Belcea Quartet - Beethoven and Haydn, 14 March 2013

Wigmore Hall

Beethoven – String Quartet no.14 in C-sharp minor, op.131

Haydn – The Seven Last Words of our Redeemer on the Cross, op.51  

Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)

Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (cello)

Thomas Quasthoff (narrator)

 

Seven movements and seven last words: I wonder whether that was the initial stimulus behind this programme. It does not necessarily reveal very much in itself – the extent to which Beethoven’s op.131 is in seven true movements is at least debatable – but, more importantly, prefacing the serenity of Haydn’s most extraordinary work for string quartet with that of late Beethoven had one both thinking and feeling, in a sense the essence of religion, in this case of Lenten religion.

 

The passionate fragility of fugal entries at the opening of Beethoven’s Adagio ma non troppo e molto espressivo sounded almost timeless, as if evoking not only Bach but even Palestrina, kinship with the Missa solemnis apparent without unnecessary underlining. Alleged purity of counterpoint may be a chimera, an ideological construct even, yet it seemed for a moment at least instantiated in the Belcea Quartet’s performance. Dynamic contrasts were ideally shaped by the harmonic ebb and flow, and vice versa. For all the austerity, humane Romanticism shone through: no hair-shirt non vibrato here. If the transition to the second movement were slightly blurred, momentum was soon regained, its D major tonality – up a semitone – sounding bright yet celestial. The third movement, itself essentially transitional though at the same time far more than a ‘mere’ transition, was handled with great care for its structural status and therefore broader meaning, preparing the way for a slow movement that was beautiful and rarefied, even if at times one might have wished for greater earthiness. Its third variation, however, offered a properly titanic mental struggle, almost a microcosm of the quartet as a whole. The scherzo rightly sounded as if the music were close to breaking point; indeed, it might readily have been taken further still along that road. Still, kinetic energy and splintering both physical and metaphysical were readily apparent. Austerity and humanity, however foreshortened, marked the transitional Adagio, quasi un poco andante, after which the vehemence of the finale, almost at times as angry as if this were Beethoven in early C minor rather than C-sharp minor mode, reinstated sonata form more defiantly than triumphantly. Moments of sweetness, of great tenderness, found their place in an intensely dramatic account.

 

Haydn’s Seven Last Words were presented interspersed with readings by Thomas Quasthoff. Whether they were Quasthoff’s own choice, I do not know, but they were arrestingly selected from Hölderlin, Novalis, Fouqué, Heine, Tieck, Rückert, and Eichendorff, and arrestingly delivered, the anger in Hölderlin’s Die Ehrsucht, for instance, followed by a consoling voice in Novalis’s Es gibt so bange Zeiten (the first Haydn sonata coming in between). There is of course no work remotely like this in Haydn’s œuvre or indeed anyone else’s, the singularity being not just a matter of a sequence of slow movements, not just of liturgical context, but also of Haydn’s musical response, his symphonic inspiration – the ‘original’ version was, after all, written for orchestra – yet filtered through tendencies, at least, of Baroque Affekt. Whilst written beautifully for string quartet in this arrangement, the music does not often sound like a typical Haydn quartet; nor should it. The Belcea Quartet’s responses seemed very well to understand the unusual qualities of this work. In tandem with Quasthoff, our concentration was held throughout, without the slightest fear that almost unrelieved ‘slow music’ might have one’s attention wander.

 

Echoes – or should that more properly be foreshadowings? – of Mozart were heard in the Introduzione. The players’ unanimity was impressive, and almost liturgically significant, in those extraordinary opening bars, Maestoso e adagio indeed. The ‘purely’ musical beauty of Haydn’s instrumental development told its own story and yet, at the same time, those of the Cross and of Hölderlin’s preceding Geh unter, schöne Sonne. The first sonata, placed as previously stated between Hölderlin and Novalis, offered a beauty that again approached that of Mozart, albeit with a variety of the plain-spoken unmistakeably Haydn’s own. Echoes of Haydn’s Stabat Mater informed, knowingly or otherwise, its successor: Amen dico tibi: hodie mecum eris in paradiso, a truly paradisiacal prospect before us, its developmental ecstasy quite overwhelming in my case. The tenderness of the Grave sonata (‘Woman, behold thy son!’) and the placing of Christ’s despair (Eli, Eli, lama asabthani) between Heine’s shipwrecked man (Der Schiffbrüchige) and an excerpt from Tieck’s novel, William Lovell, proved almost as moving, prior to the simple sublimity of the fifth sonata, Sitio (‘I thirst’). Corina Belcea’s first violin, moving quietly above pizzicato strings, met with vehement, indeed passionate response: agonising and yet not without consolation. Haydn’s response to the terrible words Consummatum est! proved searing, yet classically so, and all the more movingly so for that, likewise the surety of faith, without a trace of bitterness, in Christ’s subsequent commending himself into the hands of his Father. The plight of a world left behind – at least until Easter – made for a desolate earthquake.

Thomas Quasthoff retires...

... as noted by the excellent Von heute auf morgen blog: click here. The last time I heard him was in a Berlin Winterreise with Daniel Barenboim (review here) in 2009.

Barenboim/Quasthoff - Winterreise, 9 April 2009

Philharmonie, Berlin

Schubert – Winterreise, D 911

The last thing I wanted to do was to review the audience for this Liederabend at the Philharmonie. Unfortunately, rather like a meddlesome stage director, it was the audience, or rather a significant section thereof, which dominated much of this performance. I realise that this might seem churlish or worse but know from subsequent conversation with several other members of the audience that their appreciation was as marred as mine by the thoughtless, indeed downright selfish, antics of a philistine minority. The only saving grace was the lack of a mobile telephone contribution; otherwise, almost every other conceivable variety of audience intrusion was present – and unrelievedly. Take the woman seated directly in front of me. (I have a good few ideas concerning where I should like to have had her taken...) Not only did she fidget and cough both during and between every song; during many, she adjusted the fur coat hanging over the balcony, jangled her bracelets, took things out of her handbag and put them back in, and so on and so forth. Try as one might, having such a person near to one makes it well nigh impossible to concentrate, especially when the music is something so intimate as Lieder. My neighbour angrily remonstrated with her at the end of the recital, showing greater courage than I could muster, but of course it was too late by then and she shamelessly shrugged it all off, preferring to continue stroking her fur coat. The coughing between songs from the audience in general was worse, I think, than I have ever heard. Still, however bad this was for the rest of the audience, it must have been worse still for the performers. Thomas Quasthoff was so annoyed and unsettled that he broke off after the seventh song, Auf dem Flusse, to request that people refrain from coughing at the end of every song. His plea was made, notably, in English, which gives a clue to the possible root cause: an influx of foreign guests able to pay the increased prices for the Holy Week Festtage, guests who were more interested in being seen than in listening. There was a slight reduction at the end of the following song but thereafter we reverted to normal practice. That Quasthoff’s announcement reflected a difficulty in his ability to concentrate and not just annoyance is attested to by the fact that, in Wasserflut, he had confusedly substituted the final stanza for the second. Even before that, he, Daniel Barenboim, and the rest of us had had to endure applause at the end of the first and fourth (!) songs, the latter halted by a furious gesture from the singer.

I regret, then, that any remarks concerning the performance must remain sketchy and provisional. It was impossible to garner much sense of the work as a whole, given the indignities it and the performers suffered. Barenboim often, though by no means always, sounded somewhat restrained, unleashing something like the full tone of the piano comparatively rarely, for instance in Der stürmische Morgen. Was the musicians’ palpable anger here not entirely unrelated to the antics in the hall? Elsewhere, Barenboim’s reading was one of great textural clarity, sometimes putting me in mind of Bach or old-school Chopin, in its voice-leading. And Schubert, after all, stands somewhere between the two. One could hear the tears in Gefrorne Tränen, to chilling effect. I almost jumped out of my skin as the cold wind of Der Lindenbaum hit my face. The pianist’s pearly-toned introduction to Frühlingstraum was only semi-audible, owing to a bronchial barrage, and I could give a host of similar examples. But Barenboim remained attentive to his musical partner, beautifully echoing in inversion Quasthoff’s line ‘Habe ja doch nichts begangen,’ in Der Wegweiser. Moreover, the grandeur of the introduction to Das Wirtshaus truly registered, rendering the deathly, all-pervading stillness that followed all the more terrifying.

Quasthoff likewise offered an almost unbelievably subtle performance, given the trying circumstances. An attentive listener – I think there were a few... – could have written a small essay devoted to the differences between his rendition of the final stanza of Gefrorne Tränen first time around and his ‘repetition’, which was anything but. Bitterness was all the more poignant for its lack of exaggeration, upon the word ‘küssen’ in Erstarrung. Judiciously applied vibrato upon the word ‘glühten’ in Rückblick truly made those two maiden eyes glow. And the darkness of tone in Die Krähe, set against Barenboim’s quietly insistent piano part, was chilling indeed. I liked the way in which, in Im Dorfe, the madness of the deserted village at that eeriest time of night was conveyed by both musicians: no melodrama, but a subtle sense of uncertainty, instability. The controlled delirium of Mut! was similar, only different. Likewise the final desolation of Der Leiermann, at which one would have felt numb, had not applause immediately intruded.

What we needed was a second performance, after a short break, in which we could all have cooled down. Ideally, it would have taken place in the more intimate setting of the Philharmonie’s Kammermusiksaal – the main hall, though acoustically wonderful, is really too large – and with an audience shorn of the miscreants.

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.