Aurora Orchestra/Collon - Bach, St John Passion, 16 March 2013

Hall One, Kings Place

 

Evangelist: John Mark Ainsley
Christus: Roland Wood

Malin Christensson (soprano)

Iestyn Davies (alto)
Andrew Tortise (tenor)
David Stout (Pilate/bass)

Choir of Clare College, Cambridge

Aurora Orchestra

Nicholas Collon (conductor)

 

 

I hope readers will forgive me if I make this review relatively brief, the reason being that events outside the control of the performers, or indeed the hall, made it rather difficult to come to a conventional judgement concerning the performance. A good part of the second part fell under the shadow of an audience member apparently losing consciousness, collapsing, and receiving medical treatment, most of that going on, immediately next to my seat, whilst the performance continued. I mention that not to over-dramatise, and certainly not in any sense to complain, my thoughts being very much with the man concerned, but simply to explain why inevitably, I am not in the best position to go into great detail.

 

This was the first time I had heard the Aurora Orchestra in Baroque repertoire, though I have had quite a bit of Mozart from them and from Nicholas Collon. The swift tempo for the great opening chorus had me worried, as did the relative reticence of the strings, but my fears were confounded; tempi were, at least by present-day standards, remarkably unobjectionable, and more than that well-chosen. Nor was there for the most part a lack of flexibility such as one all too often hears now in this repertoire. The orchestra was very small (strings 4.4.3.2.1) – though doubtless the ayatollahs of one-to-a-part ‘authenticity’ would dissent – but Hall One at Kings Place is not a large space, and for the most part, it was only in making mental comparisons with great recorded performances such as those by Gunther Ramin, Eugen Jochum, and Richter that one keenly felt the loss. Likewise, though warmer string tone would at times have been desirable, there was commendably little of the hair-shirt to the performance. I am having to rely on the evidence of my ears, but it sounded to me as though some at least, perhaps all, of the violins were employing gut strings. Vibrato was mercifully not absent – a noteworthy feature in our Alice in Wonderland world of Bach performance. The woodwind were especially fine, every obbligato solo assumed with excellence of technique and feeling. Oliver Coates’s cello stood out from the continuo group and indeed as a superlative obbligato instrument.

 

The Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, offered fine performances, by turn angry and devotional, as text and role required. The turba choruses were vivid, the chorales heartfelt but clear-eyed. Diction, moreover, was thoroughly excellent. The tiny part of the Maid, taken by one of the choir members, was unfortunate in intonation, but otherwise there was little about which anyone might reasonably complain. John Mark Ainsley occasionally took his Evangelist to the limit of what might be desirably in terms of hectoring, but there was no doubting his commitment and understanding and, so long as one did not insist upon the mellifluous tones of an Ernst Haefliger, much by which to be moved. Roland Wood’s Christus was less individual, but well delivered, and that may indeed have been the point. He is not, after all, a ‘character’ in the conventional sense. All of the other soloists shone, Malin Christensson striking a fine balance between an almost operatic beauty of tone and attention to the text, likewise Iestyn Davies, the ‘operatic’ quality of whose outburst in the extraordinary ‘Es ist vollbracht!’ could hardly have been more arresting. (If I still find a counter-tenor more apt for Handel than Bach, still preferring the warmth of a mezzo or contralto, then that is arguably just a personal matter.) Andrew Tortise offered plangency and, again, detailed attention to the text, whilst David Stout’s baritone suggested a consolation consonant with that offered by the Aurora woodwind.    

 

That, then, is indicative of my experience, compromised though it was by events. It certainly augurs well for a December Aurora/Clare Mass in B minor. I wish, however, that the Kings Place website had not described the work as ‘Bach’s iconic St John Passion’. It is surely now time that that much-abused word be proscribed until further notice, if only so that it might regain a little meaning.

Belcea Quartet - Beethoven and Haydn, 14 March 2013

Wigmore Hall

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

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

Corina Belcea, Axel Schacher (violins)

Krzysztof Chorzelski (viola)
Antoine Lederlin (cello)

Thomas Quasthoff (narrator)

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Eugene Onegin, Royal Academy Opera, 11 March 2013

Sir Jack Lyons Theatre, Royal Academy of Music, London, 11.3.2013

Madame Larina – Anna Harvey

Tatiana – Tereza Gevorgyan
Olga – Fiona Mackay
Filipievna – Rozanna Madylus
Eugene Onegin – Ross Ramgobin
Lensky – Stephen Aviss
Monsieur Triquet – Stuart Jackson
Zaretsky – Samuel Pantcheff
Prince Gremin – Nicholas Crawley
Captain – Samuel Queen

Royal Academy Opera Chorus
Royal Academy Sinfonia
Jane Glover (conductor)

John Ramster (director)

Adrian Linford (designs)
Jake Wiltshire (lighting)
Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

Annd Harvey (Mme Larina) and the chorus
Images: © Royal Academy of Music

 

And still they come, not that I am complaining in the slightest! London has certainly not done badly for stagings of Eugene Onegin recently, and it did not do badly here either; indeed, it, or rather the performers, did very well indeed. Most of the operas I have seen at the Royal Academy of Music have been smaller scale; so far as I can recall, the only other nineteenth-century work was Béatriceet Bénédict, which of course is, by Berlioz’s standards, rather an intimate work. One might say the same of Eugene Onegin; after all, these ‘scenes’ from Pushkin were first performed at the Moscow Conservatory. But there is nevertheless a grander, for want of a better word ‘Romantic’, face to the work too – and there is ballet, or at least dance. However, any fears that a nineteenth-century opera might be biting off more than the RAM could chew were firmly banished.

 

Not everything was perfect, of course, but then I could say the same about any other performance I have heard. The orchestra took a while to get into its stride, noticeably more confident after the first interval. There were a good few brass fluffs early on; moreover, there were times when, with the best will in the world and even in a small theatre, the strings (6.6.4.4.2) were simply too thin in tone.  That said, what was perhaps rather more surprising was how, especially as time went on, a glowing Romantic tone was more fully achieved. Jane Glover ably shaped the musical action throughout, displaying flexibility and not inconsiderable passion, without neglecting the needs of her young singers. (In ‘normal’ circumstances, I have little patience with the idea of a conductor ‘supporting’ singers, which normally seems to mean holding back, but in a music school environment, matters are somewhat different.) I do not mean this to be faint praise, but Glover’s account of the score was infinitely preferable to the recent dismal showing by RobinTicciati at the Royal Opera House.
 

John Ramster’s production did not provoke a great deal of thought, as Kasper Holten’s excellent ROH staging certainly had. (It clearly, unsurprisingly, passed over a great number of people’s heads, though seemed perfectly clear to me.) For a ‘traditional’ staging, however, it does its job well enough, granting the cast the opportunity not only to don nineteenth-century apparel but also successfully to follow commendably detailed stage direction. I was somewhat puzzled by what looked rather like a crown of thorns above the stage prior to St Petersburg; however, I realised, upon its disappearance, that it had been nothing so conceptually provocative, merely an indication of the countryside. There is nevertheless one particular directorial intervention at the end of the second act: following the death of Lensky, we see a calculating Olga already having moved on to the Captain from Mme Larina’s party. Victoria Newlyn’s choreography is apt and well executed, a credit both to her and to the cast.

 

Tereza Gevorgyan (Tatiana) and
Ross Ramgobin (Onegin)

 

Not least of the difficulties for the singers would have been the task of singing in Russian. (Thank goodness it was not translated!) They must all have been very well coached – Glover credited Ludmilla Andrew both for coaching and transliteration – since the results ranged from good to excellent. Perhaps Tereza Gevorgyan, the Armenian Tatiana, had an inbuilt advantage, but that did not explain her well-nigh superlative assumption of the role more generally, especially later on. Hesitance was well conveyed in stage terms during the opening scene, but the greatest triumph was in her final scene with Onegin, when a rare degree of agency was forged, making it clear that an empowered woman had turned the tables on the man who had once rejected a girl from the country. The slight – and I mean slight – metallic edge to Gevorgyan’s voice worked splendidly in cutting through and soaring above the orchestra; I hope and expect to hear more from her. Rozanna Madylus’s Filipievna, though of course a far smaller role, was at least as impressive, a full assumption, visually as well as vocally convincing, such as would have graced a major house. There was also much to admire in Anna Harvey's eminently professional Mme Larina. Fiona Mackay’s Olga occasionally lacked depth of tone, but was well acted, indeed exuberantly so, and for the most part equally well sung.

 

I wondered during the first act whether the relative stiffness of Ross Ramgobin’s Onegin was deliberate or a matter of nerves. By the end of the opera, I was reasonably certain that it had been the former, for he charted an excellent dramatic course, clearly transformed by the fatal duel with Lensky. (Not for the first time, I could not help but wish that more had been made by the director of the men’s ‘romantic friendship’, a subtext so glaring that it verges upon a supertext; however, Ramster’s production was unlikely to be the place where that would happen, and so it proved.) Vocal confidence grew as the performance continued: a highly creditable performance in a difficult role. Stephen Aviss’s Lensky suffered a little by comparison. I had the impression that it was a directorial decision to stress the airs of a poet, to render them slightly ridiculous, rather than the character’s brooding Romanticism, but there might nevertheless have been greater inwardness in performance too. Stuart Jackson verily stole the show, or rather the second act, as a bumptious M Triquet. Even Zaretsky made his mark, in the excellent hands of Samuel Pantcheff, making one wish the part were more extended. Prince Gremin is a gift of a role to an established bass, but whilst sung well by Nicholas Crawley, presents a greater challenge to a younger voice, a challenge whose deepest notes were not fully surmounted. Choral singing was excellent throughout; heft, clarity, and linguistic skill were equally impressive, no mean feat in this opera.

The Schubert Ensemble: Commissions – Watkins, Cutler, Rushton, Bach-Woolrich, Novák, Knotts, Matthews, and Butler, 9 March 2013

Hall One, Kings Place

Huw Watkins – Piano Quartet (2012)
Joe Cutler – Slippery Music (2010, London premiere)
Edward Rushton – Piano Removal 2 (2013, world premiere)
Bach (arr. John Woolrich) – Five Chorales (2000)
Pavel Zemek Novák – Unisono (Homage to the Bach Family) (2011, London premiere)
David Knotts – Night Song and Garden Quadrille (2010)
David Matthews – Five to Tango (1993)
Martin Butler – American Rounds (1998)

Simon Blendis (violin)

Douglas Paterson (viola)

Jane Salmon (cello)

Peter Buckoke (double bass)

William Howard (piano)

 

 

The Schubert Ensemble, celebrating its thirtieth anniversary, presented as the culmination of its Kings Place celebrations, a programme comprising eight of the forty-five works it has commissioned, one of which, Edward Rushton’s Piano Quartet, received its world premiere. All eight works received performances of which both players and composers should have been proud; indeed, all but one of the composers, John Woolrich – well, two, if we count one Johann Sebastian Bach – were present in the audience to hear for themselves.

 

Huw Watkins’s Piano Quartet, premiered at last year’s Spitalfields Festival, emerged as a predictably accomplished single-movement work. Well-crafted and somewhat elegiac in character, its motivic design and working were audibly apparent throughout, doubtless a facet of performance as well as work. I was put in mind of (neo-)Prokofiev at times, though without a second hearing or – preferably – a viewing of the score, I am not sure that I could claim that to be more than a personal correspondence drawn. Joe Cutler’s Slippery Music, first performed at the Cheltenham Festival, opened arrestingly, that opening dominated by often high-lying violin, here played with especial verve by Simon Blendis, and piano. The piece struck me as a highly imaginative – and successfully so – employment of the apparently classical formation of the piano quartet, to heightened ‘dramatic’ ends, yet without an obvious ‘programme’. Even knocking on the wood of the instruments was integrated, not a mere ‘effect’. Edward Rushton’s Piano Removal 2, also for piano quartet, was more overtly programmatic, its five parts corresponding to the shipping of Robert Louis Stevenson’s piano from Edinburgh to the island of Upolu. The first part, with pounding pianoforte and ‘raucous’ – the composer’s word – strings was perhaps the most noteworthy, at least on a first hearing.

 

If I found myself a little underwhelmed by Rushton’s piece – such is generally the nature of such new music ‘compilation’ programmes – then Bach chorales, courtesy of John Woolrich, delighted, the ensemble now completed by the arrival of double bassist Peter Buckoke. Not for the first time I found myself lamenting how, in these days of ultra-authenticke puritanism, often the only way we are permitted to hear Bach on modern instruments is in transcription, but that is an issue for another day. Woolrich’s often dark reimagination, not unlike that of Ulysses Awakes for Monteverdi, proves faithful and unfaithful, as any true Bach performance should. Tones of Bach’s piano concertos seemed subliminally present in performance, whilst his harmonic genius both shines through in itself and inspires his collaborator(s). Pavel Zemek Novák’s Unisono takes material from various members of the Bach family and presents it in unison, but in some ways transformed rhythmically as well as texturally. If ultimately it does not seem to amount to a great deal more than the sum of its parts, it does not overstay its welcome, and made for a welcome divertissement.

 

For David Knotts’s Night Song and Garden Quadrille, we lost our pianist. The composer’s programme description opened, ‘I wanted to write a piece which focused on Judy Kleinman’s love of gardening,’ surely the only time that sentence has been formed, whether musically or otherwise. The reference was to Daniel Kleinman’s commission for the birthday of his wife, Judy. The dancing quality of the music indeed seemed matched by its sense of the outdoors, not a wild Romantic landscape, but the manageable, familiar yet always fascinating, world of the garden. David Matthews’s Tango, piano regained, followed in similar vein, an arrangement of the fourth movement of Matthews’s Fourth Symphony. If it seemed more of an occasional work than anything more substantial, there will doubtless always be a call for the former. Martin Butler’s American Rounds, by contrast, sounded over-extended: fine if sub-Copland Americana is your thing, but with apparently little else to engage. It was performed with considerable brilliance, though, and much of the audience seemed to love it.   

Le nozze di Figaro, Guildhall, 6 March 2013

Silk Street Theatre, Guildhall School of Music and Drama

Figaro – Hadleigh Adams, Joseph Padfield

Susanna – Raphaela Papadakis
Doctor Bartolo – James Platt
Marcellina – Roisin Walsh
Cherubino – Catherine Backhouse
Count Almaviva – Ben McAteer
Basilio – Adam Smith
Countess Almaviva – Magdalena Molendowska
Antonio – Piran Legg
Don Curzio – Joshua Owen Mills
Barbarina – Lauren Zolezzi
Bridesmaids – Alison Langer, Bethan Langford

Martin Lloyd-Evans (director)

Bridget Kimak (designs)
Declan Randall (lighting)
Victoria Newlyn (choreography)

James Adkins (video)

Chorus and Orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama
Dominic Wheeler (conductor)


What a wonderful surprise this turned out to be! Whilst your reviewer would be more likely to tire even of Tristan than of Figaro, he approached this evening in somewhat jaded fashion. Had the experience of once again teaching this term’s ‘Mozart’s Operas’ undergraduate course led him ever so slightly to take an opera whose perfection yields only to that of Così fan tutte? At any rate, this sparking performance, from an engaging cast of young singers, in – for once – an appropriately sized theatre came as a tonic. Not everything was perfect, of course, but it proved as a whole a superior experience to a number I have experienced in the most celebrated of houses.  

 

I was initially sceptical concerning Martin Lloyd-Evans’s staging, which relocates the action to a present-day American electoral campaign, Almaviva the candidate, in what, judging by the hint of ‘local colour’ from the chorus – a slightly questionably ‘Occidentalist’ touch, I thought – might perhaps have been New Mexico. The Overture depicts illegal immigration, the Count included, suggesting hypocrisy in the ‘two years later’ Republican hard line upon his successors. That all might sound rather remote from the concerns of Figaro – and it is really. But it is little more ultimately than a framing device, permitting the action proper to take place within a hotel campaign headquarters, making some sense of the subservient staff roles allotted to Figaro, Susanna, et al. Less jars than one might expect; the droit de seigneur does not take so very much transformation into workplace harassment. The richness of an eighteenth-century society of orders is lost, of course – how commonplace a late-capitalist hierarchy of money and politics seems by contrast – but we have the former in the back of our minds anyway.

 

There is some surprising re-ordering in the third act. For instance, ‘E Susanna non vien ... Dove sono’ after the Count’s aria came as quite a jolt. I assume the point to have been to place the Almavivas in closer dramatic counterpoint. In a fashion, it worked, but I am not sure that it was worth the upheaval; Mozart’s tonal planning is not lightly to be tossed aside. However, the production must be vigorously applauded for eschewing the wretched ‘traditional’ cuts in Act Four, permitting us to hear both Marcellina’s and Basilio’s arias. They are not simply ‘worth hearing’; they contribute immeasurably to Da Ponte’s construction of a battle between the sexes and place Figaro’s aria, which can otherwise seem to signal a somewhat bewildering change of focus, in context. Great Mozart conductors as well as poor ones have assented to the cuts; that does not make them any more palatable.

 

Dominic Wheeler’s direction of the score surprised me too. I do not mean that personally; so far as I can recall, I have not heard him before. However, I have become so wearily resigned to present-day conductors having not the slightest understanding of Mozart, that to find one whose name is not Davis or Barenboim conducting so warmly sympathetic an account comes as a genuine surprise. Very little, if anything, was hard-driven. (One of the greatest problems, perhaps the greatest, we experience today is conductors who think that denying music space to breathe – and that does not by any means equate to crotchets per minute – is somehow ‘exciting’ or ‘dramatic’; it is of course quite the opposite.) Tempi were generally apt, only the Countess’s arias proving problematical, the first dragging – again, not a matter of speed, but of insufficient harmonic motion – and the second proving a little too rushed. More to the point, Mozart’s harmonic-dramatic development was for the most part ably communicated: no mean feat. If there were occasions when the orchestra – strings 8.7.5.4.2, quite adequate for a small theatre – lost momentum, none ultimately proved so very grievous, and there was much fine playing to be balanced against such lapses.

 

There was, moreover, not really a weak link in the cast; every one of the Guildhall singers shone in one way or another. A slightly shaky start soon gave way to a vigorous performance from Ben McAteer as the Count. His Countess, Magdalena Molendowska, however unflattered by her costume in the third and fourth acts, showed considerable dignity in stage presence and in voice. Raphaela Papadakis proved a lively Susanna – without which any performance will fall flat. Catherine Backhouse was splendidly convincing as Cherubino in gawky female guise. Even if the coloratura of her aria sometimes proved a little much, Roisin Walsh offered a convincing Marcellina, at the very least matched by those taking the other ‘smaller’ roles, amongst whom I should single out Lauren Zolezzi’s beautifully sung Barbarina. The greatest praise should, however, be offered to I due Figaro. No need to worry: I have not taken on an unaccountable tendresse towards Mercadante. An ailing Hadleigh Adams, however, ceded his arias to Joseph Padfield. I wondered whether he need have done, so convincing were both his stage presence and his handling of Mozart’s quicksilver lines; indeed, there seemed to be no need whatsoever to make allowances. Padfield, however, offered an equally convincing, slightly darker, assumption of the arias from the side of the stage. Both singers richly deserved their enthusiastic applause, as did the production as a whole.

Tosca, Royal Opera, 4 March 2013

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Cesare Angelotti – Michel de Souza

Sacristan – Jeremy White
Mario Cavaradossi – Massimo Giordano
Floria Tosca – Amanda Echalaz
Baron Scarpia – Michael Volle
Spoletta – Hubert Francis
Sciarrone – Jihoon Kim
Shepherd Boy – Filippo Turkheimer
Gaoler – John Morrissey

Jonathan Kent (director)

Andrew Sinclair (revival director)
Paul Brown (designs)
Mark Henderson (lighting)

Royal Opera Chorus

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Maurizio Benini (conductor)

 

 

I shall doubtless be behind the curve when compared with many readers concerning Jonathan Kent’s Royal Opera staging of Tosca, first seen in 2006 and now revived by Andrew Sinclair, given that this was my first viewing. There is not much to say about it really. It is certainly not radical in any way, nor does it seem to have anything to say about the work. (To be fair, though, when Kent has seemed to have had something to say, for instance, in his dreadful Flying Dutchman for ENO, it has not always seemed coherent or worth saying.) I doubt that there is anything to which even the most hidebound ‘traditionalist’ – by which, I mean a fetishiser of set designs and costumes, who thinks that everything should conform to his or her poor-taste conception of what might be ‘beautiful’ – might object. There was certainly nothing so daring as a spot of updating, let alone any sense of dialogue between Puccini’s time, our own, and the time at which the opera is set. The greatest, arguably the only, dramatic jolt came from the third act gunshots. Relatively heavy set designs (Paul Brown) might have added a sense of dramatic claustrophobia, but that would have required something a little more than simply placing singers in front of them and leaving them to it. I can see why having the Te Deum take place a level above Scarpia might visually have seemed an attractive idea; the problem, however, was that it dulled the aural impact of the chorus to the level of background music, when a degree at least of sensory overload should be experienced.

 

Maurizio Benini, however, delivered a decent account, and sometimes rather more than that, of Puccini’s score. Again, it did not especially challenge, but it brought to life that which remained visually dormant. If my preference would undoubtedly be for something that brought more to the fore the symphonism of which many of Puccini’s contemporaries complained, likewise his modernist anticipations, then that has to remain a preference rather than stipulation. In a relatively straightforward way, Benini, a slightly hard-driven opening aside, supported and shaped the action, the melodramatic dénouement quite thrilling in its way. Turning of the musical screws of torture was accomplished to truly searing effect. A few slips aside, the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House played well for him, if without quite sounding on the very top of its form. I could not help but wonder, though, what more we might have learned from a great conductor such as Daniele Gatti, whose Salzburg Bohème last summer made a more powerful case for the score than any I have otherwise heard. Gatti of course had the signal advantage too of the Vienna Philharmonic playing for a conductor it loves.

 

And yet, if that all sounds a little easy-listening, one was must take into account the singular contribution of Massimo Giordano’s Cavaradossi. If a Konzept were entirely lacking in Kent’s staging, Giordano supplied his own element of deconstruction, offering a brave parody of popular conceptions of the ‘Italian operatic tenor’. There was no Kaufmann-esque mezza voce here. Instead we heard one of the most convincing assumptions of the ‘Just one Cornetto’ style I have experienced since – well, since that advertisement. What do you mean, it was not intended as a parody? Was that ‘authenticity’ too, in terms of ‘what Puccini might have expected,’ in the unfeasibly wide vibrato and portamento comprising a decent sized portion of the chromatic scale? In the immortal words of the Princess Royal, replying to Cherie Blair’s urging, ‘Call me Cherie,’ ‘Let’s not go there.’

 

Amanda Echalaz, however, offered a detailed, beautifully sung account of the title role. If she never thrilled in the way the Greek soprano who shall not be mentioned has unfortunately led us to expect, then such is a more than usually odious comparison. Michael Volle was perhaps better still, presenting an uncommonly intelligent assumption of Baron Scarpia. Hints of Dr Schön – and not just because so many of us associate him with the role – informed this villain’s sadism; if only a plot twist might have been added, in which Jack the Ripper appeared during the third act. Volle’s command of words and musical line was second to none, lifting the melodrama in many cases beyond itself. Many of the smaller roles were very well taken too. Jette Parker Young Artist, Michel de Souza, an attractive, compelling Angelotti, made one eager to hear more of him in the future; doubtless we shall. Hubert Francis’s contribution as Spoletta did likewise. Company stalwart, Jeremy White, presented as rounded a Sacristan as production and work permitted. And let us not forget Filippo Turkheimer, who certainly made one sit up and listen to the Shepherd Boy’s solo, more dramatically telling than I can previously recall.


I am unsure whether this were a matter of 'access', but the audience seemed to be largely made up of the hard of hearing. Not once was the orchestra permitted to complete an act prior to applause. Moreover, barely a bar of the third act passed by without bronchial accompaniment, chattering, throwing keys on the floor (??!!)...

R.I.P. Elisabeth Furtwängler (1910-2013)

Daniel Barenboim must now be one of our few remaining links with the greatest conductor of the twentieth century.

Tetzlaff Quartet - Haydn, Berg, and Beethoven, 2 March 2013

Wigmore Hall

Haydn – String Quartet in C major, op.20 no.2

Berg – Lyric Suite
Beethoven – String Quartet no.15 in A minor, op.132

Christian Tetzlaff, Elisabeth Kufferath (violins)

Hanna Weinmeister (viola)
Tania Tetzlaff (cello)

 

The second of Haydn’s Sun Quartets opened with a well-nigh perfect marriage of cultivation and bright tone, the Tetzlaff Quartet offering a reading that was properly detailed without the slightest hint of fussiness, the longer line always apparent, always a guiding thread. There was an equally fine sense of cumulative form, though without pressing too hard. This remained, as it must, a Haydn Moderato. The slow movement retained its predecessor’s communication of the extraordinary originality of Haydn’s formal genius. Echoes of the Baroque met with an experimentalism that almost puts Bartók to shame. Nor was the lyricism of that beautiful central melody overlooked. Haydn’s masterstroke of having the minuet steal in, foreshortening the Adagio, was beautifully handled, and the finale’s fugal ‘learning’, whilst worn lightly, was none the less vividly communicated for that. Its coda offered a wonderful sense of release – and again sheer originality.

 

The quartet’s performance of Berg’s Lyric Suite was, if anything, more committed still. Its first movement burst forth with just the right impression of (amorous) life, its sonata form clear, meaningful, without any sense of neo-Classical didacticism. There was admirable flexibility too; indeed, at times the reading – like the work – verged upon the operatic. For all I might wish that the programme had never been revealed, it was difficult not to gain a sense of something musico-dramatic here and later, kinship – melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic – with Wozzeck and Lulu perhaps especially strong in the second movement, whose opening, whilst nostalgically beautiful, I had found perhaps a little pastel in shade. (That is a mild criticism, and really the only one I can muster for this excellent performance.) Scurrying intensity and repressed passion – one almost but not quite forgets that the instruments remain muted – marked the third movement, as dramatically concentrated as one could hope for. The turbulent dynamism of post-Tristan eroticism yet still made space in the fourth movement for the quasi-religious stillness of the Zemlinsky quotation, ‘Du bist mein eigen’. It was wonderfully moving. After that, the pitch-black, savage musica negative of the fifth movement pulled quite a punch, rivalling anything in Lachenmann. The finale emerged as radiant, richly post-Romantic, a properly ambiguous attempt at reconciliation, the Tristan quotation an even more hopeless attempt than usual to turn back the clock, Stefan Georg’s ‘De profundis clamavi’ voiced in everything but its words. Music subsided into nothingness: in equal measure chilling and hopeful.

 

Beethoven’s A minor Quartet followed after the interval. The first movement and much of the rest of the performance possessed an intimacy that drew one in. Here Christian Teztlaff’s solo skill was put to excellent use. The broadening of intimacy into exultancy, Beethoven’s doing of course, was subtly, rewardingly communicated, with a crucial sense of dialectical tension. Closing vehemence sounded like a vain attempt – not unlike that mentioned in the Berg – to turn the clock back, in this case to the world of the Kreutzer Sonata. On occasion, I wondered whether the intimacy of the scherzo shaded into a certain skating over, but the sheer obsessive strangeness, for all its historical rooting, of the trio was unerringly portrayed. The grave dignity of the Heiliger Dankgesang, fragile yet strong, was alas seriously undermined by determined intervention from a crack group of bronchial terrorists. Could they have chosen holier ground to profane? They should have been utterly ashamed of themselves. Nevertheless, there was a proper sense of ‘Neue Kraft füglend’, as if totality itself had been rejuvenated by modal excursion both archaic and modernist. D major sounded as radiant as it might in a world of thoroughgoing mediation. The march with which the finale opens elicited charm and forthrightness in equal measure, the ensuing A minor intervention dramatically to the point. Not of course that it is a mere ‘intervention’; dialectical conflict was played out with gripping intensity.

Oelze/Aimard - Schumann, Debussy, and Messiaen, 1 March 2013

Wigmore Hall

Schumann – Frauenliebe und –leben

Debussy – Chansons de Bilitis
Messiaen – Harawi

Christiane Oelze (soprano)

Pierre-Laurent Aimard (piano)

 

This is a difficult concert to review. Although no announcement was made, I can only assume that Christiane Oelze was suffering from a cold or some similar ailment. Her lower register was persistently gravelly and there were often signs of constriction above too; more than once it seemed as though she really wanted to let rip but could not. It would have been perfectly possible not to progress beyond those very real limitations; I can sympathise with anyone who could not. By the same token, if one could, there were, even if one were to leave aside the stellar contribution of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, performances of real intelligence and, when circumstances allowed, brilliant technique to savour.

 

This was a formidable programme, by any standards. Schumann’s Frauenliebe und –leben came first. Even at the best of times, it would be a challenging work, to put it mildly, with which to open a recital. I wondered to start with whether that was why Oelze sounded somewhat out of sorts: just taking a while to warm up. Certainly ‘Seit ich ihn gesehen’ relied on Aimard’s artistry to have its message put across. A considerably slower tempo than one often hears worked very well, Aimard’s deliberation suggesting that more was at stake than one might suspect. That the protagonist did not sound in the first flush of youth somehow made ‘Er, der Herrlichste von allen’ all the more moving; both artists offered great acuity of response, the harmonic understanding voiced in the piano part second to none, likewise the voice-leading. Balance between the exultant and the imploring was finely judged in ‘Helft mir, ihr Schwestern’. Once again, a broad tempo worked wonders in ‘Süßer Fruend, du blickest’. The piano’s quiet ecstasy sometimes contrasted a little too evidently with the strain on Oelze’s voice, but the performance as a whole remained touching. One could not help but share in the palpitations of ‘An meinem Herzen, an meiner Brust’. They were joyous and yet, quite rightly, disturbing, even deluded. One knew that and still wanted to join in the conspiracy of self-delusionThe final song, ‘Nun hast du mir den ersten Schmerz getan’ took on an almost Wagnerian gravity; I was put in mind of Brünnhilde’s Annunciation of Death. One could readily put aside – or at least I could – vocal imperfection for such dramatic truth, especially in Aimard’s postlude.

 

Oelze displayed excellent French in Debussy’s Chansons de Bilitis; Aimard’s excellence in this repertoire of course came as no surprise. The piano acted not only as driving force but as the primary conveyor of ‘atmosphere’, a loaded, all too vague word, yet somehow unavoidable when considering Debussy. Harmonies were relished and transformed into the stuff of near-drama. The third stanza of ‘La Chevelure’ sounded, as it ought, frankly sexual, and mostly through the progression of the piano part. There was a fine sense of story-telling from both performers in ‘Le Tombeau des Naïades’. Again, though, one had to close one’s ears to the difficulties in Oelze’s lower range.

 

Such, once we had passed beyond the opening ‘La ville qui dormait, toi,’ proved less of an impediment in Messiaen’s extraordinary song-cycle, Harawi, chant d’amour et de mort. Whatever the problems with some of Oelze’s performances, it was well worth having attended the recital simply to hear the work, and to hear it in such spirited performance. Again Aimard’s excellence might also have been taken for granted, though it ought not to have been. The piano was indeed given such a pounding that a string snapped at the end of ‘L’Escalier redit, gestes du soleil’. From the wonderfully hieratic approach of the opening song to the sense of time suspended in the great piano interlude of the final song, ‘Dans le noir’, Aimard’s performance was magnificently vivid, and needless to say unerringly precise. Faster-moving material seemed to work better for Oelze, ‘Bonjour toi, colombe verte,’ coming as quite a relief after her opening troubles. Here as elsewhere, one could not fail to be struck by Aimard’s understanding and communication of the music’s construction, metrically and harmonically. ‘Doundou Tchil’ – also, as many of you will be aware, the pseudonym of one of our most engaging musical bloggers – sounded skittish and threatening, before opening out into true Messieanesque ecstasy. This was very much a ‘danse des étoiles,’ as the text, Messiaen’s own, has it. I could not, however, for the life of me understand why some members of the audience laughed at the end. The complexity of the relationship between words and music in ‘Répétition planétaire’ was very well conveyed, likewise the generative capability and function of metre. Messiaen’s calls of ‘Ahi! Ahi!’ moreover seemed to take a step outside the entire æsthetic of Western music, not unlike those transcendental moments in The Magic Flute or The Cunning Little Vixen. Whereas Oelze had seemed constricted in the climaxes of Debussy, she managed properly to let rip in ‘Adieu’: quite something! Kinship with the earlier Poèmes pour Mi, always apparent, sounded stronger still in the bizarre ‘Syllabes’, commitment from both artists overriding enduring vocal difficulties. ‘Amour oiseau d’étoile’ seemed to capture the very essence of slow Messiaen, my mind drifting back to the final movement of L’Ascension. Not a flawless experience, then, but nevertheless an experience not readily to be forgotten.

 

Denoke/Philharmonia/Nelsons - Strauss and Beethoven, 28 February 2013

Royal Festival Hall

Strauss – Tod und Verklärung, op.24

Das Rosenband, op.36 no.1
Allerseelen, op.10 no.8
Ruhe, meine Seele, op.27 no.1
Waldseligkeit, op.49 no.1Cäcilie, op.27 no.2
Beethoven – Symphony no.5 in C minor, op.67

Angela Denoke (soprano)

Philharmonia Orchestra

Andris Nelsons (conductor)

 

 

I struggled to find much of an idea behind this Strauss and Beethoven programme. Both Tod und Verklärung and the Fifth Symphony open in C minor and close in C major, but their trajectories are very different: perhaps that was the point? Maybe it was just a matter of having Andris Nelsons and Angela Denoke available on the same evening. At any rate, if the combination did not especially enlighten, nor did it jar in the sense that the briefly-popular Eroica-plus-Ein Heldenleben did. (How could the latter work not pale by comparison, even if one did not tire of E-flat major?)

 

Nelsons has built quite a reputation already as a Straussian. However, on this occasion and to my ears, it was only intermittently fulfilled. The ‘heartbeat’ to the opening of Tod und Verklärung was as aural-pictorially convincing as Strauss could ever have hoped for: tribute of course to the Philharmonia’s excellence as much as that of Nelsons. Moreover, that figure was properly integrated in musical terms; it did not simply stand out as an ‘effect’. The soft, sometimes very soft, playing drew one in, despite a less-than-well-behaved audience. Unfortunately, what had sounded as though it would be a very fine performance lost its way somewhat, vehement assertions of the hero’s life coming across in all too hard-driven a fashion. The brass sounded uncharacteristically crude, clearly acting under instruction. It might have been Sir Georg Solti conducting, were it not for Nelsons’s hyperactive podium manner. (The problem with such things is that if the musical results are good enough, for instance in the case of Bernstein at his best, no one will care; the moment they are not, the manner will irritate. And in general, it is difficult to imagine the greatest conductors – Furtwängler, Klemperer, Kleiber père or fils, Boulez, et al., jumping around in demented fashion.) What was lacking was a stronger sense of overall line, indeed of (post-)symphonism. Still, the performance certainly did not deserve its blighting by a mobile telephone; leader, Zsolt-Tihámer Visontay, whose solos had been exquisitely taken, was not the only orchestral musician to glare into the audience at that point. At least the Philharmonia’s glorious echt-Straussian glow offered some ultimate compensation. Moreover, Nelsons’s shaping of the close, a little orchestral untidiness notwithstanding, showed significant return to form – in more than one sense.

 

Interestingly – and not necessarily unusually – Nelsons seemed more relaxed, certainly more fluent, as ‘accompanist’. Denoke is not possessed of the most ideally soaring of soprano voices for Strauss, yet from the opening of Das Rosenband she communicated the words most ably. Is that enough? Perhaps not in this case, ultimately, for as Julian Johnson remarked in his excellent programme note, in Strauss’s vocal music, it is often ‘the rich quality of the voice itself that seems to embody what the poem promises’. Nevertheless, there was much to enjoy, not least in the Philharmonia’s ability to offer almost ‘chamber’-like transparency without reduction in string forces. The orchestral stirring of the wood in Waldseligkeit sounded nicely Wagnerian, Siegfried in particular coming to mind; it was good to hear the harmonium too. However, it was in this song, that Denoke’s enunciation became less distinct. Matters were put right in Ruhe, meine Seele! If her soprano remained somewhat hard-edged, she marshalled her resources well, turning the song arrestingly – even if this should not be how one would always wish to hear it – into something approaching a musico-dramatic scena. Again, Wagnerian harmonic echoes in the orchestra were well conveyed. Orchestral warmth, including delectable solos on flute (Samuel Coles) and violin (Tihámer-Visontay) was a hallmark of Allerseelen, though arguably it dragged a little. Cäcilie, however, sounded reinvigorated, from the magnificent wash of orchestral sound with which it opened onwards. Denoke’s operatic experience was put to good use in communication of meaning, though her intonation was not always spot on. Zueignung was offered as an encore; if one could not help but long for a Jessye Norman or a Gundula Janowitz, one could still appreciate the musical and verbal acuity of Denoke’s account. What a pity, then, that a vulgar audience member saw fit to bawl ‘Bravo!’ before the orchestra had ceased to resound!

 

Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is an extraordinarily difficult piece to bring off, partly on account of the great performances from the past that retain their hold in our memories, individual and collective, partly on account of the stature the work has accrued in our general cultural consciousness, partly on account of its intrinsic performative difficulty: there are so many awkward ‘corners’ to navigate, even before one begins to consider vexed questions of meaning. (Of course, to separate score and meaning is already to fall short; the latter is not somehow something to be ‘applied’ once the notes are there. A still worse course is somehow to pretend that there is no meaning; that this is just a collection of notes, a superior sewing-machine pattern.) Nelsons’s first movement did not start off badly at all. There was nothing objectionable –today, alas, that itself is almost a mark of distinction – save for his strange reluctance to give full due to the first pause of the opening motif, both at the opening and upon its every recurrence. (One can still observe a distinction between the first paused note, a minim, and the second, a minim tied to a second minim, without sounding peremptory, as here.) Everything was well executed and there was highly creditable depth once again to the Philharmonia’s sound. Formal concision certainly came across. And yet, there never quite seemed to be enough at stake; there was little sense of struggle, and Beethoven without struggle really is not Beethoven at all. The coda was excitable rather than awe-inspiring, that initial wrench to the tonic minor barely registering. Once again, podium hyperactivity began to irritate; I could not help but wish for a little of the sobriety of Wolfgang Sawallisch, to whose memory this concert was dedicated.

 

Some unfortunate woodwind slips – much to my surprise – marred the slow movement early on. Nelsons’s overly-moulded direction of the opening cello-section solo made for somewhat uncomfortable listening too, despite commendably rich cello tone. Ultimately, this proved to be episodic, harking back to the Strauss performance; the longer line was not maintained as it might have been. It was not too grievous and indeed there was a sense of real dignity to some of the episodes, but with Furtwängler, Klemperer, Kleiber, Boulez, Barenboim, et al. in the back of one’s mind, it was difficult not to wish for more. A barrage of coughing ensued once the movement had concluded, offering odd preparation for the scherzo.  It was really rather fine first time around: implacable, defiant, mysterious. Above all, it was harmonically grounded. The hushed reprise suffered a little from imperfect balancing, though one could ‘fill in the gaps’ aurally without too much ado. The transition to the finale was not helped by a further outbreak of bronchial terrorism; it nevertheless promised much.

 

Unfortunately, that sublime moment of arrival was blunted by a lack of gravity, excellence of orchestral playing notwithstanding. Nelsons once again proved too excitable. His basic tempo, whatever the dreary empirical ‘truth’ of the metronome, simply sounded hasty. Rejoicing was more suggestive of an end-of-term party than musico-metaphysical victory or presumed victory. There were fine moments, but moments alas are not enough. Without the greater whole, the heavens will not be stormed and shivers will not be sent down the spine. Despite this relative disappointment, I shall not give up hope yet that we might one day hear a fine Beethoven Fifth from Nelsons; perhaps it is just too early. A little reading of Wagner’s wonderful essays, On Conducting and Beethoven, would do no harm in the meantime. Better still, he – and we – should listen to Furtwängler.

Il barbiere di Siviglia, English National Opera, 25 February 2013

(sung in English as The Barber of Seville)

The Coliseum

Fiorello – Alexander Robin Baker

Count Almaviva – Andrew Kennedy
Figaro – Benedict Nelson
Rosina – Lucy Crowe
Doctor Bartolo – Andrew Shore
Don Basilio – David Soar
Berta – Katherine Broderick
Ambrogio – Geraint Hylton
An Official – Roger Begley
A Notary – Allan Adams

Jonathan Miller (director)

Peter Relton (revival director)
Tanya McCallin (designs)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Genevieve Ellis)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Jaime Martin (conductor)

 

ENO’s advertising emphasises the ‘25^th anniversary year’ of Jonathan Miller’s staging of The Barber of Seville. It holds the stage well enough without offering any especial insight – at least by now. The programme book mentioned commedia dell’arte: Tanya McCallin’s designs are of that world, certainly, even if there does not seem to be a great deal in Miller’s production that goes beyond the general ‘look’ of that tradition. Unlike many endlessly revived productions, this, then, is not in itself particularly tired, and one can readily imagine it offering the opportunity for new casts to come in and assume their roles without a great deal of stage rehearsal. By the same token, when compared with, for instance, John Copley’s considerably more venerable Royal Opera La bohème, which I happened to see earlier in the month, the staging does not especially sparkle, enlighten, or indeed charm either. It would do no harm to have a little Regietheater cast Rossini’s way. Either that, or assemble a cast whose sparkle would lift the work above the merely quotidian.

 

I say ‘the work’, but this performance, unfortunately, put me in mind of Carl Dahlhaus’s ‘twin musical cultures’ of the nineteenth century: too clear a distinction, no doubt, but nevertheless heuristically useful. On the one hand, one has the culture of the musical work, as understood in an emphatic sense, that of Beethoven and his successors; on the other, one has ‘a Rossini score ... a mere recipe for performance, and it is the performance which forms the crucial aesthetic arbiter as the realisation of a draft rather than an exegesis of a text’. The problem was that this performance, taken as a whole, simply did not sparkle as Rossini must. One therefore became of the score as a decidedly inferior, indeed well-nigh interminable work. Repetitions grated and a good part of the audience was espied, furtively or less furtively, glancing at wristwatches. If Rossini’s ‘musical thought hinged on the performance as an event,’ then this was an unhinged performance – and not, alas, in the expressionistic sense.

 

Jaime Martin’s conducting started well enough. There was throughout a welcome clarity in the score; this was not, at least, Rossini attempting and failing to be Mozart or Beethoven. Give or take the odd orchestral slip, there might have been much to enjoy in the contribution of the ENO Orchestra, considered in itself.  However, impetus was soon lost, and any ‘purely musical’ tension soon sagged. Whether the first act were actually as long as it felt, I am not sure, but many during the interval opined that it seemed as though it was never going to end. If Rossini’s repetitions as opposed to development serve a dramatic purpose, one can readily forget them; here they were apparent in unfortunately lonely fashion. I could not help but mentally contrast the extraordinary use to which Beethoven, for instance in the Waldstein Sonata, puts simple tonic and dominant harmony, to the tedium induced on this occasion. For some reason, the fortepiano was employed as a continuo instrument: a strange fashion, which has enslaved musicians who would never think of using it in solo repertoire. Performance, then, failed to elevate the ‘work’. At least the English translation, by Amanda and Anthony Holden was a cut above the average.

 

The greater fault in any case lay elsewhere, above all in Andrew Kennedy’s Almaviva. His casting seemed simply inexplicable. Almost entirely lacking in coloratura, let alone Florez-like facility therewith, he resorted to mere crooning, a state of affairs worsened by the application at seemingly random intervals of unnervingly thick vibrato. His stage presence was of a part with his vocal performance. Benedict Nelson’s Figaro started off in reasonably convincing fashion, but by the end was somewhat hoarse and throughout lacked the pinpoint precision that might have lifted the performance. By contrast, Lucy Crowe was an excellent Rosina. Her coloratura was impeccable, her gracious stage presence no less so. Andrew Shore reminded us of his skills as a comic actor in the role of Doctor Bartolo, and Katherine Broderick also took the opportunity to shine as Berta. Sadly, the increasingly lacklustre conducting and the embarrassing performance of Kennedy conspired to negate those positive aspects of the performance, rendering one tired with the ‘work’, however it were considered.

R.I.P. Wolfgang Sawallisch (1923-2013)

ASMF/Sampson - Bach, 22 February 2013

Hall One, Kings Place

Cantata: Non sa che sia dolore, BWV 209

Concerto for flute, violin, and harpsichord in A minor, BWV 1044
Concerto for two violins in D minor, BWV 1043
Cantata: Ich habe genug, BWV 82a

Carolyn Sampson (soprano)

Stephanie Gonley, Martin Burgess (violins)

Michael Cox (flute)

Steven Devine (harpsichord)

Academy of St Martin in the Fields

Having ‘unwrapped’ Beethoven, Chopin, Mozart, and Brahms, Kings Place has turned in 2013 to the greatest composer of them all, Johann Sebastian Bach. Even for a year-long festival, much of Bach’s voluminous surviving output will remain unperformed, but there is certainly a good deal on offer throughout the year. Here we heard a pair of cantatas and a pair of concertos, those old Bach hands in the Academy of St Martin the Fields joined by soprano, Carolyn Sampson.

 

Three out of the four works featured a prominent role for flute, hence Michael Cox’s soloist billing. He and Sampson proved nicely matched in the opening Non sa che sia dolore, a rare instance of Bach in Italian, if indeed it is by Bach at all. (It sounds as though it is.) The ASMF’s Sinfonia convincingly plunged us into the musical thick of it, the orchestral contribution being perhaps the finest I have heard in this cantata. Despite the small numbers (strings 4.4.3.2.1), there was requisite harmonic depth to the aria, ‘Parti pur e non dolore’, possessed of a fine sense of inevitability. Rhythmic precision did not come at the cost, as so often it does nowadays, of a hard-driven performance; there was nothing unyielding to any of the movements. There was occasionally something a little woolly to Cox’s tone; I wondered whether this were a hat-tip to the Baroque transverse flute. Whatever the truth of it, it did not perturb. Sampson’s tone was bell-like in its clarity without that entailing a lack of femininity; it seemed thoroughly apt for a secular cantata. Vocal and instrumental exuberance were not bought at the cost of the weird exhibitionism that sadly characterises so much present-day Bach performance.  

 

The orchestra was pared down further for the ‘Triple’ Concerto for flute, violin, and harpsichord (strings 4.3.2.2.1). Again, despite the small numbers, i was immediately struck by the harmonic depth of the ASMF’s performance. And what a relief it was to encounter sensible tempi in an age that often lauds as ‘exciting’ breakneck performances that never so much as permit Bach’s music to breathe. Balance between the soloists was well-nigh ideal: not clinically so, just apparently ‘right’. The first movement even had me come close to leaving on one side my dislike of the harpsichord as a solo instrument, so convincing were Steven Devine’s shaping of phrases and projection. Devine, Cox, and Stephanie Gonley all displayed admirable flexibility within a stricter overall framework. In the slow movement, the harpsichord (inevitably?) tended towards the merely ‘tinkling’; I longed for the sustaining power of the piano, but that was hardly the soloist’s fault. Gonley’s violin sounded wonderfully viola-like in its richness of tone. Again, balance was exemplary. Bach’s ‘learned’ counterpoint made its point in the finale, but so did his equally fine melodic genius in a shapely, stylish performance. If the harpsichord solos were at times a little clattering, that again was the fault of the instrument, not the performer.

 

The ‘Double’ Violin Concerto was the only disappointment of the evening. All three movements, but especially the outer two, were driven far too hard. Bach had no opportunity to breathe. The opening movement sounded as if a modern Vivaldi performance had been transferred to Bach’s music. ‘Calm down!’ one wanted to tell the players. Even the slow movement was harried – and Bach should be no more harried than Mozart. Ultimately, it proved prosaic, charmless even. O for the Oistrakhs...

 

Ich habe genug was given in its later version for soprano and flute (and should therefore have been marked in the programme as BWV 82a, not 82). The replacement of the original oboe with the flute makes the music less plangent, and a soprano can never hope to project the gravity of a Hotter or a Fischer-Dieskau. Nevertheless, this was a fine performance on its own terms, which certainly brought with it different Passion resonances. Again the depth of orchestral sound, doubtless assisted by the excellent Hall One acoustic, was crucial to the performance’s success. Recitative was supple, and if ‘Schlummert ein’ has been taken more slowly, it certainly did not fall prey to the inappropriate turbo-drive of the Double Concerto. Might not an organ, though, have been a better choice of continuo instrument than the harpsichord? Sampson’s low notes could not have the resonance of, say, John Shirley-Quirk in his great recording with Sir Neville Marriner and the ASMF, but this remained a moving account. The fast tempo of the final aria, ‘Ich freue mich auf meinen Tod,’ worked very well, both on its own terms and as a response to the strange Pietist words, a Christian never being at home in this world. Ornamentation was flawless, without loss to Bach’s humanity.