Volodos/Gewandhaus/Chailly - Brahms, 13 October 2013

Neues Gewandhaus, Leipzig

Symphony no.2 in D major, op.73

Piano Concerto no.2 in B-flat major, op.83

Arcadi Volodos (piano)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Riccardo Chailly (conductor)




Players of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra just prior to the
Saturday evening rehearsal for this concert

Riccardo Chailly’s recent Decca recordings of the Brahms symphonies and assorted other orchestral works are being heavily promoted by symphony-and-concerto cycles – the concertos do not appear in the Decca set – first in Leipzig, and later in London, Paris, and Vienna. I cannot claim to have been a devotee of Chailly’s Beethoven, much though I love the sound of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and so, not having heard the Brahms recordings, approached this concert with some trepidation. Perhaps I should have recalled a Prom a good few years ago, in which Beethoven and Brahms were combined, for I had found the latter far more to my liking. At any rate, if the inevitable list of favourites from the past remains unchallenged, a problem almost as great for Brahms as for Beethoven, this concert offered rewards beyond the undoubted pleasure of this great orchestra’s ‘old German’ sound.

 

The first movement of the Second Symphony was certainly not slow, but nor was it unduly driven. Tempo variations were properly transitional, with none of the abrupt gear changes one often hears in this music from ‘period’ conductors attempting to sound ‘Romantic’. Chailly’s reading focused attention upon Brahms’s concision, at least during the exposition; yet there was room for expansiveness later on too. Counterpoint was not merely ‘busy’, but urgently propelling. This remained Brahms somewhat in the mould of Schumann, even Mendelssohn, but there was strength where required. Here and elsewhere, the Leipzig woodwind ravished in properly post-Mozartian mould; such was Harmoniemusik to melt the heart of the most sceptical of listeners. Schumann seemed still more to haunt the second movement, more an intermezzo than an Adagio, even with the caveat non troppo. Yet it worked; it seemed properly ‘placed’ within Chailly’s conception of the whole. Impressively shaped, Brahms’s melodic transformations had a necessary sense of ‘rightness’. Much the same could be said of the third movement in its different way. Balletic to an extent that on occasion suggested Tchaikovsky, it is not how I should always want to hear the music; here, however, it made sense. The finale opened in what was perhaps overly excitable fashion, and remained urgent throughout. Despite occasional lapses in ensemble, the Gewandhaus Orchestra once again displayed a fine pedigree in Brahms. The first of the composer’s Hungarian Dances made for a swashbuckling and surprising encore – given that this was only the first half.

 

Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto is not so often heard as one might expect. Though I have loved it since I first heard it as a sixth-former, I cannot recall having attended a single concert performance, though I have often heard its D minor elder sibling. Its ferocious technical demands were met with ease by Arcadi Volodos; yet, however impressive on its own terms, such pianistic prowess is only a starting-point for a musical performance. Technique, as Sir Peter Pears once remarked, is the liberation of the imagination – or at least it should be. If Chailly and Volodos did not plumb the metaphysical depths of, say, Gilels and Jochum, in what remains to my mind the greatest recording I have heard of the greatest piano concerto since Beethoven, they nevertheless offered a thoroughly musical traversal. The orchestra sounded lithe in its exposition, Chailly’s occasional rhetorical inflections convincing and purposeful rather than attention-seeking. There was strength, truthfulness even, to Volodos’s performance when he re-entered. If, hearing his tone ‘blind’, I might have thought it more apposite to Liszt than to Brahms, that was perhaps as much a matter of his Steinway as anything else. (I cling in principle to my preference for a Bösendorfer here, though a great performance will soon rid my mind of such thoughts.) Moreover, the ‘fullness’ of Brahms’s piano writing was felt, understood, and communicated without heaviness. Trills were to die for too. And what a gloriously full-blooded string sound was unleashed on occasion. The scherzo was urgent, though not unduly driven. Volodos’s phrasing and shading were just as intelligent here. That difficult transition to the trio was well handled by Chailly, the ensuing cross-rhythms making their point. The slow movement was flowing, never rigid. Hand on heart, I found it difficult to warm to the tone of the principal cellist, relatively thin, with wide vibrato apparently employed to compensate. His solos were well shaped however, and taste is certainly a factor in such matters. Volodos displayed rich variation in piano tone, from half lights that peered forward to the late solo works to a full Brahms thunder that evoked the First Piano Concerto. There were wonderful moments of rapt stillness too, from orchestra and soloist alike. The finale was well judged, with a winning lilt that eludes a good number of performers. Once again, the Leipzig woodwind proved an especial joy, prompting memories of the symphony in the first half, helping to impart further unity to an impressive Sunday morning concert.

 

Prom 69: Abboud Ashkar/Gewandhaus/Chailly - Mendelssohn and Mahler, 7 September 2009

Royal Albert Hall

Mendelssohn – Piano concerto no.1 in G minor, op.25
Mahler (ed. Cooke) – Symphony no.10

Saleem Abboud Ashkar (piano)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly (conductor)

Judging by the warmth and sheer volume of the applause this concert received, most of the audience reacted a great deal more ecstatically than I did. At least the end of the concert proved a valuable opportunity for a minority menace to do something other than cough, talk, or, in some cases, sound their electronic equipment. Small mercies and all that...

The first Mendelssohn concerto was performed extremely well by Saleem Abboud Ashkar. I first heard him in 2006, in the Mozart concerto for two pianos, with the Vienna Philharmonic no less, under Riccardo Muti; reacquaintance found Abboud Ashkar equally impressive. Possessed of a pearly tone, not unlike Murray Perahia, he imparted a Mozartian beauty to the piano part, also hinting at Schumann and Brahms in the opposite chronological direction. The Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Riccardo Chailly played well enough and, in the case of the woodwind, quite magically at times, though the sheer ease in this idiom with which the orchestra played under Kurt Masur and often Herbert Blomstedt did not seem so readily apparent here. Some of Chailly’s direction in the first movement was hard-driven, though he proved able to relax on occasion. Yet I am afraid I could not bring myself to be wildly excited about the work itself. It has its moments and, in the slow movement, rather more than that. But hearing Abboud Ashkar made me wish I were hearing him in Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, or Brahms. Even those passages that sound closer to the inspired magic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream throw into relief what is missing elsewhere. Prettiness need not always be disdained but there seems to me quite a lot of note-spinning in this piece: pleasant enough, and more substantial than anything by the briefly and incomprehensibly fashionable Hummel, but little more than that. Perhaps one of the perverse advantages of intensive anniversary coverage is to make one realise the gulf, at least in many cases, between a composer’s good and great works on the one hand and, on the other, the rest. If, on the other hand, we had been treated to more Haydn...

Mahler’s Tenth Symphony, as edited by Deryck Cooke – I realise that the situation is far less straightforward than that, but sometimes shorthand is helpful – was, I think, the second live performance of a Mahler symphony I ever heard. That performance, from the BBC National Orchestra of Wales under Mark Wigglesworth, was also the second live Prom I attended. Sometimes one romanticises early experiences. However, not only can I say that that performance knocked me for six at the time; I can also report that listening to a BBC recording thereafter has barely dimmed my enthusiasm. The Welsh orchestra is perhaps not the most refulgent in tone and lacks the pedigree of the Leipzig band – though is the Leipzig pedigree right for Mahler? – but Wigglesworth’s direction is clear, dramatic, and makes an extremely strong case for Cooke’s edition/completion/call-it-what-you-will. I was considerably less convinced by this performance, which moreover made me harbour greater doubts than I have previously entertained concerning the edition. In theory, I suppose that could mean a good performance revealing shortcomings – consider, for instance, Boulez and his reservations concerning Schoenberg – but I do not think that was primarily the case here. Anyway, a performer would usually, with a few celebrated exceptions, consider himself to be counsel for the defence.

First off, this seemed a very lengthy account. Whether that were the case in reality, I have no idea, since, for better or worse, I am not one of those listeners prone to take timings. I am certainly no foe of broad, expansive performances in any repertoire; but that is a different matter from sounding as though it might never end, which the opening Adagio came very close to doing. Part of the problem seemed to be Chailly’s penchant for excessive underlining of the closing both of phrases and paragraphs. The caesura can be an integral part of Mahler’s style and, in the right hands, this can be accomplished without disruption to the longer line. Here, however, there was a strange, indeed paradoxical combination of smoothness and yet stopping and starting. By contrast, a performance last year from Vladimir Jurowski of the Adagio alone had certainly been expansive and might well have lasted for longer than this, but so intensely dramatic had the music-making been, so seamless had the musical golden thread proved, that I had merely regretted that it could not go on for longer.

Another problem I had was the sound of the orchestra, or rather of the strings, which simply did not sound right for Mahler. Perhaps it is no coincidence that I greatly admired a Brahms Fourth Symphony from Chailly and this orchestra at the Proms a couple of years ago, for often this is what it reminded me of. I missed Viennese sweetness or at least a convincing substitute. The darkness did not sound like the right sort, or at least a right sort, of darkness. Somehow Daniel Barenboim managed to accomplish a similar trick with the Staatskapelle Berlin in 2007 with the Seventh Symphony. I still do not quite know how, but his achievement would still seem to very much an exception – and it did not work during the Fifth. I should probably mention too that the Berlin strings were a good couple of degrees richer in tone than their Leipzig counterparts. Or perhaps it was the auld enemy of the Royal Albert Hall’s acoustic. Barenboim, after all, had the Philharmonie...

Another thing missing for me was the malevolent darkness, as opposed to the darkness of string sound, in the first scherzo. However, I should note that David Matthews, in his truly excellent programme note – quite a change from a number of Proms contributions this year – described Mahler as not having ‘written a scherzo so free from malice since the Fifth Symphony’. Overt references aside, my difficulty was that this sounded all too much like the scherzo of the Fifth Symphony – and that, I should contend, is far from untroubled. More worryingly, textures, especially during the scherzi, sometimes sounded as if something were missing. Of course, in a very real sense, something is – but unless this were intended as a critique of Cooke and the Matthews brothers, that is perhaps not something of which one should really be aware. On the other hand, there was some truly extraordinary woodwind playing, which I noticed with something bordering upon amazement in each movement. The alternation of icy, Webern-like purity and pastoral warmth in the Purgatorio was utterly convincing. Indeed, it set me thinking that this is precisely what Purgatory should be like: invigorating purification, just like Webern. The three clarinets in the final movement once again sounded spot on, evoking both Mozartian Harmoniemusik and the Berg of the Violin Concerto’s chorale. This movement and the Purgatorio seemed to me the strongest – and I should certainly recall the superlative percussion contribution with which the orchestra groped towards its opening.

I have deliberately written very much in the first person, since I have a sense that much of this was about my reaction, not just in the sense that others clearly reacted very differently, but also that this concerns differently held approaches to and understandings of Mahler. When the music sounded on the threshold of the Second Viennese School, especially Webern, I was most captivated, but for long stretches it seemed to me not merely ‘late Romantic’, but ‘late Romantic’ in a not entirely appropriate way. With Barenboim, a surprising relation to Brahms had worked in the Seventh Symphony, even if it might rarely be suggested by the score in itself. Whilst there was much to appreciate here, I remained unconvinced by the interpretation as a whole, except in the rather troubling – but perhaps necessary? – sense of the doubts elicited concerning the edition. I shall now perhaps look again at some of the competing completions, which would doubtless be no bad thing.

St Matthew Passion, Leipzig Gewandhaus/Chailly, 3 April 2009

Gewandhaus, Leipzig

Bach – St Matthew Passion, BWV 244

Christina Landshamer (soprano)
Marie-Claude Chappuis (contralto)
Johannes Chum (tenor: Evangelist)
Maximilian Schmitt (tenor: arias)
Thomas Quasthoff (bass: arias)
Hanno Müller-Brachmann (bass: Christus)
Klaus Häger (bass: Pilate, Peter, Judas)

Choir of St Thomas’s Church, Leipzig (choirmaster: Georg Christoph Biller)
Tölzer Knabenchor (choirmaster: Gerhard Schmidt-Gaden)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly (conductor)

Admittedly, I set myself up. Having listened, whilst on the train to Leipzig earlier in the day, to part of Klemperer’s recording of the St Matthew Passion, the opening chorus was bound to seem fast. However, I think Riccardo Chailly’s tempo for ‘Kommt, ihr Töchter, helft mir klagen,’ would be considered speedy even by contemporary – that is, ‘authentic’, in our Alice-in-Wonderland world of Bach performance – standards. What shone through, however, was an urgency born not just of tempo but of a highly dramatic view of Bach’s passion setting. Now there can, at least for some of us, be no doubt that the St Matthew Passion qualifies as music drama, in a contemporary – post-Romantic, non-authentic! – sense; but I am not sure that it lends itself so well as the St John Passion might to being driven by ‘action’ in a more or less conventional sense. Of course, there is a narrative, for some the greatest story ever told, but there is also contemplation, above all in the arias and chorales, but not only there. I worried during the opening chorus whether its almost breakneck urgency would be maintained throughout the work. Not quite, perhaps, but too much nevertheless. Sometimes this was warranted, for instance when Christ quotes Scripture on the Mount of Olives: ‘I will smite the shepherd and the sheep of the flock will be scattered abroad.’ Sometimes it might have worked, for instance in the tenor recitative (with chorale), ‘O Schmerz! hier zittert das gequälte Herz!’ but did not because the tempo was simply so fast that singer and orchestra were not always quite together. And on other occasions, for instance the chorale closing the first part, ‘O Mensch, bewein’ dein’ Sünde groß,’ which was taken at an almost unbelievably fast tempo, the sense of detachment was such that it is difficult to believe that it could ever have been warranted. A geometrical exercise, over in what seemed like record time, here supplanted a true response to the music, let alone the words. In this context, the considerable ritardando at the end of the chorus and, still more so, the extremely prolonged final bass note sounded like arbitrary ‘effects’, at odds with the general vision, flawed or otherwise.

This, despite superlative choral singing throughout from the combined forces of the choir of Bach’s own church, St Thomas’s, Leipzig and the Tölz Boys’ Choir. The choirs certainly lent a terrifying vehemence, on account both of their strength in numbers but also their agility, to the celebrated ‘Sind Blitze, sind Donner’ chorus, the anger fairly spitting, to the choral interjections in the previous number, and to the subsequent cries of crucifixion. The boys’ presence in two out of the three final numbers helped ensure a conclusion of promise not always born out by aspects of the performance beforehand.

Another baleful aspect of ‘period’ practice Chailly adopted wholesale was the virtual elimination of vibrato from the violins – and to a lesser extent, which in itself is perhaps a little surprising, from the lower strings. This seems to be quite the thing for conductors who, whilst using modern instruments, fancy themselves to be acting ‘authentically’. Even on its own dubious terms, the practice seems fatally flawed, however, not least given the ‘modern’ style of the rest of the orchestra, which therefore outshone the strings throughout. The bizarre exception was the viola da gamba, with considerable vibrato applied by Thomas Fritzsch, and all the better for it. Obbligato parts were generally taken very well by the respective soloists from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. I was especially taken with the oboe part in the tenor aria (with chorus), ‘Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen’.

The vocal soloists were of mixed quality. Hanno Müller-Brachmann was straightforwardly excellent as Christus. His nobility and warmth of tone were matched by superlative diction and response to the text. It is a pity his string ‘halo’ could not have been warmer. Johannes Chum was a good Evangelist, again to be admired in his projection of the text, although I felt he could be a little fond of employing his head voice, the repeated effect bordering dangerously upon the sentimental and apparently contributing to occasional intonational difficulties. Chum’s rhetorical pauses seemed to be Chailly’s doing – all the recitatives were conducted – but were overdone, if not the singer’s fault. (They also seemed strangely at odds with the hectic nature of so much of the rest of the performance.) Marie-Claude Chappuis impressed by the instrumental quality of her voice, her line seemingly one of chamber music, first amongst equals rather than a ‘soloist’ as such. ‘Erbarme dich’ therefore acquired a sense of imploring from within, despite the lack of string vibrato. Klaus Häger did a considerable amount with his relatively small part. Christina Landshamer did nothing wrong but brought little out of the ordinary to her soprano numbers, which was a pity. Ironically, Chailly slowed the music down to great effect for her ‘Aus Liebe will mein Heiland sterben,’ imparting just the right sense of deliberate tread to the music. In the difficult tenor arias, Maximilian Schmitt sometimes sounded a little parted, although this was far from always the case. Thomas Quasthoff started off sounding somewhat out of sorts, especially in his first aria. He improved considerably, although he was certainly not helped by a tempo for ‘Gebt mir meinem Jesum wieder!’ so fast that I thought he would be impelled to grab Christ back for himself. That said, there were nice touches, such as a subtle emphasis on ‘Geld’, underlining the role of blood money in the Saviour’s betrayal. ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein,’ was undoubtedly heartfelt, although again the tempo was simply too fast.

And yet, the final chorus did not fail to move. Having veered between born-again ‘authenticism’ and strange neo-Romantic touches – surely the wonderfully slow tempo for the chorale immediately prior to the earthquake was inconsistent with so much else – Chailly settled upon a tempo which, if hardly slow, was perfectly reasonable. Once again, the choral singing was excellent and the orchestral sound was fuller than one might have expected. Enough of a sacred atmosphere was restored, or perhaps created, to render the ensuing applause an unholy intrusion.

Prom 69: Beethoven and Brahms (Chailly), 5 September 2007

Beethoven - Overture: Coriolan, Op. 62
Beethoven - Violin Concerto in D major, Op.61
Brahms - Symphony no.4 in E minor, Op.98

Viviane Hagner (violin)
Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra
Riccardo Chailly (conductor)

This was a true concert of two halves. The lack of tension at the beginning of the Coriolan Overture was sustained throughout the entirety of the first half, which made it seem even longer than it actually was. Chailly's account was not ponderous; indeed, it was almost certainly too fast. However, it was slack rhythmically - and, more importantly still, lacked any real sense of harmonic impetus. The last Beethoven performance I had heard had been that of the third Leonore Overture from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under Daniel Barenboim, and the contrast could hardly have been greater. Whereas the huge youth orchestra's members had played as if their lives depended upon it, and Barenboim had brought an almost Furtwänglerian drama to the proceedings, this performance, which suffered from a mystifyingly inadequate number of strings, was anonymous, tame and underwhelming, words which should never be attached to Beethoven, let alone to Beethoven in C minor.

The Violin Concerto seemed to begin rather faster than would be 'traditional', not that there is necessarily anything wrong with that. Yet, somehow, the first movement soon began to drag, suffering from many of the same faults as the Overture. The development section appeared to go on for ever, ending at the point of utter exhaustion (which is not meant in a musico-dramatic sense). Incidental points of interest were sometimes made by Viviane Hagner, not least in terms of her sometimes extreme rubato, but with such a lifeless 'accompaniment' they ultimately counted for little. Chailly was not an 'accompanist' in the positive, Boultian mould; instead, he seemed content merely to offer a backing to an over-extended series of rêveries. The second movement was better, flowing nicely, at times even presaging the Pastoral Symphony's 'Scene by the Brook'. Here, the previously rather nondescript woodwind were given a chance to shine. The final movement was hardly inspiring, with the first movement's torpor soon returning. Chailly seemed oddly reluctant to grant the orchestra a chance to sing, let alone to thrill. It sounded best when it sounded closest to somewhat soft-centred Mendelssohn, but that hardly makes for great, or even good Beethoven performance. It would be interesting to hear Hagner under a different conductor; given the circumstances, it was difficult to make anything much of her performance. Beethoven, however, is clearly not Chailly's thing.

Brahms, however, was a different matter. The performance of his Fourth Symphony was surer in every sense. This may not have been the last word in Sophoclean tragedy, but Furtwängler est mort, and this was a noble reading, full of insights, not least into where musical history was heading. For if one is here only a stone's throw from Schoenberg, one is perhaps closer still to Webern. That all-important interval of the third - and in its inversion as a sixth - was beautifully and incisively brought out during the recapitualtion by Chailly and his woodwind, so as to determine much of the background and the foreground of Brahms's Schoenbergian 'developing variation'.

The Gewandhaus Orchestra's strings sounded much more at home than they ever had during the first half, exhibiting some gorgeous vibrato, yet never for its own sake, but to expressive musical ends. The violins' pizzicato was sometimes quite breathtaking, not simply in terms of precision but also with regard to its sonorous beauty. The first horn imparted a due sense of Phrygian poignancy and mystery to the opening of the second movement. Truly dramatic punctuation was provided in the Scherzo by the excellent timpanist. When it came to the great passacaglia, Chailly showed a firm hand upon the structural tiller, allowing for a well-judged increase in tension throughout the final movement. After this, we were treated to a sparkling yet tender account of the Academic Festival Overture as an encore.