Keenlyside/Martineau - Schubert, 8 May 2023

Wigmore Hall

Winterreise, D 911

Simon Keenlyside (baritone), Malcolm Martineau (piano)

More seasonal than one might expect for early May, Winterreise made for an absorbing close to Wigmore Hall’s coronation weekend (the eve of the anniversary of the Schuman Declaration). Simon Keenlyside and Malcolm Martineau were always likely to prove a box-office draw, and so it turned out to be. As for earlier concerts I attended, a large audience made its enthusiasm clear. The British ‘government’ may continue to spurn the arts as much as it does our common European culture; halls, artists, and audiences know and deserve better. 

If it always takes me time to get used to the sound (and pitch) of a baritone in music written for a tenor, that is my problem. Keenlyside’s experience as a guide doubtless underpinned all he did, but one never had the sense he was repeating himself. This was quite an acted performance: not in the sense of plot, but gesture, expression, pacing across the stage, and so on. It makes no sense, at least to me, to be dogmatic about such things; what works works, and this did, a glance or a stare as telling as an accent or a slur. Martineau’s dependability as a collaborative pianist needs no mention from me. His was a quietly – from time to time, rather less quietly – supportive performance, not the sort of Winterreise one hears from a star solo pianist, but one that both responded to and, occasionally, kept in line Keenlyside’s vision. Much was on the swift side; certainly the opening ‘Gute Nacht’ was. And it was largely, though not entirely, continuous too. This may be off the mark, but I felt Keenlyside’s conception and expression of dramatic trajectory was inspired or at least informed by his experience on stage in opera. If it would be a crude exaggeration to dub this a Wozzeck’s Winterreise, it was difficult – why would one try? – not to find and, in this case, to see as well as hear, parallels and connections. 

That opening song, in many ways quite conventionally lyrical, suggested the protagonist’s fate had yet to be sealed, that possibilities remained. At the same time, the final stanza’s turn to the major, only to be cruelly denied at the end, set up a dualism that would progressively be eroded as the journey proceeded. An angry, even hectoring ‘Die Wetterfahne’ made that clear. Focus, or our reception of it, was split, though always within a greater whole. Keenlyside’s controlled delirium in ‘Erstarrung’ was perfectly judged, the closing line ‘Fliesst auch ihr Bild dahin’, had him reach out both in voice and gesture for the image that would melt, should his heart ever thaw. Hallucinatory questioning in ‘Wasserflut’, born of naïveté rather than cynicism, spilled over into ‘Auf dem Flusse’, set against a spareness of piano writing and performance that brought the drama into relief, erupting in a ‘Rückblick’ whose fury threatened to veer out of control, yet never quite did. If ‘Irrlicht’ summed up the Janus-faced impression so far, by turn fresh and damaged, ‘Frühlingstraum’ extended that further to major-minor-uneasy synthesis.    

‘Die Post’ emerged as a mini-drama of its own from a fine singing-actor, the piano speaking as if chorus commentator or even voice of phenomenon against noumenon. The greying of Keenlyside’s voice on referring to the grave in ‘Der greise Kopf’ was an unmistakeable indicator of where we were heading even before the dreadful scene with the crow (‘Die Krähe’). As the piano depicted its circling, the voice told of something more inward, again noumenal. Through the resignation of illusory returns in ‘Im Dorfe’, ‘Das Wirtshaus’, and finally ‘Die Nebensonnen’, it was clear the die had been cast. ‘Täuschung’ embraced that path, solemnised almost liturgically in a moving, well-nigh Bachian account of ‘Der Wegweiser’ and its sorrow. A Papageno destroyed by experience, yet dignified by it, met the organ-grinder in the final song. All the while, the organ-piano played on, oblivious—or was he?

Keenlyside/Ax - Winterreise, 22 October 2014

Wigmore Hall 

Schubert: Winterreise, D 911

Simon Keenlyside (baritone)

Emanuel Ax (piano)

 

I had expected this would be an excellent, thoroughly moving performance, and so it was. Simon Keenlyside is one of our subtlest, most thoughtful, most musical baritones, and so he was here. What took me a little by surprise was the contribution of Emanuel Ax. Perhaps I have been unlucky in my experiences of his playing before, but this impressed me far more than those previous experiences had. Ax brought a strong sense of form to each song, almost as if those forms were musically ‘autonomous’, whilst in no way detracting from, indeed in every way supporting, the ‘poetic’ intent and musico-poetic alchemy. One recognised figures as one might in, say, one of the piano sonatas; one certainly registered the meaning inherent in and, in performance, communicated by every note. There was, in, for instance, ‘Der Lindenbaum’, no ‘mere’ figuration, although the part retained its pictorial element; indeed, the piano playing hinted at the consequences Schubert’s Lieder-writing might hold for the Wagnerian orchestra as Greek chorus.

 

Back to ‘Gute Nacht’. It opened relatively swiftly, with no room for sentimentality. Clean delivery from both artists worked very much to the benefit of the work, not least in Keenlyside’s ever-excellent diction. An occasional catch in his voice made no difference to the greater picture, in a performance of palpable sincerity. Wonderful touches of detail, for instance a diminuendo on ‘Matten’ the second time around, made all the difference. The artists were not hidebound by tradition, though by the same token they made no effort to be ‘new’ for the sake of it. ’Geforne Tränen’ was taken somewhat slower than usual, at least to start with, giving one pause for thought, but gathered pace, and, like a number of the songs, indeed proved admirably flexible in its progress, in this case setting the scene very well for an impassioned ‘Erstarrung’. Agonising dialogue with an unstable self marked the third stanza of ‘Wasserflut’, albeit of a different variety from the outright expressionism of, say, Matthias Goerne. This was perhaps still more of an interior nature. Ax’s bass line, oppressive without being over-emphasised, transformed ‘Auf dem Flusse’ into an ordeal of the soul, culminating in Keenlyside’s furious vocal climax.

‘Frühlingstraum’ again had one listen anew. The first and fourth stanzas were swifter, blither than one usually hears. Again, flexibility was very much to the fore in Keenlyside’s response to the words. Mood-swings, both vocal and pianistic, were perhaps if anything still greater than usual, especially with respect to the narcotic numbing experienced in the third and sixth stanzas. ‘Wann halt’ ich mien Liebchen im Arm?’ The piano was properly, chillingly silvery in ‘Die Krähe’ – even on a Steinway (as opposed to, say, a Bösendorfer). Here again, Ax’s iron-clad communication of form contributed greatly too, in this case to the turn of maddening; so, of course, did Keenlyside’s verbal response. Webern, unsurprisingly, was relished by Ax in ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, leading to the moment when Keenlyside seared the weeping of ‘wein’’ into our consciousness and thereafter our memories. A parallel madness of domesticity was verbally communicated in ‘Im Dorfe’, heightened, indeed in some cases led, by the obsessive nature of the piano figuration.

 

The graceful piano lilt of ‘Täuschung’ seemed born, as it doubtless was, of long immersion in Schubert’s piano music; the Moments musicaux came to mind. But there was no doubt that this was something more menacing, hallucinatory. Again, it was the piano that announced a new depth of sadness in ‘Der Wegweiser,’ showing the way, as it were, for Keenlyside in its final stanza to express, now every inch a Wozzeck, his true anguish. There was no unnecessary ‘extremity’, save for in his suffering. The weariness of ‘Das Wirtshaus’ and the final, deeply moving display of virility in ‘Mut!’ followed on with frightening necessity. For me, the only miscalculation was a too-forthright rendition of ‘Die Nebensonnen’, which seemed out of place with respect to work and performance. ‘Der Leiermann,’ however, mesmerised, its final lines summoning up not only the ghost (to come) of Wozzeck, but also of the most tragic of Papagenos.

 


 

Munich Opera Festival (4) - Volle/Deutsch: Winterreise, 21 July 2014

Prinzregententheater, Munich

Michael Volle (baritone)

Helmut Deutsch (piano)

 

One of the glories of the Munich Opera Festival is its series of Lieder recitals: not those curious concerts one hears of elsewhere, in which ‘star’ singers sing miscellaneous operatic arias, accompanied by pick-up-bands who occasionally throw in an overture or two, but serious song recitals. Londoners are, of course, spoiled when it comes to such matters, with the Wigmore Hall unquestionably supreme in the world as a song and chamber venue, but a festival in which Jonas Kaufmann and Michael Volle offer recitals, the latter a late replacement for an indisposed René Pape, has nothing to fear from comparisons. Pape’s promised programme had intrigued: whoever would have thought of his luxurious, ever-so-German bass in Roger Quilter? (Mussorgsky and Schumann were more like it.) Nevertheless, it was not remotely a disappointment to be faced with the prospect of a Winterreise from Volle and Helmut Deutsch; nor was it a disappointment in reality.

 

Having recently heard Kaufmann, with the same pianist, at the Royal Opera House, comparisons were always likely to suggest themselves, however much one strained to take the performance on its own terms. In the abstract, I tend to think that my preference is for a tenor in this cycle, but, as when one hears great recorded baritone performances from the past, the question never presented itself. Occasionally, my ear reminded me that it was not hearing the ‘right’ key, but even when it did so, I was not remotely troubled by the reminder. For, if there is no ‘ideal’ performance of this work in the singular, there are surely a good few ‘ideals’, and Volle comes as close to anyone in the plural. His is not a performance imbued with existential Angst from the outset; this is not the expressionism of, say, a Matthias Goerne. Indeed, ‘Gute Nacht’ sounded convincingly as a continuation if not from the end of Die schöne Müllerin – for the story there ends all too clearly – then from the world in which much of the earlier cycle takes place. There was plenty of scope then, for development, for a different turn to be taken, but what that turn might be was not yet inevitable. We might know that hopes would be frustrated, but we could sense, whether from Volle’s even-handed attention to words, to music, to their alchemy, or from Deutsch’s equal yet different dramatic precision in the piano part. Indeed, at times it seemed, intriguingly and convincingly, that Schubert’s musical forms and figurations, be they quasi-‘autonomous’ or clearly derived from the words, were as much a driving force as Wilhelm Müller’s poem itself, Schubert’s still under-explored closeness to Wagner made manifest.

 

Although I have not yet heard Volle as Wotan, there was something of the god’s Walküre monologues to our hero’s self-laceration, one in which, even at the extremity of, say, ‘Letzte Hoffnung’, this remained song, and Romantic song at that. Part and parcel of that characterisation, and certainly in no way opposed to it, was Deutsch’s pinpointing of the stabbing piano part: never can it have sounded closer to that arch-late-Romantic, Anton Webern, than here. What the most crucial turning-point(s) will be in this most chilling of descents will always be a matter of debate, whether in terms of performance or one’s own reception. Here, I could not help but think that it was this moment of ‘last hope’, still more than the signpost of ‘Der Wegweiser’ in which the moment of no turning back came. That there were several candidates, not competing but furthering the claims of each other, spoke very well of a narrative experience that held one spellbound throughout. The final extremes of no room at the Wirtshaus, the hallucinatory shining of three winter suns, and that terrifying, inevitable numbness of a finely observed, quite un-hysterical ‘Der Leiermann’ took us where we had to go, and in a sense, like the ‘hero’, we welcomed it as necessary catharsis. This was a less operatic Winterreise than Kaufmann’s. (Not that there is necessarily anything wrong with operatic influence, for every great artist will bring something different from his strengths and experience.) If anything, I think it touched me even more deeply, with an Innigkeit that seemed to find its source in the very heart of German Romanticism. For this seemed to be less ‘Volle’s Winterreise’ than Winterreise, pure and simple, however illusory that idea(l) might be.

Kaufmann/Deutsch - Winterreise, 6 April 2014

Royal Opera House

Schubert – Winterreise, D 911

Jonas Kaufmann (tenor)
Helmut Deutsch (piano)

Was the Royal Opera House the ideal venue for a performance of Winterreise, whether by Jonas Kaufmann or anyone else? No, for all the reasons you might suspect – and probably a few more. If only this could have taken place at the Wigmore Hall instead, though then tickets would have been still more difficult to come by (unless, that is, the sensible approach had been adopted of scheduling multiple performances, and prohibiting anyone from attending more than one). In any case, I have been to Lieder recitals in other, less-than-ideal venues before. Hearing Thomas Quasthoff and Daniel Barenboim perform this very work in the Berlin Philharmonie also proved a trial. And the principal reason then was the same as it was here: audience behaviour. Mobile telephones, strange rubbing noises, dropping of objects, you name it… But far and away the worst, as in Berlin, was the bronchial brigade. During songs, the terror was not too bad, though there were still a few wonderfully-timed displays; but the onslaught that greeted even the shortest of pauses, and which continued some way into Helmut Deutsch’s introduction to the next song and sometimes beyond, did its best to kill atmosphere, continuity, and most crucial, concentration alike. This was not the odd cough, unavoidable if irritating, this was rank selfishness from people who had no business setting foot anywhere near a performance. In Berlin, Quasthoff was so angered that he broke off part way through to plead – notably, in English – with the audience to desist. Such is hardly Kaufmann’s style, but he – and we – should never have had to endure what we did. It would be hoping for too much that the perpetrators would feel any sense of shame concerning their behaviour; we shall simply have to hope that the Almighty extends their stays in purgatory or elsewhere accordingly. And seriously, opera houses and concert halls should give thought to banning such sociopaths. Even if prices had been less high than on this occasion, or indeed admission had been free, performers and the rest of the audience alike deserve a modicum of consideration.

With that in mind, I shall have to limit myself to a few observations rather than offer a more detailed review. Insofar as it was possible as a listener to maintain concentration, one received an excellent sense of the songs as a cycle, as far more than the sum of their parts, from both Kaufmann and Deutsch. Unfortunately, that ‘insofar’ could not be entirely surmounted. To begin with, I wondered whether Kaufmann was not a little too withdrawn, inward-looking, especially for so large a venue, but not only did his performance draw one in, make one listen, it also revealed itself according to a longer-term plan. Thus the fine array of colourings at his disposal was not lavished upon ‘Gute Nacht’. Both performers, indeed, proved if not reticent, then cleverly expository. A journey, and a winter’s journey at that, had to be made; the world of weather-vane and frozen tears moved, but within limits, for it was but a starting-point. Likewise the colours of ‘Der Lindenbaum’, whilst different, whilst permitting a relative thaw, a relative hope, were never remotely garish; the journey had commenced, and everything was to be experienced upon its terms.

That said, when passions were truly roused, Kaufmann ensured that one knew it. It was striking to hear him sound quite so baritonal a tenor – irrespective, or almost so of the pitch. No wonder he makes so fine a Siegmund. Doubtless there would be some who would decry, or at least query, his performance as ‘operatic’, an all-too-easy evasion of very difficult questions. Lieder do not, any more than any other repertoire, exist in a vacuum; music, verse, drama, all manner of components and influences can and should combine to offer a musico-dramatic experience just as intense as that of a Wagner drama. (Indeed, the relationship between Schubert and Wagner is in need of far greater attention than anyone has yet accorded it.) Performers of all persuasions make choices; what matters is whether they convince. It would be absurd to hold against a performer his ability to maintain a vocal line. That does not mean in and of itself that he is not paying attention to the text. Kaufmann’s musicality shone through, liberated by sensitivity and technique alike; indeed, the directness of his verbal expression matched that of his musical expression. More to the point, there was rarely the slightest hint of disjuncture between the two. The ardent quality of Kaufmann’s hopes was all the more moving on account of his deeply considered performance – perhaps it was a little more akin to assumption of a role than to what many recital hall habitués would expect, but so what? – and its dynamically variegated quality. The quietest of ppp utterances could readily be heard, even given the venue and the audience; more importantly, it always had musico-dramatic warrant. This was a committed performance in the best of senses.

Moreover, Deutsch’s performance at the piano proved far more than a bedrock, though in many ways it certainly fulfilled that role too. His was not an overtly demonstrative account, drawing attention to pictorial aspects of the piano part and detracting, or at least distracting, from the overall journey. But it was perceptive nonetheless. The aethereal lightness to the opening of ‘Frühlingstraum’ was agonising, just as much for Deutsch’s attempt to smile through major-mode tears as for Kaufmann’s. The bipolar quality to the song was, moreover, beautifully, meaningfully captured, without forays into expressionist territory. (Not that I think there is anything wrong with the latter; such an approach can work very well, but it is not the only approach, and can often descend into mere caricature.) The Webern-intimations of ‘Letzte Hoffnung’ drew their crystalline terror from Deutsch, again at least as much as from Kaufmann, for theirs was a true partnerships – whatever the Kaufmann ‘fans’ might have come for. This would have been a far less complete, far less glacial, experience without Deutsch.

Finally, ‘Der Leiermann’, where piano stasis could provide the perfect setting for the existential devastation of words and halting vocal line. Kaufmann finally offered something that few, if any, other singers could or would dare: a final crescendo, beautiful yes but agonisingly, dramatically so, reminiscent in the abstract perhaps of his Florestan and yet entirely different in context. This was a final raging against the dying of the light, but we knew it would dissipate into nothing; as indeed, equally finely judged, it did. And this was nothingness rather than nihilism: Schubert rather than Mahler. A cough, needless to say, immediately followed – but after that, even this audience had the grace to remain silent for a little while.

Salzburg Festival (3) - Keenlyside/Aimard: Winterreise

Grosses Festspielhaus

Simon Keenlyside (baritone)
Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)


It would be difficult to come up with a superior replacement for an ailing Thomas Quasthoff than Simon Keenlyside. Indeed, if the truth be told, my preference would initially have been for Keenlyside, the present performance doing much to confirm that preference. Pierre-Laurent Aimard was an interesting choice as pianist; or should that be Schubert was an interesting choice for Aimard? There was often , as one might have expected, a modernistic slant to his performance, at times a little ‘objective’, not necessarily a bad thing, though at other times, his was a piano reading that showed itself fully, furiously committed. At any rate, this was not a routine Winterreise: Schubert’s great cycle emerged as a terrifying psychodrama, at times Romantic, at others expressionistic, but never comfortable.

Gute Nacht opened with promise, Aimard presenting a soft yet inexorable tread. Throughout, he proved alert to the ‘musical’ as well as ‘poetic’ form, ironclad formal certainty doing nothing to diminish poetic drama, but rather enhancing it, the rhythmic command of Die Post a case in point. He clearly knew when to support Keenlyside’s development and when to press into the dramatic foreground. If there was a certain neutrality to the piano tone in Die Wetterfahne and Gefrorne Tränen, the Debussy premonitions, Pelléas-like, of Erstarrung were testament to something particular and telling he was able to bring to Schubert: a frightening ill wind. The violence with which the third stanza of Der Lindenbaum opened was superbly judged: deeply felt in the bones, yet quite without theatrical overstatement. By contrast, the coldness of the piano in Auf dem Flusse told its story. The strangeness of Schubert’s harmonies in Irrlicht looked forward to late Liszt, rendering harmonic consolation all the more moving, whilst Mozartian delicacy in the introduction to Frühlingstraum complemented and yet ambivalently questioned Keenlyside’s lyricism. Is it not already too late to dream of springtime’s ‘bunten Blumen’? Whilst one might expect the extraordinary kinship to Webern of Letzte Hoffnung to play to Aimard’s strong suit, it was still striking how much it did. But kinship to the Schubert of the impromptus was equally apparent, in songs such as Täuschung and Das Wirtshaus. I should be intrigued to hear Aimard in more late Schubert. Finally, the ability to make the slightest (if only apparently so) variation tell in Der Leiermann was indicative of musical and dramatic certainty.

Keenlyside’s integrity – both as artist and ‘character’ – was palpable from the opening of the first song, bespeaking gentleness and hope: this was almost a Papageno verloren. There was great drama, in a more or less traditional sense, to be heard, for instance the overspill of bitterness at the close of Auf dem Flusse, but equally revealing were subtle changes in coloration, for instance the use of head voice upon the repetition of ‘Daß ich geweinet hab’?’ in Gefrorne Tränen. Yes, we noticed that the protagonist was weeping, but inwardly. Unheimlich use of head voice would chill, not least on account of its perfect integration – this was no mere ‘effect’ – in Auf dem Flusse too, rendering that subsequent explosion all the more terrifying. Wasserflut, immediately beforehand, had prepared the way: ardent, but not beautiful, Keenlyside brave enough sparingly to employ ugliness where necessary. And so, when two maiden eyes glowed in Rückblick, we fully experienced the psychosis of recollection, leading inexorably to a sickened tiredness in Rast, its weariness almost Parsifalian. (The Prelude to Act III came to mind.) In that context, the youthful ardour one still could hear in Frühlingstraum brought a tear to my eye, though of course one knew that it was too late, as the painful, hallucinogenic beauty and concluding anger (‘Grabe’) of Die Krähe would make clear. By the time we reached Im Dorfe, there was a terrible sense of desperately trying to keep everything together, the insistence on order both necessary and fooling no one. Der Wegweiser was sung with the desperate dignity of a Wozzeck, who returned definitively, frozen, in Der Leiermann.

Whether the Grosse Festspielhaus is the most appropriate venue for such a recital is open to question; the Mozarteum has a relatively intimate hall in which song recitals generally take place. Still, one can appreciate that audience demand might have played a role in the decision. What a pity, then, that so much of the audience proved incapable of remaining quiet, or in at least two cases, in their seats. Coughing was at a level that would have irritated or worse even at the height of the influenza season. The woman sitting in front of me seemed unable to keep her hands off her male companion. There was a dreadful whistling noise throughout much of the final stanza of Gute Nacht. And, to top it all, a mobile telephone from the row behind me rang at the end of Die Nebensonnen: heartbreaking preparation in the worst sense for Der Leiermann. Given such appalling behaviour, it is a tribute to the artists that the performance affected me as it did. Yes, there were occasional slips, but so what? I felt numb as after a fine performance of Tristan or Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, unable and unwilling to talk.

Performances of the Year 2009

This really has been a year full of wonderful performances. Even singling out a goodly number entails almost arbitrarily excluding others. It becomes all the more difficult with opera in particular, since the odds of a production and performance having nothing with which one might quibble verge upon the fantastical. Moreover, even when it comes to concert life, there can often be one or two outstanding performances amongst others, which, relatively speaking at least, disappoint. Nevertheless, I have managed to come up with a list of twelve performances - one for each month, on average, but not one from each month - which give some indication of the musical riches on offer in London and beyond this year.

Back in January, I was fortunate enough to attend four concerts as part of the annual Salzburg Mozartwoche. The pick of the bunch, if only just, was an all-Boulez concert, presented by Jörg and Carolin Widmann, the Experimental Studio of the Südwestrundfunk Freiburg, and Hidéki Nagano, who gave the Austrian premiere of Une page d’éphéméride. Carolin Widmann's Anthèmes 2 was simply mesmerising. Further proof, as if any were needed, as to the ongoing importance, indeed necessity, of the man who may justly be accounted the conscience of modern music.

From Boulez to the music he has done so much to champion: that of the Second Viennese School, in this case early Schoenberg. A performance of the Gurrelieder would be hard put not to be a special event. Nevertheless, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Philharmonia conjured up something unforgettable for the inaugural concert of their 'City of Dreams' festival.

Murray Perahia and the Concertgebouw under Bernard Haitink in Schumann's piano concerto, followed by Bruckner's Ninth Symphony: somehow, this concert lived up to and even surprassed expectations. I summarised the Bruckner thus: 'It was desperate but never Mahlerian, a true (non-)conclusion to a truly great performance. Haitink at eighty has never been greater.'

I initially prevaricated about including the Staatsoper Unter den Linden's new Lohengrin. Not every element of the musical performance quite matched up to Stefan Herheim's extraordinary, brilliant new production, though Klaus Florian Vogt made a powerful case to be considered the world's leading Heldentenor. Herheim's production, a worthy successor to his Bayreuth Parsifal, simply demands to be seen.

Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach have been performing the three Schubert song cycles together recently - and will perform all three at next year's Salzburg Festival. I caught their Wigmore Hall Winterreise, which was utterly devastating.

July took me to Aix en Provence, for an extremely pleasurable few days. Truly outstanding here was a concert from Pierre-Laurent Aimard, the Berlin Philharmonic, and Boulez as conductor. Bartók, Ravel, and Boulez (piano and orchestral Notations) would seem an almost stereotypical Boulez programme, but there was nothing routine to this concert.

Haitink returned to London for the Proms, conducting Mahler's Ninth Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra. I had been stunned earlier in the year by Daniele Gatti's performance of the very same work with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Haitink's reading was very different but equally powerful - and, forced to choose just one, the magnificent playing of the LSO would win out. Debating whether this extraordinary symphony, is ‘about’ life or death misses the point; Haitink showed that one cannot consider one without the other.

Daniel Barenboim brought his West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to the Proms for a trio of concerts. I could justifiably have chosen all three (Waltraud Meier in Fidelio was utterly unforgettable), but perhaps the finest of all was a chamber concert, which worked surprisingly well in the Royal Albert Hall. Barenboim's musicians were left to their own devices - and how! - for a magical performance of Mendelssohn's Octet. The Berg Chamber Concerto saw Barenboim return to the podium, his son Michael the violin soloist and Karim Said the piano soloist. Many find this work intractable; I have never understood the problem. But even the naysayers would surely have been bowled over by this incendiary account, which led us into a labyrinth from which no one would wish to depart.

The programming of much of the Philharmonia's City of Dreams festival was a little disappointing: no Webern, for instance, in a series dealing with Vienna 1900-35! However, the final concert, a semi-staged performance of Wozzeck, proved a shattering experience. Simon Keenlyside was close to definitive in the title role, whilst having the orchestra on stage rather than in the pit permitted Berg’s writing to resound as rarely it can.

A second Wigmore Hall Winterreise was equally demanding of inclusion, this time from Wolfgang Holzmair and Andreas Haefliger. Holzmair's very Austrian-sounding tenor is a very different instrument from Goerne's dark baritone. This was a Winterreise that refused to subordinate dramatic truth to musical beauty, often more akin to a poetry reading than a conventional Liederabend. I was chilled to the bone.

It had been many years - nine in fact - since I had heard Christian Thielemann live. I wish the wait had not been so long, but it was nevertheless worth it. The Berlin Philharmonic was here on home territory, in the Philharmonie, in a programme of Brahms and Schoenberg. Three Brahms choral gems, all far too infrequently heard, prepared the way for Schoenberg's Pelleas und Melisande, which for the first time in my listening experience fell into place. Thielemann’s long-term structural understanding set me wondering what Furtwängler would have made of a work I have long underestimated.

Finally, we return to the opera house, for Oper Leipzig's Al gran sole carico d'amore. Almost unbelievably, I saw two different productions of Nono's second 'opera' within a matter of months. Salzburg boasted the Vienna Philharmonic under Ingo Metzmacher, with Katie Mitchell directing. Leipzig's performance, however, was rendered all the more revolutionary immediate by Peter Konwitschny's searingly committed production. And the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra was pretty good too...

May I take this opportunity to wish my readers a very Happy New Year for 2010? I hope that the coming year will prove as rewarding as this one has.

Holzmair/Haefliger - Winterreise, 29 November 2009

Wigmore Hall

Wolfgang Holzmair (baritone)
Andreas Haefliger (piano)

This was the third and, most likely, last of my three Winterreisen this year, following Thomas Quasthoff and Daniel Barenboim in Berlin, and Matthias Goerne and Christoph Eschenbach, also at the Wigmore Hall. All three were very different performances, and not necessarily in ways I might have expected. Quasthoff and Barenboim, insofar as I could discern, given a supremely objectionable audience, proved the most Classical in outlook. Goerne and Eschenbach, not without their intimations of the twentieth century, might nevertheless be considered the most Romantic in their approach. To my surprise, it was the highly dramatic performance of Wolfgang Holzmair and Andreas Haefliger that took us deepest into the expressionist realm.

Holzmair’s general approach to the cycle is quite unlike any other I can recall. From the first words of Gute Nacht, one heard a directness of speech akin to poetry reading, the speech rhythms of Wilhelm Müller’s verse replicated in a fashion one might expect more of Mussorgsky or Janáček than Schubert. I might be tempted to call the performance operatic, were that term not so sullied with inappropriate Italianate connotations. Musico-dramatic then, for Wagner more than once came to mind: roles as diverse as Amfortas, Mime, and Tannhäuser. Perhaps it is the lightness of Holzmair’s baritone helps one think in terms of tenor roles; at any rate, this is a very different voice from that of Quasthoff or Goerne. Holzmair is not at all an artist to subordinate drama to musical beauty. Some might feel affronted that he does quite the opposite, and there is a degree of loss, but no single performance can be all-encompassing. He is unafraid to make sounds which, considered in themselves, might be ugly: again Wagner and indeed Schoenberg are not so far off the mark here. It also seems to me – and I wonder if I am being merely fanciful – that there is something specifically Austrian to Holzmair’s reading; certain vowels sound far more Viennese than hochdeutsch. Haefliger, moreover, proved anything but a reticent partner. At times, his part sounded well-nigh orchestral: more so, interestingly, than that of the conductor Barenboim.

This winter journey, then, was bleak from the onset of Haefliger’s insistent tread to Gute Nacht. Moments of repose, of beauty even, were rare. Risks were taken, for insistence the extreme rubato in Die Wetterfahne, suggestive of the possibility that the weather-vane might turn any which way. The wind, after all, ‘plays with hearts inside’. Occasionally such risks did not quite pay off; for instance, there were moments in Gefrorne Tränen and Rückblick when the performers were not quite together. Yet the dramatic end was always paramount, never more so than in the frozen rage of the final stanza to Erstarrung, or the freezing wind from voice and piano in Der Lindenbaum. A truly terrifying crescendo upon the words, ‘Und der weiche Schness zerrint,’ ensured that even the possibility of a warmer wind brought no consolation. Again, this might well be considered one-sided, and is far from the only path to follow, but it worked.

Frühlingstraum, a rare opportunity for Schubert’s aching beauty to manifest itself, was almost unbearable, the return to the major mode for ‘Ich träumte von Lieb’ und Liebe’ heartbreaking. In his harmonic preparation, Haefliger knew precisely where he was taking us – and why. Der greise Kopf was very slow – but again, it worked. In the piano prelude to Letzte Hoffnung, there was an almost pointillistic, Webern-like quality to be heard: no surprise, if one consults the score, for it even looks like late Brahms or Webern. A modernistic, fragmentary quality informed both of the first two stanzas, rendering all the more shocking Holzmair’s desperate lyricism when considering that the leaf might fall to the ground. A couple of songs on, and if you found Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau hectoring, you would certainly have felt the same of Holzmair’s Der stürmische Morgen. Yet this was a particular conception of a particular song. In Täuschung, Haefliger once again conjured up a fleeting image of beauty – Täuschung (delusion) indeed – seemingly derived from, or at least related to, the piano impromptus in its rhythmic and harmonic pointing.

This could only be a momentary distraction, however, from the ineffable sadness characterising Der Wegweiser. Here, Holzmair exhibited a prayer-like calm, beseeching someone or something in the second stanza: ‘I have, after all, done no wrong...’. Yet what does that someone or something care about that? The spareness of the piano writing in the final stanza sounded closer to late Liszt than I have ever heard before: chilling. After that, the sad dignity of the chords in Das Wirtshaus was almost more than I could take, though Holzmair managed to ratchet up the tension still further, with a bare honesty of expression far removed from conventional beauty at the end of the song. Der Leiermann brought a direct, deathly simplicity, which chilled to the bone. Rage – and what rage there had been! – was gone. As ever, Holzmair brought one so close to the verse itself, music almost negating itself. I was terrified. Even the inevitable return – had they ever gone away? – of the coughers could not quite disrupt the awestruck silence that ensued.

Goerne/Eschenbach - Winterreise, 17 June 2009

Wigmore Hall

Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Christoph Eschenbach (piano)

A quintessential image of German Romanticism is that of the blaue Blume, the unattainable ‘blue flower’ first dreamed of by Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen. Yet, for the darker side of Romanticism, a flower is doomed to wither, to die, as soon as – perhaps even before – it has bloomed, let alone been glimpsed. It seems to me that a performance of Winterreise, one of the vey greatest works of the Romantic movement, must bear in mind both strands. The first is that hope, perhaps attenuated, but hope nevertheless, which arises from the straining after the unattainable: not just the narrator’s beloved, but also something metaphysical, indefinable. Second, and overwhelming, is the tragic fate, instantiated in catastrophic breakdown, of the apparently hopeless winter’s journey. Hope and hopelessness are never, and in this tale can never be, reconciled, but the conflict between them begets and furthers the drama. I do not claim that the two strands are equal in strength, but Winterreise’s tragedy is heightened, not lessened, by the ghosts of hope. It is, when searchingly performed, an unbearable journey; so it proved here.

For someone whose musical outlook has been so marked not just by German music, but also by German history, culture, and thought, it is quite ironic – and perhaps rather healthy – that the recording with which I first explored Winterreise was the extraordinary account by Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten. I certainly do not expect to hear a Pears-like voice, should that exist, when I listen to Winterreise, but I think that it is partly from that early experience that, when I think of and listen to the work in my head, I hear a tenor, and that I retain a preference for the higher voice. This was an occasion when that preference never entered my head, so total was Matthias Goerne’s identification with the part and, in turn, mine with his performance.

It would be misleading to describe his or Christoph Eschenbach’s performance as operatic; this was Lieder-performance, without a doubt. And when I mentioned Goerne’s ‘identification with the part’, I certainly did not intend to imply a stage role, although he is a more physically demonstrative recitalist than many. However, there were many aspects of the performance which pointed, quite rightly, to Schubert’s shattering legacy to Wagner and beyond, to expressionism. Schubert always proves an ideal programme companion to composers of the Second Viennese School, much to the confusion or annoyance of an unimaginative, neo-Biedermeier contingent in the audience. Music drama, as such skilled exponents as Goerne, an unforgettable Wozzeck, and Eschenbach would keenly appreciate, has from Wagner to Henze owed a great deal to the example of Schubert’s only apparently smaller canvas.

The ominous tread of Eschenbach’s introduction to Gute Nacht, more insistent than one often hears, imparted a sense of fate, which would be borne out by the cycle, and yet that the dialectic between hope and its antipode also made its presence felt, for instance in Goerne’s subtle colouring of the word ‘Mondenschatten’. The moonlight’s shadow suggests that there remain possibilities; as the previous lines have it, ‘Muß selbst den Weg mir weisen/In dieser Dunkelheit’ (‘I must find my own way/in this darkness).* The almost infinite varieties of address on which Goerne could draw was exemplified by his explanatory ‘Gott hat sie so gemacht’ (‘God has made it so’), again tilting the scales towards fate, without overbalancing them. World-weariness was followed, quite justifiably, by the anger at injustice, temporal and otherwise, of Die Wetterfahne. The depth of tone so startlingly employed upon the words, ‘Ei Tränen, meine Tränen,’ (‘Ah tears, my tears’) in the following Gefrorne Tränen once again broadened the performers’ and Schubert’s musico-dramatic canvas. Likewise the ghostliness, peering forward to The Flying Dutchman, in the piano part of the far from placid Der Lindenbaum; Goerne’s warm yet chilling nostalgia during the final stanza fairly terrified.

The journey of contrast and underlying fatal unity continued with a burning anguish (‘heiße Weh’) which, in Goerne’s delivery truly burnt the listener, in Wasserflut. Auf dem Flusse proved almost too powerful for one to continue to listen, yet, as for Schubert’s traveller, there was no option but to do so. The final stanza was an object lesson in collaborative terror, the fury of the vocal part at one with an icy clarity in Eschenbach’s projection of the bass line. Near delirium remained controlled, if only just, in the ensuing backward glance (Rückblick). For me, it was in Rast that the piano part peered for the first time into the death-devoted heart of Tristan, late Liszt, and beyond, into the heart, or whatever might take its place, of twentieth-century expressionism. The strange, homeless harmony pointed to the Romantics’ perennial Heimweh (homesickness). To be at home, with oneself and with the world, was both an imperative and an impossibility. And this, despite the dream of spring that followed (Frühlingstraum). Here, the contrasting and developing characters of the first three stanzas were caught unerringly: Goerne’s naïve Romantic lyricism, in the first, especially its final line of happy birdsong, followed by the second stanza’s expressionism, and then the delusion and desperation of the third: not reconciling its predecessors, but an Adornian negative dialectic. The fourth, fifth, and sixth stanzas took a similar path, yet more extreme still, that final sixth stanza taken daringly slow, in almost frozen motion. If it was too much then to hope for repose in Einsamkeit, then the song opened with a sombre nobility worthy of the St Matthew Passion. Hope of a kind might still, just about, exist, although the build up to the final stanza’s Tristan-esque raging against the light suggested otherwise.

For one should remember, as Goerne and Eschenbach most certainly did, that the journey is both physical and metaphysical: a duality underlined by the painful appearance of Die Krähe, the ominous crow. What are its intentions? Do intentions still matter, or even exist? One can but hope, yet it is becoming a greater effort all the time. Eschenbach’s Letzte Hoffnung – a last hope indeed – brought hints of late Brahms and even Berg. And what hope could there be in Wozzeck or Lulu? A rare stumble at the opening of Der stürmische Morgen unsettled for the wrong reasons, but this was soon forgotten, as the bitterest of Goerne’s rage was unleashed upon seeing his heart’s likeness in the sky: ‘nothing but winter/winter cold and wild!’ This seemingly had to lead to Täuschung (‘Delusion’), otherwise the cycle would have ended there and then. Moreover, the delusion we heard brought a darkly seductive lilt, from both voice and piano, even perhaps a hint of the (falsely) consoling chamber music, of which Schubert was also such a master.

I was unprepared for the very slow tempo of Der Wegweiser, but how it worked! The metaphysical import of the signpost took on in this context almost the decisive nature of Wotan’s confrontation with Erda (and consequent rejection of Fate) in Siegfried. After that, Das Wirtshaus was taken more slowly still – and again, how it worked! This was a slowness lying beyond the glacial tempi Sviatoslav Richter would employ for the piano sonatas, yet the tread continued, as it must; it was not static. Rarely in tonal music can the major mode ever have sounded so bitter as it does in this song. We moved through Mut! and the phantasms of Die Nebensonnen to the exhaustion of Der Leiermann. Here we not only saw, through the vivid tone-painting, but we felt. Moreover, we felt not only the organ-grinder in, if this does not prove a contradiction too far, his numb lack of feeling; we also felt the protagonist’s horror, sympathy, and, just perhaps, his hope. For all the wretchedness of the organ-grinder, our hero could observe in him continuing resistance. And so could we.

There followed an all too brief silence, punctured by some cretin’s bursting in with a cry of ‘Bravo!’ He obviously thought – an abuse of the word, I realise – that he had been entertained by an Italian opera. The rest of us were as shattered as if we had been put through Wozzeck.

(* Here and elsewhere, I use Richard Stokes’s translation from The Book of Lieder, as quoted in the programme. Gavin Plumley’s excellent programme notes (to all three ‘cycles’) also deserve mention.)

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.