Writing the 'Ring'

‘Yes, I should like to perish in Valhalla’s flames! — Mark well my new poem — it contains the beginning of the world and its destruction!’ Wagner’s words in an 1853 letter to Liszt, a copy of the Ring poem enclosed, express abiding theatricality, often overlooked, despite Nietzsche’s vicious attack on Wagner as ‘actor’. They point also to his framing of the Ring dramas on which he had been at work since 1848 and whose completion would lie more than two decades hence, in 1874.

The Immolation Scene from the 'Centenary' Ring
Copyright: Bayreuth Festival

It is well known that Wagner wrote his poems in reverse order, beginning with Siegfrieds Tod, soon to become Götterdämmerung, and needing to write three prequels, before composing the music in the order we know today: the trilogy ‘with preliminary evening’. Likewise that he broke off composition of Siegfried to write Tristan  and Die Meistersinger; likewise  that he found it necessary to write a number of verbal endings to Götterdämmerung between 1848 and 1856 before resolving upon the ‘wordless’ solution, or rather enigma, with which he continues to tantalise us. But the consequences for his dramas are often misunderstood. Wagner’s thought always tended towards an amalgam of the agglomerative and the synthetic. That characteristic renders him especially attractive to the historian of the nineteenth century. Ideas and influences overlap, not necessarily supplanting or resolving, but heightening conflict, the very stuff of drama, thereby rendering him especially attractive to audiences and to performers. Not every idea and influence need be reflected in every performance; were that attempted, we should most likely end up with an unholy mess. However, not only will any production, indeed any audience, have to make choices; they also need to consider what is being left out, or at least played down.

Feuerbach, Bakunin, Marx

 

Keith Warner’s production emphasises Wagner’s intellectual influences during the 1840s, as he worked not only towards the Ring but also towards active participation in the violent, abortive Saxon revolution of 1849. Precisely what role he took on the barricades remains unclear, but it is unquestionable that he was close to the visiting anarchist revolutionary, Mikhail Bakunin, and that he was consequently ‘wanted’ by the authorities, Wagner being exiled from German soil until 1860, an amnesty from Saxony taking longer still.

Bakunin

In Warner’s words, ‘Whatever you personally believe, Wagner is dealing in the Ring with the nature of God and the universe.’ Indeed, he is, which takes us to ‘the beginning of the world,’ or at least to the beginning of a world. It is actually more complex even than that, for Wagner presents us, like the Book of Genesis, with alternative beginnings. Take the following words, which describe the Prelude to Das Rheingold: ‘the gradual development of the material world … a wholly natural movement from the simple to the complex, from the lower to the higher,’ not ‘the vile matter of the idealists … incapable of producing anything,’ but ‘matter … spontaneously and eternally mobile, active, productive.’ Those words describe the opening perfectly, from the first sounding of the double basses’ low E-flat pedal, held throughout the Prelude, reflecting unchanging Nature: as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be – or such would be the claim of the Church, and of many others. Except that those words were not written with Das Rheingold in mind at all. They come from Bakunin’s God and the State, the convergence a testament to both men’s preoccupation with the philosophy of Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx and Engels owed a similar debt. Indeed, the young Engels’s enthusiasm for Feuerbach and Teutonic mythology mirrored Wagner’s own.  Engels wrote in 1840, eulogising Siegfried as the representative of German youth. … We feel the same thirst for deeds [Taten, the same word with which Brünnhilde will send Siegfried out into the world from her rock] … we want to go out into the free world.’ Romantic words, one might think, for a founding-father of ‘scientific socialism’. That is the point: Engels’s socialism did not lack on account of his mythological enthusiasm; nor did Wagner’s.

Feuerbach

Feuerbach was a central figure in the movement that has come to be known as Left or Young Hegelianism. During the political, social, and religious repression of the period between the uneasy restoration of 1815 and the outbreak once again of revolution in 1848-9, a group of German writers wished to extend the revolutionary dynamism of Hegel’s ontology (philosophy of being) to human realms in which they believed their father-figure to have neglected, through self-censorship or otherwise, to follow its implications. Above all, radicals such as Feuerbach, David Strauss, and Bruno Bauer wished to extend Hegelian criticism to the world of religion.  History, it was claimed, in true Hegelian style, had a purpose; now was the time to cast out Christianity at least and perhaps religion itself from philosophy. In his Essence of Christianity, Feuerbach argued that theology transferred authentic religious impulses, such as love, justice, and charity, to an object outside man, namely a God of man’s own invention. Now, however, was the moment to turn from God to man. Wagner would pay tribute to Feuerbach’s Principles of the Philosophy of the Future by dedicating to him the 1849 essay, The Artwork of the Future.


Wotan and Alberich, Valhalla and Nibelheim

 

And so, in the Ring, Wagner unmasks – a favourite Young Hegelian conceit – the realm of the gods, built not upon that first ‘natural’ opening to the cycle, but arising from the second, counterpoised genesis, as told by the Norns in the Prologue to Götterdämmerung. Not that the first is so straightforward as it might seem, for Nature, in the guise of the Rhinemaidens, acts cruelly to Alberich, denies the misfit dwarf love, and is violated by him in turn; there is no golden age in the Ring-cosmos. That said, the natural world stands preferable to the deeds of Wotan, chief of the gods and thus in some sense a representation of the godhead itself. Inscribing runes upon his spear, Wotan commits the primal sin of politics, defining principles which, even had they once been good in themselves, become outdated as soon as they find themselves represented in dead wood. Fricka, according to Wagner the voice of ‘custom’, simply cannot understand this, lamenting with all the outworn moralism of a believer who has forgotten quite why she believes, that Siegmund and Sieglinde should love one another. We never see her again, though she will be invoked, off-stage – out of Heaven? – by Hunding, not that she can help him, and as the recipient of vain burnt offerings in Götterdämmerung. Her day has passed.

The spear is also an instrument of domination; it is with military force as well as ideology that Wotan rules the world. Yet ideology in a sense comes first, which is why Valhalla is built, as much a religious as a political fortress, a classic instance of European ‘representational’ culture, which ‘re-presents’ its power to subjects who must be overawed. For, as Wagner and Bakunin were convinced, the ‘critique of religion is the essential precondition for all criticism’ (Marx on Hegel): that of Alberich’s capitalist tyranny of Nibelheim with its golden hoard, the modern factory incarnate, as well as Wotan’s more sumptuous, more ideologically complex castle in the air. It is intended, in the words of the celebrated Lutheran chorale, as ‘ein’ feste Burg’ (‘a stronghold sure’), yet note that it appears first of all to Wotan in a dream. In Feuerbach’s proclamation: ‘Religion is the dream of the human mind,’ in which ‘we only see real things in the entrancing splendour of imagination and caprice, instead of in the simple daylight of reality and necessity,’ a view lent Wagnerian credence by Pierre Boulez’s observation, voiced whilst working on the Bayreuth ‘Centenary’ Ring, that  our first musical encounter with Valhalla ‘is not clearly delineated but belongs to a world of dream, phantasmagoria, and mirage.’ Moreover, the forced, disturbingly empty grandeur, or rather grandiosity, of Das Rheingold’s closing bars tells already of desperation, unnatural prolongation, deceit, and, as Erda has already foretold, ‘a dark day [that] dawns for the gods’. Freia and her golden apples may have been regained, but we have seen behind the throne, as has Alberich. Both Alberich and Licht-Alberich – the Wanderer, in his riddle-confrontation with Mime styles himself ‘Light-Alberich’, his ‘black’ antagonist’s power-seeking alter ego – commit crimes against Nature, one despoiling the Rhine, one sapping the life from the World-Ash Tree; both wish to extend that power through possession of the ring, forged in denial of that love, which was for Feuerbach the foundation of a true, human religion; both can be unmasked and thereby overthrown by extension of religious criticism beyond the ‘merely’ theological; and both have their deeds dialectically connected in the musical metamorphosis between the first two scenes of Das Rheingold of Alberich’s ring into Wotan’s Valhalla.

Loge, critic and god of fire

Built upon false contracts, entered into with Fasolt and Fafner, which was for guaranteed by Wotan’s very own spear of domination, and perpetuated by continued denial of the gold to the Rhine and its daughters, Valhalla and the gods’ rule are fatally compromised from the outset. The gods’ entrance, punctured by the Rhinemaidens’ plaints and Loge’s (Young Hegelian) criticism – ‘They hasten to their end, they who imagine themselves so strong and enduring’ – is already a dance of death, rendered all the more slippery by the destabilising, negating, almost Faustian chromaticism of Loge’s motif. Not for nothing has he been identified as the Ring’s sole intellectual, and, when one bears Bakunin and indeed the Wagner who prescribed a ‘fire-cure’ for Paris in mind, one realises that there lies no contradiction whatsoever between Loge’s twin roles as critic and as god of fire. Moreover, Loge’s ‘imagine’ (wähnen) is crucial not only in the Feuerbachian sense, but also in that it provides, in its anticipation of the Wahn (‘illusion’) of Schopenhauer, whom Wagner had not yet read, a textbook example of a concept that would acquire additional layerings of meaning as Wagner’s work on the cycle and elsewhere proceeded: recall Hans Sachs’s ‘Wahn, Wahn, überall Wahn!’

The ‘purely human’ Volsungs

The contrasting world of the ‘purely human’, a term Wagner often employed in his theoretical writings, is experienced with vernal, magical immediacy in Die Walküre: ‘You are the Spring,’ Sieglinde exults, before submitting to her brother, the curtain falling only just in time, as the music’s passion requires us all to take a metaphorical cold shower during the interval. Feuerbach abides here, for not only does this celebrate love between Siegmund and Sieglinde; it commemorates Siegmund’s rejection of Valhalla, echoing Feuerbach’s Thoughts on Death and Immortality, whose opening pages include a ‘Humble petition to the exalted, wise, and honourable learned public to receive Death into the Academy of Sciences’:

He is the best doctor on earth;

none of his cures has yet failed;

and no matter how sick you become,

he completely heals Nature.

To be sure, he never has concerned himself

with Christian theology,

yet he will have no peer

in understanding philosophy.

So then I implore you to receive

Death into the academy,

and, as soon as possible, to make

him doctor of philosophy.

What Siegmund accepts, celebrating death and his love for Sieglinde in heroic defiance of the illusory promise of immortality in Valhalla, Wotan struggles towards, at one point willing ‘the end’ and yet, even at the last in Siegfried, making a stand, unwilling quite to ‘die in the fullest sense of the word,’ according to Wagner’s words in an 1854 letter. It takes, moreover, a free act, albeit unconsciously free, by Siegfried, revolutionary hope of Engels and Wagner alike, finally to shatter Wotan’s spear of law, and to return the god for good to Valhalla, to await, in Schopenhauerian resignation, the end. Siegfried’s undoing will be his lack of consciousness, though that spontaneity will also point to his greatness, a dilemma which, as revolutionary hopes faded yet never entirely died, became all the more pressing for Wagner. Indeed, it is only in memoriam, in the shattering Funeral March, that Siegfried proves worthy of the hopes invested in him, of Wagner’s stated desire in the Ring ‘to make clear to the men of the Revolution the meaning of that Revolution, in its noblest sense’. No longer quite the hero of the drama that he had been in the more straightforwardly revolutionary Siegfrieds Tod, Siegfried has neither quite triumphed nor quite been supplanted: again, Wagner’s intellectual method poses rather than answers questions.

Concluding, thinking, making sense of uncertainty

To have written that the dramas were completed in 1874 was in a sense misleading, for they remain magnificently open-ended, whether in performance or staging. The composer was notably dissatisfied with scenic realisation at Bayreuth. Wagner’s great effort to conclude remains, whatever his own ambitions towards Hegelian totality, stubbornly necessitates further questioning. This may be of the nature, ‘What happens to Alberich?’, not at all a silly question. Does such uncertainty of plot, hardly accidental, suggest that, whatever the ‘watchers’, the mysterious ‘men and women moved to the very depths of their being’, at the end of Götterdämmerung may have experienced, even learned, that we are doomed to repeat the cycle ad infinitum? Such, after all, is the implication of a cycle, though what of Warner’s and Stefanos Lazaridis’s double helix, perhaps suggestive of Hegel’s favoured spiral? Indeed, whilst the ring itself tempts us to think in circular form, we should always bear in mind that, more often than not, its powers are ‘unmasked’  as illusory. All forms of power, love included, fall prey to Wagner’s deconstruction and savage indictment – his encounter with the philosophy of Schopenhauer here fuses with prior disillusionment with the more naïve aspects of Feuerbach’s ‘love-communism’ –  and yet we continue to ask ourselves whether a world without power is even conceivable, or merely ‘utopian’, to borrow from Marx and Engels. Siegfried is never better off than when he values the ring at naught; Brünnhilde is never worse off than when she considers it to betoken marriage, another form of property-based power. (The socialism of French writers such as Charles Fourier, with its celebration of something akin to what another generation would call ‘free love’, was always a potent ingredient in Wagner’s intellectual mix, likewise that of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, whose most famous slogan remains ‘Property is theft’, instantiated in Alberich’s conversion of value-free Rhinegold into capital.)

Thus particular questioning readily transforms itself into the more general, conceptual variety, and vice versa. That whole ‘world’ of which Wagner wrote to Liszt develops before our very eyes and ears, both in performance and in subsequent contemplation. The Ring’s web of motifs encourages us to think in such a way, to dart back and forth, reminding us of its world’s past, hinting at its future, and tantalising us with alternative paths of development, which intriguingly become all the more ‘real’ the more strongly we know that they will be denied. What if…? This is not a work one can know too well, or even well enough. And yet, we know ,with Hegel, that the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk; or, with Marx, that it is folly to write recipes for the cookery books of the future. It is no coincidence that Hegel and Marx were so taken with early theories of evolution, with their strong facility of backward explanation and their weak predictive powers. Wagner might speak theoretically of the ‘artwork of the future’, but he is wise enough in that artwork to stick to the past and present; he does not present us with science fiction.  The world is rightly given over to the ‘watchers’.

 What about us? We might do well to heed Warner’s words, ‘When you are torn apart at the end of Die Walküre – as I think you should be – it’s because you’ve had five hours of profound information about these people, not because you’ve been manipulated into weeping by mere theatrical or musical devices.’ Wagner, in his own words, aims at ‘emotionalisation of the intellect’, not at its abdication. The Ring acts as a standing rebuke to those people – Nietzsche might have called them ‘Wagnerians’ – who wish merely to wallow. An audience, just as much as a performer or a director, which fails to think is unworthy of the Ring, yet that incitement affords an extraordinary opportunity. There is clearly identification, albeit uncertain, to be had between us and the ‘watchers’ – we are all survivors – and a crucial clue here is that they are human. The end of Wotan’s rule is not hymned with words of revolutionary jubilation as it had been in one of Wagner’s projected endings, the so-called ‘Feuerbach ending’, yet there nevertheless remains a strong sense that, human though we may be in our failings as well as our strengths, our world is that Nietzsche would herald in The Gay Science:  

We philosophers and ‘free spirits’ feel, when we hear the news that ‘the old god is dead,’ as if a new dawn shone upon us; our heart overflows with gratitude, amazement, premonitions, expectation. At long last the horizon appears free to us again, even if it should not be bright; at long last our ships may venture out again, venture out to face any danger; all the daring of the lover of knowledge is permitted again; the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps there has never yet been such an ‘open sea’.

 

Uncertainty with respect both to the watchers’ position and to ours precludes glib chatter of a happy ending.Yet, informed as much by Schopenhauer’s ideas of compassion as Feuerbach’s unmasking of religion, they stand a little advanced upon the savagery we have witnessed, a beacon of hope to our world, which has signally failed to destroy Valhalla or Nibelheim. In the words of Herbert Marcuse, ‘Art cannot change the world, but it can contribute to changing the consciousness and drives of the men and women who could change the world.’ There can be no final words when it comes to the Ring, but let us temporarily conclude with a return to Boulez:

There have been endless discussions as to whether this conclusion is pessimistic or optimistic [in our shorthand, ‘Feuerbach or Schopenhauer?’]; but is that really the question? Or at any rate can the question be put in such simple terms? [Patrice] Chéreau has called it ‘oracular’, and it is a good description. In the ancient world, oracles were always ambiguously phrased so that their deeper meaning could be understood only after the event, which, as it were, provided a semantic analysis of the oracle’s statement. Wagner refuses any conclusion as such, simply leaving us with the premisses for a conclusion that remains shifting and indeterminate in meaning.

 

 

Siegfried, Royal Opera, 7 October 2012

Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Mime – Gerhard Siegel

Siegfried – Stefan Vinke
The Wanderer – Bryn Terfel
Alberich – Wolfgang Koch
Fafner – Eric Halfvarson

The Woodbird – Sophie Bevan

Erda – Maria Radner
Brünnhilde – Susan Bullock 

Keith Warner (director)

Walter Sutcliffe (associate director, first assistant director)

Stefanos Lazaridis, Matthew Deely (set designs)

Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Wolfgang Göbbel (lighting)
Mic Pool, Dick Straker (video designs)
Claire Gaskin, Michael Barry (movement) 

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Antonio Pappano (conductor)

 

It has been something of a disappointment not to have been able to attend the Royal Opera’s present revival of Wagner’s Ring in its entirety. (Incidentally, would journalists, publicists, et al., kindly take note that this ` is not, repeat not, called The Ring Cycle. By all means refer to The Ring, the Ring, The Ring of the Nibelung, Der Ring, Der Ring des Nibelungen, the Ring cycle, etc., etc., but never The Ring Cycle. That admonition counts for more, should you belong to the organisation claiming to perform a non-existent work.) I have seen it before, most recently in 2007 (see here, here, here, and here.) Nevertheless, I am immensely grateful to the reader who, unable to attend, most generously offered me his ticket for Siegfried. Moreover, I have today managed both to secure a return for Götterdämmerung and to take a Rheingold standing ticket off the hands of someone who can no longer go, so who knows? Dropping in at this stage is a different experience from experiencing Siegfried in its proper place, so what I say should be read hedged with necessary qualifications.

 

Keith Warner’s production underwent a degree of de-cluttering before the first complete cycles in 2007. My memory is too hazy to be able to say with any degree of certainty how different, if at all, the staging is this time around. What I can say is that I liked it better. The ‘educating Siegfried’ action during the first Act Prelude is apposite to the story; if it is not what one hears from the orchestra at that time, then one could equally well argue that one does not have to have, say, Fafner scenically represented, since one can hear him anyway. Last time, I wondered about the aeroplane; this time, I ceased to do so and simply thought it an arresting image. Direction of the singers was a great strength for much of the evening, a particular highlight for me the Beckettian exchanges between Alberich and the Wanderer (even though the latter proved somewhat lacking vocally, of which more below.) The forest scenes have magic to them, the green grass a crucial hint of Nature apparently unsullied – though the animals on trolleys remain a bit of a problem, technically as well as visually. I recall the dragon being more outlandish, but that may be a trick of the memory; at any rate, the visual representation worked, its red eyes fixing themselves in the more recent memory. If I cannot help suspecting that the contrasting minimalism of the third act might suggest budget restrictions rather than an æsthetic decision, it is only really the final scene that seems a cop out: no fire, too much happening behind a screen, and, perhaps most surprisingly, less than convincing Personenregie or at least execution thereof.  Use of a little video seems pointless.

 

Sir Antonio Pappano has grown as a Wagner conductor. The first times these dramas were staged, individually, the results from the pit were well-nigh catastrophic. In 2007, we had progressed to competence, if hardly greatness; the same could be said of 2012. The dreadful stopping and starting that had so disfigured Pappano’s initial efforts  seems to have been properly sorted out. If the orchestra in this particular drama seemed less a dramatic participant – Wagner’s Greek Chorus – than it had in 2007, at least the first two acts flowed nicely enough. Pappano seemingly remains content, however, to assume the role of ‘accompanist’. Sadly the first scene of the third act – the peripeteia of the Ring as a whole – was underwhelming, with little sense of anything, let alone something truly world-shattering, at stake. Much of the rest of that act dragged too. Pappano’s performance was not bad, but one hopes for a little more than that.

 

There was much better news when it came to Siegfried himself. (How surprised I am ever to find myself writing that!) Stefan Vinke fully justified the high hopes I had from having heard him as Lohengrin and Parsifal in Leipzig, sounding quite rejuvenated after a couple of recent lacklustre London performances in concert. Just about anybody would be preferable to  John Treleaven in 2007, yet Vinke was better than merely preferable; his was probably the most impressive Siegfried I have heard in the flesh as opposed to on record. There was no sign of flagging, despite the cruel demands Wagner places upon his tenor. Words were clear and meaningful; phrases were well turned. And this was a credible dramatic portrayal too, Warner’s belief, however misguided, that acting should trump singing, at least paying dividends in the results achieved here on stage. This Siegfried was more human than one generally finds; too often, one ends up wishing that Mime would succeed in his plot. In the present instance, however, one felt sympathy for the boy’s plight, without doubting his ‘natural’, unconscious strength and the problems that might entail.

 

Gerhard Siegel proved an excellent foil to Vinke’s Siegfried. Siegel can certainly do the wheedling, but he never resorts to mere caricature. (Wagner was adamant that Mime should be nothing of the sort.) This Mime was possessed of a fine, often powerful, voice, and all the more credible for it. Wolfgang Koch’s Alberich was dark, disillusioned, equally attentive to words and music. Alas Bryn Terfel’s Wanderer was disappointing. His intonation was dubious, to say the least, upon his first act entrance, and though that problem cleared itself up after a while, Terfel signally failed to impart due gravitas to the role. Strange, attention-seeking mannerisms – for instance, a very peculiar ‘effect’ upon the singing of the word ‘Wurm’ during the second act – irritated, More serious was the apparent lack of dramatic, philosophical underpinning to the words enunciated with careful – too careful? – clarity. One does not have to have read Feuerbach and Schopenhauer to sing Wotan, but one needs to seem as though one might at least consider doing so. During the pivotal scene with Erda, this Wanderer seemed more a bit of a madman than someone preparing to renounce the Will. Sir John Tomlinson’s extraordinary, Lear-like portrayal of 2007 was preferable in every respect.

 

Sophie Bevan presented a keenly-voiced Woodbird, but the other two women were less impressive. Susan Bullock gave the impression that her voice was simply not ample enough for Brünnhilde and that she was therefore having to try too hard. The result was too often a mixture of the timid and the tremulant, and the acting was not much better. Maria Radner’s Erda similarly lacked presence, whether vocally or in stage terms; she seemed miscast.

 

A gripe concerning practicalities: I am all for having decent length intervals, so that if one wishes to have a drink, one does not have to return to the theatre immediately after having fought one’s way to the front of the queue, but an hour and a quarter between the second and third acts, for a performance beginning at 3 p.m.? Had it been a ‘supper interval’, however irksome, it would have been understandable, but I cannot imagine many would have wished to dine at a quarter past six. All that was achieved was to spin out the running time to an entirely unnecessary six hours and ten minutes.

Christ lag in Todesbanden/Der Kaiser von Atlantis, English Touring Opera, 5 October 2012

Linbury Studio Theatre

 

Bach – Christ lag in Todesbanden, BWV 4 (arr. Iain Farrington)

Ullmann – Der Kaiser von Atlantis

Emperor Überall – Richard Mosley-Evans

Death – Robert Winslade Anderson
Loudspeaker – Callum Thorpe
Maiden – Paula Sides
Harlequin – Jeffrey Stewart
Drummer – Katie Bray
Soldier – Rupert Charlesworth

James Conway (director)
Neil Irish (designs)
Guy Hoare (lighting)

Aurora Orchestra
Peter Selwyn (conductor)
 

Not for the first time, the heroic efforts of English Touring Opera have put to shame the larger, wealthier opera companies. Whereas ENO has elected to garner minor headlines by launching a silly campaign to encourage audience members to wear jeans and trainers, and from the 2012 productions I have seen on the main stage at Covent Garden, but one, Rusalka, has proved artistically first-rate, not only is ETO offering an autumn season composed of three twentieth-century operas – Albert Herring, The Emperor of Atlantis, and The Lighthouse – in the present production, it has risen impressively to the challenge.  

To preface Viktor Ullmann’s opera with Bach’s Christ lag in Todesbanden was a brilliant idea. (There was also a pre-performance rendition of a newly commissioned song-cycle by Helen Chadwick, Towards an Unkown Port, which I was unable to attend.) Bach’s cantata was arranged for the same chamber forces as the Ullmann, Iain Farrington’s arrangement showing both sensitivity to the score and an imagination that at times seemed to pay occasional homage to the Bach arrangements of Webern and Berio. (Was that a touch of flutter-tonguing I heard early on?) Harlequin and Death observe the performance, presented chillingly by four soloists – Katie Bray, Rupert Charlesworth, Paula Sides, and Callum Thorpe – with suitcases ready for the journey ahead. Though sung in German, Harlequin offers a rough and ready flash card translation, which at times he uses to incite Death, waiting with his scythe. This may be an Easter Day cantata, based of course upon Luther’s chorale, itself based upon eleventh-century plainsong, but it is hardly Bach at his most jubilant. Christ lies in bonds of death and though we progress towards a final ‘Alleluia’ – this from 1724, Bach’s first version for the final stanza having been lost – via, amongst other wondrous writing, it is sin, the wait for judgement and, above all, especially in a contest such as this, the stretto contest between life and death, that linger longest and most profoundly in the mind. Each of the soloists was excellent, as indeed was the Aurora Orchestra, the plangent beauty of Charlesworth’s tenor perhaps particularly worthy of praise.

 

Der Kaiser von Atlantis, or  to give it its full title, Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (‘The Emperor of Atlantis, or Death’s Denial’), followed on immediately. How does one listen ‘objectively’ even upon hearing the subtitle, given that one knows this was a Theresienstadt opera? One does not, of course, and it would be unreasonable to expect anyone to do so.  A Schoenberg pupil, on his teacher’s recommendation, Ullmann was made a founder member of the committee for the Society of Private Musical Performances. Having been taken to Theresientadt in 1942, he wrote this opera with librettist Peter Kien the following year, though it only went so far as dress rehearsal, before being realised for the thinly disguised satire that it was. Ullmann, Kien, and many of their colleagues would be transported to Auschwitz in October 1944, to be murdered there.

 

Yet Ullmann’s opera is not of mere historical interest; he was an established composer for quite some time before the Second World War, and it shows. ‘Eclectic’ would perhaps give the wrong impression of the score, since it does not dart around willy-nilly; however, it certainly draws upon elements of tonal Schoenbergian writing and more popular idioms, often bringing Weill to mind. Death’s withdrawal of his labour disturbs the Emperor Überall – here, in spite of the opera being sung in English, the name was wisely not translated, adding definite national resonance – in his campaign of total war. (Yes, that very phrase is uttered.) The non-death of the soldier and girl in the third scene echoes, questions, subverts the struggle between life and death in the Bach cantata. Eventually, the Emperor accedes to Death’s demand that he be the first to die in return for the freedom for others to die again. It is perhaps only in this fourth scene that the music lingers a little too long, but even that arguably has its dramatic point, given the Emperor’s reluctance to die. The final ‘rejoicing’ is set to a lightly modernist elaboration of, irony of ironies, Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.   

Once again, the orchestra, expertly directed by Peter Selwyn, was on excellent form. James Conway’s direction was typically impressive throughout, each character well prepared for his or her actions within this almost surreally terrifying setting, the sets of Neil Irish and Guy Hoare’s lighting playing their part here too. One had a sense if not of the conditions of Theresienstadt – how could one? – then of how modest means can create something far and beyond what one might expect, of the defiance and, clichéd though it may sound, hope that artistic solidarity may confer in the darkest of circumstances. Especially noteworthy amongst the cast were, once again, Charlesworth as the Soldier, also Callum Thorpe’s intelligently presented Loudspeaker, informing the Emperor of the war’s progress, and Paula Sides’s attractively voiced Maiden. Richard Mosley-Evans wavered somewhat as the Emperor, but the whole performance remained far more than the sum of its parts.

 

The production will also be seen in Cambridge, Exeter, Tunbridge Wells, Harrogate, Aldeburgh, Malvern, and Buxton. Click here for further details from the ETO website.

Röschmann/Bostridge/LSO/Honeck - Mozart and Mahler, 4 October 2012

Barbican Hall

Mozart – Symphony no.41 in C major, KV 551, ‘Jupiter’

Mahler – Des Knaben Wunderhorn

Dorothea Röschmann (soprano)
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
London Symphony Orchestra
Manfred Honeck (conductor)

 

This concert was to have been conducted by Sir Colin Davis; indeed, the prospect of our greatest living Mozartian conducting the Jupiter Symphony was what had brought me to it in the first place. Alas, recovery from a recent illness meant that Davis was unable to return to the podium quite yet. However, whereas hisrecent eighty-fifth birthday concert had therefore to suffer considerable programme reorganisation, here the only alteration necessary was Sir Colin’s replacement with Manfred Honeck.

 

The first movement of the Jupiter was faster than Davis would have been likely to have taken it, but not unreasonably so. Perhaps it was a little unsmiling, but the LSO was on excellent form, and neither orchestra nor conductor had any truck with silly reduction of forces or withdrawal of vibrato. Excellent woodwind playing was a particular joy, the magic flute of Gareth Davies in particular. The violins’ silken grace in the second subject was equally impressive. If it remained difficult to warm to Honeck’s direction in this movement, at least he took it seriously, the development section evincing almost Beethovenian strength and purpose, though overall form was undeniably Mozart’s in its balance and symmetry. I had no reservations whatsoever concerning the slow movement, which, for once, actually was a slow movement. Taken at a judicious tempo, it was anything but somnolent; indeed, it received a performance close to ideal. Drama told through maintenance of line and understanding of harmonic rhythm, not via any applied ‘effects’. The LSO’s playing from all sections was beyond reproach, dark not sugary, counterpoint unerringly projected. Honeck and the orchestra combined the intimacy of chamber music with the dramatic urgency of the opera house, and in its dark Romanticism, this performance edged the music to but a stone’s throw from Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. The minuet was almost, but not quite, neo-Classical in its grace; intimations of La clemenza di Tito were not far away at all. Mozart’s harmonic richness and the sheer deliciousness of his melodic inspiration – the woodwind especially delightful here – were justly relished.

In character, the finale rather resembled the first movement. I should have preferred something less fierce, more ‘Austrian’ in a sense (and despite Honeck’s nationality), but great strength of purpose was still to be applauded. Mozart’s structural genius, if not his profoundest humanity, shone through, the LSO on scintillating form. And that coda miracle of quintuple invertible counterpoint told with clarity of dynamism. All that was lacking, at least for me, was a smile. I should add that the LSO clearly loved playing with Honeck, and rightly so, for this was quite a debut, with Mozart surely the cruellest test of all.

 

The only other occasion on which I have heard Des Knaben Wunderhorn in concert in its entirety was a truly first-rate performance in 2009 from Petra Lang, Hanno Müller-Brachmann, and the Staaskapelle Berlin under Michael Gielen. There, alas, the problem, at least for me, was the companion piece on the programme: the ‘Vienna version’ of Bruckner’s First Symphony, which, try as I might, I continued to find more or less interminable. Honeck’s direction of the LSO seemed to me the equal of Gielen’s in Berlin, which represents praise indeed. Indeed, I do not think I could come up with an adverse criticism of either conductor or orchestra even if I tried. (Well, perhaps I could, but I shall resist the underwhelming temptation.) The pianissimi in particular were breathtaking. From the very first song, ‘Der Schildwache Nachtlied,’ we were treated to wonderfully transparent orchestral colours. The militarism of this and some other songs was equally well judged – take the three LSO trumpets in ‘Revelge’ – and the Wagnerian harmonies of alternate stanzas (Dorothea Röschmann’s) were tellingly conveyed. Rhythms throughput were taut, and whenever necessary, or desirable, for instance in the second and eighth songs, a properly idiomatic Viennese lilt was to be heard – and felt. The orchestra fairly seethed in ‘Das iridische Leben,’ chilling as it must, whilst the dark, ominous tread of ‘Der Tambourgesell’ also displayed an English horn plangency (Christine Pendrill) that might have come from Bach. ‘Lob des hohen Verstandes’ sounded, as it should, like a chamber offshoot of Die Meistersinger, albeit with the irony so signally lacking in Wagner’s own ‘Meisterstück’. Finally came the seemingly endless sadness of ‘Wo die schönen Truompeten blasen,’ searingly presented.

 

Röschmann began a little tremulously, but soon calmed down, permitting us to enjoy both a truly Romantic richness of voice as well as detailed attention to the words. Ian Bostridge certainly could make some claim to the latter, but I am afraid that, try as I might, I found his contributions very difficult to take. If, in that first song and in ‘Trost im Unglück’, one could convince oneself this was an interesting ‘alternative’ reading, perhaps foretelling the Captain in Wozzeck, ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ was so wearyingly presented in inverted commas that it sounded as if the tale were being told by a caricature of Wagner’s Mime. Yes, there was apt bitterness of tone, but the directness, which yet lacked nothing in subtlety, of Müller-Brachmann in Berlin was infinitely preferable, at least to this listener. ‘Lied des Verfolgten im Turm’ again had bitterness, but Bostridge’s delivery tended so strongly toward Sprechgesang as to sound like straightforward caricature. Some, I can imagine, may have found ‘Reveille’ well ‘characterised’, but for me it crossed the boundary from mannerism into outright grotesquerie, more akin to the ravings of a morphine addict than anything Mahler seems to have had in mind. ‘Verlorne müh’!’ offered the ne plus ultra, vocal tone so unpleasant that all one could do was try to concentrate upon the orchestra. There was, of course, much to enjoy from Röschmann, whether the beautiful handling of the melismata in ‘Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht’, or the winning delivery of ‘Rheinlegendchen,’ from which one emerged smiling, in true Viennese fashion, one eye dry, the other moist. 

 

 

Boulez wins the Golden Lion

Congratulations to Pierre Boulez on the award of the Golden Lion for lifetime achievement, which he will receive at the 56th International Festival of Contemporary Music on 6 October. For further details from Universal Edition, click here. Below are the first three movements from his wonderful Berlin Philharmonic recording of Webern's Cantata no.2, with Christiane Oelze, Gerald Finley, and the BBC Singers.

Angela Hewitt - Bach and Beethoven, 2 October 2012

Royal Festival Hall

 

Bach – Chorale Prelude: ‘Nun komm’ der Heiden Heiland,’ BWV 659, arr. Wilhelm Kempff

Bach – Siciliano in G minor from Flute Sonata, BWV 1031, arr. Kempff
Bach – Sinfonia in D major from Cantata no.29, ‘Wir danken dir, Gott,’ arr. Kempff
Beethoven – Piano Sonata no.28 in A major, op.101
Bach – The Art of Fugue, BWV 1080: Contrapunctus I – Contrapunctus X
 

Not wishing to be typecast as a ‘Bach pianist’ is quite understandable, though if ever there were a composer in whose music one could satisfyingly immerse oneself for ever and a day it would surely be Johann Sebastian. ‘Specialist’ seems an utter misnomer, given that we are dealing with the most universal composer of all, not that those who would reduce Bach to the status of a generic Baroque composer have the faintest inkling of that. Angela Hewitt’s repertoire has of course always ranged beyond Bach. On the evidence, however, of this recital, the first in this season’s International Piano Series, her Beethoven – admittedly a fearsomely difficult choice in the guise of op.101 – is not or at least not yet on the same level as her Bach, which itself has over recent years gained greater depth. (Click here for a review of Hewitt performing Book One of the Forty-Eight.)

 

There was much to admire in the Beethoven sonata, the first two movements proving the most successful. Indeed, the first movement, Etwas lebhaft und mit der innigsten Empfindungen – how utterly different such instructions sound in German from the usual Italian, and how different is their meaning! – struck an almost ideal balance between apparent reverie and structural communication. Beethoven’s syncopations both disoriented and comforted. The March was strong, rhythmically alert, ceding once again to dreams in the trio, though only apparently so, the trilling transition back equally impressive. In the finale, again, the transitional passages – however over-used a word it may be, ‘liminal’ seems almost to be demanded here – were magical. However, the fugal writing, perhaps surprisingly given Hewitt’s Bachian experience, came off less well. Or rather, perhaps unsurprisingly, given that Beethoven is doing something quite different in this case. As if trying too hard to summon up a Beethovenian spirit, the music hardened rather than raged, sounding brittle rather than Romantic. Or was that to be ascribed to Hewitt’s Fazioli piano? Might a Bösendorfer or Steinway have provided greater depth? At any rate, white heat of development, without which the sonata principle cannot function, was fitful.

 

The three Wilhelm Kempff transcriptions had in a sense told a similar story in miniature. Nun komm’, der Heiden Heiland was beautifully voiced, noble in spirit, though there were occasions when I felt Hewitt – much to my surprise – bent the rhythms a little too much, sacrificing momentum. The Siciliano from BWV 1031 was limpid, quite magical, an object lesson in Bach playing, hyphenated or otherwise. However, the Sinfonia from BWV 29 – again to my surprise – sounded at times somewhat brutalised, tone hardening whilst at the same time being over-pedalled. A less breathless tempo might have helped, though I also wondered both whether the piece simply lent itself less well to piano transcription and again whether a mellower instrument might have assisted.

 

Reservations, such as they were, evaporated in the second half, in which Hewitt performed Contrapuncti I-X from The Art of Fugue. I could only wish that we had heard the work in its entirety. Her tone was expertly chosen, or rather did not seem ‘chosen’ at all, sounding utterly natural in response to the music. Bach’s endless reserves of imagination and intellect were at one. As the fugues progressed, one always had the sense that the world was his oyster; yet, looking, or hearing, back, one knew equally well that things could not have been other than they were. The first four fugues sounded very much as a group, Bach’s contrapuntal means and learning audible and meaningful, whether or no any particular listener would be able to put into words, let alone technical terms, what he was doing. In the stretto fugues and their successors, pace – whatever, if anything, that might mean – seemed to increase, Romantic ‘expression’ to deepen. The French Overture rhythms of Contrapunctus VI were beautifully handled; in Bach, ‘ornament’ is never really anything of the kind. No wonder Schoenberg revered him inordinately; his friend Adolf Loos’s criminalisation of ornament, so meaningful for Schoenberg himself, might as well have been derived from these fugues, harbingers of a searching modernism that would extend to the Domaine musical, to Darmstadt, and beyond. Yet pianistic beauty was never sacrificed to structural rigour; the two went hand in hand. Kempff’s transcription of Orpheus's Lament and the Dance of the Blessed Spirits from Gluck’s Orfeo – strictly, from his Orphée – made for a delectable, slightly unexpected, choice of encore.

 

Giulio Cesare in Egitto, English National Opera, 1 October 2012

The Coliseum

(sung in English, as Julius Caesar)

Giulio Cesare – Lawrence Zazzo

Curio – George Humphreys
Cornelia – Patricia Bardon
Sesto – Daniela Mack
Cleopatra – Anna Christy
Tolomeo – Tim Mead
Achilla – Andrew Craig Brown
Nireno – James Laing

Fabulous Dance Theatre – Saju Hari, Karolina Kraczkowska, Johannes Langholf, Louise Mochia, Erik Nevin, Emmanuel Obeya, Keir Patrick, Rachel Poirier, Raquel Gulatero Soriano, Louise Tanoto

Michael Keegan-Dolan (director, choreography)

Andrew Lieberman (set designs)
Doey Luthi (costumes)
Adam Silverman (lighting)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Christian Curnyn (conductor)

Julius Caesar returns to the Coliseum for its second production, succeeding that by John Copley, conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras, with Dame Janet Baker in the title role. (It remains available in both CD and DVD.) There is much to enjoy, especially vocally, and though Michael Keegan-Dolan’s production is in some respects baffling, I doubt that it would prove unduly off-putting to anyone. Keegan-Dolan ultimately seems far more of a choreographer than a dancer. Opinions will doubtless differ on whether ‘interpretative’ dance of pretty much every number adds something or becomes wearisome. Some instances work better than others; though the work of Keegan-Dolan’s Fabulous Dance Theatre is very good on its own terms, some of the movement can nevertheless tend towards silliness. My concern is more that it tends to be a substitute for presenting a more fully-formed production, though doubtless the practice’s advocates would claim that dance in itself is a perfectly acceptable form of operatic direction. Likewise images such as dead crocodiles and giraffes do not compensate for a clearer vision of what the opera might be about, or even what is happening. Too often, especially during the first act, the concern seems more to be to show off the bodies of dancers and singers – white vests and tight-fitting trousers do the trick – rather than to present a credible or even involving drama. Gun shots here and there are not really an adequate substitute for a Baroque sense of the fantastic.   

That brings us to a more general problem involving Handelian opera seria. As Jonathan Keates put it in his programme note, ‘At the heart of Baroque opera lies an unresolved tension between past and present. On the one hand its preferred subject-matter offers us an idealised vision of classical antiquity ... On the other lies a timeless world of intimate personal relationships, a private, confessional universe where ordinary emotions – rage, desire, jealousy, remorse – expose these very same heroes and heroines to our scrutiny as ordinary men and women.’ In a sense, that approaches the problem many of us continue to experience with Handel’s operas at least. There seems little real interest in the ‘antique’ setting, but also little that enables us to relate to the characters as flesh and blood. Presumably that brings part of the motivation for a ‘different’, dance-based approach, but I cannot help but think that a more thorough-going reimagination – call it Regietheater, if you will, but there is no especial need to confine oneself with the implications that may present – might have enabled us to care more about what was happening on stage.

Christian Curnyn’s resolutely vibrato-free approach will doubtless find many supporters; so does hanging. To me, it seemed a pity to spoil the ship for a ha’porth of tar, since thin string tone detracted from what was for the most part a sensibly, attractively paced reading. Recitatives did not outstay their welcome, partly a matter of considerable pruning – a few arias had to go too – but more a matter of keen dramatic handling (pun unintentional). Recorders do not blend very well with modern strings, even when the latter are played so as to sound as close as possible to their forebears, but there was a great deal to relish in the splendid performance of the ENO Orchestra’s woodwind section. Some delicious oboe and bassoon playing brought to mind the instrumentation of Handel’s dramatic oratorios, Saul – the Witch of Endor scene – in particular. (If only we might see that staged – and of course benefit from the inspired choral writing, absent from Handel’s operas.)  

Lawrence Zazzo offered a dazzling performance in the title role, tender moments every bit as impressive as quick-fire coloratura. Zazzo showed quite how far we have come from the days of counter-tenor hooting, even though I retain an heretical liking for transposition (remember Fischer-Dieskau), if only for the sake of vocal variety. Tim Mead’s venomously spitting Tolomeo proved an impressive foil. I am afraid I could not relate to the vocal character of Anna Christy’s Cleopatra; though well enough sung in abstract term,; the role seems to demand something richer than a soubrette. (Valerie Masterson on the Mackerras recording and still more so the wonderful Tatiana Troyanos for Karl Richter show how it can be done.) Daniela Mack’s Sesto was inexplicably portrayed as a girl – the programme actually has: ‘Sesto, daughter of Pompey and Cornelia’ – but Mack overcame that weird directorial handicap as impressively as one could have reason to expect. The situation was rendered all the more confusing by the counter-tenor-like voice of Patricia Bardon’s Cornelia. Following some unattractive scooping in her first aria, she recovered well, but I had to check the programme to assure myself that this was not a falsettist who looked uncommonly convincing in women’s clothes. It was a pity, if understandable for reasons of timing, that Andrew Craig Brown’s Achillas lost two out of his three arias, for in his first, he revealed a dark, dangerous voice eminently suited to the role, and of which I should be keen to hear more.

Brian Trowell’s 1978 English translation is a model of its kind. Leaving aside arguments as to whether translation might be necessary or even desirable in an age of surtitles, this vernacular version presents the words clearly, musically, and without drawing undue attention to itself. If the truth be told, translating Handel’s operas into English does relatively little harm; Handel writes similarly whether setting Italian or English, and this is not, to put it diplomatically, Mozart setting Da Ponte. As I mentioned above, however, I wonder whether ENO might consider staging the odd dramatic oratorio – by which, however, I certainly do not mean a revival of Deborah Warner’s misguided Messiah production.

Höbarth/Tomes - Mozart, 30 September 2012

Wigmore Hall

Sonata for piano and violin no.22 in A major, KV 305/293d

Rondo in D major, KV 485
Sonata for piano and violin no.27 in G major, KV 379/373a
Sonata for piano and violin no.21 in E minor, KV 304/300c
Rondo in A minor, KV 511
Sonata for piano and violin no.32 in B-flat major, KV 454

Erich Höbarth (violin)

Susan Tomes (piano)

 

I wonder how differently one hears music when one has played, indeed, performed it oneself. The difference can doubtless be exaggerated and will always depend on a number of other factors too. It is, moreover, surely possible to listen critically to a performance of Tristan und Isolde, and indeed to write about it, without having conducted the work, let alone to have played or to have sung every part. Nevertheless, there is probably a certain insight – ‘in-hearing’? – which is likely to assert itself via the engagement of performance, even if it remains far from impossible otherwise to acquire it. I was led to such thoughts on this particular occasion since I realised that I had at some point, and in some cases more than once, performed each of these works in public. Indeed, such a bloody nose did I receive from a teenage performance of the D major Rondo that I swore I should never play Mozart in public again, realising with a vengeance the truth of Schnabel’s oft-quoted remark about music being better than it could be performed. It took me another fourteen years before I dared perform that particular piece again, though in the meantime I had actually played its more complex cousin, the A minor Rondo, also on this Wigmore Hall programme, a number of times in front of an audience. At the very least, then, bitter experience enables one to realise quite what an extraordinarily difficult task performing any piece of Mozart will always be; indeed, it would be unusual were one not to conclude that Mozart is the most difficult of all composers to perform well.

 

In a field more than unduly littered with failures, Erich Höbarth and Susan Tomes acquitted themselves very well. Tomes is celebrated as a chamber musician, so I was interested to hear her in two solo rondos. The D major, KV 485, was fluent, nicely shaded, though to my ears at least lacking a sense of darker undercurrents. Many, I realise, would say that they are simply not there in so overtly sunny, even blithe, a work, but certain harmonic shifts would seem to imply otherwise. It was a good performance – I shudder when I even think of that teenage effort of mine mention above – but perhaps a little closer to the spirit of JC Bach than to the richness of Mozart. The A minor Rondo, which I have often thought Mozart’s single greatest work for solo piano, was sad, chaste, though none the less involving for that. Counterpoint was clear but, every bit as important, imbued with harmonic direction. At times, I might have wished for something more Romantic, especially in the build up to those climaxes at which Mozart really goes for the Wagnerian, even Bergian, jugular. Nevertheless, a more Classical reading, so long as it is not unduly understated or, worse, mechanised, has validity. No one could have doubted from Tomes’s performance that this was a towering masterpiece – though perhaps someone behind me did, given that she burst into inexplicable laughter at the end.

 

Framing the two solo performances in both halves were violin sonatas or, strictly, sonatas for piano with violin accompaniment. (For what it is worth, they are not really: a performance of the piano parts alone would be a nonsense.) KV 305/293d, in A major, received a wonderful performance. The first movement was ebullient without sounding boisterous, Höbarth and Tomes exhibiting impressive unanimity without a hint of the clinical. They proved themselves flexible as the harmony demanded, or at least suggested. From the outset, and throughout the recital, I was impressed by the very real sense of a physical connection with Höbarth’s instrument; this was a true violinist, not a mere virtuoso. There was not the glossy perfection associates with certain celebrated and, frankly, boring players, but something far more rewarding and meaningful. So many players take the second movement far too fast. It was a relief that Höbarth and Tomes allowed plenty of space for the harmony to speak, their command of phrasing ensuring that the longer line unfolded without interruption. Mozart is already not so very distant from Beethoven here, so the variations emerged as properly weighty, in the sense of being consequential – and not just in the minor mode. Above all, the players communicated their love for the music – even above a quite extraordinary bout of bronchial intervention.

 

The G major sonata, KV 379/373a, benefited from a rich, almost Beethovenian, sound to the piano introduction, matched by Höbarth’s violin response, equally rich and dignified. The Allegro was alert, finely articulated, and every bit as responsive to the demands of the harmony. Yes, there were moments of imperfect intonation, but the meaning of the notes was always fully apparent. Neither musician mistook vehemence for driving too hard. As with the second movement of the A major sonata, the intricacies of Mozartian variation form sounded not at all distant from Beethoven. There is a tendency amongst some musicologists as well as performers to underestimate Mozart and Haydn as writers of variations; that was rightly resisted here, or better, would never have occurred to either musician. Tomes notably relished both the syncopations and the richness of harmony. Each variation was characterised, not least the extraordinary Bachian – though it is a moot point how much of Sebastian Bach’s music Mozart would yet have known – fifth variation, which, with its piano decoration and violin pizzicato can hardly fail to put one in mind of certain slow movements from Bach’s piano concertos. And the whole was undoubtedly greater than the sum of the parts.

 

The opening phrase of the E minor sonata, KV 304/300c, was imbued with Schubertian sadness, but Mozart’s imagination was soon shown to more variegated than that might imply. Indeed, the first movement was characterised by a passion that all but the most sentimental would recognise as operatic. There were passages when I thought that Höbarth, perhaps recalling his association with Concentus musicus Wien, might justly have applied a little more vibrato, but tonal warmth was certainly not neglected elsewhere. Mozart’s piano writing sounded, quite rightly, concertante in style at times. The nobility of contrapuntal utterance from the piano’s opening bars of the second movement marked it out as something quite special, counterpoint and melody proving properly indivisible. The E major trio emerged warm, hymn-like, as if from another (Zauberflöte-like) world, which in a sense it is. Tragic vehemence marked the sonata’s close.

 

Few, I am sure, would contest the claim that the B-flat major sonata, KV 454, is one of Mozart’s greatest contributions to the genre. (To my mind, the A major sonata, KV 526, is the only work to match it.) The first movement’s introduction had due grandeur, eliciting a splendid feeling of release for the ‘launch’, as it were, of the exposition proper. Again, there was an entirely apt air of the piano concerto to much of the writing. Joy was not unalloyed – Mozart is always more ambivalent than Haydn, Handel, even Bach – but the fecundity of his operatic imagination sang through, indeed moulded, his conception of sonata form. Though the performance never went so far as to be hard-driven, there were occasions when I thought it might have yielded a little; I am nit-picking really though. The slow movement flowed without being harried. There was no doubt here as to Mozart’s operatic inspiration; this was revealed to us in its beauty, its darkness, all its ambiguities, as a sister-aria to those of the Countess, though of course such ‘influence’ runs both ways. If I might sometimes have preferred something a little more Romantic, that is neither here nor there. It is very tempting to take the Allegretto, despite Mozart’s marking, too fast to allow the richness of his melodic and harmonic genius properly to tell. Here the players arguably fell on the fast side, not absurdly so, for the music remained enjoyable and, at times, winningly theatrical. I could not help but think, however, that a slightly more measured approach might have offered a more penetrating interpretation. That was nevertheless one of very few reservations I harboured concerning an impressive recital.