Salzburg Festival (7) – VPO/Salonen - Wagner and Messiaen, 28 August 2022

Grosses Festspielhaus

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and ‘Liebestod’
Messiaen: Turangalîla-Symphonie

Yuja Wang (piano)

Cécile Lartigau (ondes martenot)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen (conductor)

A little morning light music by Wagner and Messiaen proved a fine way to round off my visit to this year’s Salzburg Festival. Esa-Pekka Salonen is by now quite an experienced Wagnerian, especially for one not so associated with the opera house. His association with Tristan und Isolde goes back many years by now; I have heard him conduct it both in Paris and (in concert) in London. This performance of the first-act Prelude and so-called ‘Liebestod’—Wagner’s ‘Verklärung’ is surely closer to the mark—spoke with the wisdom of long acquaintance, yet not the slightest hint of staleness. The same, of course, could be said of the Vienna Philharmonic—Wagner’s abortive planned Vienna premiere notwithstanding. Indeed, both conductor and orchestra took care to ensure that there was much more to the sound than string-saturated ‘voluptuousness of hell’ (Nietzsche); the Viennese woodwind in particular had considerable bite. Salonen’s ears seemed focused on the century to come, whilst remaining rooted in Wagner’s own. Taking all the time that was needed, the performance nonetheless always moved, always evolved. Climaxes shattered and thrilled. One could lose oneself, but it would have been a pity to have done so.

The Prelude’s after-glow or -shock proved especially inviting, ushering in Isolde’s transfiguration as if it were telescoping the action in between. It appeared as if out of a dream, a neat solution to what remains tonally a problematic non-connection between the two movements. Under Salonen, the music truly teemed with life; it was not done for yet. The VPO shimmered, almost as if it were Liszt’s piano. And what a final climax ir proved to be.

Messiaen’s vast Turangalîla-Symphonie followed without a break. Two apparently affronted audience members left within a minute or two; I wonder what they had been expecting. Whatever divine and/or diabolical force was at work in the Introduction, it certainly made its immanence felt. As did Yuja Wang, whether solo or as part of the ensemble, for instance in dizzying duet with xylophone. The crazy imagination of Olivier Messiaen—almost as crazy as that of Richard Wagner—had been unleashed: awe-inspiring.

It did not take long before the two ‘Chants d’amour’ revealed Tristan-esque yearning and languor. Cécile Lartigau’s ondes martenot worked its weird and wonderful magic, slightly beyond yet never dissociated. Wang’s piano glistened and shuddered. This is not subtle music, and why should it be? In between, though, lay something far more inscrutable, the beguiling, even forbidding ‘Turangalîla 1’. It seemed, to return to Nietzsche, to lie beyond good and evil, beyond morality; it simply ‘was’.

A duly wacky ‘Joie du sang des étoiles’ fully embraced its big-heartedness, the whole of Creation seemingly in motion. Its successor, the ‘Jardin du sommeil d’amour’ offered a welcome, even necessary change of piece. The ‘rightness’ of Salonen’s tempi almost had one fail to notice them; on that account, it is all the more important to recognise them. There were darker, or at least less sweet, undercurrents, but undercurrents they remained. ‘Turangalîla 2’ in turn offered relief and contrast, before a ‘Developpement de l’amour’ designed to test the limits. Dynamic contrasts and moods of introversion and extroversion (albeit biased towards the latter) pushed each climax further. Apart from anything else, it was quite a noise. The close sounded, even tasted, as if an antidote we suspected might actually be a variant of the same witches’ brew.

‘Turangalîla 3’ extended the ambiguity of that close, erupting in hieratic, hypnotic mystery, as if aurally tasting—that sense again—a Boulezian sorbet. Hand on heart, I sometimes wish more of the work were like that; but then, it would be a different work. The final movement certainly functioned as such, motivically and in mood. It did not just happen to be last; it culminated.

Salzburg Festival (7) - Goerne/Wang/Matthes - Brahms, 9 August 2016

Grosser Saal, Mozarteum

Brahms – Die Schöne Magelone, op.33

Matthias Goerne (baritone)
Yuja Wang (piano)
Ulrich Matthes (narrator)

 

I had not initially been intending to attend this concert, but, owing to a mix-up, stupidly returned my ticket to hear Grigory Sokolov’s recital; by the time, I realised my mistake, the concert was sold out, as it continued to be until the day itself. I therefore bought myself a ticket for what seemed to be the next best option that evening. Why mention that at all? Partly to explain why I think I should have got more out of the concert, had I been more fully prepared.

 

For this was a performance of Brahms’s ‘song-cycle’, Die schöne Magelone, with narrative coherence provided by readings from Ludwig Tieck’s romance, the Liebesgeschichte der schönen Magelone und des Grafen Peter von Provence. Ulrich Matthes’s delivery of those readings was, to my second- or third-language ears quite outstanding. He did not try to upstage the musical performances, but nor was he unduly reticent; he understood – on one case, with wry, infectious amusement – the particular tone of Tieck’s verse, its direction, and its preparing the way, in this particular context, for Brahms’s setting of the songs within the romance, one per chapter. I should have benefited from a translation, whether in titles or in the programme, but only the songs were translated. It was certainly good practice for my German-language skills, and the language is not in itself especially difficult, but I could not help but think that an international festival such as Salzburg might have made provision for people in my situation and, indeed, for those with less or no German. There were, sadly, quite a few departures from the hall – accompanied, needless, to say by still-more disruptive tutting from some of those remaining.

 

None of that offers any reflection, of course, upon the readings themselves, which I should have loved to hear again, having more firmly an idea in my head of the direction and nature of the verse. Nor does it offer reflection upon the musical performances from Matthias Goerne and Yuja Wang. I did not find them especially well matched; nor did I find Wang’s piano tone especially well suited to this particular repertoire. That is perhaps more a matter of taste than anything else – however unfashionable this may be, Brahms will probably always retain at least a veneer of mahogany for me – but Wang’s bright, unapologetically Steinway-ish tone sounded to me more appropriate to Rachmaninov, say, than to Brahms. By the same token, though, there was much to admire in the clarity of her playing; there was no muddiness here. I liked the post-Schubertian lilt both she and Goerne imparted to ‘Sind es Schermzen’, for instance. However, for the most part she seemed somewhat withdrawn as an ‘accompanist’, rather than an active participant.

 

Goerne, by contrast, offered keen narration, far more dramatically committed than he had seemed in the Kindertotenlieder a couple of nights earlier. He placed Brahms not only as a successor to Schubert but to Beethoven too; indeed, in the aforementioned ‘Sind es Schmerzen’, the dialectic between, say, the heritage of  a song such as Erlkönig and that of the Beethoven Lieder Goerne had recently sung at the Wigmore Hall was vividly, dramatically apparent. A subtle, never exaggerated sense of near-Wagnerian – yet only near-Wagnerian – intoxication at times, for instance during ‘Wie soll ich die Freude’, proved another welcome ingredient to the mix. The conflicts of ‘Muß es eine Trennung geben’, the playfulness of ‘Sulima’ – no Orientalism here, thank God! – and the genuine optimism, even happiness of ‘Wie froh und frisch’ marked important stations on our procession to the close. And yet again it was Beethoven, in ‘Treue Lieder dauert lange’, who came to mind in something approaching ecstatic conclusion. Even for me, a non-native-speaker, the additional context had proved invaluable.