Salzburg Festival (5): Fidelio, 13 August 2015

Grosses Festspielhaus

Florestan – Jonas Kaufmann

Leonore – Adrianne Pieczonka

Don Pizarro – Tomasz Konieczny

Rocco – Hans-Peter König

Marzelline – Olga Bezsmertna

Jaquino – Norbert Ernst

Don Fernando – Sebastian Holececk

Leonore’s Shadow – Nadia Kichler

Pizarro’s Shadow – Paul Lorenger

First Prisoner – Daniel Lökös

Second Prisoner – Jens Musger

Claus Guth (director)

Christian Schmidt (designs)

Ronny Dietrich (dramaturgy)

Olaf Freese (lighting)

Torsten Ottersberg (sound design)

Andi A. Müller (video design)

Concert Association of the Vienna State Opera Chorus (chorus master: Ernst Raffelsberger)

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Franz Welser-Möst (conductor) 

Florestan (Jonas Kaufmann)
Images: Monika Rittershaus/Salzburg Festival

I shall start with the good news. It will not take long. Yes, no surprises here: it was Jonas Kaufmann. Kaufmann may not have been able to save the day, but his Florestan proved almost as impressive as it had in Paris more than six years ago. Perhaps I am being unfair or unduly cautious when I say ‘almost’; it may just have been a matter of a less than exalted setting, or simply an inability on my part to relive the thrill of hearing Kaufmann’s portrayal for the first time. Whatever the truth or otherwise of that, there was nothing for which I could fault him. His baritonal tenor seems just right for the role, but what he does with it – and it seems that he can do anything he wishes – is still more breathtaking. As I wrote in 2008, ‘He exhibited a heroism to rival that of Jon Vickers, albeit without the vocal oddness.’ There can be no arguing with his acting abilities either. Called upon to portray an apparent descent into madness, quite at odds with the text, such of it that remained, let alone with Beethoven’s score, Kaufmann marshalled all of his artistic resources to powerful effect.

What else? Hans-Peter König’s Rocco, after a somewhat indistinctive start, grew in humanity. The Two Prisoners made their mark well, and the chorus proved well-trained. Otherwise, there was little to inspire. Admittedly, Adrianne Pieczonka improved as time went on; Kaufmann’s presence seemed to lift performances, at least onstage, across the board. However, her tone was often harsh and her intonation was at best variable. Olga Bezsmertna’s Marzelline was blowsy, and Tomasz Konieczny’s Pizarro undistinguished, lacking even pantomime malevolence. On its own terms, the Vienna Philharmonic played well enough, but it was impossible for me to assent to those terms.

For that, Franz Welser-Möst was squarely to blame. Beethoven surely stands as the antithesis of mediocrity, but Welser-Möst proved quite unable to raise his game. At his very best, he sounded like a poor man’s Toscanini – a rich man’s is bad enough – but this was uncomprehending stuff indeed. Proceeding phrase by phrase, sometimes even bar by bar, there was not a hint of a longer line, let alone of the indomitable spirit with which this most noble of operas is infused. The orchestra was brash, harsh, often entirely lacking in tonal variegation. Chugging replaced development. The absurdly-inserted Leonore III Overture – a great conductor can just about get away with that regrettable ‘tradition’ – was an ordeal such as Florestan himself might have had to endure. The audience, bafflingly, gave it a rousing ovation. Still more bafflingly, conductor and orchestra stood to take their bows – yes, in the middle of the second act. How frustrating, then, to know that the greatest living Beethoven conductor, Daniel Barenboim, was also in town.

Leonore (Adrianne Pieczonka) and her 'Shadow' (Nadia Kichler)

And yet, there was worse. I approached Claus Guth’s production with an open mind. On the face of it, ridding Fidelio of its dialogue seemed a bad idea – is the dialogue really so bad? Why cannot people simply leave it alone? – but perhaps it might have worked in practice. It does not. I am pretty sure that, had I not know the opera, I should have had no idea whatsoever who anyone was or what he or she was doing. Fidelio without the dialogue is at best an interesting concert; that, however, would require at the very least a conductor up to the task. Worse, still, however is the Konzept which replaces Beethoven’s. Instead of a call to humanity, we had something one might just about dignify with the term ‘existentalist’. It is all, apparently, about freeing oneself from the imprisonment of one’s own mind. Or, as Norbert Abels declares in the programme, admittedly in translation, ‘In an ever-shrinking world of universal enmeshment, of the transcontinental interconnectedness of the globe, of the unlimited procedures of saving and monitoring data, Beethoven’s opera still navigates as the utopia of man’s escape from his self-inflicted imprisonment.’ Shorn of its verbiage, that might conceivably prove a fruitful addition to what we have already; as a replacement, it simply smacks of modern self-indulgence. ‘Fidelio,’ according to Abels, ‘is usually interpreted as a salvation and liberation opera with a political background.’ It is hardly ‘interpreted’ as such; it straightforwardly is that, and this is not a work that seems especially amenable to perverse reinterpretation. Whilst Guantánamo, Gaza, all manner of other actually-existing prisons, still exist, indelible stains upon humanity, is it acceptable to suggest that the solution is simply, to ‘find ourselves’? Weird sound effects punctuate the movements: presumably the workings of the unconscious. Or something. If they are intended to terrify, they sadly fail; they are not nearly loud enough. Instead, they merely irritate. Invoking Freud is not enough; it never was.

Claus Guth justifies himself, again in the programme, by disingenuously claiming that Beethoven’s revisions leave us with an ‘indefinite, indeed open form’. For some unspecified reason, the Salzburg Festival ‘in particular, offers us a place to open a space for non-normative ideas where we are able to experiment as if in a laboratory.’ All very well, if they work, but they do not. Instead, we have especially crass references to Beethoven’s deafness thrown in, a woman, Leonore’s ‘shadow’, frantically using what appears to be sign language, Florestan covering his ears in agony, and a banal narrative of personal self-discovery (I think, in Leonore’s case) superimposed upon the opera to no good effect. I shall leave the last word to designer, Christian Schmidt: ‘On our quest for a place for the events, we tried … to avoid any clarity.’ Quite.

Salzburg Festival (4): WEDO/Barenboim - Debussy, Boulez, and Tchaikovsky, 12 August 2015

Grosses Festspielhaus

Debussy – Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Boulez – Dérive 2
Tchaikovsky – Symphony no.4 in F minor, op.36

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Daniel Barenboim (conductor)

 

Each performance in this concert proved a thing of wonder. Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune exuded warmth, languor, subtle yet unmistakeable eroticism. Most intriguingly, it seemed to play tricks with my experience of time. Half way through, it seemed ready to be over in the twinkling of an eye, barely begun; thereafter, motion – like ‘traditional’ harmony – appeared almost but not quite to have been suspended. A gnawing, corrosive cello motif, for want of a better word, sounded unusually close to Alberich: testament, doubtless, to Daniel Barenboim’s Wagnerian pedigree, but also to the richness of tone and rhythmic incisiveness of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra. And all the while, we, the orchestra, the woodwind, remained haunted, yet, as it were, leisurely incited, by memory, (non-)development and reinstantiation of that opening flute melody. Yes, New Music had begun, even if, as this performance subtly reminded us, it had already begun with Tristan.

It continued in a performance of Boulez’s Dérive 2, which was little short of miraculous. (I am sad to report that it was marred by the worst audience behaviour I have experienced at this Festival, a selfish minority fidgeting, chattering, noisily flicking programme pages, exiting the hall. They should not have been allowed back in after the interval.) Not the least of my reasons for never forgetting this concert will be that it was the moment when I felt, not that I had suddenly grasped this protean work, but that I had, at long last, began to grasp it, in its perhaps uniquely challenging dialectic between the most insistent motivic (?) unity I know in a work by Boulez and its extraordinary variety. Doubtless it was partly a matter that I had somehow become ‘ready’ for this epiphany. But it was not just that; it was more, I think, a reflection of the quality of burningly committed performance from Barenboim and his players (Michael Barenboim (violin), Yulia Deyneka (viola), Adi Tal (cello), Emmanuel Danan (English horn), Jussef Eisa (clarinet), Mor Biron (bassoon), Sharon Polyak (horn), Michael Wendeberg (yes, him: piano), Lev Loftus (marimba), Dominic Oelze (vibraphone), Aline Khouri (harp)). I only read Paul Griffiths’s programme note after the performance, so this offered no key to my experience at the time, but Boulez’s ‘starting point … in some examples … sketched for lectures he was giving at the Collège de France’ seemed more than a mere starting point: ‘When I reflected,’ Boulez had explained, ‘on some of Ligeti’s compositions, I felt the desire to dedicate myself to some almost theoretical research into periodicity in order to systematically examine its overlays, its shifts, and its exchanges’. The brilliance, the (unavoidable word!) éclat of ever-shifting, yet apparently continuous sonorities seemed magnified, extended in rhythmic and harmonic progress – if, indeed, ‘progress’ it be. Something not entirely unlike post-Lisztian thematic transformation seemed at times the generative force, albeit somehow mapped out in a dizzying array, or so it seemed, of dimensions: as if the spatial games of sur Incises were extended yet, in the spirit of Debussy’s Prélude, subverted by the apparently arbitrary.

My (perhaps) laboured talk of ‘seemed’, ‘apparently’: such was a good part of the magic. What was glittering ‘surface’? What was deeper, generative? Those questions may have been the wrong ones, but it seemed as though one was intended to ask them. Barenboim and his players demanded that one listen, whatever the selfish behaviour of some in the audience; indeed, such was the strength, the security of the performance that one almost had the sense that what we heard lived only in that, not in the score, however erroneous that sense might have been. Snatches of remembered, half-remembered figures from other favourite Boulez works – more Wagner, The Rite of Spring – hovered, transmuted whilst we waited, before our ears. There could hardly have been a more vivid, more inviting demonstration of the truth of Boulez’s claim that serial procedures might extend material and its progress indefinitely, nor of his claim, with us since the Domaine musical years, that what New Music most desperately needs is excellence in performance. That early dissatisfaction with the few performances of, say, Webern he heard, so unsatisfactory that one could not discern the musical sense, seemed compositionally manifest, set free as a flight of post-Debussyan fantasy. My doubts about this work, about my ability it not to understand it then at least to begin to appreciate it, were banished forever.   

I remain unsure quite what, from a programming position, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony was doing next. From an experiential standpoint, however, I similarly had any lingering doubts dispelled concerning a work that has not always convinced me. Again, I realised the problem had most likely concerned insufficient performances (as well, no doubt, as insufficient response on my part). What can sometimes seem a little empty on no count did here; indeed, I think it may have been the best performance I have ever heard of the work. At any rate, the playing of the West-Eastern Divan was simply hors concours. The depth of tone of the string section (seventeen first violins, if I remember correctly, going down to eight basses), assisted by the wondrous acoustic of the Grosses Festspielhaus, had to be heard to be believed, but so did the lushness of its vibrato, the sheer ‘Russianness, in spirit, not imitation, of its sound – perhaps a tribute to the importance of the Russian school of string playing in the instruction of its members? Implacable brass, horns which sounded as if they had come straight out of Tannhäuser, spellbindingly fresh woodwind with soloists of the very highest calibre… I am afraid I simply lapse into cliché in trying to describe the sound; it is better, perhaps, to hear for oneself.

 

The work of those who have trained the WEDO – Barenboim certainly, but many others too – was, then, triumphantly vindicated; however, this was above all a triumph of the spirit. Barenboim led the players in his most Furtwänglerian mode. It was not that his reading seemed in any sense to ape that of his predecessor, but that the metaphysical spirit sounded so close. The broadest first movement I can recall was, I think, more broad in spirit than actual tempo, although one section was gloriously slow. That lent the performance the air of an almost Mahlerian struggle for life and death rather than anything remotely ponderous; indeed, I have never been so gripped. The Furtwänglerian Fernhören that characterises Barenboim’s greatest performance was certainly an abiding presence in this case. Songful, soulful longing, perhaps to be elsewhere, was the impression granted by the second movement (and what an oboe soloist we heard!) Again, it unfolded as if in a single breath. By contrast, a distinctly modernistic voice characterised much of the scherzo, pizzicato sounding as if it would be acclaimed for a technical breakthrough, had the composer been Webern rather than Tchaikovsky. The composer’s melding together of different lines, different strands of thought, sometimes brought another surprising comparison to mind: one with Haydn. Barenboim and his orchestra trod to perfection the line between conviction and alienation in the finale. Composer and performers alike seemed, as it were, to know the score only too well.

Salzburg Festival (3): Karg/Martineau - Wolf, Montsalvatge, Duparc, Ravel, Hahn, Koechlin, Poulenc, and Barber, 11 August 2015

Mozarteum

Wolf – Kennst du das Land; Mir ward gesagst, du reisest in die Ferne; Mein Liebster singt am Haus im Mondenscheine; Mein Liebster ist so klein; Ich ließ mir sagen und mir ward erzählt; Ich hab’ in Penna einen Liebsten wohnen; Sagt, seid Ihr es, feiner Herr; In dem Schatten meiner Locken; Klinge, klinge, mein Pandero

Montsalvatge – Cinco canciones negras
Duparc – L’Invitation au voyage
Ravel – Cinq mélodie populaires grecques
Hahn – Lydé; Vile potabis; Tyndaris
Koechlin – Chanson d’Engaddi, op.56 no.1; La Chanson d’Ishak de Mossoul, op.84 no.8; Le Voyage, op.84 no.2
Poulenc – Voyage à Paris; Montparnasse; Hyde Park; Hôtel
Barber – Solitary hotel; Sure on this shining night

Christiane Karg (soprano)

Malcolm Martineau (piano) 

 

One of the most tiresome clichés of contemporary life, and the competition is stiff, is that of the ‘journey’. It perhaps reached its bathetic nadir – I say ‘perhaps’, since I cannot claim to have read the book – in the title of Tony Blair’s autobiography. (Yes, Tony: what really matters most about the invasion of Iraq is how it affected you and your ‘journey’.) How refreshing it was, then, to have an intelligently programmed recital which presented an array of different journeys, actual and anticipated, in excellent performances from Christiane Karg and Malcolm Martineau.

We began with Wolf and specifically with Goethe (not, one suspects, artists with whom our beloved ex-Prime Minister has spent much time). There was nothing of the warm up – how could there be? – to Kennst du das Land? Karg sang as if reaching out – not, I hasten to add, in the sense of a Blairite ‘journey’ – towards the land where lemons blossom, Martineau’s piano part offering Lisztian urgency. On the level of small detail – slightly lingering upon ‘Geliebter’, ‘glänzt’ whispered almost as Schwarzkopf were reborn – and the longer line, with all its increasing dramatic urgency, this seemed to me a model performance. Mir ward gesagt, du reisest in die Ferne, first of the Paul Heyse settings, sounded as continuation and foil in equal measure. The spirit of Chopin’s mazurka pervaded Mein Liebster singt am Haus im Mondenscheine, whilst performative wit, especially to the ending, brought smiles, inward and outward, in Mein Liebster ist so klein. Moving from Italy to Spain, Sagt, seid Ihr es, feiner Herr, sounded imbued with the spirit of the dance. Again, a knowing smile, visible and audible, characterised the final ‘Ach nein!’

Xavier Montsalvatge’s Cinco canciones negras proved a revelation to me: expressing the voice, it seemed, of a Catalan Poulenc. The habanera rhythm of the opening ‘Cuba dentro de un piano’ offers scope, fully realised, for rhythmic play with word endings. Karg and Martineau seemed equally in their element. Rhythmic flexibility and intriguingly ‘different’ harmonies were the order of the day in the ensuing ‘Rhythmus der Habanera’. Karg’s delicious pianissimo singing was the abiding memory of ‘Canción de cuna para dormer a un negrito’. The set reached a wonderfully lively conclusion in ‘Canto Negro’.

Duparc’s L’Invitation au voyage initiated a series of French songs in the second half, the performance striking just the right note of invitingly French post-Wagnerism. The varying moods of Ravel’s Cinq melodies populaires grecques were unfailingly captured, verbal detail impressively present yet unexaggerated. Piano rhythms were flexible where necessary, insistent where necessary. Reynaldo Hahn, I am afraid, is a composer to whom I am yet to respond; the three Etudes latines we heard seemed very well performed, but as music, I found them little more than pleasant. Charles Koechlin offered something far more interesting. Chanson d’Engaddi emerged very much with a personal ‘voice’, its spare quality leading one in, especially with such varied vocal colourings, to the Schoenbergian harmonies of La Chanson d’Ishak de Mossoul.

 

Poulenc is so often at his finest in song, and so he proved again here. Voyage à Paris plunged us immediately into a world of unmistakeably Parisian urbanity, Montparnasse offering a sad foil of solitude, hinting at the world of La Voix humaine: those harmonies, that tristesse… Hyde Park again made me smile: surely the point, whilst the passing time – a Parisian Marschallin, perhaps – of Hôtel cast its own melancholy spell. The programme concluded with two songs by Samuel Barber. Karg’s vocal shading and her understated sadness had Solitary Hotel linger in the memory for some time.

Salzburg Festival (2): Die Eroberung von Mexico, 10 August 2015

Cortez (Bo Skovhus) and Montezuma (Angela Denoke)
Images: Monika Rittershaus

Felsenreitschule

Montezuma – Angela Denoke

Cortez – Bo Skovhus
Soprano – Susanna Andersson
Contralto – Marie-Ange Todorovitch
First Speaker – Stephan Rehm
Second Speaker – Peter Pruchniewitz

Peter Konwitschny (director)

Johannes Leiacker (designs)
Manfred Voss (lighting)
fettFilm (video)
Peter Böhm, Florian Bogner (sound direction)
Bettina Bartz (dramaturgy)

Mixed Choir (on tape)

Movement Choir

ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna

Ingo Metzmacher (conductor)

This was a magnificent evening in the theatre, to which my immediate reaction was to wish to see – and to hear – it all again. Partly, that was of course a matter of a rich work, experienced for the first time, in a rich staging, experienced for the first time, in rich performances, experienced for the first and last time. I am sure that I missed a great deal. I will do so in a staging of Parsifal, which I flatter myself I know reasonably well; how much more so will that be the case in a work hitherto unfamiliar? But I hope here to give a taste of my vivid theatrical experience of Wolfgang Rihm’s Die Eroberung von Mexico (The Conquest of Mexico).

 

 

Director Peter Konwitschny is at pains, in a programme interview, to dissociate the work from the merely ‘Mexican’. ‘We saw,’ he claims, ‘the sign warning us not to turn off into the dead-end marked “Mexico”’. Before that, we read Konwitschny: ‘It’s not about Europe/America or Mexico/Spain, but Man/Woman.’ Such might be the case for Konwitschny’s staging, though not, I think entirely, but I am less sure that it is the case for the Musiktheater (an interesting, not-quite-Wagnerism) itself. It is certainly not to be reduced to any one particular polarity, as the oft-repeated, Antonin Artaud-derived, ‘Neutral, Weiblich, Männlich’ (‘Masculine, Neuter, Feminine’ – not always, notably in that order) seems to remind us. And the space available for the mediating – or original? – ‘Neutral’ is not always clear, perhaps does not even survive, or at least survive in its initial form. Is it perhaps – and this might be a Wagnerism of sorts – in the orchestra? In Rihm’s own libretto, which, taking Artaud’s Le Théâtre du Séraphin as one of its building blocks, would thus both suggest and reject some form of verbal (perhaps even colonial?) supremacy?

 

With such an enterprise, it is, of course, difficult to know where to start, and I have probably stepped ahead of myself on one strand already. I shall attempt no clear division between work and staging, since such was not my experience – and indeed would not be possible on the basis of an initial encounter. (Frustrating, yet inevitable and indeed in some sense fruitful?) There is a perhaps predictable, yet already surprising, identification of Montezuma with the feminine – and not only in voice – and Cortez with the masculine. Rape occurs early on; does it not always? But before that, and returning at long last to my initial point concerning Mexico, we have had a long, introductory, introduction, or perhaps immersion, into the landscape. The first of three parts, ‘Die Vorzeichen’/’Omens’; ‘Bekenntnis’/’Confession’; ‘Die Umwälzungen’/’Upheavals’) has drummers surrounding the audience lead us in for a few minutes before the conductor has even arrived, and indeed before the audience has received the signal to sit and to be quiet. The drum melodies, Rihm writes, are ‘the melody “of a landscape that senses the approach of a thunderstorm”’. They do not – or at least, did not to me – feel ‘Orientalist’, or better ‘Occidentalist’; yet, at the same time, it is difficult, upon reflection, not to think that in some sense they must be, and, as the action unfolds, that they have, perhaps knowingly, been presented, even constructed as such. Oppositions, then, not entirely straightforward, continue to frame, to participate, to incite.

 

 

 

Rihm’s score, as often with this composer, covers a broad canvas in any number of respects. Yet, doubtless partly as a matter of the excellence of staging and all performances, though not only, I think, as a matter of that, it offers the composer at his integrative as well as his discursive best. Schoenbergian Sprechstimme – can we not but think of Moses at times? – vies or collaborates with choral writing and vocal amplification that bring to mind Nono and Lachenmann. Something far more Romantic, the ghost of Mahler perhaps, or of Strauss, swells up in the orchestral strings (fewer than one perhaps realises). Lyricism – whether vocal, or solo instrumental – that would surely have brought a smile to the face any of those composers has one melt, and at the same time has one suspect, has one question, not least in light of what we see and do not see on stage.

 

Konwitschny makes a strong case for his conception of male-female incomprehension. Not just in the violence, whether it be of Cortez towards Montezuma, of the movement choir (which, in a brilliant coup de théâtre, stands up and reveals itself as initially having been seated in the audience) towards the golden (yes, gold again brings us back to Moses and, of course, to the idea of the New World) female, danced portrayals of Malinche, ‘who speaks with her body’. The living room in which most of the action takes place – the rest surrounding that space – has at its centre Frida Kahlo’s The Wounded Deer: both image and knowledge of Kahlo’s relationship with Diego Rivera contribute to our understanding. In perhaps the most arresting image of all, still more so than the movement choir’s gang-rape of Malinche, Montezuma gives birth, we presume to Cortez’s child: the offspring is the offspring of Apple. fettFilm’s video images plunge us into a world of projected ‘apps’ and video games: Cortez’s war is virtual – remember those television images of Baghdad, and so many other victims of Western imperialism – but the virtual appears to be real and, of course is. Both sides suffer; both sides die, kill each other, and yet appear still to be in some sense alive. What is going on? What has gone on? The information age threatens to disclose all, yet leaves us all the more alienated. Montezuma’s transformation into a statue – here, a marrying, apparently pacified doll – does nothing to resolve, everything disquietingly to disturb, as does the further violence that ensues. And yet opera, the primæval and/or modern cry, reassert themselves at the end of each part, with verse from Octavio Paz, a striking, harrowing duet for Montezuma and Cortez at the very close. Or is it? Rihm’s libretto ends: ‘Ende (?) der Oper’. Images from the (Spanish/Mexican) past have fleetingly passed before our eyes: are they a clarification, or a ‘dead end’? Log in, to find out? Or should we turn away from our screens? Perhaps to listen?

 

 

Performances, as I suggested, were uniformly excellent. Angela Denoke and Bo Skovhus offered near-superhuman efforts as Montezuma and Cortez, range as impressive in dynamic terms as in pitch, in stage presence and conviction as in musical and verbal delivery. Cortez, backed up by speakers, never elicited sympathy, but suggested a broadening of our experience and understanding. Montezuma, shadowed by spectacular high soprano and deep contralto (Susanna Andersson and Marie-Ange Todorovitch) was anything but a sentimentally conceived victim. We did not – and surely should not – know what to do with him/her, and in some sense (s)he survived. I should probably add: in another sense, sadly, not at all. The contrast with the trendy banalities of Peter Sellars’s The Indian Queen, loudly proclaiming itself post-colonial, whilst all the time forgetting the ‘post’ bit, could hardly have been greater. This approached Wagnerian music drama, not on Wagner’s terms, but not opposed to them either. And, as with Wagner, the orchestra was perhaps most crucial of all. There could certainly no be gainsaying the outstanding contribution made by the ORF Symphony Orchestra, Vienna, wisely, viscerally, reflectively directed by Ingo Metzmacher. Yes, this work needs to be seen – and heard – again.

 

 

 

Salzburg Festival (1): Pollini - Beethoven and Schoenberg, 9 August 2015

Grosses Festspielhaus

Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.17 in D minor, op.31 no.2, ‘The Tempest’

Schoenberg – Three Piano Pieces, op.11
Schoenberg – Six Little Piano Pieces, op.19
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.24 in F-sharp major, op.78
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.23 in F minor, op.57, ‘Appassionata’

Maurizio Pollini (piano)

 

Sometimes, I wish Maurizio Pollini would play music by Schoenberg in every recital. The composer, astonishingly, still seems to need such advocacy, at least with the general musical public, whatever that might be. But then, sometimes I wish he would play Beethoven in every recital. Or Chopin. And so on. A Pollini recital remains one of the great musical events in any concert-goer’s year; this Salzburg concert was no exception.

Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata was the opening work. If I were to be hyper-critical – and, if I am honest, find a cavil for the sake of finding a cavil – there were in the first movement a couple of occasions on which some, though not necessarily I, might have found Pollini’s tone a little dry (actually closer to the sound one sometimes hears on some of his DG recordings). But I shall waste no more time as an unconvincing Devil’s Advocate: from those extraordinary Largo opening bars to the end of the finale, this was as compelling a performance as I have heard, one that took one by the scruff of the neck and never let one go, although in no sense brutal. There is so much to be said in those opening bars, still more to be said in what comes from them, and in how that comes from them.  The endlessly — and ever-controversially — analysed first movement of Beethoven’s D minor piano sonata, Op. 31 no. 2, the so-called Tempest, may be a more apposite model here than that of the Ninth Symphony. As Carl Dahlhaus once put it, ‘By the criteria of Italo-French music, Beethoven’s movement does not have the slightest claim to a musical idea worthy of the name.’ Leaving on one side, the generalisation regarding other music, we can still assent to the ‘German’ organicism of both work and performance. ‘What his work is based on,’ Dahlhaus continued, ‘is not a thematic — much less melodic — “inspiration” so much as a formal concept: the arpeggiated triad … The opening, seemingly an introduction, can be viewed in retrospect as an exposition.’ And that is how we heard it: almost an instantiation of an endless dialectical process, albeit one in which both composer and pianist intensified the complexity by necessarily yet meaningfully calling time, in more sense than one. The demands of Beethovenian sonata form are not identical with those of, say, Boulez’s serial proliferation. ‘If one extreme of music is the melodic “inspiration”, Dahlhaus went on, quoting as an example a cavatina from Les Huguenots, ‘limited to a few measures and with the form functioning merely as an arrangement, the other would seem to be the almost disembodied formal process emerging from a void.’ Indeed – and with what drama that emerged, albeit embodied rather than ‘disembodied’ in the heroism of performance. The occasional, very occasional, blurring – as so often, Pollini’s tempo was fast indeed – would doubtless be seized upon by his detractors as evidence of ‘failing technique’; they seem to want to have it both ways, elsewhere referring to elevation of ‘technique’ over ‘emotion’, as if the two might be separated. For the rest of us, it was a white-knuckle ride, all the more so, since it was of the mind as much as the body (as if the two, etc. …). The Adagio struck just the right balance between sublimity – hard to define, though one knows it when one hears it, and surely not unrelated to exquisite, apparently obvious voicing – and something more earthy. Schumann and Chopin came to mind more than once in the sonorities teased from the piano in the finale, but as an extension of Beethoven, not in opposition to him.

For there is more to be heard in such a performance, let alone such a work, than can ever be dreamed of by the Beckmessers of this world. Whatever their protests, ‘Beethoven Hero’ is far from dead. So we heard in the other two Beethoven sonatas: the Appassionata of course, but also, in more playful yet ultimately no less serious mode, the wonderful F-sharp major sonata, op.78. Again, there was ‘slow movement sublimity’, albeit ever so briefly, in the opening of the first movement; again, the main Allegro section (here with the rider, certainly observed, ma non troppo) emerged from within, both negating and ultimately sublating the initial material. Variegated tone and the subtlest of agogic touches showed Beethoven’s wilful yet winning humour at something approaching it greatest.

Pollini’s reading of the Appassionata Sonata, and the first movement in particular, was all the more powerful for its (admittedly predictable) eschewal of ‘mere’ rhetoric. There was, quite rightly, no distinction to be made – or at least this is how it seemed – between material and its dynamic expression, whether in the score or in the concert hall. Especially noteworthy was the difference in colour – whether through touch, weighting, dynamic contrast, and/or who knows? – so powerfully, meaningfully communicated in different tonal areas and the transitions between them. Andante con moto seemed spot on for what we heard in the second movement. Variations unfolded of necessity, but also of will; there was a beating heart at, well, the heart of this performance. The finale swept all before it: a cliché, I know, but words tend to be insufficient. Alas, they are all I have, at least here. Middle-period Beethoven needs no vindication, but even for those who might think the work too ‘familiar’, it could hardly have sounded so on this occasion.

The Schoenberg performances were no less fine. Op.11 was haunted by the motivic ghost of Brahms; how could it not be? But in context, it seemed equally haunted by the ghost of Beethovenian tonal processes. D minor – that most ‘Second Viennese School’ of keys – seemed resurrected from The Tempest, flayed, suspended: all of those things and more. Schoenberg’s instantly familiar piano sound spoke, or rather sang. For both the longer pieces of op.11 and the aphoristic pieces of op.19 had something more than usually vocal to them: It was not just the voicing of lines, which again occasionally seemed to have a little Chopin to it. (I thought also of the ‘Valse de Chopin’ in Pierrot lunaire, shortly to come.) That was certainly important, but so too was the ability to understand and to communicate each piece as if in a single breath. Op.19 no.1 sounded as if a slightly extended operatic sigh – a warning, perhaps, to Dahlhaus’s (too?) ready opposition of German and ‘Italo-French’, Debussy appearing too – if not as an influence, then perhaps as a cousin. The Mahlerian bells of the closing op.19 piece sounded as if without hammers, both heavy with mourning and light with the air of another planet. Now some later Schoenberg too, please! In the meantime, though, we had – as I suspected – two exquisite Beethoven Bagatelles as encores: op.119 nos 3 and 4. Their kinship (no.3 in particular) with Schoenberg’s piano pieces has never sounded so apparent: again, as if in a single, profound breath.




 

Salzburg Festival 2015



Dirndl-mania, 2013

 

Tomorrow, I shall fly to Salzburg. With performance, one never quite knows what will happen, but I am quietly confident that I should find a few things to enjoy from the following:

9 August – Maurizio Pollini: works by Beethoven and Schoenberg

10 August – Wolfgang Rihm, Die Eroberung von Mexico (Skovhus, Denoke, ORF SO/Metzmacher; dir. Konwitschny)

12 August – West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim: works by Debussy, Boulez, and Tchaikovsky

13 August – Fidelio (Kaufmann, Pieczonka, VPO/Welser-Möst; dir. Guth)

14 August – West-Eastern Divan Orchestra/Barenboim: works by Beethoven and Schoenberg

14 August – Mackie Messer – Eine Salzburger Dreigroschenoper (arr. Martin Lowe; dir. Julian Crouch and Sven-Eric Bechtolf)

15 August – Mutter/VPO/Muti: works by Tchaikovsky and Brahms

15 August – IRCAM/EIC/Pintscher: Boulez, Répons (my first ‘live’ performance)

Prom 28 - Power/BBC SO/Knussen - Dukas, Turnage, Schuller, and Scriabin, 6 August 2015

Royal Albert Hall

Dukas – L’Apprenti sorcier

Turnage – On Opened Ground
Schuller – Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee
Scriabin – The Poem of Ecstasy

Lawence Power (viola)

BBC Symphony Orchestra

Oliver Knussen (conductor)

 

Try as I might, I could not discern a common theme or line to this programme, although there were certain connections to be made between some of the pieces. No matter: it opened my ears to two new works (new both to me and to the Proms), and was all very well performed.

 

Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not heard so often as one might expect. I am not sure I have heard it sound so hard-edged before; ideas of something childish or even childlike were banished on no uncertain terms. Oliver Knussen’s reading began quite deliberately, the opening offering a languor that perhaps drew it a little closer to Debussy. It was full of expectation too, before taking an angular course, which yet remained rather jolly. A strong sense of narrative was imparted throughout, without detracting from the musical substance.

 

Mark-Anthony Turnage’s On Opened Ground was commissioned by the Cleveland Orchestra for Yuri Bashmet; Lawrence Power, who gave the British premiere in 2004, joined the BBC Symphony Orchestra for its first Proms performance. The first movement, ‘Cadenza and Scherzino’, gently upsets preconceived notions of ordering. More important than that, its subtle opening, with quiet accompaniment – had I not known otherwise, its hinting at refractions of the viola might have had me thinking of electronics – captivates, draws one in to an absorbing exploration of the viola and its potential relationships with the symphony orchestra.  Later, the ‘Scherzino’ section dances, hints at post-Bergian blues – Berg’s Violin Concerto more than once came to mind – and, above all, sings in a voice that is recognisably Turnage’s. The stillness of the close proved magical: testament to a fine performance as well as mastery of orchestration. The second of the two movements, ‘Interrupted Song and Chaconne’, begins in rapt fashion I am tempted to call ‘pastoral’ or at least ‘elegiac’. There develops some sense of conflict between soloist and orchestra, as if the latter is determined to thwart the former, but Turnage’s keen sense of drama permits another way, resolving itself through the working out of a chaconne: at times Big Band-ish, at others, frankly Romantic, its Romanticism seemingly arising from the material rather than the easy option beloved of so many neo-tonal composers. I have not always responded warmly to Turnage’s work, but certainly did so on this occasion.

 

The other Proms premiere was of Gunther Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee: suite-like, and full of incident, often quietly surprising. The opening ‘Antique Harmonies’,  hieratic orchestrally as well as harmonically, prepared the way for a delightfully quirky, even capricious ‘Abstract Trio’, played only by three instruments at any one time. ‘Little Blue Devil’ offered a possible connection with Turnage and jazz: very much at home rather than depicting or imitating. ‘The Twittering Machine’, by contrast, seemed to move between other, quite different, 1950s style: a journey, one might say, from swarming to pointillism; or, alternatively, a hint of early Stockhausen (or is it perhaps amused by him?) with a dash of Amériques-like material (albeit with far more sparing use of the orchestra). Flute arabesques from the Gallery, soon joined by other instruments in counterpoint, were the abiding memory of the curiously Orientalist ‘Arab Village’. ‘An Eerie Moment’ is more than a little suggestive of various movements from Schoenberg’s op.16 Five Orchestral Pieces, the contrast with the concluding ‘Pastorale’ perhaps the greatest of all. Klee-like? I am not sure; perhaps I am too wedded to the idea of Webern as the musical manifestation of Klee. But that is neither here nor there, really; I should happily hear more where this came from.

 

Finally, The Poem of Ecstasy. I cannot really take the piece seriously, although many musicians I greatly admire, Knussen amongst them, clearly do. Such music, even if one discounts the composer’s megalomania, tends to have me reflect how economical Wagner is with his climaxes. Scriabin’s meandering is clearly deliberate, but I am never entirely sure to what end. Knussen and the BBC SO nevertheless offered an enjoyable, wholehearted performance, opening with luscious, vibrato-laden languor (a possible connection with the opening of the Dukas?) Although Scriabin’s climaxes come thick and fast, Knussen shaped them with great skill, in as lucid a reading as I can recall. There was some wonderfully evocative afterglow to be experienced, and it is always a joy to hear the Albert Hall organ. Those bells, though…?

Prohaska/Arcangelo/Cohen - Lachrimae, 2 August 2015

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Dowland – Lachrimae Pavane

Tarquinio Merula – Hor ch’e tempo di dormir
Purcell – The Blessed Virgin’s Expostulation
Cavalli – Gli amori d’Apollo e di Dafne: ‘O più d’ogni richezza’
Giovanni Felice Sances – Usurpator Tiranno
Purcell – Sonata in G minor, Z.807, from Ten Sonatas in Four Parts
Strozzi – Diporti de Euterpe, op.7: ‘Lagrime mie’
Dowland – Flow my Tears
Strozzi – Che si può fare
Salomone Rossi – Sonata terza sopra l’aria romanesca
Purcell – The Fairy Queen: ‘The Plaint: O let me weep’
Scarlatti – Sonata in D minor, K.90, arranged for violin and continuo
Cavalli – La Calisto: ‘Restino imbalsamate’
Purcell – An Evening Hymn

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Arcangelo
Jonathan Cohen (director)

I apologise that this will not be a ‘review’ as such. That is not primarily because Anna Prohaska, the soloist, is a friend of mine. (I think a lot of nonsense is spoken about such things. It is the nature of things that, sometimes one has to write about a performance, a book, a musical work by someone one knows. It may in some ways render the task more difficult, but it may also afford insights. Honesty is the best policy here – and indeed anywhere else.) However, I was unable to buy a programme – the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse ran out very soon, and only offered them again for the second half, which struck me as extortion – and was thus unable to follow the texts and translations, and indeed in many cases was unaware what was being performed. Quite a good test of one’s ear in many ways: I was delighted to recognise one of Cavalli’s two arias and to guess that he was the composer of another (from a work I thought I knew, but which I clearly do not know well enough!) I was still more delighted to hear works by Barbara Strozzi, whose music I have long admired, but whom we hear far too little: alas, we all know why. I wanted simply to post the programme, discovered from Arcangelo’s website after the event, to remind me what I had seen and heard.

 

If you will permit me – and even if not – I should like to say that Anna gave an intensely dramatic performance, quite befitting the theatrical location. I very much liked the way the various works fitted together and suggested moods and even narratives greater than the sum of their parts. A hint, and sometimes more than that, of the wilder world of the Mediterranean was sometimes present, especially in Strozzi’s music. (I know I am being ungrateful, but a little Monteverdi would have been greatly appreciated too. When, however, would that not be the case?) Moreover, whilst I am, as any regular readers will know, anything but a paid-up member of the period-instrument lobby, I found Arcangelo’s performances, on their terms and indeed often on mine, mostly highly convincing, even if I could not quite work out what an arrangement of a Scarlatti keyboard sonata was doing there. The Playhouse is, whatever its acoustical problems for the performers, an interesting and, yes, beautiful space; I look forward to seeing a play or an opera there. I shall stop now, lest this turn into an actual review, whatever that might be…