Royal Opera House
Woglinde - Sarah Fox
Wellgunde - Heather Shipp
Flosshilde - Sarah Castle
Alberich - Peter Sidhom
Wotan - John Tomlinson
Loge - Philip Langridge
Fricka - Rosalind Plowright
Freia - Emily Magee
Donner - Peter Coleman-Wright
Froh - Will Hartmann
Fasolt - Franz-Josef Selig
Fafner - Phillip Ens
Mime - Gerhard Siegel
Erda - Jane Henschel
Orchestra of the Royal Opera House
Antonio Pappano (conductor)
Keith Warner (director)
Stefano Lazaridis (designer)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
What a difference expectations make! When I had last heard Das Rheingold at Covent Garden, it had been at the beginning of the Royal Opera’s preparations for these complete cycles. Then I had been fortunate enough, on the occasion before that, to have heard Bernard Haitink conduct the Ring in semi-staged performances at the Royal Albert Hall: one of the greatest musical experiences of my life. To have said that the Covent Garden performance, with much the same cast, broadly the same production, and the same conductor as the present cycle, had disappointed would have been to put it mildly. The good news is that things have improved considerably, doubtless helped by the lowered expectations, although the improvements remain real and substantial.
Talk about removing the clutter from the production proved to be more than mere spin. On this occasion, Keith Warner’s vision shone through far more clearly, less unencumbered by the designs than had previously been the case. We are only at the beginning of the cycle, of course, but it seems that the overarching idea is a good one, with firm grounding in Wagner’s intentions. Standing with its intellectual roots in the thought of Ludwig Feuerbach and other Young Hegelian writers, this Ring bids fair to tell a tale of supersession of the rule of the gods, first created by men but subsequently coming to rule over him, by man. The Young Hegelian critique of religion informed attacks from writers of the subsequent generation, such as Marx, Bakunin, and Wagner, on other aspects of the pervading alienation they witnessed, notably with regard to the state and economics. And so, as the commentator Peter Wapnewski has written concerning the entry of the gods into Valhalla, ‘The gods are on dangerous ground, but they fail to recognise the fact, dazzled as they are by their own splendour, their foolish arrogance, and their delight in illusions. They are participating in a glorious, richly costumed dance of death.’ Where before, confusion had reigned, and it was difficult, even for those of us who flattered ourselves we ought to know what was going on, to determine this, a relatively streamlined presentation now aids our understanding. The final scene’s dance of death is brought out in all its illusory, deceiving and self-deceiving pomp, whilst Loge, with his coruscating criticism, detaches himself from his masters and begins to play with the fire that will consume them and their fortress of politico-religious deceit. Musically, however, this discrepancy could have been depicted more strongly, the orchestral triumph appearing rather unmediated. It was too beautiful, although the Rhinemaidens’ lament certainly made its point, as had the mysterious intervention of Jane Henschel’s fine Erda.
Much of the earlier action worked well too. The first scene, ‘a complete tragedy in miniature’ (Warren Darcy), told a story, again far more clearly than before, of Alberich, spurned by the Rhinemaidens on account of his ugliness, brought to a stage of frustration at which he would foreswear love in order to win the Rhinegold. Peter Sidholm’s characterisation of Alberich before the Fall was most impressive, in that here was an eager, bumbling dwarf, driven by what Wagner called his liebesgelüste (‘erotic urge’), not the monstrous tyrant of the third act, nor the embittered prisoner of the fourth. Indeed, Sidholm acknowledged all these stages of Alberich’s tragic progression, with no harm done to more purely musical considerations. The Rhinemaidens too impressed, perhaps more individually in vocal terms than when in chorus. But their role as amoral sirens – a just state of affairs must be created rather than merely discovered in Nature – was well portrayed. Their movement now seemed less uncertain. I am not sure that Wotan’s presence, observing events, added much to our understanding, but nor was it especially distracting. Much orchestral colour was brought to the fore, suggesting that Pappano had learned well his lessons as sometime répétiteur to Daniel Barenboim, whose Wagner has always exhibited greater colouristic tendencies than his ‘Teutonic’ reputation might allow. Yet there lacked a sense of true stillness, of a sound that had always been there, with the crucial opening E flat, the subsequent development of the Prelude therefore falling somewhat short of the spontaneous generation that is its lifeblood. Dynamic contrasts were not as great as they might have been, much of the orchestral direction tending towards what Pierre Monteux tellingly dubbed the indifference of mezzo forte. This of all scenes needs more gradations of light and shade. On the credit side, the music flowed far better than on the Rheingold’s first outing, in which perennial stops and starts had prevented the musical melos from ever really announcing itself.
The crucial transition between the first two scenes, in which the ring motif metamorphoses into that of Valhalla, showing Alberich and Wotan to be dialectically related in their pursuit and acquisition of power, was not heard to best effect. A particularly jarring moment came with what should have been the magical – in many senses – first statement of the Valhalla motif proper: the harps and tubas were simply not together. It sounded as if the latter were late, rather than the former early, but rhythmic vagueness made it difficult to tell with any certainty. The rest of this first statement was not delivered without blemish either.
Thereafter, the music settled down and again was far less subject to stops and starts than had been the case the first time round. The gods’ heavenly residence was clearly a place of wealth and illusion, which is as it should be. The influence, in terms of a frankly plutocratic portrayal, of Patrice Chéreau’s legendary Bayreuth production was no cause for shame; any production of the Ring must by now come to terms with its predecessors, and will profit from considering reception history as an integral part of its own message. The Zeus-Hera relationship of Wotan and Fricka was well observed. John Tomlinson’s Wotan was as much of a stage presence as it always has been, and his keen attention to the text and its implications cannot be commended highly enough. There is sometimes a more pronounced wobble to his voice than was once the case, but the dramatic truthfulness is such that this is really only a matter for pedants. Tomlinson is so immeasurably superior to Bryn Terfel in the role that the Royal Opera should be thanking its lucky stars that the latter so gracelessly withdrew at very short notice. Rosalind Plowright correctly resisted the temptation to make Fricka too much of a monster: her interest in the ring, once Loge informs her that it might tie her husband more closely to her was sharply characterised by a telling shift in vocal quality.
The prospect of a fine Loge stealing the Rheingold show is always a distinct possibility. It certainly happened at the English National Opera, where Thomas Randle was more or less the only positive aspect of an otherwise execrable production, both scenically and musically. Here, Tomlinson’s Wotan was far too strong to cede the stage to Philip Langridge’s quicksilver Loge, but this was a fine performance. His busy stage action was well directed by Warner; the combination of this with his vocal modulation presented a Loge who was, perhaps more than any I have seen, the very incarnation of instrumental reason. Any tendency towards caricature was firmly resisted, but he remained an outsider. The contrast with Franz-Josef Selig’s lovelorn Fasolt, the only character who truly gains a hold over our emotions in this frigid world, did credit to both artists. Other parts during this scene were sung well enough, without any particular insights. It is, however, worth adding that the insights to be gleaned from deliberately cipher-like parts such as Freia and Froh are few and far between. Will Hartmann certainly beguiled in a properly ineffectual fashion in the latter part, which is probably as much as one can expect. His pseudo-oriental (Orientalist?) garb was puzzling, but did no great harm. Phillip Ens’s Fafner, the ‘pure seeker after power’ (Deryck Cooke) ought really to have been more imposing, both here and, more crucially, in the final scene.
Nibelheim might be considered more controversial. This is not straightforwardly the realm of capital as would generally be understood and certainly as Wagner intended. However, if one takes a broader view of economic power being a form rather than the determining form of power – that is, somewhat vulgarly, if one tends towards Wagner’s proto-Nietzschean will-to-power rather than to Marxian dialectical materialism – than one can see this portrayal of a dark world of cruel scientific experiments as far from entirely out of keeping. This was a development of Wagner readily comprehensible to students of the post-Freudian Marxism of the Frankfurt School, and of Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment in particular. It seemed to me to have much in common with Warner’s fine Covent Garden Wozzeck, which dwelled on a similar theme. It is certainly one with which Wagner, and the later Wagner in particular, would have sympathised, given his increasing hostility towards scientific domination. For once, the Tarnhelm’s transformations of its wearer were credible on stage, although, sadly, the Tarnhelm music lacked the rootless, phantasmagorical mystery, born as much of its instrumentation as its harmony, which is so vital to full expression of its seductive horror. Sidholm’s Alberich, as I have already mentioned, was a man transformed by his new status, and his interactions with Gerhard Siegel’s creditable Mime, and with the visitors to Valhalla, were strongly portrayed, as also they would be during the final scene. If Siegel’s Mime was not a portrayal that burned itself into the memory, it wisely heeded Wagner’s warning that Mime must never lapse into caricature, and paid due attention to musical as well as stage considerations.
The two other transformation scenes, descending to and ascending from Nibelheim, lacked somewhat in dramatic impact, although the purely scenic realisation was well handled. Pappano is not a natural Wagnerian, but his reading of the score has improved almost out of recognition. There is still something of a sense of adhering too much to the leitmotifs as signposts, rather than understanding leitmotif technique, in Carl Dahlhaus’s words, as ‘the binding together of a music drama through a dense web of motivic connections from within’. It was not sufficiently clear that Wagner’s writing is to a considerable extent symphonic, or at least post-symphonic, nor that the entire network of interrelated themes may be seen to derive from the individualisation of, to quote Wagner himself, ‘a few malleable Nature motifs’. Yet the dramatic flow was significantly superior, both on stage and in the pit. Haitink will never, I am sure, be forgotten by those of us who heard him, but this was, all considered, a better Rheingold than I had dared hope.
Thursday, 18 October 2007
Monday, 8 October 2007
LSO/Davis: Haydn, The Creation, 7 October 2007
Barbican
Haydn: The Creation (sung in German)
Sally Matthews (soprano)
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Dietrich Henschel (baritone)
London Symphony Chorus
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)
Let there be no beating around the bush: this was a magnificent performance. I am beginning, or perhaps more than beginning, to run out of superlatives concerning Sir Colin Davis's music-making with the London Symphony Orchestra. This was fully the equal, however, of either of the previous two concerts held in celebration of his eightieth birthday. It vied in quality with a recording I had previously thought untouchable, that of Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in this work. Indeed, were one to combine elements of both, I believe we should find ourselves but a hair's breadth from perfection. The additional good news is that the performance was being recorded.
This was very much Sir Colin's reading, beholden to no school or orthodoxy. The astonishing 'Representation of Chaos' was played with a mysterious, veiled quality, not from the strings, who minimised rather than eschewed vibrato. This we hear far too often nowadays, or rather we hear it for the wrong reason: on account of some dubious 'historical' dogma. Here, it was done for good musico-dramatic reasons, with sensitive application of vibrato rather than pseudo-ascetic self-denial. The creative act removed the veil, engendering orchestral playing that was sweet yet never cloying, incisive yet never brash, and supremely well-balanced throughout. As ever with Davis, the woodwind provided especial delight. (My Seen and Heard colleague Melanie Eskenazi recently suggested that this might have roots in Sir Colin's upbringing as a clarinettist, and I am sure this must be true.) Those three flutes at the beginning of the Third Part of the oratorio truly represented an annunciation of Paradise. Yet the rest of the orchestra was every bit as good. Whilst I admire the aforementioned Karajan recording greatly, I think Davis here had the edge in terms of careful yet never fussy differentiation of light and shade. Every line told, as did its combination with every other line. This was the Davis of his greatest Mozart achievements - and, of course, the Davis of those wonderful recordings of Haydn symphonies. If only there were more...
Comparisons, I know, are odious, but the soloists did not match the perhaps unmatchable team Karajan had at his disposal. Ian Bostridge presented a finely detailed Uriel, keenly responsive to the sound and meaning of the German text. His reading was not without its mannerisms, especially at the somewhat tremulous outset, but it was nevertheless a commanding, if undeniably 'English-tenor-style' performance. He can hardly be blamed for not being Fritz Wunderlich, the beauty of whose tone so ravishes under Karajan. Their reading of 'Mit Würd und Hoheit angetan' is one of the most beautiful things I have heard, never beautiful for its own sake, but as a supreme expression of Enlightenment humanism. By comparison, this aria was rather plain, although the surprise of its miraculous, Schubertian modulation did register. Likewise, Sally Matthews could hardly be expected to ravish as did Gundula Janowitz. Hers was nevertheless perhaps the finest of the soloists' performances. Where she might have been accused of a little mannerism, in her comely portrayal of Eve, there is ample justification in the text, especially the musical text. Moreover, she handled the difficult coloratura not just with technical aplomb (Janowitz had a few difficulties here, I recall), but with truly musical colouring. Dietrich Henschel, however, proved a variable soloist. There were ominous insecurities of tuning in his opening recitative. This problem lessened, although it never quite abated. He pointed the words carefully, but his tone was sometimes rather dry and lacked character in comparison with his colleagues, let alone with Walter Berry and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Raphael and Adam on the Karajan recording).
I can happily report, however, that the London Symphony Chorus was superb. This was, without exception, the finest choral singing I have heard in The Creation. It boasted everything: weight and lightness, warmth and clarity, and a keenness of response that would even put most smaller choirs to shame. Above all, it was wonderfully human. In this, Davis certainly had the edge over Karajan's far from negligible Wiener Singverein, still more so over one highly-regarded professional choir in another recording, whose performance is so clinical that it might be computer-generated. The singing was beautifully moulded, yet never self-consciously so. More importantly, it was truly exultant, as close to fulfilment of Haydn's challenge to praise the Creator as we shall have the fortune to hear this side of the heavenly host. The heavens really were telling the glory of God, and Haydn's work was truly enabled to display the firmament. This was a memorable performance indeed, which, unless something horrendous should happen in terms of its transfer to disc, should eagerly be acquired by all those who love what is perhaps Haydn's greatest single work.
Haydn: The Creation (sung in German)
Sally Matthews (soprano)
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Dietrich Henschel (baritone)
London Symphony Chorus
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)
Let there be no beating around the bush: this was a magnificent performance. I am beginning, or perhaps more than beginning, to run out of superlatives concerning Sir Colin Davis's music-making with the London Symphony Orchestra. This was fully the equal, however, of either of the previous two concerts held in celebration of his eightieth birthday. It vied in quality with a recording I had previously thought untouchable, that of Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic in this work. Indeed, were one to combine elements of both, I believe we should find ourselves but a hair's breadth from perfection. The additional good news is that the performance was being recorded.
This was very much Sir Colin's reading, beholden to no school or orthodoxy. The astonishing 'Representation of Chaos' was played with a mysterious, veiled quality, not from the strings, who minimised rather than eschewed vibrato. This we hear far too often nowadays, or rather we hear it for the wrong reason: on account of some dubious 'historical' dogma. Here, it was done for good musico-dramatic reasons, with sensitive application of vibrato rather than pseudo-ascetic self-denial. The creative act removed the veil, engendering orchestral playing that was sweet yet never cloying, incisive yet never brash, and supremely well-balanced throughout. As ever with Davis, the woodwind provided especial delight. (My Seen and Heard colleague Melanie Eskenazi recently suggested that this might have roots in Sir Colin's upbringing as a clarinettist, and I am sure this must be true.) Those three flutes at the beginning of the Third Part of the oratorio truly represented an annunciation of Paradise. Yet the rest of the orchestra was every bit as good. Whilst I admire the aforementioned Karajan recording greatly, I think Davis here had the edge in terms of careful yet never fussy differentiation of light and shade. Every line told, as did its combination with every other line. This was the Davis of his greatest Mozart achievements - and, of course, the Davis of those wonderful recordings of Haydn symphonies. If only there were more...
Comparisons, I know, are odious, but the soloists did not match the perhaps unmatchable team Karajan had at his disposal. Ian Bostridge presented a finely detailed Uriel, keenly responsive to the sound and meaning of the German text. His reading was not without its mannerisms, especially at the somewhat tremulous outset, but it was nevertheless a commanding, if undeniably 'English-tenor-style' performance. He can hardly be blamed for not being Fritz Wunderlich, the beauty of whose tone so ravishes under Karajan. Their reading of 'Mit Würd und Hoheit angetan' is one of the most beautiful things I have heard, never beautiful for its own sake, but as a supreme expression of Enlightenment humanism. By comparison, this aria was rather plain, although the surprise of its miraculous, Schubertian modulation did register. Likewise, Sally Matthews could hardly be expected to ravish as did Gundula Janowitz. Hers was nevertheless perhaps the finest of the soloists' performances. Where she might have been accused of a little mannerism, in her comely portrayal of Eve, there is ample justification in the text, especially the musical text. Moreover, she handled the difficult coloratura not just with technical aplomb (Janowitz had a few difficulties here, I recall), but with truly musical colouring. Dietrich Henschel, however, proved a variable soloist. There were ominous insecurities of tuning in his opening recitative. This problem lessened, although it never quite abated. He pointed the words carefully, but his tone was sometimes rather dry and lacked character in comparison with his colleagues, let alone with Walter Berry and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (Raphael and Adam on the Karajan recording).
I can happily report, however, that the London Symphony Chorus was superb. This was, without exception, the finest choral singing I have heard in The Creation. It boasted everything: weight and lightness, warmth and clarity, and a keenness of response that would even put most smaller choirs to shame. Above all, it was wonderfully human. In this, Davis certainly had the edge over Karajan's far from negligible Wiener Singverein, still more so over one highly-regarded professional choir in another recording, whose performance is so clinical that it might be computer-generated. The singing was beautifully moulded, yet never self-consciously so. More importantly, it was truly exultant, as close to fulfilment of Haydn's challenge to praise the Creator as we shall have the fortune to hear this side of the heavenly host. The heavens really were telling the glory of God, and Haydn's work was truly enabled to display the firmament. This was a memorable performance indeed, which, unless something horrendous should happen in terms of its transfer to disc, should eagerly be acquired by all those who love what is perhaps Haydn's greatest single work.
CSO/Muti: Prokofiev, Falla, and Ravel, 6 October 2007
Royal Festival Hall
Prokofiev: Symphony no.3 in C minor, Op.44
Falla: The Three-cornered Hat, Suite no.2
Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole
Ravel: Boléro
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti (conductor)
This was a splendid concert, full of orchestral colour, which acted as a showcase for numerous strengths of both orchestra and conductor. That the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of the world's greatest orchestras can hardly have been in doubt even before, but there could be no doubt having heard it at the Royal Festival Hall. It is in many respects a very American sound, with gleaming strings, great precision of attack, and of course its celebrated brass section, but it never sounded anonymously 'international' as some bands of that ilk can. Muti is of course a brilliant conductor, 'old school' and all the better for it. I was put in mind more than once of the orchestral command exercised by two former music directors in Chicago, Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti. Yet there was none of the brashness that could sometimes characterise Solti's work.
Prokofiev's Third Symphony packed quite a punch from the very outset. Those thumping initial chords made a duly screaming impact, not only with their volume, not only with their dissonance, but also with the supremely judged balance, which allowed more colours to emerge than has often been the case in performances of this work. This was achieved without any lessening of the impact of brass and percussion. If the opening overshadowed the rest of the first movement, this is attributable to Prokofiev rather than to the performance, which did everything he could conceivably have asked. It does seem to me that there is something of a mismatch between the musical material, initially conceived for the masterly Fiery Angel, and symphonic form, but probably the best course of action is to consider a surreal succession of often garish images, rather than to worry too much about formal shortcomings. The repose of the slow movement was certainly welcome. Muti's command of the long, almost vocal lines impressed, as did the varied solo contributions. The violin glissandi and other ghostly aspects of the scherzo came across with unusual vividness, and never at the expense of the clearer form of that movement. Much the same could be said of the well-nigh faultless finale, whose marriage of grotesquerie and harmonic side-slipping lyricism was portrayed with both a keen ear for colour and balance and an impressive sense of theatrical effect. This symphony is not often performed, but I can safely say that I have not heard a superior performance.
In the second half, we moved to Spain. The second suite from Falla's ballet, The Three-cornered Hat, received an equally committed reading. Rhythms were acutely pointed, as was their marriage to harmonic progression. The array of colours on offer was kaleidoscopic, with warm and sultry moments caught in vivid relief against the backdrop of the dance. As with every section of the evening's programme, there was never the slightest doubt that the musicians knew precisely where they were going; they acted as perfect hosts during our colourful tour.
The Ravel items were, if anything, more impressive still, partly, I suspect, on account of their being whole works, and partly on account of the still greater scope they offered for colouristic differentiation. In this respect, orchestra and conductor wanted nothing. The emphasis may have been more brazenly 'Spanish' than French performances of the old school might have offered, but there is nothing wrong with that. There was certainly none of that wateriness in the strings that has often characterised readings of that school. Precision was at the very core, as it should be, since Ravel has none of Debussy's ambiguity; not for nothing did Stravinsky dub him a Swiss watchmaker. The ostinato rhythm of the Rapsodie's 'Prélude à la nuit' pulsated with a winning combination of persistence and languor, whilst Ravel weaved his colouristic and harmonic magic above. And the cumulative effect of Boléro can rarely have been better achieved - even if that very success did point to the undoubted monotony of the work. Thank goodness for that final harmonic wrench to E major, without which I might have been driven mad.
As an encore, Muti and the CSO offered a blistering account of the Overture to Verdi's La forza del destino. It exhibited all the virtues outlined above, and moreover boasted a flexibility born of the conductor's immersion in Verdi's music. To return to the beginning, its opening evocation of fate packed just as much a punch as had the barbarism of the Prokofiev symphony, yet the celebrated melody that followed (forever associated in my mind with the films Jean de Florette and Manon des sources) was as tender as one could imagine. Even for a Verdi sceptic such as myself, this provided a worthy culmination to the evening. The repertoire exhibited not a trace of Teutonic profundity, but our musical heritage possesses other aspects demanding attention, attention which paid off handsomely in this case.
Prokofiev: Symphony no.3 in C minor, Op.44
Falla: The Three-cornered Hat, Suite no.2
Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole
Ravel: Boléro
Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Riccardo Muti (conductor)
This was a splendid concert, full of orchestral colour, which acted as a showcase for numerous strengths of both orchestra and conductor. That the Chicago Symphony Orchestra is one of the world's greatest orchestras can hardly have been in doubt even before, but there could be no doubt having heard it at the Royal Festival Hall. It is in many respects a very American sound, with gleaming strings, great precision of attack, and of course its celebrated brass section, but it never sounded anonymously 'international' as some bands of that ilk can. Muti is of course a brilliant conductor, 'old school' and all the better for it. I was put in mind more than once of the orchestral command exercised by two former music directors in Chicago, Fritz Reiner and Sir Georg Solti. Yet there was none of the brashness that could sometimes characterise Solti's work.
Prokofiev's Third Symphony packed quite a punch from the very outset. Those thumping initial chords made a duly screaming impact, not only with their volume, not only with their dissonance, but also with the supremely judged balance, which allowed more colours to emerge than has often been the case in performances of this work. This was achieved without any lessening of the impact of brass and percussion. If the opening overshadowed the rest of the first movement, this is attributable to Prokofiev rather than to the performance, which did everything he could conceivably have asked. It does seem to me that there is something of a mismatch between the musical material, initially conceived for the masterly Fiery Angel, and symphonic form, but probably the best course of action is to consider a surreal succession of often garish images, rather than to worry too much about formal shortcomings. The repose of the slow movement was certainly welcome. Muti's command of the long, almost vocal lines impressed, as did the varied solo contributions. The violin glissandi and other ghostly aspects of the scherzo came across with unusual vividness, and never at the expense of the clearer form of that movement. Much the same could be said of the well-nigh faultless finale, whose marriage of grotesquerie and harmonic side-slipping lyricism was portrayed with both a keen ear for colour and balance and an impressive sense of theatrical effect. This symphony is not often performed, but I can safely say that I have not heard a superior performance.
In the second half, we moved to Spain. The second suite from Falla's ballet, The Three-cornered Hat, received an equally committed reading. Rhythms were acutely pointed, as was their marriage to harmonic progression. The array of colours on offer was kaleidoscopic, with warm and sultry moments caught in vivid relief against the backdrop of the dance. As with every section of the evening's programme, there was never the slightest doubt that the musicians knew precisely where they were going; they acted as perfect hosts during our colourful tour.
The Ravel items were, if anything, more impressive still, partly, I suspect, on account of their being whole works, and partly on account of the still greater scope they offered for colouristic differentiation. In this respect, orchestra and conductor wanted nothing. The emphasis may have been more brazenly 'Spanish' than French performances of the old school might have offered, but there is nothing wrong with that. There was certainly none of that wateriness in the strings that has often characterised readings of that school. Precision was at the very core, as it should be, since Ravel has none of Debussy's ambiguity; not for nothing did Stravinsky dub him a Swiss watchmaker. The ostinato rhythm of the Rapsodie's 'Prélude à la nuit' pulsated with a winning combination of persistence and languor, whilst Ravel weaved his colouristic and harmonic magic above. And the cumulative effect of Boléro can rarely have been better achieved - even if that very success did point to the undoubted monotony of the work. Thank goodness for that final harmonic wrench to E major, without which I might have been driven mad.
As an encore, Muti and the CSO offered a blistering account of the Overture to Verdi's La forza del destino. It exhibited all the virtues outlined above, and moreover boasted a flexibility born of the conductor's immersion in Verdi's music. To return to the beginning, its opening evocation of fate packed just as much a punch as had the barbarism of the Prokofiev symphony, yet the celebrated melody that followed (forever associated in my mind with the films Jean de Florette and Manon des sources) was as tender as one could imagine. Even for a Verdi sceptic such as myself, this provided a worthy culmination to the evening. The repertoire exhibited not a trace of Teutonic profundity, but our musical heritage possesses other aspects demanding attention, attention which paid off handsomely in this case.
Tuesday, 2 October 2007
Luigi Nono: Fragments of Venice - opening concert, 1 October 2007
Queen Elizabeth Hall
Nono - Incontri
Schoenberg - Chamber Symphony no.1, Op.9
Nono - Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell' op.41 di Arnold Schoenberg
Nono - 'No hay caminos hay que caminar ... Andrej Tarkowskij'
London Sinfonietta
Diego Masson (conductor)
How wonderful for the Southbank Centre to be celebrating Luigi Nono! It is about time someone did, the only other major retrospective of his work in this country of which I am aware having been at Huddersfield in 1995. This series will reach its climax next May with the British premiere of Prometeo, his 'tragedy of listening'. For this concert, we were treated to three varied works, plus a masterpiece from his posthumous father-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg. Proceedings had commenced even before the concert, with a conversation between Christopher Cook and Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, the composer's widow (and Schoenberg's daughter). She provided an informative and at time moving insight into her late husband's beliefs and methods, not least his instruction from Bruno Maderna, who had encouraged him to compare responses compositional problems in composers old and new, for instance Gabrieli and Webern, Ockeghem and Schoenberg. Hermann Scherchen also emerged as a hero of the tale. We also heard a most sympathetic account of the heady days of 1950s Darmstadt, not as some quasi-totalitarian Ministry of Serialist Truth but as a place of openness, experimentation, and - perhaps most interestingly - as a meeting-place for those who had survived the horrors of fascism with the post-war avant garde. Tradition and its development played a much greater role than myths of a 'year zero' have allowed.
The concert began with a few words from the pianist John Constable concerning the recently deceased London Sinfonietta flautist, Sebastian Bell, to whom the concert was dedicated. Berio's brief Autre fois, composed for flute, harp, and clarinet, in memory of Stravinsky, was performed - most beautifully - in Bell's honour.
We then proceeded to the 'encounters' of Nono's 1955 Incontri, for twenty-four instruments. The two independent structures of which Nono wrote, emerged independently of one another, through differentiation of rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre. And yet they came together too, unable to escape each other, and producing something more through their encounters. Post-Webernian lines and combinations, and extreme dynamic contrasts were well judged by Diego Masson and his expert players, both in terms of individual clarity and a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. This is partly a matter of mathematics - what music is not? - in terms of the ratios between the two structures, but also of development, of sympathy, of a refusal to repeat oneself which Nono shared with Schoenberg. One felt a true sense of musical and political unity, of the hope in social solidarity which Nuria Schoenberg-Nono had already spoken as a hallmark of Nono's oeuvre.
Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony has long been a Sinfonietta speciality. This was a performance which evinced long familiarity with a work that is for these players 'standard repertoire'. The confidence with which the string soloists projected their lines meant that there was no chance of one of this work's greatest pitfalls presenting itself, namely the strings being overshadowed by the piquant wind. (The opposite pitfall tends to occur in the later, inferior version for full orchestra.) In its contrapuntal clarity and the propulsion of its harmonic progression, this was a model performance, expertly guided by Masson. My taste often tends to veer towards Schoenberg performances that emphasise a little more his Romantic inheritance, but the bracing, relentless modernism of this reading afforded an equally valid perspective and, given the circumstances, was perhaps more apt. My sole cavil was that the 'slow movement' did not really emerge as distinctly as it might. If one thinks of the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, whose form Schoenberg's work so closely resembles, one realises what is gained by a stronger sense of four distinct movements within the one-movement sonata form of the whole. The conclusion, however, was duly thrilling, without ever degenerating into a headlong rush, as can often be its fate.
The interval afforded an opportunity to observe the progress of work from Kingston University students on a wall of protest in the foyer, inspired by the final work on the programme. We too were encouraged to offer reactions to the music in the guise of postcards for colouring, which would then be displayed. This certainly contributed to the buzz of the occasion, to a genuine rather than manufactures sense of the excitement of an event - which the beginning of this festival certainly should have been - so different from the often dreary conventionality of more 'mainstream' concerts.
Nono's greatest homage to Schoenberg, his Canonical Variations on a note row from the Ode to Napoleon, received an extremely fine reading. All the virtues of the Incontri performance were once again present, as was a definite sense of narrative progression, of moving towards and then beyond the final variation's statement of the row. Where 'Darmstadt', as we somewhat misleadingly and monolithically have come to call it, has tended to be portrayed as tolerating Schoenberg mostly for having prepared the way for Webern, here we heard an avowedly post-Webernian serialist employing the Webern inheritance - the sighs of instrumental fragments, the constructivist tension between certain intervallic relations - of earlier variations to build up to a more or less explicit tribute to one of Schoenberg's most unambiguously 'political' works. The almost Romantic beauty of the orchestra, albeit never without a necessary astringency - reminded us of Nuria Schoenberg-Nono's conception of Darmstadt as a continuation of European tradition. (Failure of many of the participants thus to root themselves, rather than outright antipathy towards Cage, was why Nono had eventually left, she explained.)
'No hay caminos, hay que caminar ... Andrej Tarkovskij' represented late Nono (1987). Inspired by a mediaeval wall inscription from a Toledo monastery - 'Traveller, there is no pathway, only travelling itself' - this work triumphantly refuted claims that Nono's later work lost its political edge. There was still here the humanist emphasis upon creation and the utopian hope of a better society, no matter what difficulties life and this world might present, which had marked Nono's earliest works. What was new was the spatial experimentation, a product of practices old (consider Gabrieli) and new (think Stockhausen), with additional instrumentalists positioned around and in between the audience, responding to and furthering the 'main' orchestra on the stage. The slow, still Webern-like beauty of so much of this work received the fullest contrasts with the sudden eruptions from beyond. This was an unpredictable procession, for there are no paths, only travelling. The audience was compelled by the extremes of expression to listen more closely, and thus the smallest variations in timbre and pitch registered with the utmost forcefulness: violent and beguiling, the two attributes gaining in intensity through collision with one another (rather like the two structures of Incontri). This was tribute indeed to a truly committed performance from Masson and the London Sinfonietta. Their belief in Nono was truly infectious, in the best sense, and bodes well for the festivities to come.
Nono - Incontri
Schoenberg - Chamber Symphony no.1, Op.9
Nono - Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell' op.41 di Arnold Schoenberg
Nono - 'No hay caminos hay que caminar ... Andrej Tarkowskij'
London Sinfonietta
Diego Masson (conductor)
How wonderful for the Southbank Centre to be celebrating Luigi Nono! It is about time someone did, the only other major retrospective of his work in this country of which I am aware having been at Huddersfield in 1995. This series will reach its climax next May with the British premiere of Prometeo, his 'tragedy of listening'. For this concert, we were treated to three varied works, plus a masterpiece from his posthumous father-in-law, Arnold Schoenberg. Proceedings had commenced even before the concert, with a conversation between Christopher Cook and Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, the composer's widow (and Schoenberg's daughter). She provided an informative and at time moving insight into her late husband's beliefs and methods, not least his instruction from Bruno Maderna, who had encouraged him to compare responses compositional problems in composers old and new, for instance Gabrieli and Webern, Ockeghem and Schoenberg. Hermann Scherchen also emerged as a hero of the tale. We also heard a most sympathetic account of the heady days of 1950s Darmstadt, not as some quasi-totalitarian Ministry of Serialist Truth but as a place of openness, experimentation, and - perhaps most interestingly - as a meeting-place for those who had survived the horrors of fascism with the post-war avant garde. Tradition and its development played a much greater role than myths of a 'year zero' have allowed.
The concert began with a few words from the pianist John Constable concerning the recently deceased London Sinfonietta flautist, Sebastian Bell, to whom the concert was dedicated. Berio's brief Autre fois, composed for flute, harp, and clarinet, in memory of Stravinsky, was performed - most beautifully - in Bell's honour.
We then proceeded to the 'encounters' of Nono's 1955 Incontri, for twenty-four instruments. The two independent structures of which Nono wrote, emerged independently of one another, through differentiation of rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre. And yet they came together too, unable to escape each other, and producing something more through their encounters. Post-Webernian lines and combinations, and extreme dynamic contrasts were well judged by Diego Masson and his expert players, both in terms of individual clarity and a whole that was more than the sum of its parts. This is partly a matter of mathematics - what music is not? - in terms of the ratios between the two structures, but also of development, of sympathy, of a refusal to repeat oneself which Nono shared with Schoenberg. One felt a true sense of musical and political unity, of the hope in social solidarity which Nuria Schoenberg-Nono had already spoken as a hallmark of Nono's oeuvre.
Schoenberg's First Chamber Symphony has long been a Sinfonietta speciality. This was a performance which evinced long familiarity with a work that is for these players 'standard repertoire'. The confidence with which the string soloists projected their lines meant that there was no chance of one of this work's greatest pitfalls presenting itself, namely the strings being overshadowed by the piquant wind. (The opposite pitfall tends to occur in the later, inferior version for full orchestra.) In its contrapuntal clarity and the propulsion of its harmonic progression, this was a model performance, expertly guided by Masson. My taste often tends to veer towards Schoenberg performances that emphasise a little more his Romantic inheritance, but the bracing, relentless modernism of this reading afforded an equally valid perspective and, given the circumstances, was perhaps more apt. My sole cavil was that the 'slow movement' did not really emerge as distinctly as it might. If one thinks of the Liszt Piano Sonata in B minor, whose form Schoenberg's work so closely resembles, one realises what is gained by a stronger sense of four distinct movements within the one-movement sonata form of the whole. The conclusion, however, was duly thrilling, without ever degenerating into a headlong rush, as can often be its fate.
The interval afforded an opportunity to observe the progress of work from Kingston University students on a wall of protest in the foyer, inspired by the final work on the programme. We too were encouraged to offer reactions to the music in the guise of postcards for colouring, which would then be displayed. This certainly contributed to the buzz of the occasion, to a genuine rather than manufactures sense of the excitement of an event - which the beginning of this festival certainly should have been - so different from the often dreary conventionality of more 'mainstream' concerts.
Nono's greatest homage to Schoenberg, his Canonical Variations on a note row from the Ode to Napoleon, received an extremely fine reading. All the virtues of the Incontri performance were once again present, as was a definite sense of narrative progression, of moving towards and then beyond the final variation's statement of the row. Where 'Darmstadt', as we somewhat misleadingly and monolithically have come to call it, has tended to be portrayed as tolerating Schoenberg mostly for having prepared the way for Webern, here we heard an avowedly post-Webernian serialist employing the Webern inheritance - the sighs of instrumental fragments, the constructivist tension between certain intervallic relations - of earlier variations to build up to a more or less explicit tribute to one of Schoenberg's most unambiguously 'political' works. The almost Romantic beauty of the orchestra, albeit never without a necessary astringency - reminded us of Nuria Schoenberg-Nono's conception of Darmstadt as a continuation of European tradition. (Failure of many of the participants thus to root themselves, rather than outright antipathy towards Cage, was why Nono had eventually left, she explained.)
'No hay caminos, hay que caminar ... Andrej Tarkovskij' represented late Nono (1987). Inspired by a mediaeval wall inscription from a Toledo monastery - 'Traveller, there is no pathway, only travelling itself' - this work triumphantly refuted claims that Nono's later work lost its political edge. There was still here the humanist emphasis upon creation and the utopian hope of a better society, no matter what difficulties life and this world might present, which had marked Nono's earliest works. What was new was the spatial experimentation, a product of practices old (consider Gabrieli) and new (think Stockhausen), with additional instrumentalists positioned around and in between the audience, responding to and furthering the 'main' orchestra on the stage. The slow, still Webern-like beauty of so much of this work received the fullest contrasts with the sudden eruptions from beyond. This was an unpredictable procession, for there are no paths, only travelling. The audience was compelled by the extremes of expression to listen more closely, and thus the smallest variations in timbre and pitch registered with the utmost forcefulness: violent and beguiling, the two attributes gaining in intensity through collision with one another (rather like the two structures of Incontri). This was tribute indeed to a truly committed performance from Masson and the London Sinfonietta. Their belief in Nono was truly infectious, in the best sense, and bodes well for the festivities to come.
Mozart: Uchida/LSO/Davis, 30 September 2007
Barbican
Mozart: Piano Concerto no.27 in B flat, KV 595
Mozart: Requiem Mass in D minor, KV 626
Mitsuko Uchida (piano)
Marie Arnet (soprano)
Anna Stéphany (mezzo-soprano)
Andrew Kennedy (tenor)
Darren Jeffery (bass)
London Symphony Chorus
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)
In the second of the LSO concerts celebrating Sir Colin Davis's eightieth birthday, he turned his attention to Mozart, one of the composers with whom he is most closely associated. It would be no exaggeration to describe him as perhaps the greatest living Mozartian. Since nowadays we must be grateful to be spared Mozart on period instruments or at least, performed according to something erroneously called 'period style', the competition is not fierce. But Sir Colin is undoubtedly one of the great Mozart conductors of any era, and in this sense the rivalry would be intense indeed. Not that there is any need to think in terms of 'competition': the greater the number of musicians who can perform the most difficult music of all, the better.
It almost goes without saying that the performances were excellent, which they were. However, I did not feel that this was Davis at his very best. I wonder whether, at least in the beginning, this may partly be attributed to the orchestra. Certainly, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House responded far more keenly from the outset, in Davis's recent Così fan tutte. Here, the opening of Mozart's final piano concerto was slightly tentative, with a little edginess amongst the violins. This is a fragile work indeed, but fragility is a different thing from tentativeness. Mitsuko Uchida's contribution, however, was well nigh faultless. Her beauty and subtlety of touch seems ideally suited to Mozart, and perhaps to works such as this in particular. Here there are no festal trumpet and drums moments; all is elegy, even when, indeed perhaps particularly when, the sadness lies in the major mode. The opening of the slow movement was delectable indeed, as were the woodwind responses. This sounded like true chamber music. The delicacy of the 'hunting' 6/8 finale - the apparent contradiction is quite deliberate - sounded as it should: a memory of former times, and therefore tinged with ineffable sadness. Davis guided the proceedings, but after the slight initial awkwardness, the level of orchestral playing was such that on occasion he appeared - this may of course be deceptive - to have little to do, beyond benign encouragement. This he was well placed to offer. Uchida's 'encore' began as a reminiscence of Don Giovanni, but soon metamorphosed into 'Happy Birthday', joined by the orchestra - and a cake.
It was refreshing to have a performance of the Requiem unencumbered by editorial 'improvements', which celebrated the fine job that Süssmayr accomplished. We shall never quite know the truth about this work, which adds to its fascination, but the mastery points to Mozartian inspiration at almost every turn. Sir Colin's forthright approach to choral Mozart was much in evidence here, although there were instances of the greater flexibility that has characterised some of his more recent essays more generally in Mozart performance. (It is interesting to note that he now seems to favour greater flexibility of tempo than he does in Beethoven.) The singing of the London Symphony Chorus was more or less beyond reproach; that of the soloists was perfectly adequate but, sadly, far from memorable. It seemed as though there had been a decision to engage young soloists: admirable in itself, but the character of experience would not have gone amiss, especially in a work we all 'know' so well.
The orchestra, however, was not remotely tentative here, sounding truly galvanised in all sections. Yet on occasion there was a slight relentlessness, which might have been alleviated by a more differentiated sense of light and shade. Even the Day of Judgement should be allowed its moments of hope, and equally important, its moments of truly Mozartian ambivalence. This was a relatively minor reservation however, for one truly felt the presence of the Angel of Death. As so often in Davis's recent conducting, the angel of Klemperer - just think what a Mozart Requiem would have been like... - seemed present too.
Friday, 28 September 2007
Beethoven concert: Kissin/LSO/Davis, 27 September 2007
27 September 2007, Barbican
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, Op.37
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E flat major, Op.55, 'Eroica'
Evgeny Kissin (piano)
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)
This concert was part of the LSO's celebrations to mark the eightieth birthday of Sir Colin Davis, now the orchestra's President. Opinions at such a rarefied level vary, of course, but I should go far as to call Sir Colin the greatest British conductor since Beecham - and this in no sense implies that I consider him Beecham's inferior. (I am assuming that we count Stokowski as American, insofar as it matters.) After a prolonged period in which Davis appeared to be lauded more abroad than at home, British critics appear to have woken up to the fact that this is someone very special indeed, and worthy of celebrating.
The concerto received a duly grand performance. There appears to be little anyone can do completely to rid me of my reservations about the opening tutti. Wonderful though the music may be, it simply seems too long - a full sonata-form exposition - before the soloist enters. Beethoven only really heeded Mozart's example in his final two piano concertos, both towering masterpieces. Nevertheless, Davis and his orchestra played the music for all that it was worth. The strings really dug into the music, and played as if their lives depended upon it. There were no concessions to 'period' sonority or articulation. Articulation was not pitted against phrasing, as tends to be the case with such contemporary performances. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt springs immediately to mind.) Instead, phrases and paragraphs all fitted into their place. as a consequence of a structural command and orchestral weighting that recalled Klemperer. Kissin impressed throughout with his marvellous rich, almost chocolate-like tone. His articulation too was impeccable, again without any recourse to short-breathed preciousness. It sounded as though his reading was informed by his experience of voice-leading in Chopin, which gave his performance a slightly unfamiliar and most welcome twist. Not that it ever sounded 'like' Chopin, with the possible and perfectly justifiable exception of the virtuosic first movement cadenza. There, Kissin's double octaves provided a feast for the ear; they were not indulgent, but they were a treat.
The slow movement was allowed to unfold naturally, organically - or rather, this was how it seemed, for much work is necessary (in Davis's case, of course, many decades of experience) to engender that sense of inevitability. There was no question of adopting the fashionable tendency to rush, of transforming a Largo into an Andante. In many senses, and certainly for a pianist, Beethoven's slow movements present the greatest challenge of all. To sustain the over-arching line without sacrifice of detail, and to plumb the emotional depths without becoming merely 'heavy' is no easy thing. If I am to be harshly critical, it seemed on occasion as if there could have been greater integration of piano and orchestra. Davis presented a more or less perfect canvas, upon which Kissin painted some ravishing detail, but the element of chamber music was not perhaps quite so evident as it might have been. That said, the woodwind solos here, as throughout, were delectable: somehow both pure and sinuous.
This was also true of the finale, which provided a thrilling and noble conclusion. The orchestra and Sir Colin were on truly wondrous form, and Kissin's pianism proved once again a marvel in its dynamism and delicacy. Indeed, the latter was more to the fore than it had been during the first movement. The one thing lacking on his part, though not on the orchestra's, was a sense of impish humour, never more to the fore than in Beethoven's ornaments and syncopations. I am not sure that Kissin 'does' humour, but this was a minor drawback in a truly heroic account, by far the best I have ever heard 'live'.
Such a performance augured well for the second half of the concert, and we were not to be disappointed. The Eroica is a highlight of Davis's very fine set of Beethoven symphonies with the Staatskapelle Dresden, and this performance was at least as fine. From the shock of those extraordinary - and yet in another sense so 'ordinary' - opening chords onwards, everything, and I mean everything, was in place for an inevitable unfolding of Beethoven's great symphonic narrative. I do not think there was a single chord that was not weighted so as to seem as it could not be otherwise, and the conductor brought a profound sense of understanding to the work's harmonic and rhythmic progress. There was no need for ascetic thinning of textures, let alone for ugly tapering of phrases; nothing was done to bring attention to itself. Instead, the multifarious strands of Beethoven's blend of harmony and counterpart were balanced so as to give just the right measure to both, and never more so than in the finale's variations, where once again comparisons with Klemperer seemed justified: not just his Eroica recordings, but also the Grosse Fuge.
Throughout, the strings - which can sometimes be the Achilles heel of London orchestras - evinced a weight of tone and an athleticism that sounded to the manor born. No other orchestra is ever going to sound like the Vienna Philharmonic, and none is likely to achive quite the richness of the Staatskapelle Dresden; such odious comparisons aside, it is difficult to imagine how an orchestra could have sounded more suited to the work and to the composer. The brass have long been an especially valued section of the LSO, and they certainly shone on this occasion. Indeed, the horns, led by David Pyatt - is there a better horn player alive? - achieved a perfect blend, closer to Vienna than we have any right to expect, during their celebrated opening to the Scherzo. Before that, the long paragraphs of the Funeral March had unfolded with such grandeur, such nobility, such inevitability, that one could hardly fail to be moved to tears. Davis's moulding of phrases, utterly un-self-conscious, was an object lesson to those who would wish to 'do' too much with, or rather to, this music. Tempo variations in the manner of Furtwängler or Barenboim, let alone Mengelberg, have never been his way. Such is the integrity of approach that what might stand in danger of sounding 'worthy' on paper is anything but in practice, not least since there is no lack of blistering attack where necessary, 'necessary' being the operative word.
David Cairns, in a birthday appreciation printed in the programme, drew attention to the prominence of woodwind in relation to the strings in Davis's Dresden cycle. This was again apparent, and most welcome, given the soloistic brilliance of the LSO's players, although 'prominence' is perhaps not quite the right word. The instruments were allowed to shine where and when necessary, Gareth Davies's flute proving a particular delight. Cairns suggested that Davis might therefore have been more influence by the period instrument movement than he might care to admit. I do not think this was or is the case at all. The delight in woodwind lines more likely comes from Davis's great experience in Mozart, yet he never wishes to reduce Beethoven, to stress his eighteenth-century inheritance at the expense of what the composer was to usher in. If 'influence' there be, it seems more likely to have come from Klemperer, whose Philharmonia woodwinds were always 'prominent'. But Davis is very much his own man, and all the stronger for it. This concert provided a splendid opportunity to confirm his independence from fashion and, more importantly, his musical intelligence, wisdom, and integrity.
Beethoven: Piano Concerto no.3 in C minor, Op.37
Beethoven: Symphony no.3 in E flat major, Op.55, 'Eroica'
Evgeny Kissin (piano)
London Symphony Orchestra
Sir Colin Davis (conductor)
This concert was part of the LSO's celebrations to mark the eightieth birthday of Sir Colin Davis, now the orchestra's President. Opinions at such a rarefied level vary, of course, but I should go far as to call Sir Colin the greatest British conductor since Beecham - and this in no sense implies that I consider him Beecham's inferior. (I am assuming that we count Stokowski as American, insofar as it matters.) After a prolonged period in which Davis appeared to be lauded more abroad than at home, British critics appear to have woken up to the fact that this is someone very special indeed, and worthy of celebrating.
The concerto received a duly grand performance. There appears to be little anyone can do completely to rid me of my reservations about the opening tutti. Wonderful though the music may be, it simply seems too long - a full sonata-form exposition - before the soloist enters. Beethoven only really heeded Mozart's example in his final two piano concertos, both towering masterpieces. Nevertheless, Davis and his orchestra played the music for all that it was worth. The strings really dug into the music, and played as if their lives depended upon it. There were no concessions to 'period' sonority or articulation. Articulation was not pitted against phrasing, as tends to be the case with such contemporary performances. (Nikolaus Harnoncourt springs immediately to mind.) Instead, phrases and paragraphs all fitted into their place. as a consequence of a structural command and orchestral weighting that recalled Klemperer. Kissin impressed throughout with his marvellous rich, almost chocolate-like tone. His articulation too was impeccable, again without any recourse to short-breathed preciousness. It sounded as though his reading was informed by his experience of voice-leading in Chopin, which gave his performance a slightly unfamiliar and most welcome twist. Not that it ever sounded 'like' Chopin, with the possible and perfectly justifiable exception of the virtuosic first movement cadenza. There, Kissin's double octaves provided a feast for the ear; they were not indulgent, but they were a treat.
The slow movement was allowed to unfold naturally, organically - or rather, this was how it seemed, for much work is necessary (in Davis's case, of course, many decades of experience) to engender that sense of inevitability. There was no question of adopting the fashionable tendency to rush, of transforming a Largo into an Andante. In many senses, and certainly for a pianist, Beethoven's slow movements present the greatest challenge of all. To sustain the over-arching line without sacrifice of detail, and to plumb the emotional depths without becoming merely 'heavy' is no easy thing. If I am to be harshly critical, it seemed on occasion as if there could have been greater integration of piano and orchestra. Davis presented a more or less perfect canvas, upon which Kissin painted some ravishing detail, but the element of chamber music was not perhaps quite so evident as it might have been. That said, the woodwind solos here, as throughout, were delectable: somehow both pure and sinuous.
This was also true of the finale, which provided a thrilling and noble conclusion. The orchestra and Sir Colin were on truly wondrous form, and Kissin's pianism proved once again a marvel in its dynamism and delicacy. Indeed, the latter was more to the fore than it had been during the first movement. The one thing lacking on his part, though not on the orchestra's, was a sense of impish humour, never more to the fore than in Beethoven's ornaments and syncopations. I am not sure that Kissin 'does' humour, but this was a minor drawback in a truly heroic account, by far the best I have ever heard 'live'.
Such a performance augured well for the second half of the concert, and we were not to be disappointed. The Eroica is a highlight of Davis's very fine set of Beethoven symphonies with the Staatskapelle Dresden, and this performance was at least as fine. From the shock of those extraordinary - and yet in another sense so 'ordinary' - opening chords onwards, everything, and I mean everything, was in place for an inevitable unfolding of Beethoven's great symphonic narrative. I do not think there was a single chord that was not weighted so as to seem as it could not be otherwise, and the conductor brought a profound sense of understanding to the work's harmonic and rhythmic progress. There was no need for ascetic thinning of textures, let alone for ugly tapering of phrases; nothing was done to bring attention to itself. Instead, the multifarious strands of Beethoven's blend of harmony and counterpart were balanced so as to give just the right measure to both, and never more so than in the finale's variations, where once again comparisons with Klemperer seemed justified: not just his Eroica recordings, but also the Grosse Fuge.
Throughout, the strings - which can sometimes be the Achilles heel of London orchestras - evinced a weight of tone and an athleticism that sounded to the manor born. No other orchestra is ever going to sound like the Vienna Philharmonic, and none is likely to achive quite the richness of the Staatskapelle Dresden; such odious comparisons aside, it is difficult to imagine how an orchestra could have sounded more suited to the work and to the composer. The brass have long been an especially valued section of the LSO, and they certainly shone on this occasion. Indeed, the horns, led by David Pyatt - is there a better horn player alive? - achieved a perfect blend, closer to Vienna than we have any right to expect, during their celebrated opening to the Scherzo. Before that, the long paragraphs of the Funeral March had unfolded with such grandeur, such nobility, such inevitability, that one could hardly fail to be moved to tears. Davis's moulding of phrases, utterly un-self-conscious, was an object lesson to those who would wish to 'do' too much with, or rather to, this music. Tempo variations in the manner of Furtwängler or Barenboim, let alone Mengelberg, have never been his way. Such is the integrity of approach that what might stand in danger of sounding 'worthy' on paper is anything but in practice, not least since there is no lack of blistering attack where necessary, 'necessary' being the operative word.
David Cairns, in a birthday appreciation printed in the programme, drew attention to the prominence of woodwind in relation to the strings in Davis's Dresden cycle. This was again apparent, and most welcome, given the soloistic brilliance of the LSO's players, although 'prominence' is perhaps not quite the right word. The instruments were allowed to shine where and when necessary, Gareth Davies's flute proving a particular delight. Cairns suggested that Davis might therefore have been more influence by the period instrument movement than he might care to admit. I do not think this was or is the case at all. The delight in woodwind lines more likely comes from Davis's great experience in Mozart, yet he never wishes to reduce Beethoven, to stress his eighteenth-century inheritance at the expense of what the composer was to usher in. If 'influence' there be, it seems more likely to have come from Klemperer, whose Philharmonia woodwinds were always 'prominent'. But Davis is very much his own man, and all the stronger for it. This concert provided a splendid opportunity to confirm his independence from fashion and, more importantly, his musical intelligence, wisdom, and integrity.
Monday, 24 September 2007
Don Giovanni, New York City Opera, 15 September 2007
Don Giovanni: Aaron St Clair Nicholson
Donna Anna: Mardi Byers
Donna Elvira: Julianna DiGiacomo
Zerlina: JiYoung Lee
Don Ottavio: Bruce Sledge
Leporello: Daniel Mobbs
Masetto: Matthew Burns
Commendatore: Daniel Borowski
Orchestra and Chorus of New York City Opera
David Wroe (conductor)
Harold Prince (producer)
Albert Sherman (stage director)
It was interesting, in the light of this Don Giovanni, to reflect upon the profound differences between European and American approaches to staging opera. The New York City Opera has a reputation for being more adventurous, edgier even than its world-renowned sibling, the Metropolitan Opera. Yet this was a production of a kind that has largely vanished from European houses. Were it to have appeared at Covent Garden, let alone in Berlin or Frankfurt, it would seem like an attempt at revival, rather than an unmediated representation. The production was set in the time and place envisaged in the stage directions, which were generally observed and certainly never transgressed. There was no sense of a producer imposing a 'message', let alone a Konzept, upon the work, and the emphasis lay squarely upon telling a recognisable story. The Met's opulent grandeur was absent, but by the same token the staging was in no wise abstract or minimalist, presenting a straightforward representation of various locations in Seville.
I can imagine many European, especially British, readers warming to this description, perhaps even going so far as to wish 'if only...'. Indeed, when one considers some of the horrors inflicted upon stages on this side of the Atlantic - for instance, Jonathan Miller's ugly, unmusical transformation of Così fan tutte into a vulgar farce - relief might seem a justified reaction. And yet, that was just about it. This was a production utterly lacking in insights, let alone justified or even unjustified provocation. What many critics, and not only on the American side of the Atlantic, might sneer at as 'Eurotrash' direction can, even at its worst, spark debate about the meaning or meanings of a work, the production's relationship towards it and its reception history, and so forth. This was opera as a museum piece, and was largely received as such. Perennial bronchial complaints, intrusive applause - on one occasion, it had begun so early that it had finished before the orchestral postlude - and mobile telephones infuriated throughout; but perhaps this is what one should expect if one treats theatre as 'entertainment', there for the benefit of 'customers'.
The musical performance might best be described as 'middle-of-the road'. There was not a sign of any 'period' influence, which is more than fine with me: the last thing we needed was more of the museum. Of all Mozart's operas, Don Giovanni is perhaps the most clearly forward-looking, which is why Furtwängler's Wagnerian approach has in many respects never been equalled. One needs a sense of a world on the edge of something truly catastrophic, never more so than in those terrifying cries of ' ‘Viva la libertà!’, in which society appears upon the edge of dissolution. The energy that runs through the work, in essence that energy so perfectly captured in Giovanni's 'Champagne Aria', is a force of both life and death. Don Giovanni is both celebration and tragedy, as the Overture makes clear, just as its hero is both timely and untimely, indeed almost Nietzschean. This, however, was all rather well-mannered, and often plain lacklustre: the sort of thing one might have expected to hear from a reasonably-sized chamber-orchestral performance a generation ago.
That daemonic drive which should have been present from those extraordinary opening bars was rarely if ever present. In the Overture, a part of the opera that was unambiguously Mozart’s, the composer chose the most undeniably tragic music of all with which to commence Giovanni’s descent into Hell, namely that of the Stone Guest scene, in D minor. It is Mozart at his closest to Gluck: not really in the sense of ‘sounding like’ Gluck, although it is perhaps not wholly removed from the latter's Overture to Alceste, but rather dramatically, in that the music involves itself with the action. And in this, as in so much else, Mozart also prefigures Wagner. If this music needed any assistance to remain the most strongly imprinted upon the listener’s memory, this premonition is it. Whilst there is much to be said for polished performance - and this was, bar a few nasty moments of tuning, generally polished - it is hardly enough, just as a presentation of events in period costume in front of pleasant scenery is not enough.
The singing ran parallel to the production, although perhaps it was better on the whole. There were no absolute disasters, which is far from always the case. It would perhaps be unfair to compare Aaron St Clair Nicholson's Giovanni with that of Erwin Schrott, whose assumption of the role a couple of months previously for the Royal Opera was the most complete I have experienced. Much of this portrayal was musical, although at times it was disturbingly unable to rise above the far from Wagnerian orchestra. Yet once again, there was little sign of what was really at stake: nothing less than a re-dramatisation of the Fall. Daniel Mobbs's Leporello possessed more of the necessary quicksilver reactions to changing circumstances than his master, which seemed an accidental rather than provocative transformation. The tuning of Mardi Byers as Donna Anna was too wayward for comfort, let alone for anything more than that, whilst Bruce Sledge presented a perfectly adequate Ottavio. Julianna DiGioacomo's Elvira was probably the best of the bunch, although once again this was hardly a memorable account.
I should perhaps make it clear that more adventurous productions are not the sole preserve of European houses, although I do think that there is a cultural distinction to be made here. I do not rule out the possibility of a 'traditional'-style production permitting an insightful and challenging performance. Nor do I deny that many 'provocations' remain just that. But musical drama must be dramatic, just as it must be musical. Whether in apparently 'extreme' cases, such as Calixto Bieto's brilliant, if flawed production of this work, or the gentler, more humane approach of a director such as Sir Peter Hall, it would be impossible to exhaust the theatrical opportunities of a towering masterpiece such as Don Giovanni. What is really needed is a fusion of theatrical and musical vision, such as that heard under Joseph Swenson's baton for Bieto's production at the English National Opera. (This was so much of a piece that I very much doubt I should wish to hear the frenetic musical account on its own.) To be sure, there was in New York a consonance, or at least a coincidence, between pit and stage, between what we heard and what we saw. Yet this appeared to be born out of an equal lack of imagination rather than a shared sense of purpose.
Donna Anna: Mardi Byers
Donna Elvira: Julianna DiGiacomo
Zerlina: JiYoung Lee
Don Ottavio: Bruce Sledge
Leporello: Daniel Mobbs
Masetto: Matthew Burns
Commendatore: Daniel Borowski
Orchestra and Chorus of New York City Opera
David Wroe (conductor)
Harold Prince (producer)
Albert Sherman (stage director)
It was interesting, in the light of this Don Giovanni, to reflect upon the profound differences between European and American approaches to staging opera. The New York City Opera has a reputation for being more adventurous, edgier even than its world-renowned sibling, the Metropolitan Opera. Yet this was a production of a kind that has largely vanished from European houses. Were it to have appeared at Covent Garden, let alone in Berlin or Frankfurt, it would seem like an attempt at revival, rather than an unmediated representation. The production was set in the time and place envisaged in the stage directions, which were generally observed and certainly never transgressed. There was no sense of a producer imposing a 'message', let alone a Konzept, upon the work, and the emphasis lay squarely upon telling a recognisable story. The Met's opulent grandeur was absent, but by the same token the staging was in no wise abstract or minimalist, presenting a straightforward representation of various locations in Seville.
I can imagine many European, especially British, readers warming to this description, perhaps even going so far as to wish 'if only...'. Indeed, when one considers some of the horrors inflicted upon stages on this side of the Atlantic - for instance, Jonathan Miller's ugly, unmusical transformation of Così fan tutte into a vulgar farce - relief might seem a justified reaction. And yet, that was just about it. This was a production utterly lacking in insights, let alone justified or even unjustified provocation. What many critics, and not only on the American side of the Atlantic, might sneer at as 'Eurotrash' direction can, even at its worst, spark debate about the meaning or meanings of a work, the production's relationship towards it and its reception history, and so forth. This was opera as a museum piece, and was largely received as such. Perennial bronchial complaints, intrusive applause - on one occasion, it had begun so early that it had finished before the orchestral postlude - and mobile telephones infuriated throughout; but perhaps this is what one should expect if one treats theatre as 'entertainment', there for the benefit of 'customers'.
The musical performance might best be described as 'middle-of-the road'. There was not a sign of any 'period' influence, which is more than fine with me: the last thing we needed was more of the museum. Of all Mozart's operas, Don Giovanni is perhaps the most clearly forward-looking, which is why Furtwängler's Wagnerian approach has in many respects never been equalled. One needs a sense of a world on the edge of something truly catastrophic, never more so than in those terrifying cries of ' ‘Viva la libertà!’, in which society appears upon the edge of dissolution. The energy that runs through the work, in essence that energy so perfectly captured in Giovanni's 'Champagne Aria', is a force of both life and death. Don Giovanni is both celebration and tragedy, as the Overture makes clear, just as its hero is both timely and untimely, indeed almost Nietzschean. This, however, was all rather well-mannered, and often plain lacklustre: the sort of thing one might have expected to hear from a reasonably-sized chamber-orchestral performance a generation ago.
That daemonic drive which should have been present from those extraordinary opening bars was rarely if ever present. In the Overture, a part of the opera that was unambiguously Mozart’s, the composer chose the most undeniably tragic music of all with which to commence Giovanni’s descent into Hell, namely that of the Stone Guest scene, in D minor. It is Mozart at his closest to Gluck: not really in the sense of ‘sounding like’ Gluck, although it is perhaps not wholly removed from the latter's Overture to Alceste, but rather dramatically, in that the music involves itself with the action. And in this, as in so much else, Mozart also prefigures Wagner. If this music needed any assistance to remain the most strongly imprinted upon the listener’s memory, this premonition is it. Whilst there is much to be said for polished performance - and this was, bar a few nasty moments of tuning, generally polished - it is hardly enough, just as a presentation of events in period costume in front of pleasant scenery is not enough.
The singing ran parallel to the production, although perhaps it was better on the whole. There were no absolute disasters, which is far from always the case. It would perhaps be unfair to compare Aaron St Clair Nicholson's Giovanni with that of Erwin Schrott, whose assumption of the role a couple of months previously for the Royal Opera was the most complete I have experienced. Much of this portrayal was musical, although at times it was disturbingly unable to rise above the far from Wagnerian orchestra. Yet once again, there was little sign of what was really at stake: nothing less than a re-dramatisation of the Fall. Daniel Mobbs's Leporello possessed more of the necessary quicksilver reactions to changing circumstances than his master, which seemed an accidental rather than provocative transformation. The tuning of Mardi Byers as Donna Anna was too wayward for comfort, let alone for anything more than that, whilst Bruce Sledge presented a perfectly adequate Ottavio. Julianna DiGioacomo's Elvira was probably the best of the bunch, although once again this was hardly a memorable account.
I should perhaps make it clear that more adventurous productions are not the sole preserve of European houses, although I do think that there is a cultural distinction to be made here. I do not rule out the possibility of a 'traditional'-style production permitting an insightful and challenging performance. Nor do I deny that many 'provocations' remain just that. But musical drama must be dramatic, just as it must be musical. Whether in apparently 'extreme' cases, such as Calixto Bieto's brilliant, if flawed production of this work, or the gentler, more humane approach of a director such as Sir Peter Hall, it would be impossible to exhaust the theatrical opportunities of a towering masterpiece such as Don Giovanni. What is really needed is a fusion of theatrical and musical vision, such as that heard under Joseph Swenson's baton for Bieto's production at the English National Opera. (This was so much of a piece that I very much doubt I should wish to hear the frenetic musical account on its own.) To be sure, there was in New York a consonance, or at least a coincidence, between pit and stage, between what we heard and what we saw. Yet this appeared to be born out of an equal lack of imagination rather than a shared sense of purpose.
Friday, 7 September 2007
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.
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.
Friday, 31 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival: Strauss, Zimmermann, Schumann, 31 August 2007
Usher Hall
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel
Zimmermann: Photoptosis
Schumann: Symphony no.3 in E flat major, Op.97, 'Rhenish'
Strauss: Das Rosenband, Op.36 no.1
Strauss: Morgen! Op.27 no.4
Strauss: Cäcilie, Op.27 no.2
Gabriele Fontana (soprano)
Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra
Markus Stenz (conductor)
The Gürzenich orchestra has much of this music in its blood; indeed, it gave the first performance, in 1895, of Till Eulenspiegel. This performance evinced a great warmth of tone, and never fell prey to the harshness that can sometimes disfigure ostensibly distinguished accounts. Especially memorable were the violas, percussion, the solo trumpet, and those most Straussian of instruments (save for the soprano voice), the horns. Markus Stenz imparted an impressive sense of narrative and characterisation, shaping a fine example of true programme music, with no sacrifice to perception of its classical rondo form. The influence of Berlioz upon Strauss's orchestration was clearly felt, never more so than in the kettledrums of excecution, which brought to mind the 'March to the Scaffold' from the Symphonie fantastique. Till Eulenspiegel is a splendid opportunity for a fine orchestra to shine, not just technically but musically too, and in both cases this orchestra passed with flying colours.
Zimmermann's Photoptosis does much the same, albeit in a very different voice. The audience was greatly assisted in its prospects of affording a sympathetic hearing to the work by Stenz's spoken introduction. His enthusiasm was so genuine, so winning, that it must have helped win a few converts, or at least open minds, to a cause that has never really caught on, at least in this country. The ravishing beauty of the 'blue' canvas, inspired by Yves Klein's monochrome wall panels in the Musiktheater im Revier, shone brightly as we, the spectators, approached. Here was narrative of a different kind to that of Till Eulenspiegel, but narrative nevertheless. We were drawn in to the drama of a single colour, a single colour in whose variation according to perspective the whole orchestra enthusiastically participated. This was Klangfarbenmelodie, not quite of Schoenberg's variety, but Klangfarbenmelodie nevertheless. The second, collage section enabled many of the quotations to be readily discerned - Stenz was surely being unduly modest in claiming only to have perceived one of them upon his first hearing of the piece - yet never at the expense of their place within the greater whole. And the orchestral virtuosity displayed during the great crescendo of the final section made for a fine marriage between the twin earlier threads of narrative and Klangfarbenmelodie. Zimmermann could hardly have wished for better advocates than Stenz and his orchestra.
After that, the Schumann symphony was less impressive. There was a noticeable vernal freshness to the performance, but it sometimes lacked gravity. This is often the way with modern, pseudo-'authentic' Schumann performances, I know, but I did not feel that the relatively small size of the orchestra, especially with regard to the strings, provided the strongest advocacy for his still-derided - at least in some quarters - orchestration. Conductors as different as Furtwängler, Kubelik, Karajan, Sawallisch, and Kubelík managed perfectly well - indeed, much better than perfectly well - without cutting the strings, and thereby reminded us what truly Romantic music this is. The strings' articulation added to a somewhat short-breathed impression, which unhelpfully highlighted Schumann's penchant for two- and four-bar phrasing. On the other hand, this became less troublesome as time went on, Stenz appearing less hidebound by the dubious pronouncements of musical 'authenticity'. The woodwind and brass sounded resplendent throughout, although a real sense of mystery was not inappropriately reserved for the opening of the 'Cologne Cathedral' movement. The tricky gear changes of the final movement, which have tripped up some very illustrious names indeed, were surely navigated, to drive the piece to a satisfying if hardly rip-roaring conclusion.
The three Strauss songs were late, 'surprise' additions, and most welcome they were too, possessing something of a less pressurised 'encore' character. Gabriele Fontana made all of the words tell, and shaped Strauss's soaring phrases with real musicianship, although the hushed quality Morgen! demands was never quite achieved. By contrast, Torsten Janicke's violin solo was heartbreaking in its melting tone. Fontana reversed the personal pronouns in Das Rosenband. Whilst hardly a matter of fundamental importance, is this any longer necessary in an age that has known - and loved - Brigitte Fassbaender's stunning Winterreise, or which, alternatively, might even amongst the ladies of Morningside accept the possibility of love between two persons of the same sex? No matter: Cäcilie provided a resplendent conclusion. The orchestra was immediately given its head, providing a fitting contrast with the restraint of Morgen! And Fontana was well placed to ride its waves. This, undoubtedly, was the finest performance of the three songs.
Strauss: Till Eulenspiegel
Zimmermann: Photoptosis
Schumann: Symphony no.3 in E flat major, Op.97, 'Rhenish'
Strauss: Das Rosenband, Op.36 no.1
Strauss: Morgen! Op.27 no.4
Strauss: Cäcilie, Op.27 no.2
Gabriele Fontana (soprano)
Cologne Gürzenich Orchestra
Markus Stenz (conductor)
The Gürzenich orchestra has much of this music in its blood; indeed, it gave the first performance, in 1895, of Till Eulenspiegel. This performance evinced a great warmth of tone, and never fell prey to the harshness that can sometimes disfigure ostensibly distinguished accounts. Especially memorable were the violas, percussion, the solo trumpet, and those most Straussian of instruments (save for the soprano voice), the horns. Markus Stenz imparted an impressive sense of narrative and characterisation, shaping a fine example of true programme music, with no sacrifice to perception of its classical rondo form. The influence of Berlioz upon Strauss's orchestration was clearly felt, never more so than in the kettledrums of excecution, which brought to mind the 'March to the Scaffold' from the Symphonie fantastique. Till Eulenspiegel is a splendid opportunity for a fine orchestra to shine, not just technically but musically too, and in both cases this orchestra passed with flying colours.
Zimmermann's Photoptosis does much the same, albeit in a very different voice. The audience was greatly assisted in its prospects of affording a sympathetic hearing to the work by Stenz's spoken introduction. His enthusiasm was so genuine, so winning, that it must have helped win a few converts, or at least open minds, to a cause that has never really caught on, at least in this country. The ravishing beauty of the 'blue' canvas, inspired by Yves Klein's monochrome wall panels in the Musiktheater im Revier, shone brightly as we, the spectators, approached. Here was narrative of a different kind to that of Till Eulenspiegel, but narrative nevertheless. We were drawn in to the drama of a single colour, a single colour in whose variation according to perspective the whole orchestra enthusiastically participated. This was Klangfarbenmelodie, not quite of Schoenberg's variety, but Klangfarbenmelodie nevertheless. The second, collage section enabled many of the quotations to be readily discerned - Stenz was surely being unduly modest in claiming only to have perceived one of them upon his first hearing of the piece - yet never at the expense of their place within the greater whole. And the orchestral virtuosity displayed during the great crescendo of the final section made for a fine marriage between the twin earlier threads of narrative and Klangfarbenmelodie. Zimmermann could hardly have wished for better advocates than Stenz and his orchestra.
After that, the Schumann symphony was less impressive. There was a noticeable vernal freshness to the performance, but it sometimes lacked gravity. This is often the way with modern, pseudo-'authentic' Schumann performances, I know, but I did not feel that the relatively small size of the orchestra, especially with regard to the strings, provided the strongest advocacy for his still-derided - at least in some quarters - orchestration. Conductors as different as Furtwängler, Kubelik, Karajan, Sawallisch, and Kubelík managed perfectly well - indeed, much better than perfectly well - without cutting the strings, and thereby reminded us what truly Romantic music this is. The strings' articulation added to a somewhat short-breathed impression, which unhelpfully highlighted Schumann's penchant for two- and four-bar phrasing. On the other hand, this became less troublesome as time went on, Stenz appearing less hidebound by the dubious pronouncements of musical 'authenticity'. The woodwind and brass sounded resplendent throughout, although a real sense of mystery was not inappropriately reserved for the opening of the 'Cologne Cathedral' movement. The tricky gear changes of the final movement, which have tripped up some very illustrious names indeed, were surely navigated, to drive the piece to a satisfying if hardly rip-roaring conclusion.
The three Strauss songs were late, 'surprise' additions, and most welcome they were too, possessing something of a less pressurised 'encore' character. Gabriele Fontana made all of the words tell, and shaped Strauss's soaring phrases with real musicianship, although the hushed quality Morgen! demands was never quite achieved. By contrast, Torsten Janicke's violin solo was heartbreaking in its melting tone. Fontana reversed the personal pronouns in Das Rosenband. Whilst hardly a matter of fundamental importance, is this any longer necessary in an age that has known - and loved - Brigitte Fassbaender's stunning Winterreise, or which, alternatively, might even amongst the ladies of Morningside accept the possibility of love between two persons of the same sex? No matter: Cäcilie provided a resplendent conclusion. The orchestra was immediately given its head, providing a fitting contrast with the restraint of Morgen! And Fontana was well placed to ride its waves. This, undoubtedly, was the finest performance of the three songs.
Edinburgh Festival: Strauss and Mahler, SFSO/Tilson Thomas, 30 August 2007
Usher Hall
Strauss: Salome - final scene
Mahler: Symphony no.7
Deborah Voigt (soprano)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas (conductor)
Deborah Voigt's assumption of the role of Salome, albeit for a single scene, was the finest I have heard in the flesh. Hers was superlative Strauss-singing, every phrase shaped and shaded with the care that is vital to avoid this becoming a tiresome feat of vocal display. Voigt showed herself alert to every twist and turn of the text, the music, and most importantly, the marriage of text and music. Her diction was such that one could discern every word, an achievement that is not to be taken for granted from Strauss sopranos. Moreover, although this was a concert performance, she really had assumed the role, permitting the listener's directorial imagination to transport itself wherever it would. The orchestra offered impressive support under Michael Tilson Thomas, and often rather more than that, leading where required. Balances were well calculated - and projected. All that was really lacking was a sense of truly having lived this music as a seasoned opera orchestra would, or a symphony orchestra in a great performance might somehow be able to pretend that it had. The phantasmagorical display of colours and harmonic shocks could not entirely remove the sense that this was a 'showpiece' rather than the culmination of a drama. Voigt largely had to shoulder that responsibility herself. One grumble: it might be claimed that it would have been prohibitively expensive to engage singers for the lines allotted to Herod and Herodias, but one does miss them, and no one would consider omitting an important orchestral line in similar fashion. Without that chilling, gloriously melodramatic final line from Herod - 'Man töte dieses Weib! - the final bars lose some at least of their dramatic motivation. (I know that we all too often endure performances of the 'Immolation Scene' without Hagen, but that is no excuse.)
It was an ambitious programme, to say the least, which coupled the final scene from Salome with Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Once again, the orchestra was on excellent technical form, which should not be taken wholly for granted: I recall a deeply unimpressive Proms performance a few years ago from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ivan Volkov. Tilson Thomas clearly has ideas about what may well be the most problematical of Mahler's symphonies, and knows moreover how to put them into practice. His reading was certainly interventionist, though never narcissistically so. It married something of the bracing modernist coloration of Pierre Boulez with the 'house of horrors' scenario Leonard Bernstein so memorably portrayed in his Deutsche Grammphon recording with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The extraordinary surprise of Daniel Barenboim's route, assimilating the work to the great symphonic tradition, was not taken here, but Barenboim's appears so far to be a singular approach, which may not benefit from imitation. There were occasions when I thought Tilson Thomas lingered a little too much, perhaps above all during the second Nachtmusik movement, which can easily overstay its welcome. And there was something of a stop-go character to some progressions, which did not quite seem worked out as it might have done in the kind of post-Adornian, glorying-in-incoherence sensibility that Boulez brings to the work. The orchestra improved as the work went on. Brass and percussion were superb throughout, as were the violas, who shone whenever Mahler allowed them to do so. However, the other strings sometimes sounded a little thin, anonymous even, until the third movement at least. The first two movements were also somewhat marred by insensitive playing from the middle woodwind instruments - oboes and clarinets - whose phrasing was curiously unshaped, or even absent. They appeared to up their game later on, to match the most impressive flute playing from which we had benefited throughout. This was a good but not great Mahler performance. Unfortunately, the general level of Mahler performance from conductors as different as Boulez, Abbado, Haitink, and on occasion Barenboim and Rattle, is now so high that one notices more than one otherwise might, just how much apparently fine gradations can matter.
Strauss: Salome - final scene
Mahler: Symphony no.7
Deborah Voigt (soprano)
San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
Michael Tilson Thomas (conductor)
Deborah Voigt's assumption of the role of Salome, albeit for a single scene, was the finest I have heard in the flesh. Hers was superlative Strauss-singing, every phrase shaped and shaded with the care that is vital to avoid this becoming a tiresome feat of vocal display. Voigt showed herself alert to every twist and turn of the text, the music, and most importantly, the marriage of text and music. Her diction was such that one could discern every word, an achievement that is not to be taken for granted from Strauss sopranos. Moreover, although this was a concert performance, she really had assumed the role, permitting the listener's directorial imagination to transport itself wherever it would. The orchestra offered impressive support under Michael Tilson Thomas, and often rather more than that, leading where required. Balances were well calculated - and projected. All that was really lacking was a sense of truly having lived this music as a seasoned opera orchestra would, or a symphony orchestra in a great performance might somehow be able to pretend that it had. The phantasmagorical display of colours and harmonic shocks could not entirely remove the sense that this was a 'showpiece' rather than the culmination of a drama. Voigt largely had to shoulder that responsibility herself. One grumble: it might be claimed that it would have been prohibitively expensive to engage singers for the lines allotted to Herod and Herodias, but one does miss them, and no one would consider omitting an important orchestral line in similar fashion. Without that chilling, gloriously melodramatic final line from Herod - 'Man töte dieses Weib! - the final bars lose some at least of their dramatic motivation. (I know that we all too often endure performances of the 'Immolation Scene' without Hagen, but that is no excuse.)
It was an ambitious programme, to say the least, which coupled the final scene from Salome with Mahler's Seventh Symphony. Once again, the orchestra was on excellent technical form, which should not be taken wholly for granted: I recall a deeply unimpressive Proms performance a few years ago from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ivan Volkov. Tilson Thomas clearly has ideas about what may well be the most problematical of Mahler's symphonies, and knows moreover how to put them into practice. His reading was certainly interventionist, though never narcissistically so. It married something of the bracing modernist coloration of Pierre Boulez with the 'house of horrors' scenario Leonard Bernstein so memorably portrayed in his Deutsche Grammphon recording with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. The extraordinary surprise of Daniel Barenboim's route, assimilating the work to the great symphonic tradition, was not taken here, but Barenboim's appears so far to be a singular approach, which may not benefit from imitation. There were occasions when I thought Tilson Thomas lingered a little too much, perhaps above all during the second Nachtmusik movement, which can easily overstay its welcome. And there was something of a stop-go character to some progressions, which did not quite seem worked out as it might have done in the kind of post-Adornian, glorying-in-incoherence sensibility that Boulez brings to the work. The orchestra improved as the work went on. Brass and percussion were superb throughout, as were the violas, who shone whenever Mahler allowed them to do so. However, the other strings sometimes sounded a little thin, anonymous even, until the third movement at least. The first two movements were also somewhat marred by insensitive playing from the middle woodwind instruments - oboes and clarinets - whose phrasing was curiously unshaped, or even absent. They appeared to up their game later on, to match the most impressive flute playing from which we had benefited throughout. This was a good but not great Mahler performance. Unfortunately, the general level of Mahler performance from conductors as different as Boulez, Abbado, Haitink, and on occasion Barenboim and Rattle, is now so high that one notices more than one otherwise might, just how much apparently fine gradations can matter.
Thursday, 30 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival: Capriccio, 28 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival Theatre
Countess - Gabriele Fontana; Count - Ashley Holland; Flamand - Hauke Möller; Olivier - Johannes Beck; La Roche - Michael Eder; Clairon - Dalia Schaechter; M. Taupe - Johannes Preissinger; Italian soprano - Katharina Leyhe; Italian tenor - Ray M. Wade, Jr; Major-Domo - Ulrich Hielscher; Dancer - Luisa Sancho Escanero
Christian von Götz (director); Cologne Opera; Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne; Markus Stenz (conductor)
Is there a more violently controversial composer than Richard Strauss? The answer would surely be yes: Wagner at the very least is, as for very different reasons is Schoenberg. However, I am not so sure that this should be the case. Strauss leads us to ask very difficult questions; or rather, we ought to ask such questions: aesthetic, political, and moral. Wagner, on the other hand, is often made to answer for questions based upon misrepresentation. Stravinsky levelled the charge that Strauss 'didn't give a damn', and one can certainly end up feeling manipulated by a composer who might just be note-spinning, who cynically appears to know which buttons to press rather than 'believing' in what he is doing. Henze has gone further, writing: 'Beethoven regarded his whole enterprise as a contribution to human progress. As with Marxism, his goal is not God but Man, whereas there are other artists who have never given a thought to the moral function of their work; for instance Richard Strauss, who is for me – perhaps I’m going too far – something like a court composer to Kaiser Wilhelm II.' The charge comes to seem even more serious when one considers Strauss's later career, and the fraught, unavoidable question of his relationship towards the Third Reich. This does not mean that it is our place to put him on trial, still less to transform him into a hero along the lines of Schoenberg or Furtwängler. It remains, however, a legitimate, indeed necessary, question to ask what it might mean to pen an apparently escapist conversation piece such as Capriccio in the darkness of 1942.
The reality, as producer Christian von Götz so ably demonstrated, is that Capriccio is intimately connected with political reality, and this heightens rather than detracts from the aesthetic disputes at its core. In one of the archetypal operas about the making of an opera, it is more than usually appropriate to add another narrative layer, in which the era of the making of Capriccio itself features. Our first sight, disturbingly set against a beautiful reading of the opening string sextet, was of the Wehrmacht marching down the Champs-Elysées. The opera therefore remained in France, somewhere outside Paris. And the bulk of the action, Capriccio's creation of an opera as opposed to the production's creation of Capriccio, took place in eighteenth-century costume: a final house party, in which the coming of the Gestapo might be put out of mind for a couple of hours. Is this what Strauss himself was doing? Perhaps, although more on that anon. There were from time to time reminders of approaching fate, which grew more numerous in the second act. (This was Joseph Keilberth's two-act adaptation.) Every aspect of the production, be it 'political' or 'aesthetic', showed the dichotomy to be false and worked inexorably towards the denouement: the Count's preparation of a cyanide capsule, the last vain attempt to answer the vexed question of words or music, and perhaps most chillingly of all, the prompter, Monsieur Taupe, replete with his yellow star, being left behind by the departure of the main party and offered his own carriage 'home'.
The final scene thus depicted the Countess saying farewell. Who knew when or indeed whether she would ever return after being escorted to the railway station? And yet, there was another, equally important side to what was going on. Radiantly sung by Gabriele Fontana, who had made an extraordinary recovery from a less than impressive first act, Strauss's music offered some sense of hope, 'utopian' in a sense Ernst Bloch might have understood, against this terrible backdrop. Whether the hope were vain or even irresponsible remained unanswered, at least explicitly. Yet just as surely as music always wins out against the words - witness the glory of the closing music as against the banality of the Major-Domo's announcement that supper is served - so here did art, the entirety of its enterprise, including music, words, and theatre, against its surrounding evil. This was not to speak of an unequivocal victory, which would be illusory and would therefore ultimately prove to be nothing more than capitulation to the horrors of fascism: monopoly capitalism's emergency strategy. Yet the music of the final scene, some of the most heartrending Strauss ever wrote - for here, as in Metamorphosen, and a few other works, the mask does seem to drop to reveal the real human being - becomes all the more moving when it confronts rather than retreats from evil.
This production understood that dialectical truth only too well - unlike a woman whom I heard leaving the theatre asking 'How was the opera supposed to be connected to National Socialism?' She exhibited either extraordinary stupidity or outrageous disingenuousness, but was not, I suspect, untypical of the largely bourgeois audience that would have wished only to be 'entertained'. Thankfully, the artists involved worked together to honour La Roche's pledge to 'serve the eternal requirements of the theatre,' to grant it 'neue Gesetze - neuen Inhalt!', in the search for the 'genialischen Werke unserer Zeit'. Michael Eder's performance of La Roche's great justification of the theatre was impressively handled, as were all of the varied contributions to the difficult second act, full of virtuoso ensemble writing. For whilst few of the vocal performances, individually taken, would sear themselves onto one's memory, there was a true, heartening sense of collective effort, of a fine company.
At the very heart of this, of course, stood the orchestra, which played finely throughout, and justly proved itself the most important 'character' of all. Markus Stenz conjured an echt-Straussian glow from the strings, nobility from the brass, and wonderfully piquant contributions from the woodwind, never more so than in the Rosenkavalier-recollections of the final scene (another layer of ironic memory). The clarity, propulsion, and overall coherence of the ensembles, not least the celebrated octet, reminded us that Così fan tutte was Strauss's favourite Mozart opera, and heightened the pervading sense of elegy. Edinburgh and Cologne served Strauss well, which is to say truthfully and without evasion.
Tuesday, 28 August 2007
Edinburgh Festival: Christine Brewer and Roger Vignoles, 28 August 2007
Queen's Hall
Strauss: Ich liebe dich, Op.37 no.2
Strauss: Breit über mein Haupt, Op.19 no.2
Strauss: Die Georgine, Op.10 no.4
Strauss: Die heiligen drei Könige aus Morgenland, Op.56 no.6
Strauss: Befreit, Op.39 no.4
Wolf: Vier Mignon Lieder
Britten: Cabaret Songs
John Carter: Cantata
Christine Brewer (soprano)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
Christine Brewer is celebrated for her Strauss, and not only in the opera house. Her recent disc with Roger Vignoles for Hyperion has gathered many plaudits. The opening group of songs gave an opportunity to consider further this growing reputation. Her apparently endless reserves of breath ensured that maintaining and shaping long phrases was never a problem and her diction was excellent. Moments of intimacy, however, were fewer than one might have expected; I rather had the impression that Brewer would have been better matched by an orchestra. Moreover, whilst Vignoles accompanied provided adept accompaniment, the piano part also lacked the sense of insights won from a seasoned partnership. This seemed to be almost the stereotypical Lieder-recital -by-an-'opera-singer', albeit one with great command over her awesome vocal reserves. Indeed, I missed the orchestra in 'Die heiligen drei Könige', in which the lengthy postlude sounded rather matter of fact on the piano. Vignoles doubtless had his reasons for not lingering, but the piano part did sound a little too much like the transcription that it is. The violin trills that depict, with such knowing naïveté, the infant Christ's crying either do not transfer very well to the piano or did not do so on this occasion.
But maybe nerves had been at play, for matters improved with Wolf's great Mignon Lieder. All four songs are so beautifully proportioned, for which we must thank both Wolf and Goethe, and these proportions were well served by readings attentive to formal as well as verbal concerns. Brewer seemed to respond more readily to the narrative context of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, enabling Vignoles to follow suit with less generalised accompaniment. Whilst the tendencies present in the Strauss songs had not disappeared completely, a greater readiness to respond to the shifts and turns in Wolf's alchemic blend of words and music exhibited itself as the group progressed, rendering the delectable 'Kennst du das Land' most moving. When Brewer asked, at the opening of the second stanza, 'Kennst du das Haus?' her hushed tone conveyed just the right sense of confiding consolation. Her full vocal strength would then be employed for a well-judged and never-strained climax at the third 'Dahin! Dahin!', before subsiding for the final line, both drawing back and urging Mignon's father on: 'Geht unser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn!'
I felt nevertheless - perhaps surprisingly for a singer so steeped in the vocal works of German Romanticism - that Brewer was much more at ease in the English-language items of the second half. There was no longer any communicative barrier between singer and audience, which may partly have been a product of the audience's comprehension of the texts. She proved a witty, winning 'hostess' in the Britten-Auden Cabaret Songs, which might easily have seemed merely 'clever'. There was not only an impressive dynamic range but a quicksilver flexibility largely absent from the Strauss songs and only intermittently present in the Wolf items. Once again, this seemed also to apply to Vignoles, who must, I imagine, have been taking his cues from the singer.
John Carter's Cantata is a shaping of four Negro spirituals into the shape of a pseudo-Baroque cantata: Prelude/Rondo ('Peter go ring dem bells'), Recitative ('Sometimes I feel like a motherless child'), Air ('Let us break bread together'), and Toccata ('Ride on King Jesus'), although the designations seem somewhat arbitrary. The composer added a busy and ever-so-mildly 'wrong-note' piano part. Brewer, in her brief introduction, admitted to a longstanding devotion to these songs in their original form, having sung them so often at home as a child. She certainly seemed to sing from the heart, and once again communicated vividly, rising to a splendid climax on the held-note at the end of the final 'Toccata'. Vignoles shaped his part considerately yet with requisite vigour when required. It would be difficult to remain unmoved by the circumstances of the piece: Carter is believed dead, perhaps on account of suicide, but nobody knows where the sometime composer-in-residence of the National Symphony Orchestra may be. Nevertheless, my reaction was along the lines of: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.
Strauss: Ich liebe dich, Op.37 no.2
Strauss: Breit über mein Haupt, Op.19 no.2
Strauss: Die Georgine, Op.10 no.4
Strauss: Die heiligen drei Könige aus Morgenland, Op.56 no.6
Strauss: Befreit, Op.39 no.4
Wolf: Vier Mignon Lieder
Britten: Cabaret Songs
John Carter: Cantata
Christine Brewer (soprano)
Roger Vignoles (piano)
Christine Brewer is celebrated for her Strauss, and not only in the opera house. Her recent disc with Roger Vignoles for Hyperion has gathered many plaudits. The opening group of songs gave an opportunity to consider further this growing reputation. Her apparently endless reserves of breath ensured that maintaining and shaping long phrases was never a problem and her diction was excellent. Moments of intimacy, however, were fewer than one might have expected; I rather had the impression that Brewer would have been better matched by an orchestra. Moreover, whilst Vignoles accompanied provided adept accompaniment, the piano part also lacked the sense of insights won from a seasoned partnership. This seemed to be almost the stereotypical Lieder-recital -by-an-'opera-singer', albeit one with great command over her awesome vocal reserves. Indeed, I missed the orchestra in 'Die heiligen drei Könige', in which the lengthy postlude sounded rather matter of fact on the piano. Vignoles doubtless had his reasons for not lingering, but the piano part did sound a little too much like the transcription that it is. The violin trills that depict, with such knowing naïveté, the infant Christ's crying either do not transfer very well to the piano or did not do so on this occasion.
But maybe nerves had been at play, for matters improved with Wolf's great Mignon Lieder. All four songs are so beautifully proportioned, for which we must thank both Wolf and Goethe, and these proportions were well served by readings attentive to formal as well as verbal concerns. Brewer seemed to respond more readily to the narrative context of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, enabling Vignoles to follow suit with less generalised accompaniment. Whilst the tendencies present in the Strauss songs had not disappeared completely, a greater readiness to respond to the shifts and turns in Wolf's alchemic blend of words and music exhibited itself as the group progressed, rendering the delectable 'Kennst du das Land' most moving. When Brewer asked, at the opening of the second stanza, 'Kennst du das Haus?' her hushed tone conveyed just the right sense of confiding consolation. Her full vocal strength would then be employed for a well-judged and never-strained climax at the third 'Dahin! Dahin!', before subsiding for the final line, both drawing back and urging Mignon's father on: 'Geht unser Weg! o Vater, lass uns ziehn!'
I felt nevertheless - perhaps surprisingly for a singer so steeped in the vocal works of German Romanticism - that Brewer was much more at ease in the English-language items of the second half. There was no longer any communicative barrier between singer and audience, which may partly have been a product of the audience's comprehension of the texts. She proved a witty, winning 'hostess' in the Britten-Auden Cabaret Songs, which might easily have seemed merely 'clever'. There was not only an impressive dynamic range but a quicksilver flexibility largely absent from the Strauss songs and only intermittently present in the Wolf items. Once again, this seemed also to apply to Vignoles, who must, I imagine, have been taking his cues from the singer.
John Carter's Cantata is a shaping of four Negro spirituals into the shape of a pseudo-Baroque cantata: Prelude/Rondo ('Peter go ring dem bells'), Recitative ('Sometimes I feel like a motherless child'), Air ('Let us break bread together'), and Toccata ('Ride on King Jesus'), although the designations seem somewhat arbitrary. The composer added a busy and ever-so-mildly 'wrong-note' piano part. Brewer, in her brief introduction, admitted to a longstanding devotion to these songs in their original form, having sung them so often at home as a child. She certainly seemed to sing from the heart, and once again communicated vividly, rising to a splendid climax on the held-note at the end of the final 'Toccata'. Vignoles shaped his part considerately yet with requisite vigour when required. It would be difficult to remain unmoved by the circumstances of the piece: Carter is believed dead, perhaps on account of suicide, but nobody knows where the sometime composer-in-residence of the National Symphony Orchestra may be. Nevertheless, my reaction was along the lines of: if you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you will like.
Sunday, 26 August 2007
Prom 55: Wagner and Debussy (Haitink)
25 August 2007
Wagner - Parsifal: Prelude to Act I and 'Good Friday Music'
Debussy - Nocturnes
Debussy (orch. Rudolf Escher) - Six épigraphes antiques
Wagner - Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and 'Liebestod'
Tenebrae (women's voices)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)
What are we to do about Wagnerian 'bleeding chunks'? Ever since Sir Donald Tovey coined the phrase, and arguably before that, there has been some doubt concerning the appropriateness of performing sections of Wagner's music-dramas out of context, especially when this involves omission of vocal lines. Probably the best course of action is pragmatic: if something works, it does, and if not, leave it well alone, whilst always bearing in mind that one may be doing Wagner less than justice and in some cases even violence.There seem to be few if any problems with a concert performance of the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger; with these Parsifal excerpts, I am less sure. The Prelude to Act I is so much a prelude to what follows, a necessary preparation that can only lead in one direction, that it cannot produce anything like the effect it would in prefacing the drama. Fair enough, one might say; in which case, treat it simply as a concert overture. This might work in theory, although I cannot recall an utterly convincing example. Do we not treasure even Furtwängler's reading above all since we lack a recording of the entire work? However, there was little sense here of a self-standing piece, or even of one which made more sense alongside the 'Good Friday Music'. This is mere speculation, of course, but I wondered whether Bernard Haitink's current preoccupation with Parsifal - he has recently conducted the work in Geneva, and will return to Covent Garden to do so in December - inclined him to hear the music simply as it would be in a reading of the entire drama. The 'Good Friday Music' in particular might well have worked perfectly well in the opera house - with voices - but here it really did seem a 'bleeding chunk'. The orchestra sounded fine for the most part, but on occasion did sound a little drab. We could have done with far more of the Debussian sense of being 'lit from behind'. There was nothing especially 'wrong', but electricity and luminosity were not in abundant supply. It pains me to say so, since there can hardly be a greater admirer of Haitink's Wagner than I, but this was not a memorable account.
Not to worry: matters improved thereafter. Haitink and the Concertgebouw have a long track record in Debussy, their 1979 recording of the Nocturnes having garnered awards. The balance between the three movements was expertly judged, as if one were dealing with a three-movement symphony. Nuages seemed to grow out of the sounds of late Wagner, but with more attention paid to colour. Liszt's extraordinary late piano piece, Nuages gris, much admired by Debussy, also sprang to mind as a source. But the sound was all Debussy's own. Haitink has never been a conductor to exhibit the laser-like clarity of Boulez in such repertoire - or indeed in any other repertoire - but one could hear everything that was going on, especially the delightful woodwind, without any loss of atmosphere. The rhythmic assuredness of Fêtes had almost the implacability of Ravel, again without losing the impressionistic ambiguity so personal to Debussy. Antiphonal placing of the women's voices paid dividends in Sirènes, and once again the woodwind, not least the English horn, shone, as did the beautiful muted trumpets. One could have lingered forever with these dangerous siren sounds, but then that is the point. All I missed was a hint more of Wagner from the strings, which sounded uncharacteristically lean. A little more refulgence would not have gone amiss, although one might well argue that they sounded all the more 'French' for this.
Rudolf Escher's orchestration of the Six épigraphes antiques was also well performed. I am not convinced that the orchestration is quite the last word, although it appears to have become quite popular. It neither sounds quite like original Debussy - how could it? - nor like an imaginative re-creation in a personal voice of the composer's own. The seductive combination of flute and harp is perhaps a little over-used. Still, both orchestration and performance gave some sense of the music's origin in incidental music (to a recitation of poems by Pierre Louÿs), whose material was then reused in the relatively well-known work for piano duet. At the risk of unbearable repetitiveness, this item once allowed the woodwind to exhibit great beauty and individuality of tone.
Fine though the Debussy items were, the climax came with the Tristan excerpts, and with the so-called 'Liebestod' in particular. (The term comes from Liszt, in his piano transcription, not Wagner, who favoured Verklärung, 'transfiguration'. Still, we appear stuck with 'Liebestod', so best not to complain unduly...) Here, Haitink's experience with the work in the theatre - who could ever forget his magnificent account during his last season as Music Director at Covent Garden? - worked dividends. One loses much, of course, by only having the opening and the conclusion, but there was here perhaps enough distancing too, to allow the music to emerge on its own terms. There was never any doubt of the inevitability of where it was heading (Furtwängler's fabled Fernhören), save for the slight awkwardness of transition between Prelude and 'Liebestod'. Nothing can be done about that really, for the two do not really belong together, as Tovey pointed out. Here at last the strings shimmered with the vibrato of Nietzsche's 'voluptuousness of Hell', with no sacrifice in terms of the rest of the orchestral playing, which was uniformly superb. Haitink's wisdom shone through in the marvellously judged ebb and flow. If the climaxes were not so shattering as they might have been in the theatre, here they benefited from his expert musical shaping. There was never any question of transforming the music into an orchestral showpiece; in that, I was reminded of Claudio Abbado's Mahler Third a few nights earlier. It may be a forlorn hope, but we must fervently hope nevertheless that Haitink will once again have and take the opportunity to conduct the entire work. Responding to the warmth of the reception that will surely always be his in London, Haitink then allowed the orchestra to show off in a blazing encore: the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin.
Wagner - Parsifal: Prelude to Act I and 'Good Friday Music'
Debussy - Nocturnes
Debussy (orch. Rudolf Escher) - Six épigraphes antiques
Wagner - Tristan und Isolde: Prelude to Act I and 'Liebestod'
Tenebrae (women's voices)
Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra
Bernard Haitink (conductor)
What are we to do about Wagnerian 'bleeding chunks'? Ever since Sir Donald Tovey coined the phrase, and arguably before that, there has been some doubt concerning the appropriateness of performing sections of Wagner's music-dramas out of context, especially when this involves omission of vocal lines. Probably the best course of action is pragmatic: if something works, it does, and if not, leave it well alone, whilst always bearing in mind that one may be doing Wagner less than justice and in some cases even violence.There seem to be few if any problems with a concert performance of the Prelude to Act I of Die Meistersinger; with these Parsifal excerpts, I am less sure. The Prelude to Act I is so much a prelude to what follows, a necessary preparation that can only lead in one direction, that it cannot produce anything like the effect it would in prefacing the drama. Fair enough, one might say; in which case, treat it simply as a concert overture. This might work in theory, although I cannot recall an utterly convincing example. Do we not treasure even Furtwängler's reading above all since we lack a recording of the entire work? However, there was little sense here of a self-standing piece, or even of one which made more sense alongside the 'Good Friday Music'. This is mere speculation, of course, but I wondered whether Bernard Haitink's current preoccupation with Parsifal - he has recently conducted the work in Geneva, and will return to Covent Garden to do so in December - inclined him to hear the music simply as it would be in a reading of the entire drama. The 'Good Friday Music' in particular might well have worked perfectly well in the opera house - with voices - but here it really did seem a 'bleeding chunk'. The orchestra sounded fine for the most part, but on occasion did sound a little drab. We could have done with far more of the Debussian sense of being 'lit from behind'. There was nothing especially 'wrong', but electricity and luminosity were not in abundant supply. It pains me to say so, since there can hardly be a greater admirer of Haitink's Wagner than I, but this was not a memorable account.
Not to worry: matters improved thereafter. Haitink and the Concertgebouw have a long track record in Debussy, their 1979 recording of the Nocturnes having garnered awards. The balance between the three movements was expertly judged, as if one were dealing with a three-movement symphony. Nuages seemed to grow out of the sounds of late Wagner, but with more attention paid to colour. Liszt's extraordinary late piano piece, Nuages gris, much admired by Debussy, also sprang to mind as a source. But the sound was all Debussy's own. Haitink has never been a conductor to exhibit the laser-like clarity of Boulez in such repertoire - or indeed in any other repertoire - but one could hear everything that was going on, especially the delightful woodwind, without any loss of atmosphere. The rhythmic assuredness of Fêtes had almost the implacability of Ravel, again without losing the impressionistic ambiguity so personal to Debussy. Antiphonal placing of the women's voices paid dividends in Sirènes, and once again the woodwind, not least the English horn, shone, as did the beautiful muted trumpets. One could have lingered forever with these dangerous siren sounds, but then that is the point. All I missed was a hint more of Wagner from the strings, which sounded uncharacteristically lean. A little more refulgence would not have gone amiss, although one might well argue that they sounded all the more 'French' for this.
Rudolf Escher's orchestration of the Six épigraphes antiques was also well performed. I am not convinced that the orchestration is quite the last word, although it appears to have become quite popular. It neither sounds quite like original Debussy - how could it? - nor like an imaginative re-creation in a personal voice of the composer's own. The seductive combination of flute and harp is perhaps a little over-used. Still, both orchestration and performance gave some sense of the music's origin in incidental music (to a recitation of poems by Pierre Louÿs), whose material was then reused in the relatively well-known work for piano duet. At the risk of unbearable repetitiveness, this item once allowed the woodwind to exhibit great beauty and individuality of tone.
Fine though the Debussy items were, the climax came with the Tristan excerpts, and with the so-called 'Liebestod' in particular. (The term comes from Liszt, in his piano transcription, not Wagner, who favoured Verklärung, 'transfiguration'. Still, we appear stuck with 'Liebestod', so best not to complain unduly...) Here, Haitink's experience with the work in the theatre - who could ever forget his magnificent account during his last season as Music Director at Covent Garden? - worked dividends. One loses much, of course, by only having the opening and the conclusion, but there was here perhaps enough distancing too, to allow the music to emerge on its own terms. There was never any doubt of the inevitability of where it was heading (Furtwängler's fabled Fernhören), save for the slight awkwardness of transition between Prelude and 'Liebestod'. Nothing can be done about that really, for the two do not really belong together, as Tovey pointed out. Here at last the strings shimmered with the vibrato of Nietzsche's 'voluptuousness of Hell', with no sacrifice in terms of the rest of the orchestral playing, which was uniformly superb. Haitink's wisdom shone through in the marvellously judged ebb and flow. If the climaxes were not so shattering as they might have been in the theatre, here they benefited from his expert musical shaping. There was never any question of transforming the music into an orchestral showpiece; in that, I was reminded of Claudio Abbado's Mahler Third a few nights earlier. It may be a forlorn hope, but we must fervently hope nevertheless that Haitink will once again have and take the opportunity to conduct the entire work. Responding to the warmth of the reception that will surely always be his in London, Haitink then allowed the orchestra to show off in a blazing encore: the Prelude to Act III of Lohengrin.
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