. Oddly, given the plentiful use of video, the dragon is conjured up by the Eastman Company – yes, I am afraid the dancers are back – and some sheets. It starts off rather well, viewed with disinterested æsthetic contemplation, only to degenerate into a vision more akin to a group laundry activity. There is doubtless some enjoyment to be derived from the lithe dancers, choreographed well enough in the abstract, but what any of it might have to say about the Ring is not even obscure. If Cassiers presents, as is claimed, a Ring for the twenty-first century, may God have mercy upon our culture-industry-enfeebled souls. Politics, religion, any variety of thought, even any variety of drama, have been banished to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; it is enough to have one wish to embark upon a spot of time travel.

 

Daniel Barenboim and the Staatskapelle Berlin came to the rescue. I have not heard a better conducted, better played Siegfried, even from the Royal Opera and Bernard Haitink. The Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle may have offered breathtaking orchestral virtuosity in Aix-en-Provence, but there was something of virtuosity for its own sake in that case, partly, I think, because Rattle’s reading failed to dig anything like so deep. This was Barenboim at his more than estimable best. The great paragraphs of Wagner’s imagination unfolded with unforced, unexaggerated inevitability, not monumental in, say, the Knappertsbusch mode, but teeming with dramatic life born of the musico-dramatic material. Scenes, dialogues, phrases were sharply, colourfully characterised, playful yet steely Beethoven to the fore in the final scene of the first act, a grinding sense of peripeteia possessing us at the opening of the third. There was none of the reluctance one encounters from lesser conductors to let the orchestra speak as Greek chorus, no alleged ‘consideration’ for vocal fallibility. This was above all orchestral drama, as fully achieved in a Furtwänglerian sense as I have heard from Barenboim in Wagner. 

 

Lance Ryan had his moments as Siegfried, especially during the second act. Up until the scene with Brünnhilde, I should have said that at least he did not tire – quite an achievement in itself – but alas, a pattern of too much shouting and not enough singing took its toll. Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde, by contrast, was highly variegated in tone, at times almost too much, having one strain to hear the words. A rather wooden Wanderer from Terje Stensvold was shown up by Johannes Martin Kränzle’s vivid, detailed Alberich. Peter Bronder was very much the singing actor as Mime, stronger in tone than one often hears, but sometimes edging too much, against Wagner’s urgings, toward caricature. Mikhail Petrenko’s voice seemed to have lost some of its darkness, but there could be few real complaints about his Fafner. Anna Larsson’s otherworldly depth of tone reminded us why she is very much the Erda de nos jours. Rinnat Moriah navigated the Woodbird’s lines with admirable ease. It remained, however, Barenboim’s and the Staatskapelle’s show.

Alceste, Chelsea Opera Group, 28 November 2009

Cadogan Hall

Herald – Jonathan Sells
Coryphaeuses – Sophie Junker, Amy Payne, Paul Curievici, Jonathan Sells
Evandre – Paul Curievici
Alceste – Cécile van de Sant
High Priest of Apollo – Matthew Hargreaves
Oracle – Simon Wilding
Admète – Peter Bronder
Hercule – David Stout
Infrenal Deity – Simon Wilding
Apollo – Jonathan Sells

Chelsea Opera Group (guest chorus master: Robin Newton)
Nicholas Collon (conductor)

How welcome to hear Gluck’s Alceste at all, let alone in so creditable a rendition, for which many thanks must go to the ever enterprising Chelsea Opera Group. However revered Gluck might be by those of us who hope against hope that opera might be concerned with drama rather than vapid vocal display, the composer arguably receives the rawest deal of all the great musical dramatists in terms of performance. The COG’s history is of course littered with important performances, not least Colin Davis’s early Mozart and Berlioz, so it is perhaps to be expected that its attention might turn to such a cause. Rather to my surprise, I discovered that the group had mounted Alceste once before, under Lázsló Heltay, in 1983. I assume that was also the 1776 French version; performances of the original, Italian version, in many respects quite a different work, are extremely rare indeed. In any case, a generation is quite long enough to have waited and we can but hope for more Gluck from this stable.

Following the previous night’s ENO Messiah, quite the worst production of anything I have seen this year, it proved something of a relief to be able to concentrate on the music in the form of a concert performance. (And no, this does not contradict what I said above concerning opera as drama, though it is a sadness that one should have to say it.) I had heard Nicholas Collon only once before, in quite different repertoire, Berio’s Différences, but I hope and expect that there will be many other occasions. This was for the most part a Classical rather than a proto-Romantic Gluck, whatever the foreshadowings of Berlioz in the score. Collon, however, showed that this could be achieved without any of the condescension and unpleasantness of the ‘historically-informed’ – actually, anything but – brigade. Gluck’s vigour and dignity, his Winckelmann-like ‘noble simplicity’, and above all his concern for dramatic truth, were well served here. One felt very much that this was a French work, a tragédie lyrique in direct descent from Rameau; one could also hear that Idomeneo and, in the Oracle’s pronouncement, the Commendatore were only just around the corner. Rhythmic and harmonic impetus was maintained throughout, without any recourse to exhibitionistic shock tactics or otherwise frenetically driving the score. If the tragedy did not overwhelm in the way it might with a conductor such as Riccardo Muti, it is only fair to remind oneself that Muti had the forces of La Scala, whilst the Chelsea Opera Group is an amateur organisation.

Indeed, despite the odd fluff – more than that, sadly, in the case of the horns – the orchestra put many jaded professionals to shame. There were some truly wonderful moments, for instance the beautiful, melting oboe solo in Alceste’s ‘Grands Dieux, du destin qui m’accable,’ and the extraordinary piercing violin figuration during the Act I Scene III priests’ chorus. ‘Perce d’un rayon éclatant’ (‘Pierce with a shining ray’) – and it did. Orchestra and priests combined here in the Temple of Apollo to elicit a duly terrifying effect. There was a nice swing to the opening scene of the second act, in which premature rejoicing for the sparing of Admète’s life was heard once again from both orchestra and chorus. Collon ensured that ‘life’ here contrasted with the tragedy of impending sacrifice from the first act, heightening the tension between appearance and the reality that tragedy is still very much with us. The ballet music was not perfect, but more important than a few smudges was the character imparted to the dances: they too, indeed they particularly, must be compelled to take on dramatic character. In Gluck, the aspiration must be for nothing to be extraneous – which is perhaps why the closing divertissement, much of it in any case by Gossec, was omitted.

The choral singing, as I have already more than hinted, was generally of a very high standard: full-bodied yet in no sense lacking in clarity, one in the eye for those insisting that the latter require a paucity of forces. There was much to commend in the solo singing too. Cécile can de Sant could hardly be expected to erase memories of Janet Baker and Jessye Norman, or Kirsten Flagstad in the Italian version, but she showed herself fully committed to the draining title role. To begin with, she occasionally sounded a little forced; perhaps it was a matter of adjusting to the acoustic of a small hall such as the Cadogan. It was noticeable that she remained in character throughout, her eyes and stance reflecting her predicament even when she was not singing. When she was, she combined style and dramatic projection to very good effect. She had, moreover, the inestimable advantage of good French. Peter Bronder was less impressive as Admète. Whether again he was simply trying too hard for the acoustic, I do not know, but he often sounded uncomfortably loud, hectoring even. There could be no doubting his dramatic commitment, but shouting something does not in itself render it ‘dramatic’. David Stout made a bluff, good-natured Hercule, a role absent in the Italian original. Also notable was Matthew Hargreaves, as a suitably stentorian High Priest of Apollo. There were, indeed, no disappointments in any of the smaller roles. Special mention should be made of Paul Curievici, whose plangent, expressive tenor was put to stylish use as Evandre and a Coryphaeus. A member of the Guildhall’s Opera Programme, I do not doubt that we shall hear more from him.

Chelsea Opera Group will present two further operas in concert this season, both at the Queen Elizabeth Hall: La traviata on 21 February and Guillaume Tell on 23 May.