Written on Skin, Royal Opera, 18 March 2013

Royal Opera House

Agnès – Barbara Hannigan

Protector – Christopher Purves
First Angel/Boy – Bejun Mehta
Second Angel/Marie – Victoria Simmonds
Third Angel/John – Allan Clayton

Katie Mitchell (director)

Vicki Mortimer (designs)
Jon Clark (lighting)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

George Benjamin (conductor)

 

 

Near-unanimous approval tends to make me suspicious. However I might have tried, though – and, to be honest, I did not try very hard – I found myself unable to dissent. If George Benjamin’s new opera, Written on Skin, does not necessarily knock one for six, sixty even, in the way that a Birtwistle opera would, such is not Benjamin’s subtler – not superior, just different – way. The Mask of Orpheus and Gawain, for instance, make a cataclysmic impression akin to one’s first Wagner; in a sense, Benjamin requires closer, more attentive listening, not unlike that necessitated by Pelléas et Mélisande, and, just as important, readiness to consider what opera might be, what it might do, where it might yet take us. (Not, I hasten to add, that Birtwistle does not benefit greatly from the most attentive listening, but one might entirely miss the point of Benjamin without it.) Insofar as one can possibly feel emboldened to use the word after a single hearing, Written on Skin is a masterpiece. Perhaps most intriguingly, it seems to mark more of a beginning, Benjamin’s chamber opera Into the Little Hill notwithstanding, than a culmination. It may be the latter too, in that in retrospect, much of Benjamin’s œuvre seems to have been heading in this direction, but the opportunities opened up seem greater still.

 

Martin Crimp’s libretto derives inspiration from a thirteenth-century Occitan ballad, though no more than Benjamin’s music does it attempt any manner of pastiche. The story, at least on one level, is dealt with easily. A landowner, The Protector invites The Boy into his house and household to write an illustrated book, to be written on skin, a book that would chronicle and celebrate a good life and good deeds. Initially suspicious, the Protector’s Wife – his ‘property’, as he tells us – falls both for book and Boy, their combination a liberation for her, in a sense an instantiation of personhood. They become lovers, as documented by the Boy in his book. Though attracted to the Boy himself, the Protector kills him and serves Agnès a meal that includes the Boy’s heart. What is intended as revenge, as a way to subordinate her once again, provokes defiance, for Agnès is able to declare that the taste of the Boy’s heart will never leave her mouth. She frustrates her husband’s attempt to kill her by taking her own life.

 

So far so good, but in many ways, what most interests are the framing and the questioning. An opening Chorus of Angels takes the audience back eight centuries and bring to life the Protector and Agnès; one of them takes on the role of the Boy. The angels intervene and comment, drawing a parallel with Biblical Creation: man is invented and punished; woman is invented and blamed. Who provokes the dreams of the Protector, in which he learns of a secret page to the book, Agnès depicted therein ‘gripping the Boy in a secret bed’? There are many other such questions one might and should ask, but they are perhaps to be subsumed within the striking realisation that writing itself is at the heart of the drama. Fate in the guise of the pitiless angels is strong, but narrative formulations in which the protagonists speak of themselves in the third person present not only a degree of artificiality – ‘naïve’ art, in Schiller’s celebrated formulation, being no longer possible – but compel the audience to write and to interrogate its own dramas. We are involved in something old, strange, and yet new; at the same time, we are both of the Angels’ party and repelled by it. Benjamin’s music, is of course instrumental – in more than one sense – in accomplishing that too, if never straightforwardly. The fifteen scenes may in some sense be considered ‘cinematic’ but they are still more of the theatre.

 

But before coming to that, let us consider Katie Mitchell’s staging. The thing with ‘one size fits all’ metatheatricality is that, not unlike a stopped clock, from time to time it fits. And given the horror of her ENO Idomeneo, it is a matter of gratitude that Mitchell did not on this occasion try something different. I cannot in all honesty say that I perceived a particular need for the extras to be doing what they were doing rather than something else, at least for much of the time, but that, I think, was the point. A sense of something ongoing, indifferent to mere human concerns, angels as bureaucrats, one might say, came across so strongly for the very reason that Mitchell had paid such attention to apparently irrelevant – though who is to say? – detail. Action proceeding on different levels, physical as well as otherwise, here assists the story or stories, Vicki Mortimer’s contrasting ‘old’ and ‘new’ designs assisting equally in that respect.

 

I shall limit my remarks concerning Benjamin’s music, remarks which must necessarily remain generalised; I have only heard it once and have not seen the score. Nevetherless, even from a single hearing, it not only accomplished a necessary union of intellectual and emotional involvement; it enticed one to hear the work again and again. Sonorities old and new beguile, though it is worth reiterating that there is nothing of the pastiche even, indeed especially, to the use of an ‘old’ instrument such as the bass viol. Its Passion resonances may be unavoidable, but what most strikes is its apparent contemporaneity, to the action, to us, to wherever or whenever we might be. Likewise the use towards the end of glass harmonica might initially have one think ‘Mozart’, but what it does has apparently little to do with those strange miniature masterpieces Mozart composed under very particular circumstances. The ethereal quality remains, to be sure, but almost takes on an electronic- or, perhaps better, post-electronic quality, seducing our ears, expanding their range, hinting even at sounds we have yet to perceive. Stockhausen may seem quite distant, and in most senses he is, yet perhaps his ghost in that sense haunts.

 

Perhaps more striking still, however, are the use not of ‘unusual’ sounds, but of the orchestra as commonly understood and indeed of post-tonal – use what adjective one will – harmonic relations. One hears references, conscious or otherwise, above all to Pelléas and to Wozzeck – I was delighted to see Benjamin mention both works in a programme interview, having reached that conclusion for myself – but it is only occasionally, for instance in a Wozzeck-like set of intervals, that one can say for certain, and even when one can, it is admirably unclear what that might mean, if anything. The understatedness must surely have some inspiration in Pelléas, the only non-Benjamin opera the composer has conducted, making one listen, drawing one in, preparing the way for the moments of cataclysm, which register with power all the greater. The pacing and drawing of climax suggests, no embodies, a mastery of musico-dramatic composition to rank with some of the greatest. Vocal writing is grateful, yet again makes no deluded references to styles no longer possible.

 

About an hour and a half, moreover, proves once again a wise length for an opera. There are great operas that last for much longer, of course, operas from which one would rather slit one’s throat rather than have a single bar cut from them. However, one thinks more often of brevity in terms of its lack than its excess. (I vigorously, even furiously, dissent, but I have even heard people talk of longueurs in Elektra.) Janáček tends to have it just about right; so does Berg in Wozzeck. Wagner never fails in that respect – well, perhaps in Rienzi, though we should do well to grant ‘Meyerbeer’s greatest opera’ the opportunity to be heard ‘in full’, whatever that might be. Yet, as everyone knows, Wagner offers the most dangerous of models. Mozart and Monteverdi are similarly unapproachable, perhaps still more so. It is far better, then, to have an informed audience wondering whether there might have been room for a little more expansiveness than to have it constantly checking its watches.   

 

Performances were excellent. I assume Christopher Purves to have been a little under the weather, since so fine a singer would not normally have had recurring problems at the top of his range. Dramatic truth shone through nevertheless; it was at the time of hearing – and I do not mean this in a restrictive fashion – impossible to imagine anyone else in his role of Protector. Bejun Mehta and Barbara Hannigan both proved sensational as the Boy and Agnès. By now, at this stage on the production’s tour, this must almost be a repertoire work for them, but their combination of musical and dramatic intelligence felt as keen as I imagine it might have done at the premiere. Ethereal beauty, sensuous allure, and an inscrutable blend of apparent naïveté and knowingness marked Mehta’s Boy. Hannigan’s musico-dramatic excellence, her journey from subservience through sexual liberation to mastery – a deliberately gendered choice of word – over her husband were charted equally by stage presence, vocal line, and communication of the text. Victoria Simmonds and Allan Clayton offered admirable support as angels and as Agnès’s sister and brother-in-law.

 

Last yet anything but least, the performance of the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House was breathtaking, not least in the sense that one had to remind oneself after the event that this was ‘new music’. Benjamin’s score was performed with both special, loving attention, every phrase sounding apparently as it should – again, I should stress, there is a degree of supposition here, without actually seeing it for myself – and the whole despatched as if, in the best sense, this were staple operatic fare. By that, I mean not to say that there was the slightest hint of routine, but rather that the confidence to express and indeed to seduce was paramount. If such playing did not convince, convert, then it is difficult to know what would.

 

It really is past time, then, to smash the museum, a museum all the more constraining – as any good Feuerbachian will tell you – because its alienation is imaginary. Opera houses – all of them, certainly not just Covent Garden – devote an inordinate amount of time to works of little consequence, endlessly repeated, for no other apparent reason than that historically they have formed part of the repertoire. What, then, sells out? Written on Skin and The Minotaur. Whenever one speaks to opera-goers – as opposed, doubtless, to people who attend ‘the opera’ as a social occasion – they thirst for new repertoire and for modernist classics, many of them unstaged in whichever house, city, even country one is considering. Would anyone really care if another note of Donizetti were never heard again? Many of us would be relieved. In any case, surely it is about time that Nono, Henze, Stockhausen, Busoni, Dallapiccola, Schoenberg, even Haydn and Gluck, had a chance, still more so composers who – cue a deep intake of breath – have the temerity still to be alive. What people talk about, care about, are willing even to travel across the globe for, are great reimaginings of repertoire masterworks – Parsifal from Gatti and Herheim, for instance – revivals of unjustly neglected masterworks – take the  Theater an der Wien’s recent Mathis der Maler – and great contemporary musical drama. Opportunities to hear the nth high C may be relegated to the circus. Boulez, from whom we still of course await an opera, once spoke of his admiration for the Red Guard, since it was willing to destroy; if audiences are to renew themselves, it will be through works such as those of Benjamin, Birtwistle, et al., works which themselves renew the operatic form to which so many of us are devoted.

 

Still, Kasper Holten’s new regime seems to be offering something of a new dawn for the Royal Opera; the recently announced 2013-14 season an undoubted improvement upon what has gone before. Contrasts with the artistic near-nullity on offer next year in Paris and Vienna is stark. Let us hope, then, that this splendid achievement will be built upon and that never again shall we hear that a new production of a wonderful opera such as Weber’s Oberon – hardly an avant-gardist work! – has been cancelled in order to make room for the third run within a single season of La traviata. If one’s reaction to a great opera performance, whether it be a newly-minted Figaro under Sir Colin Davis or a genuinely new work, is to wish to hear it again immediately, then that is what we need to feel about opera seasons as a whole. Let us toast, then, the Royal Opera’s plans to place new opera at the very heart of what it does, of what it is, of what it will be.

 

Die Feen, Chelsea Opera Group, 17 March 2013

Queen Elizabeth Hall

Lora – Elisabeth Meister

Ada – Kirstin Sharpin
Zemina – Eva Ganizate
Farzana – Emma Carrington
Drolla – Michelle Walton
Arindal – David Danholt
Gunther – Andrew Rees
Morald – Mark Stone
Gernot – Andrew Slater
Fairy King, Voice of Groma – Piotr Lempa
Harald - Ben McAteer
Messenger - Mario Mansillo

Chelsea Opera Group Chorus (chorus master: Deborah Miles-Johnson)

Chelsea Opera Group Orchestra
Dominic Wheeler (conductor)

 

Wagner’s attempts to have his first completed opera staged were to no avail; the interested reader may consult his autobiography, Mein Leben, for his own account. Eventually staged in Munich in 1888, five years after the composer’s death, it would not be staged in Britain until 1969, under the auspices of the Midland Music Makers Grand Opera Society. The Chelsea Opera Group, as is its custom, gave the work in concert, though I shall be fortunate enough to see Die Feen staged next month in Leipzig. It is a splendid work, far from perfect and at times immature, but far superior to a number of works, and indeed entire œuvres that continue, bafflingly, to hold the stages of many opera houses. For the Wagnerite, and indeed for those with any interest at all in musical history, there is considerable additional pleasure to be derived from the parlour game of identifying both the many influences upon the work and the ways in which it offers a true starting point for Wagner’s subsequent explorations.

 

Let me hand over for a moment to Wagner, writing in Mein Leben:

While I had written [the incomplete, preceding] Die Hochzeit without operatic embellishments and treated the material in the darkest vein, this time I festooned the subject with the most manifold variety: beside the principal pair of lovers I depicted a more ordinary couple and even introduced a coarse and comical third pair, which belonged to the operatic convention of servants and ladies’ maids. As to the poetic diction and the verses themselves, I was almost intentionally careless about them. I was not nourishing my former hopes of making a name as a poet; I had really become a ‘musician’ and a ‘composer’ and wanted simply to write a decent libretto, for I now realised nobody else could do this for me, inasmuch as an opera book is something unique unto itself and cannot be easily brought off by poets and literati.

And so of course, it would continue, Wagner writing all of his own musico-dramatic texts, even though in this instance he reworks – should that not be too modest a verb – Carlo Gozzi. One may trace a multitude other continuities or presentiments, not least the idea of the forbidden question, albeit the other way round from Lohengrin, at least in terms of gender, Ada, the half-fairy, half-mortal, having agreed to marry Arindal, the King of Tramond, with the condition that he never ask her who she is. Die Feen, however, is no tragedy, for, after inevitably having asked the question, had Ada disappear, and followed here to the underworld, where, Orpheus-like (a tribute to Wagner’s beloved Gluck?), he restored her to life with voice and lyre, Arindal gains immortality and joins Ada in the land of the fairies. Immortality would, of course, become a curse or chimera to the later, Feuerbachian Wagner: think of Wotan. Here, however, the trials he must undergo both recall The Magic Flute and presage Die Frau ohne Schatten. That is not, of course, to say that Die Feen itself is a crucial link between Mozart and Strauss, though Wagner certainly is, but rather to remind oneself that so many of the ideas on which German and indeed other dramatists draw are part of common currency, not least that of the resolutely unsentimental fairy tale, as in the present case. And then, there is Arindal’s hallucinatory Wild Hunt, which cannot but make one think of Gurrelieder.

 

I could go on and on about the ‘dramatic’ content, but ought at least briefly to say something in similar vein, if equally selective, about the music. For instance, there is a second-act figure that naggingly anticipates Tristan, and the choral writing certainly at times looks forward to Tannhäuser and Lohengrin.  Looking back, Weber, Marschner, and only slightly less, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Schumann loom large in the general music language, this being a more unalloyed ‘German’ opera than either of its two immediate successors, Das Liebesverbot and Rienzi, though the Italian and French influences upon those works have often been exaggerated. But in any case, the broader point is that, for Wagner at this time, standing firmly in a dominant tradition of eighteenth-century German æsthetics, perhaps the key to understanding ‘German art’ was its power of synthesis, overcoming merely ‘national’ styles to progress, in his later Zurich ‘reform’ language, toward the universal.

 

Sadly, this performance was let down severely by the orchestra. Whilst it may not yet possess the Greek choral role of Wagner’s mature music dramas, it is nevertheless fundamental to the drama as a whole. Here, however, the players proved for the most part quite unequal to Wagner’s exacting demands. The first act suffered most, the strings in particular often painful to listen to, each desk apparently playing according to its own unique and highly variable system of temperament. Rhythm was little more of a strong point; indeed, at one point, Dominic Wheeler had to re-start proceedings, a wise split-second decision, which one did not envy him. In the circumstances, his direction of proceedings was not bad at all, though it could not be said that he boasted any especial insights. Ideally this music requires the advocacy of a great Wagner conductor, though very few have deigned to perform it, the late Wolfgang Sawallisch an honourable exception. Still, it seemed as though whatever Wheeler said to the orchestra, or at least to the strings, during the first interval paid off somewhat, for horrors were fewer as the work progressed. However, some truly dreadful woodwind and horn playing marred the beginning of the third act. At least the choral singing, whilst sometimes a little fuzzy and underpowered, stuck for the most part to the right words and notes.

 

There was a degree of tentativeness to some of the solo singing too, again most obviously in the first act, where one sometimes had the impression of relatively early rehearsal run-through. I later had it on good authority, however, that the soloists only received their scores two weeks prior to the performance; if that be true, one may appreciate their predicament, and deplore the situation. If there were often, though by no means always, a sense that greater familiarity with the score would have been of considerable assistance, there were no especially weak links in purely vocal terms. The smaller roles were in general well taken, Mark Stone impressive as the courtier, Morald, and Piotr Lempa splendidly stentorian in the small roles of the Voice of Groma the magician and the Fairy King; I should not be surprised to hear him in the future  as a big-stage Commendatore, even a Fafner.  Kirstin Sharpin’s Ada improved appreciably as the performance progressed; if vocal strength is intermittent at the moment, it is nevertheless present and will doubtless develop. Elisabeth Meister’s voice and dramatic presence are already the real thing; hers was undoubtedly the star turn of the evening. Not only did her voice stand head and shoulders above the others during ensembles, her dramatic commitment as Lora, Arindal’s sister, could be sensed and indeed seen throughout. At his best, David Danholt offered a tenor of impressive heft and no little tenderness. There were, however, times when he seemed a little uncertain and when his contribution petered out, perhaps out of tiredness.

 

Better than nothing, then, especially when nothing is what we have had for far too long. However, a rarity, even when its rarity-value is so thoroughly undeserved, often needs particularly talented advocacy, which in this case was at best fitful. Perhaps, in these circumstances, the cuts were not entirely ill-advised.

 

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.