‘Music for the thinking ear’: the opening concert of the Pierre Boulez Saal, 5 March 2017

© Volker Kreidler

 

Boulez – Initiale

Schubert – Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, D 965
Mozart – Piano Quartet in E-flat major, KV 493
Berg – Chamber Concerto
Widmann – Fantasie, for solo clarinet
Boulez – sur Incises

Anna Prohaska (soprano)

Michael Barenboim (violin)

Yulia Deyneka (viola)

Kian Soltani (cello)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

Karim Said (piano)

Boulez Ensemble

Daniel Barenboim (piano, conductor)

‘Musik für das denkende Ohr’ is the slogan for Berlin’s new Pierre Boulez Saal, which opened its doors to the public on Saturday 4 March. Why a new hall? The city’s Philharmonie (‘Karajan’s Circus’, or ‘Zirkus Karajani’, as West Berliners dubbed it) remains a monument to architectural, acoustic, and indeed performative modernism. There are no bad seats, whether visually or acoustically; the surrounding of the orchestra, or other performers, by the audience offers quite a different, ‘in the round’ experience from many more ‘traditional’ halls, even the most blessed acoustically, such as Vienna’s Musikverein and Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, let alone the miserable examples with which London has been cursed.  Nevertheless, although Hans Scharoun’s Berlin hall has a smaller, chamber music hall attached, Berlin has had nothing like this. Frank Gehry’s oval design – no stage, merely a centre, again ‘in the round’ – genuinely seems to open up, in the spirit of Boulez’s long-held desire for a flexible ‘salle modulable’, the possibility of the ‘thinking ear’: to engage, to reflect, to make itself part of the performance. The greatest distance there can be between the conductor and the most distant member of the audience (682 seats in total) is but fourteen metres. There is intimacy, then, but the intimacy, it is hoped of collaborative endeavour.

The conceptual collaboration between Gehry, Daniel Barenboim, and acoustician, Yasuhisa Toyota stands very much in the spirit of the artistic collaboration, spanning more than half a century, between Barenboim and Boulez. They performed together for the first time in Berlin, with the Philharmonic, in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto, and Barenboim has long proved one of the most ardent champions of his friend’s music. Whilst Boulez’s death continues to be lamented, the conscience of New Music seems almost to be reborn here. In programming philosophy, we see echt-Boulezian selections, connections made. Barenboim’s new ‘Boulez Ensemble’, at least as modulable as the hall, made up of musicians from his Staatskapelle Berlin and West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, both of which Boulez conducted, will present concerts with combinations of contemporary music, Classical music, and classically modernist music – just as Boulez would insist that musicians auditioning for his Ensemble Intercontemporain play one Classical piece, not just contemporary music. The hall will also, most important of all, offer a home to the young musician-students of the Barenboim-Said Akademie, whose first cohort, thirty-seven of them, enrolled last autumn.

 

© Volker Kreidler

There will be much more to say about the hall itself; much will already have been said by others. I should like to concentrate now on the opening concert itself. It was given twice, the Saturday evening concert in the presence of a host of dignitaries, the German President included; I went the following morning. It may have been a lengthy occasion by the standards of the typical, one might say formulaic, concert; it did not feel as if it were. There is no reason why every concert should last for about two hours with an interval; every opera does not. If a performance of, say, the Diabelli Variations or the Missa solemnis is enough in itself, then there is no reason to add to it. Nor is there any reason to fret about a concert as rich, in very Boulezian terms, in programming possibility as this. Split into three parts, with two intervals, repertoire stretching from Mozart to Jörg Widmann, this encouraged, even did its part to create, that very ‘thinking ear’ of which we had previously been informed: to think and to listen.  

A new hall needs a fanfare. This one had Boulez’s 1987 Initiale, for seven brass instruments (two horns, two trumpets, two trombones, and tuba). The musicians encircled us, or rather played to us, Gabrieli-like, from the balcony, conducted (although I could not see him from where I was seated) by Barenboim. Clarity and warmth combined in near-ideal proportions, both in work and in performance. The experience of Répons seemed to offer musical as well as spatial inspiration – albeit now somewhat miniaturised. Five minutes of music offered an extraordinary expressive range, almost as if a symphonic poem and its narrative, wordless or otherwise, were being distilled – which, in a sense, is just what was happening.  It is not for nothing that ‘form’, understood as something more dynamic than ‘structure’, is contained within the word ‘performance’.

Schubert is to feature strongly in the Boulez Saal’s programming. A Winterreise with Christian Gerhaher, Barenboim at the piano, will launch a cycle of the complete Lieder over several years; Barenboim will also play the complete piano sonatas and conduct the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the complete the symphonies. Here, we heard Der Hirt auf dem Felsen, with Anna Prohaska and Jörg Widmann, neatly also offering connections both to Widmann’s own clarinet Fantasie in the third section of the concert and to subsequent Widmann contributions to the season. This was true chamber music, perhaps especially between the two ‘soloists’, Barenboim not exactly reticent but far from dominant. The song opens: ‘When I stand on the highest rock, look down into the deep valley, and sing,’ that final ‘und singe’, quietly ecstatic here, enthusiastically echoed, as if across the valley, by the clarinet. The clarity of both lines – this was certainly not just a matter of the acoustic – did much to aid the Alpine impression: ‘atmosphere’, as Boulez would have been the first to point out, does not necessarily entail a blur. There was real sadness to be heard in the fourth and fifth stanzas, ‘In tiefem Gram verhehr ich mich…,’ until the ‘wunderbarer Macht’ (wondrous power) of song itself won through: a triumph as unmistakeable as it was unexaggerated. Playing to the gallery, figuratively or literally, is not a requirement for the hall of the thinking ear. And what post-Mozartian delight there was to be had in the concluding stanza, Spring arrived, receiving a fitting celebration in Prohaska’s coloratura.

Barenboim has been associated with the music of Mozart for as long as he has been a performing musician. For many of us, his piano concertos (whether with the English Chamber Orchestra or the Berlin Philharmonic) can hardly be bettered. It was fitting, then, to round off this first part of the concert with Mozart’s E-flat major Piano Quartet, with Michael Barenboim (violin), Yulia Deyneka (viola), and Kian Soltani (cello). I am yet to be entirely convinced by Barenboim senior’s new piano, much as I applaud the initiative; this was not the occasion on which I was to be won over. At times, although I do not wish to exaggerate, his uncontested leading role passed over into heavy-handedness. Nevertheless, at its best the first movement offered a fine balance between ebullience and tenderness, muscularity excluding neither relaxation nor, most importantly, dialogue. A typical Barenboim strength was to be heard in the dynamism of form I remarked upon in Initiale; Mozart’s music developed, motivically and harmonically, the one engendering the other. The balance between simplicity and complexity was well achieved in the slow movement, harmonic surprised registering with a delight that comes of knowing them well. The quiet dignity of the score, supported by extraordinary musical richness as soon as one exercised that ‘thinking ear’, was affirmed. Perhaps the finale was taken a little hastily: more Allegro than Allegretto? Such matters are, however, tricky in Mozart. It had, at any rate, the character of a finale, even if Barenboim sometimes proved a little too dominant again. The extroversion of the close was nothing less than delightful.

 

© Peter Adamik

The second section was given over to Berg’s Chamber Concerto. Barenboim conducted, his son played the violin solo, with Karim Said as solo pianist. (It was difficult not to think of this as a reinvention of the classic recording with Boulez, Barenboim, and Pinchas Zukerman.) Even with the intervention of an interval, one could hardly resist, even if one wished to do so, hearing Berg with Mozartian ears: protean, teeming with invention and expression. Boulez’s late recording with Mitusko Uchida and Christian Tetzlaff, cunningly, revealingly coupled with Mozart’s own Gran Partita, KV 361, came to mind. Thirteen instruments: how very un-Schoenbergian! The two soloists only combine in the final movement, the first being the pianist’s territory. Said offered clarity and sweep – just as Boulez, or Berg, might have wanted, or so one could fancy. Conductor, ensemble, and hall seemed to combine to afford a relationship between such clarity and complexity that came to the very heart of the work and its ever-shifting balances. Barenboim had its measure as few conductors, Boulez excepted, can ever have done, more than once playing up, or so it seemed, anticipations of Lulu.  

Musical process was audibly at work throughout, just as much in the central Adagio as in that opening theme and variations. Michael Barenboim’s playing gave us tenderness and fury, sometimes well-nigh spontaneous. Still more so did that of the Boulez Ensemble, its climaxes fearsome, de profundis. Berg’s music emerged as it should: labyrinthine yet purposeful. The thread was never lost, not even for a split second. Furious, again, and still more febrile, the finale, piano and violin now combined, proved endless generative in its working through of musical material. Constructivism was shown to be in itself expressive, not somehow, sentimentally, opposed to expression. (Again, Boulez would surely have approved.) The re-entry of the orchestral ensemble seemed truly to set in motion the idea of a finale, endlessly developmental and yet unquestionable in its conclusion.

Widmann returned to give a spell-binding account of his early (1993) Fantasie for solo clarinet. Like the brass players for Initiale, he played down to us from the balcony, in a performance that incited, might even be thought of as incantatory.  Musical line was as clear, as direct, as anything we had heard before, extended techniques very much at its service rather than heard for the first time. The performance seemed almost to exemplify the wishes expressed both by Boulez and by Barenboim that new music (newish, in this case) be performed as if it were classical (and vice versa).

Meanwhile, three pianos, three sets of percussion instruments, and three harps awaited their respective performers (Karim Said, Denis Koshukhin, Michael Wendeberg; Lev Loftus, Pedro Torrejón González, Dominic Oelze; Aline Khouri, Susanne Kabaln, Stephen Fitzpatrick) for Boulez’s sur Incises. Like many of Boulez’s works, sur Incises has its seeds in an earlier work. Incises is a piano piece written (1994, revised 2001) for the Umberto Micheli Piano Competition (with which Maurizio Pollini, long an advocate of Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata, had a strong association). Boulez’s initial intention, as he explained in an interview of 1998, was to:

 

… transform this piece into a longer one for Pollini and a group of instrumentalists, a kind of piano concerto although without reference to the traditional form. … Therefore, I produced a piece for three pianos, assuming that there already exists enough interesting literature for two pianos and ensembles, especially in the modern age – take for example Bartók's Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion. (In my opinion, everybody would have been reminded of this world if I had also written a piece for two pianos.) I have also considered the possibility of four pianos as this constellation is very attractive and provides a good balance.

 

Then, however, the siren call of Stravinsky and especially Les Noces suggested another path. As Boulez would remark more recently, in 2010, ‘This is the reason why I ended up with three pianos - incidentally three pianists are part of our ensemble [Intercontemporain].’ There were likewise three percussionists in the ensemble, and subsequently, the idea of adding three harps occurred to him, an idea rendered more attractive by his use of the instrument in Répons.

Boulez’s conception of serialism as ever-expanding, open-ended, was the overriding experience of this performance, conducted by Barenboim. The spatial element sounded more crucial than ever: we hear solo lines but also different groups: three groups, considered vertically, each of percussion, harp, and piano, and, considered horizontally, the three percussionists, the three harpists, and the three pianists. A startling aspect of those latter formations, all the more so in this telling acoustic, was to hear passages transferring spatially across, say, the three pianos, whilst remaining in a sense part of the one giant piano: played, as it were, by Barenboim, the pianist-conductor. I have long thought here of Boulez playing with something akin to a musical magical square, three rows and columns constantly shifting, and yet always adding up to the required total, even if we do not know what that should be: a magical extension of Webern, one might say.

Then there were the beguiling sonorities: the sumptuous quality of Boulez’s harmonies, fully captured here, harks back to and yet surely extends those of Debuusy. Kinetic, rhythmic energy brought every more strongly to mind Stravinsky and Bartók; indeed, that distancing from the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion notwithstanding, Bartók’s ghost seemed present in some of the piano writing, contagious, as it were, for the other instrumentalists. Barenboim seemed especially adept at signalling moments of transformation; one might think of Boulez’s own conception, adumbrated in his lectures to the Collège de France, of the musical ‘signal’. Rising clamour, typically Boulezian frenzy, would subside, at least partially, dialectically: confounding, yet making unanswerable sense. Form, we were again reminded, lives, acquires meaning, in performance, especially one so outstanding in quality as this. (What collaborative virtuosity was on show, and yet never for its own sake!) Nevertheless, however much we might have wished this universe to continue expanding forever, its material in perpetual proliferation, the conclusion once again proved decisive – at least until the next time. The ear had thought; the mind had listened.

(An edited version of this article appeared first in VAN Magazine, focusing less on the performances, more on the idea and reality of the hall and its programming. Please click here to read that. Apologies for the inconsistencies of formatting in this case: I seemed unable to get it to work, however much I tried...)

Edward II, Deutsche Oper, 9 March 2017

Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Images: Monika Rittershaus
Edward II (Michael Nagy) and Piers de Gaveston (Ladislav Elgr)

Edward II – Michael Nagy

Isabella – Agneta Eichenholz
Piers de Gaveston – Ladislav Elgr
Roger Mortimer – Andrew Harris
Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry – Burkhard Ulrich
Lightborn – James Kryshak
Angel – Jarrett Ott
Soldiers, Councillors, Guards, Tourguides, etc. – Markus Brück, Gideon Poppe
Spencer Jr – Gieorgij Puchalski
Prince Edward – Ben Kleiner

Christof Loy (director)

Annette Kurz (set designs)
Klaus Bruns (costumes)
Stefan Bolliger (lighting)
Yvonne Gebauer, Dorothea Hartmann (dramaturgy)

Chorus of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin (chorus master: Raymond Hughes)

Orchestra of the Deutsche Oper, Berlin

Thomas Søndergård (conductor)

Walter Langton, Bishop of Coventry (Burkhard Ulrich) and the crowd

Andrea Lorenzo Scartazzini’s new music theatre piece – ‘Musiktheater in zehn Szenen,’ although I am unsure in what sense it is not an opera as conventionally understood – seems to have generated quite some controversy. I have avoided reading the offending article or indeed anything else until seeing this, but I hear that one journalist has been accused of homophobia in the insults she has hurled at the work. Let us leave that on one side – I can hardly do otherwise, not having read any of the commentary – and attend to Edward II on its own terms, or what I take them to be.

Foreground: Spencer Jr (Gieorgij Puchalski), Roger Mortimer (Andrew Harris), Gaveston, Edward 

 

It turns out to be one of those difficult things to write about: perfectly serviceable as an opera, competently constructed, doing pretty much everything one would expect it to and almost nothing one would not expect. The work’s ten scenes do not overstay their welcome; the pacing seems just about right. There is a very traditional operatic and more broadly dramatic contrast between the public and private: think of Schiller, or the Petrarchan AMOR/ROMA dilemma, although here, not unreasonably, one never has any doubt that King Edward will choose love and ‘sodomite’ – a word endlessly repeated – lifestyle over matters of state. A vicious crowd, stirred up by hypocritical clergyman, bays for sodomite blood. The Queen moves – perhaps a little quickly, but such is opera – from sympathetic, lonely figure to vicious, vengeful, murderess. There is, moreover, a genuine sense of ‘this could be any family’, the young Prince Edward torn between his two self-obsessed parents. Scartazzini’s score follows the action, in what sounds on a first hearing (with all the caveats that must imply) like a generic not-quite-contemporary modernism. It screams when one would expect it to, likewise creates a hushed atmosphere when one would expect; it has structural impetus of its own within scenes.

 

And yet, there is little that adds up to anything more than that, or at least it did not for me. We can leave aside the playing fast and loose with history and with sources: that is what dramatists do. However, the framing devices of librettist, Thomas Jonigk, come across as forced, and indeed almost haplessly agitprop. Attempts, for instance in comments by the Angel, to present knowingly anachronistic references to other pertinent historical events and figures, are a bit embarrassing, likewise the historical tour’s visitation of Edward’s cell at the close. The comparison between wronged Jews and sodomites is not pursued in any depth, and merely seems glib. It is, moreover, only really at the close – and perhaps this is deliberate, but if so, it again needs better framing – that Edward as a character comes into focus; everyone else, despite extremely strong performances, remains something of a caricature. Derek Jarman, let alone Christopher Marlowe, did this, or something akin to this, so much better. Scartazzini never seems to lead the action, to have the orchestra partake in it, engender it, rather than predictably mirror the events on stage. His vocal lines, such as they are, hold little or no interest of their own; I could not help but wonder whether he would have been better off writing a symphonic poem or equivalent on the subject.

Edward and Gaveston

 

The sad conclusion I ended up drawing was that this opera’s creators seem to have thought it enough to write a gay opera. Perhaps it is; we are not exactly blessed with a huge number of examples, at least overtly, proudly so. (Subtexts, however close to the surface, are another matter.) Overall, though, it feels too much like box-ticking, too little like something that might have arisen from genuine artistic necessity. Imagine what might have been done in an opera that placed queer experience at its complex heart, doing something akin to what Nono did for women’s revolutionary experience in Al gran sole carico d’amore. There will, I hope, be other opportunities – and, to be fair, there is an abundance of mediocre, or worse, operas dealing with heterosexual themes.

Isabella (Agneta Eichenholz) and Prince Edward (Ben Kleiner)

 

That said, the Deutsche Oper deserves only praise for the commitment it has shown, both in staging the new work and, still more, doing so in performances of such quality. Its orchestra and chorus, the latterly brilliantly trained by Raymond Hughes, played under Thomas Søndergård with a confidence that suggested this might have been a repertory work. Balance, weight, incisiveness, tenderness: all those qualities and more were present in the pit; on stage, one could hardly have asked for more from the chorus, director Christof Loy’s blocking of the partly differentiated mass a joy in itself to behold. Indeed, Loy’s work in general – I speak as someone who has been far from a constant fan of his productions – deserves great credit, essentially presenting the opera as a somewhat abstracted version of classic grand opera, with slightly alienated invasions from without. The ‘family values’ crowd was an obvious ploy, replete with placards from any reactionary demonstration one might care to look at, but it made its (agitprop) point well enough.

Angel (Jarrett Ott), Edward, and Spencer Jr

 

Michael Nagy drew one in more than one had any right to expect in a visually torn, vocally secure performance of the title role. As the Angel only the King could see, Jarrett Ott offered all the strength and comfort Edward might ever have asked: a rock in a vicious world indeed. Ladislav Elgr, seen for about ninety per cent of his time on stage merely in well-fitted white vest and briefs, exhibited as the favourite, Gaveston, a near-ideal marriage of fun, born of social desperation no doubt, and magnetism. Agneta Eichenholz made the most of that abrupt transition from wronged woman to monster in a powerful assumption of the role of Isabella. The darkness of her relationship to Andrew Harris’s unreconstructedly masculine Mortimer could only really be hinted at, given the confines of the work, but hinted at it certainly was. There was a good deal of camp humour to be had from the recurring double act – from thirteenth-century soldiers guardedly admitting their sodomite tendencies to modern tour-guides – of Philip Jekal and Gideon Poppe. The Mime-like nastiness, with an undoubtedly chilling Nazi allusion of just following orders, of Edward’s murderer-with-abortionist’s-bag, Lightborn, was splendidly portrayed by James Kryshak. Ben Kleiner’s treble could hardly be faulted as the young prince; he knew how to deport himself on stage too. And last but not least, Gieorgij Puchalski’s performance in the non-speaking role as Spencer Junior, the new favourite risen from the ashes of the old, showed just what the suggestiveness and sheer physicality of a dancer in a vocal work can achieve.

 

If the above tends too much towards a list, that is part of my point. These were all, without exception, fine performances indeed; they did all they could with a work that could have been much worse, but ought to have been much better.

 

Barenboim/Lupu - Schubert, 8 March 2017

Pierre Boulez Saal

Sonata in B-flat major, D 617

Fantasia in F minor, D 940
Divertissement sur des motifs originaux français, D 823

Radu Lupu, Daniel Barenboim (piano)

Schubert’s works for piano, four hands, make in some ways for strange concert music. It is certainly not what they were ‘intended’ to be, although we need not worry ourselves unduly about that; nor was much of the solo piano repertoire. An intimate space such as Berlin’s Pierre Boulez Saal (682 seats) works well in this respect: no need for grandstanding, every possibility of scaling down intimacy of response (for performers and audience alike), and perhaps even something not so very far away from the treat of overhearing a fine, ‘domestic’ performance. Not that most of us would have Daniel Barenboim and Radu Lupu in our drawing rooms, of course, but anyway…

The first of the programmed works here was the B-flat major Sonata, D 617, a piece I played many times as a teenager with friends (such is really the idea of these pieces). The pianists alternated between primo and secondo roles, Barenboim here the former, Lupu the latter. Barenboim’s opening flourish (and its repeat too) showed that there was plenty of room for a little showmanship; Schubert offers us here a mini-cadenza on the traditional dominant seventh, after all. I could not help but smile. But then, the music, in performance and score, retreated to a more intimate world; we might almost have been in a parlour, at least if we closed our eyes. The superlative acoustic certainly aided clarity, but an acoustic can only do so much; this was the players’ achievement too. Moreover, the way in which one heard phrases sigh and fall was unmistakeably theirs – and Schubert’s. The composer’s wonderful modulatory surprises thus registered, did their developmental work, without any need for exaggeration. Andante con moto is not a marking peculiar to Schubert, far from it, but it is perhaps particularly associated with or typical of him. Here, Barenboim and Lupu judged it perfectly: sad, rather than tragic, and with resolve. (It is perhaps as much a matter of mood as of speed, arguably more so.) Such preparation had Schubert’s later contrasts surprise us again – however much we might have ‘known’ what was coming. The strangeness of the harmony at the opening of the finale duly disconcerted. (When first playing the piece, I presumed I had misread it!) Just as important, it prepared us for the often surprising moods and paths to come. The movement’s gait, very tricky, was effortlessly well judged, or so it seemed. Episodes revealed their secrets neither too soon nor with too much delay, soon integrated into a broader aural canvas.

 

Our guides proved just as wise, and just as capable of surprising us with what we knew already, in the F minor Fantasia. Many of Schubert’s works for four hands may be overlooked, but there has never been any denying the greatness of this work. Lupu now took the upper part, Barenboim providing a typically sure harmonic foundation, with much interest in inner parts too, of course, from both of them: when Barenboim voiced a melody in the tenor, or Lupu in the alto, there was something of the soft-spoken sublime to what we heard, what we felt. Taken relatively swiftly, though far from unreasonably so, the music seemed to create its own insistency and unease, born both from rhythmic insistence and harmonic necessity; at any rate, there was no sense of insistence being applied to it. Its extraordinary tonal plan was navigated with just the understanding the eavesdropping listener requires to find his or her bearings – and to keep them. The mystery in those strange eruptions was not argued away, but it was never merely arbitrary. Strange, liminal passages made sense after the event, after new vistas had opened up before our ears in not entirely un-Mahlerian fashion. There were occasional smudges, but nothing to worry about; the overall direction was what really mattered. The fugal section showed just how misplaced were Schubert’s own fears – he considered taking a refresher course in counterpoint shortly before his death! – of inadequacy in that front; this was lived counterpoint, dynamically creating form. And yes, we were left in no doubt whatsoever that this was Schubert’s greatest work for piano, four hands.

 

After the interval came the Divertissement sur des motifs originaux français, D 823, Barenboim returning to primo, Lupu to secondo, the latter’s left-hand providing the most exquisite foundation for the musical activity above. There was, though, a grander, more public style in evidence too – rightly, given the nature of the music, often straining towards the orchestral, without that precluding the pianistically yielding. The players did not try to turn this music into something that it is not, yet nevertheless, through the excellence of largely unassuming advocacy, enlarged our ideas of what it might be, or perhaps better, of the value of what it is. The Andantino second movement showed a definite kinship with its counterpart in the Sonata. There was much to absorb and simply to enjoy in the inner parts, in the harmonies, but never at the expense of onward tread. (It seems almost impossible, at least for me, to write about Schubert’s music without using the phrase ‘onward tread’ at some point or other.) Until, that is, the strange, contrasting material made its presence felt. The lilt of the final movement was splendidly judged; it charmed without needing to try too hard. Again, a few slips did not detract from the overall view, and if the music, perhaps not always showing Schubert at his most inspired, goes on a little, one can live with those ‘heavenly lengths’. A delightful account of the Rondo in A major, D 951, proved a well chosen, greatly appreciated encore.

Schubert looms large in the programming here. His Der Hirt auf dem Felsen was given in the opening concert (by Barenboim, Jörg Widmann, and Anna Prohaska). Barenboim will shortly be performing Winterreise with Christian Gerhaher, as part of a multi-year project for different artists to perform all of Schubert’s songs at the hall. The indefatigable pianist-conductor-world citizen will also soon be performing all of the piano sonatas and, later this year, will conduct the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in the complete symphonies. Watch this space for some, at least, of those fruits…

[P.S. A review of the opening concert will appear here on Saturday, a slightly longer version of a piece I have written for VAN Magazine, to be published there later today.]

Der Freischütz, Oper Leipzig, 4 March 2017

Leipzig Opera House

Samiel (Verena Hierholzer) and Kaspar (Tuomas Pursio)
Images: © Ida Zenna

 

Agathe – Gal James

Ännchen – Magdalena Hinterdobler
Samiel – Verena Hierholzer
Max – Thomas Mohr
Kaspar – Tuomas Pursio
Kuno – Jürgen Kurth
Kilian – Patrick Vogel
Ottokar – Jonathan Michie
Hermit – Rúni Brattaberg
First Hunter – Andreas David
Second Hunter – Klaus Bernewitz
Bridesmaids – Katrin Braunlich, Estelle Haussner, Eliza Rudnicka, Teresa Maria Winkler
 

Christian von Göltz (director)

Dieter Richter (set designs)
Jessica Karge (costumes)
Heidi Zippel (dramaturgy)
Verena Hierholzer (Samiel’s choreography)

Leipzig Opera Chorus (chorus master: Alexander Stessing)

Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra

Christian Gedschold (conductor)

 

Agathe (Gal James) in front of the assembled company

‘It seems to be the poem of those Bohemian woods themselves, whose dark and solemn aspect permits us at once to grasp how the isolated man would believe himself, if not prey to a dæmonic power of Nature, then at least in eternal submission thereto.’ With those words, the homesick, indigent Richard Wagner, revolted by what he had experienced as the base superficiality of Parisian musical culture, reported on an 1841 performance of Le Freischütz (Berlioz’s version, with ballet music that was at least Weber’s own). In a piece addressed ‘to the Paris public’, Wagner ostensibly tried to explain the work to that public, yet seemed unable to prevent himself from turning his article into an attack upon – yes, you have guessed correctly – Parisian and, more broadly, French culture.

Kaspar, Samiel and her spirits, Max (Thomas Mohr)

 

The Freischütz (most certainly Der) we know and love is the quintessential German Romantic opera, and Wagner’s advocacy has played no little role in that. Upon returning to Saxony, to Dresden, he assumed a leading role in the longstanding if hitherto unsuccessful campaign to have Weber’s bones returned from London and reburied in the city whose German opera (as opposed to its long-flourishing Italian version) he had done much to build. Wagner eulogised his predecessor with music and a flowery address, proclaiming that there had never been a more German musician. Whilst the younger Wagner had stood far more critical, his first opera, Die Feen notwithstanding, of Weber and earlier German opera, now he placed his work in that tradition, as would others theirs. That is far from nonsense, of course, yet it is also far from unproblematical. For one thing, it is impossible, living in the face of what Friedrich Meinecke called in 1948 the ‘German catastrophe’, to assent to such nationalism any more, however differently it may have been intended. For another, much of Weber’s music, still more than Wagner’s, and perhaps still more in this than in Weber’s subsequent two ‘German Romantic’ operas, often questions, even resists, such identification.

Kaspar and Max

 

Why do I mention all that? Because it was very much in that spirit that, almost whether I wished to or no, I approached this new production of Weber’s opera in Wagner’s home city (itself long ambivalent concerning its greatest son, its concert tradition long, somewhat frustratingly, enjoying a higher profile to the fruits of its still lengthier operatic history). What struck me upon hearing the Overture from the excellent Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Christian Gedschold was, first, how fresh, how vernal (it had been a beautiful, almost spring-day in Leipzig) Weber’s score sounded from every section: the strings an ideal combination of the golden and something darker, the woodwind at times heartbreakingly characterful, almost as if partaking as woodland creatures in Wagner’s fancy, the brass as euphonious as one could hope for, horns tender to a degree. And yet, Gedschold’s direction did not, for me, take its place in the tradition I think of here as ‘German Romantic’: at least not wholeheartedly, or perhaps it was my mindset that had me hear it differently. Where Furtwängler, in his outstanding Salzburg life recording, puts us momentarily at peace, and has it, perhaps, sound more ‘German’ than the music ‘in itself’ always is, where Carlos Kleiber somehow makes his objectively hard-driven Dresden account sound equally at ease with itself, breathing where the tempi might suggest otherwise, this performance sounded more internationalist, perhaps even more at home with the French models Weber – and Wagner – so eagerly adopted in individual numbers. (I mean here a number of the arias and ensemble pieces, although even the Huntsmen’s Chorus, soon to become a staple of German books of allegedly ‘popular song’, actually derives from part of an eighteenth-century French street song, ‘Malbrouk s’en va t’en guerre’.) What sometimes, then, I missed in the seemingly unaffected German Romanticism that would grow into Wagnerian music drama an aural reassessment of the work as the number opera it undoubtedly is.



Opening scene

 

It was with such thoughts that I also set about watching Christian von Götz’s production, in part, I think, on account of his brilliantly thought-provoking Capriccio, in which Strauss’s work engaged with its own time to an extent, and to a fruitful extent, rarely seen. (Such are the perils, as well as the joys, of reception, whether of a composer, a director, or anyone else!) Perhaps, then, I was too preoccupied with understanding what I saw as part commentary on German history, but this is perhaps one of those works in which such a path is inevitable, and ultimately requires no apology. What struck me from its later nineteenth-century setting was how it enables, perhaps even invites, one to consider the work’s Rezeptionsgeschichte. Indeed, to begin with, I understood it more as a deliberately sanitised version of the period of composition, the hunting lodge too spick and span, even too grand (rather as one might visit such a place touristically today, or indeed in the later nineteenth century). Be that as it may, such sanitisation, displacement, alienation, however one might consider it, served to remember the work such as it never was, even if we have ‘always’ known it as such, something of a ghost, setting the scene for what became still more of a ghost story than one often sees.

 

Ännchen (Magdalena Hinterdobler), Agathe, and Samiel

It is here, though, a ghost story with a very particular twist, or at least standpoint. Looking at, if not listening to, Weber from a standpoint not so distant from Mahler (recall Die drei Pintos) and his world – the designs hint as much at Franz Joseph and Bad Ischl as at the Bohemian Woods, at least until we briefly enter the latter – we begin to understand the centrality of female experience to the horror tale unfolding. Fear and hysteria reign, Samiel – here, strikingly, a self-choreographed female dancer, Verena Hierholzer – seemingly a projection of some evil deed from the past, haunting the present, just as untruths from our retelling of history continue to haunt us. (Whatever the tribulations of German history, it is the English who do not have a word for Vergangenheitsbewältigung, resulting recently in a catastrophe that could hardly seem more likely over here.) Noting that the opera was originally to be called Die Jägersbraut, the director plays on Agathe’s fear of marriage, a fear born, it seems, of living in so unhappy, so haunted, a place. Samiel’s delivery of the funeral crown in the third act terrifies all the women; is it not, however, actually the perfect symbol for patriarchal hegemony and the fantasies it encourages? If the horror-film imagery of Samiel’s other appearances seemed more silly than anything else, perhaps it is all too easy for a man to say that in the face of female agency. (I am questioning myself more as Devil’s Advocate here than because I really think so, but the openness of the staging to such self-criticism is perhaps not the least of its strengths.)

Max and Agathe

 

Such would in itself count for much less, had it not been for an excellent cast, whose performances would have graced any stage. If Thomas Mohr, I am afraid to say, looked and acted too much on the old side for Max – however one might have framed the performance – his vocal delivery more than compensated. A tenor bright and clear, yet sensitive too, he complemented very well the sopranos of Gal James and Magdalena Hinterdobler, exhibiting many of the same qualities, and with fine coloratura to boot, Hinterdobler’s especially expressive as well as merely impressive. Tuomas Pursio’s darkly dangerous Kaspar stood very much in the line of other fine performances I have heard him give (from Wagner to Nono), yet there was nothing generic about the malady of his pride and delusion. Jürgen Kurth and Jonathan Michie offered intelligent, verbally acute performances as Kuno and Ottokar, whilst Patrick Vogel’s lighter, nimbler tenor (by comparison with Max) offered ample indication of why he might have won the title of king of the marksmen. Rúni Brattaberg’s dark, sonorous Hermit did what he should, although why anyone should necessarily take heed of the character’s words remains something of a dramaturgical mystery. Choral singing throughout spoke of music well known, 'in the blood', if you will, yet never taken for granted: it was as fresh as it was 'traditional'.

Final scene

 

There was then, plenty, of opportunity to rethink, to reassess, wherever that impulse may have originated. And yet, for everything I have said, and for all the outstanding quality of orchestral instruments’ ‘French’ solo moments (of which there are many), it remained the dark, undeniably Wagnerian tones of the Wolf’s Glen that made the deepest impression of all. Here, Saxon tradition spoke of an orchestra, one of the greatest in the world, that knew where this music led, and which was happy to guide us. Göltz made a better job of staging frankly impossible scenic directions than many (‘Gothic’ horror notwithstanding), but Weber’s extraordinary presentiments of Siegfried remained an aural experience above all. Wagner’s truths may not always be empirical; that does not necessarily render them untruths.

 

Petrushka and L’Enfant et les sortilèges, Komische Oper, 2 March 2017

Komische Oper, Berlin

Images: Iko Freese | drama-berlin.de

Petrushka – Tiago Alexandre Neta Fonseca

Ptitschka – Pauliina Räsänen
Patap – Slava Volkov
 

L’Enfant – Nadja Mchantaf

Le Feu, La Princesse, Le Rossignol –Talya Lieberman
Maman, La Tasse Chinoise, La Libellule – Exgi Kutlu
Une Pastourelle, La Chauve-Souris – Elizabeth Holmes
La Chatte, L’Ecureuil – Maria Fiselier
L’Horloge comtoise, Le Chat – Denis Milo
La Bergère, La Chouette – Mirka Wagner
Le Fauteuil, L’Arbre – Carsten Sabrowski
Le Petit Vielliard, La Théière, La Rainette – Ivan Turšić
Un Pâtre – Katarzyna Włodarczyk
 

Suzanne Andrade and Esme Appleton (directors)

Paul Barritt (animations)
1927, Pia Leong (set designs)
1927, Katrin Kath (costumes)
Diego Leetz (lighting)
Ulrich Lenz (dramaturgy)

Vocalconsort Berlin (chorus master: Andrew Crooks)

Children’s Choir (chorus mistress: Dagmar Fiebach) and Orchestra of the Komische Oper

Markus Poschner (conductor)

1927’s Magic Flute has been well-nigh universally lauded, both at the Komische Oper and subsequently on tour. I say ‘well-nigh’, since I felt more ambivalent, applauding some aspects of the reworking, whilst lamenting a lack of seriousness at its heart: for me a perennial problem with many stagings of that work. Maybe I was not in a very good mood, or maybe the combination of æsthetic and work was just not for me; maybe I missed the point. Or perhaps I was right: who knows? I am not terribly easy to please when it comes to Mozart. At any rate, I am delighted to welcome its successor, a double-bill of Petrushka and L’Enfant et les sortilèges.

 

Petrushka is 1927’s first completely non-verbal work, and, of the three I have seen, I think it comes off best of all. (A counter-argument might be that I know less of ballet than I do of opera, but I should like to think that I know a little about Stravinsky, at least.) Here we see it via the offices, once again, of Paul Barritt’s animation – and with three humanised puppets: Petrushka as ‘awkward clown’, alongside a ‘sensitive acrobat’, Ptitschka, and an ‘unrefined but good-natured muscle-man,’ Patap. The animations are a period-influenced, but not period-restricted, delight: from a little later than the writing of the work, as the company’s name, ‘1927’, might suggest. Russian constructivism and the world of silent films more generally loom large. Colours, aptly, are gloriously bright (even if the curmudgeon in me might have wished for the original score rather than the more ‘practical’ 1947 revision), yet monochrome plays its part too. We tumble headlong – not unlike Petrushka himself, a little later – into the world of the fairground. ‘Roll up, roll up,’ the Russian speech-bubble (thank goodness for the Komische Oper’s multi-lingual titles) beckons us; it really felt to me as though we were making an individual and collective decision to attend the show within a show.  

That show is beautifully presented, not only showing but dramatising a keen sense of the thin line between comedy and tragedy. Puppet shows have always done that brilliantly, or at least the best ones have, so why should not a multi-media reimagining of the format, a work about puppetry? Petrushka is the latter anyway, of course, and here the figure of the puppeteer looms large – not visually, although his (I think we can presume ‘his’) actions certainly do. The heartlessness with which Petrushka is toyed with – which yet endears him to Ptitschka, and indeed also elicits sympathy from Patap, following his necessary moments of self-display – moves us, as does the excellence of the onstage performers, seemingly effortlessly moving between the worlds of stage and film. The sad clown, for Barritt close to Buster Keaton, and dressed as such, is not for nothing one of our culture’s perennially recurring figures. He lacks the grace of Ptitschka, the physique of Patap, but he is human, he feels sadness even when, particularly when, he amuses us. The manipulator of his emotions – the puppeteer, that is – does not entirely succeed in manipulating ours.

 

As for the other manipulator, the composer who so notoriously declared music’s inability to express anything other than itself, his score in performance exuded colourful rigour, its opening nicely, intriguingly deliberate, as if the forces were limbering up yet undoubtedly in control. Like what we saw, what we heard sounded audibly ‘Russian’ in origin and spirit, but with some degree of distance from time to time as well: not unlike Stravinsky, one might say. A few minor frayed edges aside – one can readily forget what a difficult piece this is – the orchestra under Markus Poschner did it proud, reminding us that recreation is not simply a matter of a new production; it happens, or should happen, every time we play and hear Petrushka.

In a programme interview, Suzanne Andrade likens the figure of the puppeteer in Petrushka to that of the Mother in L’Enfant et les sortilèges. It makes for a good connecting motif: meaningful rather than merely neat. It also helps make the ‘moral’ of Colette’s story – I think Ravel remains more circumspect; does he not always? – both more explicit and open to question. (Perhaps it criticises itself anyway; I am genuinely not sure. If so, that tendency is stronger here.) Andrade says that she and her collaborators had originally intended the boy (sung by a woman, let us never forget) to be like ‘one of those upper-class boys from Great Britain … they are naughty and learn nothing from the experience, because the societal status quo is such that they need not learn anything.’ If those overgrown schoolboys (and their aspirant hangers-on) have ‘had enough of experts’, we, not least those of us recently pushed into exile, have had more than enough of their running amok with our lives and futures; it is therefore something of a relief to experience contrition and forgiveness, before asking ourselves: ‘but whose, and on what authority?’ Who is the Mother, whether personally or more broadly, and what does she intend to be the outcome of those trials through which she means to get her own way?

 

The visual inspiration here comes from comics and films involving naughty little boys. Andrade names Dennis the Menace and the American film series, Our Gang (which began in the 1920s). Again, the transitions between animation and staging are deftly, wittily presented. (They also help with doubling or tripling of parts: one need not always see the singer in costume.) If I did not feel that as much was added to my thoughts about the work as in Petrushka, beyond that intellectual and dramaturgical question of overarching agency, perhaps I am showing myself a little more resistant, as I suggested, in opera than ballet (if, indeed we consider Stravinsky’s work primarily as such). Perhaps I also missed the nostalgia evident in Ravel’s sophisticated conception of childhood: no child could or would ever think of its ‘hood’ like that. One might counter that the score is there to do that anyway.

 

The Komische Oper’s welcome change of language policy – are you listening, ENO? – meant that we did not have to hear Ravel in German. If not everything was delivered with the most assured sense of what we have come to accept as French style, it rarely, or never is, even with Francophone singers. Moreover, one could hear every word – which is not always the case with such singers. Nadja Mchantaf made for a splendidly tomboyish boy – if that makes any sense. As hapless and as clumsy as Petrushka, he will at least have another chance. (Those privileged boys always do.) Orchestra and conductor seemed – or perhaps this was just my imagination, given the context – to play the score as if informed by some Stravinskian elements, rhythm perhaps playing a more prominent role than harmony at times, although such hierarchies will always be a matter of degree. In keeping with what we saw, there was much in bright, primary colours, and an evident delight in the mastery of that ‘Swiss watchmaker’, as Stravinsky called him. The rest of the cast proved very much more than the sum of its parts. If I do not relist the singers, it is not out of disrespect, but at least in part to emphasise, as so often in this house, the nature of the achievement of the company in an emphatic sense.