The Spectator goes far beyond Gergiev, even in his Enemies' Wildest Dreams: Ignorance and Homophobia Vie for Supremacy

As ever, I hesitate to provide a link to something at least partly designed to do just that and thus to generate advertising revenue on the back of bigotry that the Neanderthals would have rejected as wildly de trop. However, in order to refer to a piece The Spectator has for some reason decided to publish, I suppose I must. (I do not know what the legal position would be in simply copying it here, and do not wish to expose myself to vindictive action on that count.) One Melanie McDonagh, who seems to have form in 'social conservatism' - bigots' choice self-definition when they elect not to be out and proud bigots - has penned what, in a fiercely contested field, may well be the most woefully ignorant, heinously bigoted, at the very best hideously disingenuous, rant upon Valery Gergiev, Vladimir Putin, and homosexuality I have yet had the misfortune to see. I suppose it makes a change from racist comments on Somali mothers or even that lovely sleight of hand typical of the 'thoughtful social conservative' in distinguishing between homosexuality and 'homosexual acts', somehow mysteriously employed as ballast against the ordination of women.

Let us leave on one side, however, previous sins of commission and turn to this quite extraordinary piece; I cannot help but wonder whether it might be a cunning ploy by Gergiev's PR team to produce something so vile, so extreme, that anything the conductor may or may not have done will seem small fry by comparison. 'The conductor', I said, but McDonagh, who claims to have attended Thursday's Barbican concert, outside which Peter Tatchell led a wonderful-sounding, sparkling protest, seems to think that Gergiev is a composer. Clearly our new-found expert on musical, sexual, and Russian affairs cannot have paid too much attention to the programme (all Berlioz, not a note by the up-and-coming Gergiev). Gergiev, we read, was 'presumably here to conduct the LSO at their invitation'. No, Melanie, he was not. (By the way, are you trying to surpass your namesake, and sometime Spectator contributor, Ms Phillips, for instance in her outrage at the 'gay curriculum' apparently being taught in schools?) If you knew anything about Gergiev, the LSO, music, life, the universe, etc., etc., you would be aware that Gergiev is the Principal Conductor of what many would consider to be London's premier orchestra.

Note also the phrase, the phrases, 'his boys,' 'the Tatchell boys,' and so on; the latter do not 'shout' but are 'screaming'. A highly charitable reading might decide that this was a piece of outmoded sexism along the lines of walking into an office and referring to female employees as 'girls', that is, if we accept the highly implausible claim - I was not there, so it might just to be true - that the protesters against Gergiev and Putin were 100% male. But we know the real implication, do we not? It allies McDonagh with Putin's - and Gergiev's - claim that the notorious, even infamous, Russian law against the promotion of homosexuality is targeted against paedophiles. (As we know, they are all gay. 'Social conservatives': that was a case of irony shading into sarcasm, just in case you were wondering.) And so it turns out to be: 'I'd say myself that it's none of our business if the Russian government doesn't think that children should be educated about sex in a fashion approved by Nick Clegg.' It is, you see, a matter of an 'approach to child protection'. Section 28, then, needs to be brought back as soon as possible. Because gays, of course, are paedophiles. ('Social conservatives': again, that is not to be taken as an expression of my views. Were I a bigot, I should at least have the decency so to describe myself.) Peter Tatchell, one of the bravest men in this country, as shown by his attempt to arrest Robert Mugabe, and indeed his Moscow protest in 2007, is actually the enemy. He, we read, is 'a bully' - unlike a woman who writes such vile accusations for money. Gergiev's apologists have continued to protest that music and politics should somehow be separated; I cannot readily think of a more brazen, if hearteningly hapless, attempt to use music to serve political ends than McDonagh's words.

Will The Spectator now have the decency to dissociate itself from them? Perhaps the Evening Standard, though an undoubtedly right-wing publication, hardly a champion of homophobia, might wish to consider her position as a leader-writer for the newspaper?

UPDATE: As David points out below, Peter Tatchell has now had a response published on the magazine's site. Click here to read it.

Die Zauberflöte, English National Opera,7 November 2013

(sung in English, as The Magic Flute)

The Coliseum

Tamino – Ben Johnson

First Lady – Eleanor Dennis
Second Lady – Clare Presland
Third Lady – Rosie Aldridge
Papageno – Roland Wood
Queen of the Night – Cornelia Götz
Monostatos – Brian Galliford
Pamina – Devon Guthrie
Three Boys – Alessio D’Andrea, Finlay A’Court, Alex Karlsson
Speaker – Steven Page
Sarastro – James Creswell
First Priest, First Armoured Man – Anthony Gregory
Second Priest, Second Armoured Man – Robert Winslade Anderson
Papagena – Mary Bevan

Simon McBurney (director)

Michael Levine (set designs)
Nicky Gillibrand (costumes)
Josie Daxter (movement)
Jean Kalman (lighting)
Finn Ross (video)
Gareth Fry (sound designs)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)
Orchestra of the English National Opera
Gergely Madaras (conductor)

I seem to be in a minority in not remotely regretting the passing of Nicholas Hytner’s ENO production of The Magic Flute. Though others loved it, when first, rather late in the day, I saw it, I found it ‘more West End than Masonic’, and was still less thrilled upon a second viewing. For ENO, in a co-production with the Dutch Opera, the International Festival of Lyric Art, Aix-en-Provence, and in collaboration with Complicité, to present something new from Simon McBurney was therefore most welcome. At first, things seemed quite promising. The emphasis upon theatricality and showing its workings is certainly not out of place in such a work, even if the use of video – for instance, in writing ‘The Magic Flute’ on a screen during the Overture – often seems unnecessary. The presence on either side of the stage of sound booths, in which one witnesses the making – or in some cases, I think, not actually the making – of various sound ‘effects’, some more welcome than others, offers the prospect of an interrogation of Complicité’s brand of theatricality. Unfortunately, little more issues from such intriguing possibilities. We seem more often than not to be in the world of Wagner’s celebrated accusation against Meyerbeer: effect without cause. What initially, and indeed for a good part of the first act, seems refreshing, for instance the presence of actors with paper birds sometimes to surround Papageno, soon palls.

 

More fundamentally, despite the undoubted technical ingenuity on display, theatricality seems to serve as a substitute for, rather than a means to express, any idea of what the work might actually be about, or be held to be about. With such a host of possibilities, which might be presented, questioned, even rejected, not even to ask the question in the first place leaves behind a sense of lack of fulfilment, rather as if one had eaten an initially striking yet ultimately un-nutritious meal.  I am not entirely convinced that Furtwängler was right to argue against viewing the work as a brother to Parsifal, although I can understand why he did; it is a point of view worth taking seriously in any case. However, I should rather a production and performance that took The Magic Flute too seriously, should that even be possible, than one that did not take it seriously enough. That need not, should not, preclude magic, humour, wonder; however, as the Leipzig Gewandhaus has reminded us since 1781, ‘Res severa verum gaudium’. Instead we have yet again the tedious and at the very least borderline offensive depiction of a ‘Northern’ accent for Papageno as intrinsically amusing.   

 

Gergely Madaras, making his operatic debut, often took the music too fast, yet at least he did not fall into many ‘authenticke’ traps, bar that annoying, increasingly prevalent, trait of double-dotting in the Overture. The effect of excessive speed tended to be a little inconsequential rather than hard-driven, such as we have had to endure from ENO’s Music Director in his ill-advised forays into Classical repertoire. There were also peculiar instances of scaling back the number of strings – already meagre, with nine first violins down to just two double basses. Perhaps most serious of all, gravity was lacking; surely the practice of any number of great conductors, such as Furtwängler, Böhm, Klemperer, and Colin Davis, ought to have been suggestive here. That said, there was a sense, when it was not rushed, of delight in the music. Perhaps a greater sense of what is at stake will come with greater experience.

 

Ben Johnson made a very good impression as Tamino: his acting committed and his singing generally stylish. As his beloved, Devon Guthrie was competent, but little more than that. Alas, Cornelia Götz, as her mother, was rather less than that, boasting neither ferocity nor sparkle. (Quite why she was in a wheelchair, I have no idea.) James Creswell lacked sonorous dignity as Sarastro, though he was certainly not helped by the staging. Brian Galliford’s Monostatos was more a theatrical than a musical assumption, but on those terms made its mark. (I assume, given McBurney’s remarks concerning The Tempest, that the strange visual portrayal must have been intended as a Caliban equivalent. It was not perhaps, a bad idea to replace the problematical Moorish associations with Shakespeare’s ‘salvage and deformed slave’, though that again is hardly without its problems for a modern audience; yet again, it was difficult to discern any fundamental dramatic point being made.) Roland Wood’s Papageno was sadly lacking in charm, though again that may have been partly to be ascribed to the production; for some unfathomable reason, his appearance bore at least a hint of the post-Jimmy Savile. The Three Ladies were a good bunch, musically and theatrically. Otherwise, it was left to Mary Bevan to offer with her veritably sparkling Papagena, however briefly, the only real vocal complement to Johnson.

 

The increasingly common usage, ‘Three Spirits’, was used for what used to be the standard English, ‘Three Boys’: odd, given that girls’ voices were used. In any case, the boys, despite their weird portrayal as skeletal old men – again, for no reason I could discern – sang well. More seriously, the programme described the Two Armoured Men as ‘Armed Men’: a common mistake, though the German is perfectly clear, and the meaning is quite different. A strange piece on ‘Mozart and Maths’ by Marcus du Sautoy seemingly labours under the delusion that Mozart wrote his own libretti. (Yes, of course he would suggest sometimes considerable revisions, but that is another matter.) On the positive side, there is much to provoke one to thought, far more than in the production, in a splendid short essay by Anna Picard on the role of women.

 

For Hans Sachs's birthday: a free copy of The Wagner Journal to new readers

5 November has many resonances, especially for Englishmen, but it is also Hans Sachs's birthday, the Nuremberg poet having been born on this day in 1494. He would go on to write more than 6000 poetic works, including Meisterlieder, comedies, tragedies, and Shrovetide plays. Nowadays, of course, his principal, though far from exclusive, renown, is as Wagner's Meistersinger manipulator of Wahn: a real-life Wotan with a coping mechanism, we might say, though the profundity of Wagner's exploration of art dissolves all notions of 'real' life. So too did Stefan Herheim's recent Salzburg production of Die Meistersinger. Here is a picture of Michael Volle in that production; note the busts of three titans of heil'ge deutsche Kunst in the foreground: Goethe, Wagner, and Beethoven. (Goethe too had contributed to Sachs's latter-day fame.) I chose the picture as the cover for the November 2013 issue of The Wagner Journal, which I guest-edited. It includes a review of that brilliant staging. Here is a list of the contents:

Anyone wishing to buy a copy, or to subscribe, may do so by clicking here. However, if you have not previously done so, it is possible to obtain a free electronic introductory copy by e-mailing the journal at thewagnerjournal@btinternet.com.

Finally, here are Ferdinand Frantz, Wagner's own Staatskapelle Dresden, and Rudolf Kempe:

LPO/Eschenbach - Messiaen: Des Canyons aux étoiles, 2 November 2013

Royal Festival Hall

Tzimon Barto (piano)
John Ryan (horn)
Andrew Barclay, Erika Öhman (percussion)
London Philharmonic Orchestra
Christoph Eschenbach (conductor)

Bryce Canyon, Utah

 

A strange sight greeted the audience at the Royal Festival Hall. No, not the usual lack of anywhere to sit before the performance, the public spaces having yet again been colonised by whatever the collective noun for massed, less-than-heavenly laptop users might be. (By all means encourage use of the space during the day, but is it that unreasonable to expect some spaces at least to be available for concert-goers at night? One would not be able to enter the Philharmonie, the Musikverein, or for that matter the Royal Opera House without a ticket when a performance was on.) No, not even the sight of the hall creditably full for an hour-and-three-quarters of Messiaen, for the season, ‘The Rest of Noise’, whatever one might think of sometimes predictable, even conservative, programming, has nevertheless more or less guaranteed sizeable audiences for twentieth-century music. It was the bust of Beethoven placed upon the stage. Perusal of the programme noted the reinstatement in the Royal Philharmonic Society’s bicentenary of a venerable tradition for the society’s concerts, the bust having been given to the RPS in 1870 by Fanny Linzbauer, ‘in recognition of the Society’s kindness to Beethoven during the last years of his life’. Why strange, then? Apart from the far from unwelcome surprise, the presence of Beethoven on the stage served principally to underline Messiaen’s strangeness, or perhaps better, his dissociation from the dominant æsthetic of modern Western music. Beethovenian development is quite foreign to a world of repetition and stasis. And if ultimately there is goal-orientation in this work, Des Canyons aux étoiles, it is of a very different nature from that of a Beethoven symphony.

 

Christoph Eschenbach is no mean Beethovenian himself, of course, so it was interesting to hear him in such different repertoire. If there were a few occasions when the knife-edge precision and, just as crucial, time-defying patience of, say, a Boulez was lacking, there was by the same token nothing that was unidiomatic. Eschenbach was blessed by a fine collection of solo musicians: pianist Tzimon Barto, horn player John Ryan, and percussionists, Andrew Barclay and Erika Öhman. And if the London Philharmonic Orchestra was not always as precise or as infallible as a band under Boulez might have been – he conducted the British premiere in 1975, itself an RPS concert – then again, it would be churlish to complain too much about what remained undeniably a memorable occasion.

 

This tour of landscapes both American and heavenly – the Tea Party may need reminding of the distinction, but I doubt that many of its members are avid Messiaen listeners – opens with the desert, ‘Le Désert’. Nigel Simeone’s note reminded us that, according to the composer, ‘The Desert represents the emptiness that is needed if the soul is to be receptive to the message of the Holy Spirit.’ There certainly was an element of that necessary stillness, even barrenness, both from the obvious – too obvious? – wind machine and, more thoroughly penetrating to the spiritual heart of the matter, lonely solo orchestral instruments. Yet there was also a sense even here, in the opening call, and in the later solos, of God’s Creation made manifest, immanent, even in its most inhospitable environment. And God seemed to speak, unanswerable, unchallenged, through Ryan’s horn. ‘Les Orioles’ offered a more fully realised vision of joy in Creation: birdsong of course, but also harmonies that would not have been out of place in L’Ascension, Barclay’s contribution to tuned percussion every bit as precise as that of Barto. A harder-edged sonority announced itself at the beginning of ‘Ce qui est écrit sure les étoiles’, setting the scene for its portentous apocalyptic quality. Lack of unanimity amongst the orchestra slightly lessened its impact, but that should not be exaggerated. The piano solo, ‘Le Cossyphe d’Heuglin’ (‘The White-browed Robin’) – Messiaen is certainly good for enriching one’s avian vocabulary – was despatched with crystalline clarity, occasionally besmirched by what might have been a little over-pedalling. The final movement of the first part, ‘Cedar Breaks et le Don de Crainte’ was urgent and, yes again, apocalyptical, imbued with a sense of God’s majesty.  There were a few cases in which woodwind rhythms might have been tighter; it was not entirely clear whether that was Eschenbach’s doing. Yet again, there was little truly to detract from the gift of awe. And there was a splendid contribution from muted trumpet.

 

The second part opens with the celebrated horn solo, ‘Appel interstellaire’. It received a splendid performance from Ryan, echoes and all. Not only was there more tonal variegation than one might reasonably have hoped for; there was, more importantly still, a proper sense of narrative coherence. I could not help be put in mind at one point of the cor anglais solo from Act III of Tristan, as well as more obvious French horn-specific precedents. ‘Bryce Canyon et les rochers rouge-orange’ is the largest movement in the work. Again, it sometimes lacked the last word in rhythmical exactitude, but that was certainly not the case with the contributions from the soloists or indeed from the admirable LPO string section. Moreover, there was nothing that detracted or distracted from the sense of divine awe and majesty. Barto really pounded the bass of his instrument, the treble passages proving equal in authority.

 

‘Les Ressuscités et le chant de l’étoile Aldébaran’ opens the third and final part. It initially offered a post-Debussyan air of hazy mystery, which Messia(e)nic certitude soon broke through. Despite a few loose ends, the music’s hieratic progress mesmerised. Barto’s second solo movement, ‘Le Moqueur Polyglotte’, was impressive: songful and muscular. At the same time, I entertained the doubtless heretical thought that this mockingbird perhaps overstays his welcome. ‘La Grive des bois’ offered another occasion for percussionists, both solo and orchestral, to shine, which they did. ‘Omao, Leiothrix, Elepaio, Shama’ showed, amongst other things, that the horns had not gone away, their opening calls leaving us in no doubt about that. A wonderful chorus of birdsong followed: a sense imparted of triumph being prepared. And so it came to pass in ‘Zion Park et la Cité Céleste’, a typically Messiaenesque celestial coronation. The birds were far from silenced; rather they were sublimated – assumed? – into a new heaven-scape, itself summoned into being by the divine brass chorale, implacable yet not without tenderness. This final movement thus proved summative in a musical and a theological sense. Its conclusion sent shivers down the spine; as Messiaen put it, ‘the bells ring out, heralding the ultimate joy.’

 

 

Wozzeck, Royal Opera, 31 October 2013

Gerhard Siegel (Captain), Wozzeck (Simon Keenlyside), Doctor (John Tomlinson)

 

Royal Opera House

Captain – Gerhard Siegel

Wozzeck – Simon Keenlyside
Andres – John Easterlin
Marie – Karita Mattila
Child – Sebastian Wright
Margret – Allison Cook
Doctor – Sir John Tomlinson
Drum Major – Endrik Wottrich
First Apprentice – Jeremy White
Second Apprentice – Grant Doyle
Idiot – Robin Tritschler

Keith Warner (director)

Stefanos Lazaridis (set designs)
Marie-Jeanne Lecca (costumes)
Rick Fisher (lighting)

Royal Opera Chorus (chorus master: Renato Balsadonna)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Sir Mark Elder (conductor)

Rankings may well be stupid, pointless, pernicious, yet any performance of Wozzeck which has not reminded one that it is the greatest of all post-Wagnerian operas has failed. This most certainly did not fail; indeed, it triumphantly succeeded. Moreover, this revival of Keith Warner’s Royal Opera production offered a fascinatingly complementary experience to that of ENO’s Carrie Cracknell staging, seen earlier this year. Whereas the latter restored with a vengeance the social protest and condemnation often mystifyingly absent from stagings of Berg’s opera, Warner concentrates upon more expressionistic, existentialist, experimental matters. Part of me was tempted to wish that both had heeded the other a little more, but another voice inside me cautioned that, as Schoenberg observed, only the middle road does not lead to Rome. It is far better to have a focused, committed, if necessarily partial interpretation than one that drops the excess number of balls it would juggle.  (Not that multivalent operatic staging is impossible. We have only to look at the work of Stefan Herheim – imagine a Wozzeck from him! – to appreciate that.)

 

Perhaps the most strongly abiding memory of Warner’s production and the late Stefanos Lazaridis’s designs is that of the Doctor’s experimental laboratory. We are reminded less of social degradation – though that of course is present in the action, by no means slighted – than of Das Cabinet des Dr Cagliari. The Doctor’s weird fascination in experimentation and curiosity takes upon itself the role of that productive, sadistic, deadly perversion inherent in instrumental reason known to us since Adorno and Horkheimer as the dialectic of enlightenment. (It reaches back to Homer in their book, and now inescapably does so in any non-naïve appreciation of the Western tradition.) Wozzeck ends up in the Doctor’s tank rather than in a lake as such, yet he most likely imagines the latter, and it certainly fulfils the exclamation and/or (scientific) observation, ‘Das Wasser ist blut.’ Modern liberals shy away from, perhaps even stand in ignorance of, Nietzsche, but we do well to heed his warnings against the claims of the natural sciences, if only so as more fully to appreciate the real, as opposed to imagined, benefits they have brought us.

Child (Sebastian Wright)

 

 

The unequal division of the stage, most of it devoted to that cabinet of malevolent grotesquerie, a corner sliced off at the front for Marie’s dwelling serves a dramatic as well as practical end. Marie and her child are hemmed in, on the verge of being expelled beyond the stage: there be dragons? They are invaded too, not least by the raucous, post- and sub-Mahlerian music of the local band. What at first seems as though it makes little sense visually comes to do so, but one needs patience and one’s critical faculties to ensure that it does. There is loss: the brutality and brutalisation of war and barracks life, indeed that of late capitalism in a broader, more depraved sense, does not register as it might, as it did in Cracknell’s production. But we do not have to choose. The final scene is, or should be, controversial, Wozzeck’s child freeing himself from the bed where he has witnessed all manner of sordid misery to move towards the tank, haunted by amplified children’s voices, presumably in his head. It is perhaps a step too far away from the societal underpinning of the work, and the amplification is clumsy, whether deliberately so or otherwise. Yet even that has one think.

 

As so often, the conductor, in this case Sir Mark Elder, took a little while fully to get into his stride. The first act, though pristine, precise, pellucid, did not quite cohere as it might have done – and maybe will in subsequent performances. Yet the rest of the performance incorporated those virtues into a reading that drove the action forward as proper music-drama and yet also highlighted to an extent I cannot previously recall the true miracle of Berg’s closed forms. Whatever the composer might have claimed regarding our not needing to hear them in the theatre, to do so in conjunction with the tragic dramatic thrust, the tension between them heightening rather than detracting from, the drama only opens up possibilities, both reflecting and yet also, in Adornian fashion, criticising the dialectic of enlightenment. Occasional orchestral slips notwithstanding, this was a committed performance from the orchestra, at times as ravishingly beautiful as a fine account of Schoenberg’s op.16 Orchestral Pieces, with great, though never exaggerated, dramatic punch where it was required.

Wozzeck and his tormentors, with Karita Mattila (Marie) and Endrik
Wottrick (Drum Major) cavorting in the background

 

 

Simon Keenlyside follows in the footsteps of Matthias Goerne as a great Wozzeck. (It is interesting to note that both baritones are or have been such fine Papagenos too.) Everything is there: intelligence, albeit cruelly circumscribed and tormented, an agony that is almost Christ-like, and, perhaps most painful of all, an empty, dulled numbness at the close. Keenlyside has done many, many wonderful things, but I am not sure that any of them can have been better than this. Karita Mattila brings an undeniable Finnish accent to her German, but it helps one hear the words: no bad thing. Her performance was as committed as one might expect; it drew one in, had one sympathise almost beyond endurance in the Bible-reading scene. Endrik Wottrich’s Drum Major offered a stronger performance than any I can recall from him, his swagger, in both stage and vocal terms, finely judged indeed. The unmistakeable John Tomlinson made for a splendid Doctor; there was no doubting his understanding and communication of the text. Likewise the wonderful Gerhard Siegel as the Captain, putting his experience as Mime to good use in a performance of duly perverted power. For this was a proper team effort, all of the cast deserving of praise, all of their efforts at the service of Berg’s drama. I emerged duly moved, duly bludgeoned.

 

(BBC Radio 3 will broadcast Wozzeck on 2 December at 7.30 p.m.)

Wozzeck: Karl Böhm's Bergian reminiscences

Wozzeck, to my mind the very greatest opera of the twentieth century, opens at Covent Garden on Thursday. Here Karl Böhm, a great champion and interpreter, rarely matched and most likely never surpassed, discusses his first encounters with the work and with Berg himself:

Tharaud/LPO/Nézet-Séguin - Poulenc and Prokofiev, 23 October 2013

Royal Festival Hall

Poulenc – Piano Concerto

Prokofiev – Symphony no.7 in C-sharp minor, op.131
Poulenc – Stabat mater

Alexandre Tharaud (piano)

Kate Royal (soprano)

London Philharmonic Choir

Yannick Nézet-Séguin (conductor)

 

 

None of these works is over-exposed in the concert hall, though Prokofiev’s Seventh Symphony perhaps comes closer to regular performance. It was only really in Poulenc’s Stabat mater, however, that the performance made a relatively strong case for the work in question.

 

Poulenc’s Piano Concerto is certainly a work that needs an excellent case to be made for it. Here it sounded disjointed and often somewhat lacklustre; indeed, there was an air, whether accurate or otherwise, of under-rehearsal to the performance that emerged. Whilst one could sense an attempt at ‘authentic’ orchestral sonority – whether one really wants that somewhat watery early-twentieth century string sound is another matter – the first movement lacked a sense of overall sweep and was also disfigured by too many orchestral fluffs. Balances were often peculiar too, for no apparent reason. Perhaps an understandable desire on Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s part to avoid sentimentalism had shaded too far into brusqueness. Alexandre Tharaud’s somewhat self-effacing account of the piano part imparted a fluency not always present elsewhere. Certain passages sounded comfortingly Ravel-like, though this is hardly a work to place in such exalted company. The slow movement was more settled: partly a matter of the material, but also of the performance itself. Tharaud offered some gorgeous piano tone to float above the orchestral cushion, but again the LPO’s performance was far from flawless. Quite what the musical connections are between the contrasting material here continues to elude me, but that is either my fault or the composer’s. The succession of melodies was cherished in the finale, probably the strongest section of the performance, and the ending proved splendidly deadpan.

 

Prokofiev’s symphony opened in gravely beautiful fashion, though I could not help but wonder whether Nézet-Séguin’s first-movement tempo was a little fast for Moderato. The LPO seemed more at ease, though there remained cases of tentative playing. An ‘heroic’ idiom familiar from the Fifth Symphony still registered, albeit, rightly so, in more ambivalent fashion, the disquiet of the toyshop equally apparent. Waltz rhythms proved nicely balletic in the scherzo. Unfortunately, the performance seemed rather to lose its way, continuity being lost. Nézet-Séguin made partial amends with a relatively frenzied orchestral climax; the problem remained, however, that it was not quite clear where it had come from. The slow movement, though, was handled in loving fashion, its songfulness imbued with a sense of drama that harked back to its origins in incidental music for Eugene Onegin. A ghost from the Fifth Symphony again haunted the finale, as did reminiscences of Prokofiev’s ballet writing, Nézet-Séguin opted for the original ending, returning us to the mood of the opening, albeit somewhat darkened. Even if the performance as a whole had not lived up to expectations, a properly unsettled mood was engendered at the close.

 

The London Philharmonic Choir did Poulenc’s Stabat mater proud. Indeed, one sensed that Nézet-Séguin’s roots in choral conducting generally lifted the level of performance. Though the choir brought out echoes of Fauré in the opening chorus, there was no mistaking the composer’s individual, if synthetic, voice. Stravinskian echoes (Œdipus Rex) resounded in the orchestra, yet the mood was overwhelmingly one of serenity. Nézet-Séguin highlighted the neo-Baroque dotted rhythms in ‘Fac ut portem’ to telling effect. Choral fury was heard in the ‘Cujus animam gementem,’ but some of the most touching moments were to be found in Poulenc’s a cappella writing, for instance in ‘O quam tristis’ and ‘Fac ut ardeat’. Some of the composer’s response to the text strikes me as peculiar, if not quite on the surreal level of Rossini’s; nevertheless, the performers responded in kind, even if that response necessarily jarred somewhat with the text. Kate Royal sang in an attractive-enough, generically ‘operatic’ fashion; alas, it was well-nigh impossible to discern all but the occasional word of what she sang. There was certainly an embarrassing contrast with the diction of the choir. It was a serious blemish, but ultimately there remained much to admire in the performance as a whole.

Greek, Music Theatre Wales, 22 October 2013

Linbury Studio Theatre

 

Gwion Thomas and Sally Silver as Eddy's parents
Images: Clive Barda

 

Eddy – Alastair Shelton-Smith/Michael McCarthy

Eddy’s Mum/Waitress/Sphinx – Sally Silver
Eddy’s Sister/Waitress who becomes Eddy’s Wife/Sphinx – Louise Winter
Eddy’s Dad/Café Manager/Chief of Police – Gwion Thomas

Michael McCarthy (director)

Simon Banham (designs)
Ace McCarron, Jon Turtle (lighting)
The Music Theatre Wales Ensemble
Michael Rafferty (conductor)

 

After the bitter disappointment of Anna Nicole, came this reminder – both sad and hopeful– that Mark-Anthony Turnage was once capable of writing urgent, exciting music theatre. Indeed, from this composer I have heard nothing finer, perhaps nothing to match, this, his first opera, to Steven Berkoff’s libretto after his own Oedipal play, Greek. Adverse circumstances notwithstanding, this performance and production from Music Theatre Wales offered everything one could reasonably hope for, and more. Marcus Farnsworth, who had been ailing on the first night, had awoken with no voice, to be replaced by an heroic combination of the flown-in-from-Berlin-that-afternoon Alastair Shelton-Smith to sing the part on stage and Michael McCarthy to act, to mime the sung passages, and to deliver the spoken text. If anything, the practice added to the feeling of alienation, social and theatrical, but it would have come to nothing without such committed performances. From the word go, or rather a somewhat bluer word than that, when McCarthy hastened toward the stage, scarily impersonating an irate member of the audience hurling abuse at the audience, he inhabited the role visually and gesturally. His own production frames the performance convincingly, offering a return into the audience as Eddy is rejected by his family, those who supposedly love him unable to stomach his desire to ‘climb back inside my mum’. Shelton-Smith’s assuredly protean yet deeply felt vocal performance fully deserved the rapturous reception it received from audience and fellow cast-members alike, and would have done so even if it had not been for the particular circumstances.

Sally Silver and Louise Winter as the Sphinx

 

 

But the other performances were equally assured. Sally Silver and Louise Winter proved as versatile in vocal as in acting terms, their combination as lesbian separatist sphinx being sleazy and savagely humorous in equal measure. Gwion Thomas was just as impressive in the other male roles, the sad would-be patriarch as much as the brutal police chief. The Music Theatre Wales Ensemble under Michael Rafferty played Turnage’s score as to the manner born: angry and soulful, biting and tender, urgent and yet offering oases for reflection. Whether called upon to play in conventional terms, to shout, to stamp, or even to strike a pose, there could be no gainsaying the level of artistry on offer from players and conductor alike.

 

McCarthy’s production places the work firmly in the tradition of music theatre – doubtless partly out of necessity, but, unlike in the opera, virtue certainly arises out of fate. Props are minimal but used to full effect, the cast in proper post-Brechtian fashion undertaking the stage business too. Video projections of key words, not least Berkoff’s inevitable ‘Motherfucker’, heightens both drama and alienation. But perhaps the principal virtue is that of allowing the anger of Berkoff and Turnage’s drama to unfold, within an intelligent yet far from attention-seeking frame. The transposition of the Oedipus myth to 1980s London now seems both of its time and yet relevant to ours. It works as a far more daring version of the original EastEnders might have done, yet with injection of magic realism. Both Berkoff’s ear for language – the ability to forge a stylised ‘vernacular’, which yet can occasionally shift into knowingly would-be Shakespearean poetry – and Turnage’s response and intensification, whether his pounding protest rhythms or the jazzy seduction of his beloved saxophone, work just as McCarthy’s staging does: they grip and yet they will also, if not always, distance. Above all, one continues to feel and indeed to reiterate the anger felt by outcasts in the brutal Britain of Margaret Thatcher. Incest offers not only its own story, but stands or can come to stand also for other forms of social and sexual exclusion. Hearing of the plague, one can think of it as Thatcherism and the ignorant, hypocritical right-wing populism that continues to infest political discourse, or one can turn it round and view it as the guardians of morality most certainly would have done at the time of the 1988 premiere, as the fruits of sexual ‘deviance’: the tragedy of HIV/AIDS.

 

That space to think, to interpret is not the least of the work’s virtues, fully realised in performance. Its musical lineage is distinguished; on this occasion, those coming to mind included Stravinsky, Andriessen, magical shards of Knussen, and, alongside the music theatre of the Manchester School, that of Henze too, especially the angry social protest of Natascha Ungeheuer. But it is its own work, now with its own performance tradition, of which Music Theatre Wales’s contribution is heartily to be welcomed.    

Madama Butterfly, English National Opera, 21 October 2013

(sung in English)

 

Coliseum

Cio-Cio San – Mary Plazas

Suzuki – Pamela Helen Stephen
Pinkerton – Timothy Richards
Sharpless – George van Bergen
Goro – Alun Rhys-Jenkins
Prince Yamadori – Alexander Robin Baker
The Bonze –Mark Richardson
Yakuside – Philip Daggett
Imperial Commissioner – Paul Napier-Burrows
Official Registrar – Roger Begley
Mother – Natalie Herman
Aunt –Judith Douglas
Cousin – Morag Boyle
Kate Pinkerton – Catherine Young

Anthony Minghella (director)

Sarah Tipple (revival director)
Michael Levine (set designs)
Hang Feng (costumes)
Peter Mumford (lighting)
Blind Summit Theatre (puppetry)

Chorus of the English National Opera (chorus master: Martin Fitzpatrick)

Orchestra of the English National Opera
Gianluca Marciano (conductor)

 

Many readers will doubtless already have seen the late Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly, now revived by Sarah Tipple, whether at the Coliseum, at the Met, or even in Vilnius.  This, however, was my first viewing, and I found it rather impressive. There is any number of ways in which one might in performance respond to Puccini’s deeply problematical orientalism, though simply failing to do so and reproducing or rather vulgarising it is surely no longer an option, if ever it really were. Minghella’s staging, aided immensely by the rest of his collaborative team, offers a convincing blend of abstraction, stylisation, and moments through which more conventional, if highly disturbing, emotion, may flow like blood – or like the scarlet, silken banners unfurled by actors and dancers. The relative abstraction of Michael Levine’s versatile set designs focuses our attention upon the drama rather than irrelevant incidentals. In a relationship that partakes in contrast and complementarity, the ‘beauty’ – I affix inverted commas, since Western eyes will doubtless perceive such things rather differently from Japanese eyes, and in any case, no group sees everything in the same manner – of Hang Feng’s ‘Oriental’ costumes reminds us that there should be a degree of alienation as well as seduction and sympathy to our response. Whatever the sins in which this opera indulges – and in many respects, racist, sexist, etc., it seems to tick almost every box – that is of nothing when compared with a modern opera audience treating it in unquestioning fashion.  Ultimately, that remains our responsibility, but a production can help or hinder; this does the former. Even the fall of darkness and emergence of the stars at the end of the first act, ‘beautifully’ accomplished according to any understanding, both draws one in and holds one slightly distanced, in a sense thus making one all the more dangerously susceptible both to Puccini’s brazenly manipulative genius and to knowledge of that manipulation. If it would be exaggerated to compare him to Strauss in terms of sophistication, the effect and to a certain extent the technique are not entirely dissimilar either.

 

The lack of realism, or perhaps the theatricality that goes beyond realism, of Japanese puppetry makes a great impression in that sense too. On one level, it is a sensible theatrical solution to the problem of what to do with a small child. Yet to have Sorrow as a puppet, visibly manipulated by some of the mysterious, dark shrouded figures who intermittently populate the stage also heightens our sense of the clash between artificiality and a crude, manipulative, yet highly potent emotionalism that would collapse into mere sentimentality if any of us were not careful. To have those figures’ dance of death suggest during Cio-Cio San’s  suicide an outpouring of daemons – perhaps both hers and ours – furthers the ambiguity  we require as a defence to the undeniable, dangerous power of the score’s close.

 

At that point, conductor, Gianluca Marciano and the ENO Orchestra pull out all the stops – as of course does Puccini himself. There were times earlier on when it was difficult not to feel the lack of a more incisive musical mind at work in the pit; sometimes, the music floated along a little too amiably. Yet even when the performance is more that of a Kapellmeister than a great conductor, the niggling difficulties of the score – modernist, Wagnerian, orientalist – have a way of continuing to insinuate themselves.

 

The cast for the most part made the best of an unenviable job of singing Puccini in English. Timothy Richards’s Pinkerton was, alas, something of a blemish, though language was not here the problem. Rather, he lacked vocal or stage allure; one can believe up to an extent in an unprepossessing American officer relying upon the force of an occupying power to have his way, but it cannot be entirely that. (His pantomime encouragement of the audience to boo him at the end was, moreover, quite out of keeping with the sensibility of work and production.) Mary Plazas, despite a few shaky moments – perhaps most notably, her very first line, and then the first line of ‘Un bel di, vedremo’ – offered a sympathetic, highly involving performance in the title role. Pamela Helen Stephen’s Suzuki was warmly sympathetic too; one felt her protectiveness, her love, and indeed her intelligence. George van Bergen made for a tortured – in a good sense! – Sharpless, his humanity contrastingly strongly with Pinkerton’s cowardice. And though her role may be small, Catherine Young made as close to a three-dimensional impression of Kate Pinkerton as one has any right to expect: sensible, concerned, and in a sense as ‘other’ as the other wife she faced. Various of the other smaller roles were well taken, in a performance that benefited from a fine sense of ensemble.   

Book review: KM Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna

KM Knittel, Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Ashgate: Farnham and Burlington, 2010), ISBN 9780754663720, pp. xiii + 201, £55. 




Die Muskete, 10 January 1907

 

Gustav Mahler’s time has come, the anniversary years 2010 and 2011 (150 years since his birth and 100 since his death) having intensified the ubiquity of his music. Orchestras and conductors treat it as a calling-card. Even Beethoven has been eclipsed as the concert hall’s favourite symphonist. Yet, not so long ago, things were very different. Mahler’s years in the doldrums have been exaggerated, especially by those anxious to claim that Leonard Bernstein’s direction of the New York Philharmonic catapulted Mahler into the spotlight, a dubious proposition even in the Western Hemisphere. Mahler had numerous earlier, influential advocates. Nevertheless, his music long faced ignorance and disdain. Ralph Vaughan Williams, for instance, opined: ‘Intimate acquaintance with the executive side of music made even [!] Mahler a very tolerable imitation of a composer.’ Why might this have been? Did anti-Semitism play a role?

A study of Mahler’s early critics should have much to offer here. As KM Knittel argues in her conclusion (p.168), ‘if there is even the slightest possibility that we have taken over a way of thinking about Mahler and his music from a culture that could not deal with his Jewishness … we owe it to ourselves to rethink what makes Mahler’s music unique, thought-provoking, and valuable.’ Such rethinking, alas, lies without her study. No matter: we can rethink for ourselves. The real problem with Knittel’s book, rather, is that it fails to make a cogent case for anti-Semitic coding of early Mahler criticism: oddly, given the endemic nature of anti-Semitism in Mahler’s Vienna and many of the attacks he suffered as Director of the Court Opera. Despite occasional disclaimers that texts may be read variously, the tunnel-vision of Knittel’s readings counter-productively renders one suspicious of reasonable interpretations in such a vein. She misses an open goal.

The first chapter proper opens promisingly, surveying artist Alfred Roller’s verbal portrait of Mahler. It is good to have Roller’s original German quoted in footnotes, though Knittel appears throughout to have used Norman Lebrecht’s existing translation rather than furnished her own. That may seem pedantic, but when dealing with the nuances of linguistic transmission, reference to words actually used will help. When interpretation commences, claims immediately become questionable. Roller’s ‘failure to address the obvious issue of circumcision inadvertently emphasises its association with castration’. Perhaps, but assertion replaces argument. Moreover, it is odd, in discussion of the body, to lack reference, explicit or implicit, to writers such as Foucault, Lacan, and Žižek. An oft-acknowledged progenitor, however, is Marc Weiner’s ‘brilliant’ (p.160) Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination. Weiner’s inability or disinclination, during discussion of Parsifal, to distinguish between circumcision and castration does not augur well.

Moving on to discussion of Mahler’s wife, Alma, it is doubtless revealing that she writes (p.41), ‘So much irritates me: his smell, the way he sings, the way he speaks,’ but failure to consider words such as ‘I don’t believe in him as a composer,’ as possessing weight of their own or other possible justifications almost renders one sceptical concerning anti-Semitism undoubtedly present. Alma’s descriptions are surely more interesting when ambiguity is permitted, indeed explored. That she decided to marry Gustav in order to ‘cure’ him of Jewishness is asserted (p.43) without a shred of evidence. In its absence, many will follow Mahler’s near-definitive biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, considering documented dedication of a performance of Die Zauberflöte to Alma and her mother’s attempted dissuasion to have played some role. Roller’s positive physical descriptions most likely betray (p.47) ‘his unconscious absorption of … cultural markers of difference’. Such is lost, however, in a morass of implausible assertions. Doubtless a considerable part of such work will have to remain highly speculative; it is not thereby invalidated. Consideration of alternatives might nevertheless prove fruitful.

The villain, bizarrely, is Wagner. Weiner et al. at least make him the villain of his own story. Here, echoing Joachim Köhler’s monocausal explanation of the Second World War (Wagners Hitler: Der Prophet und sein Vollstrecker), newspaper critics err on account of, or at least in sympathy with, Wagner’s Das Judent[h]um in der Musik [not ‘Music’, p.53], unhelpfully conflated by Knittel with his Oper und Drama, so that anything in the latter automatically betokens anti-Semitism. Wagner’s criticism of Berlioz’s ‘mechanical means’ of orchestration is read as anti-Semitic, though Berlioz was never thought to be Jewish and Francophobia seems a better candidate – as well, perish the thought, as misplaced cultural criticism. William Ashton Ellis’s outdated translation of Wagner is employed, so that we have no opportunity to compare Wagner’s actual words with the critics’.  Is Wagner, even if one takes the most hostile approach to him, the sole lens through which to view musical critics’ anti-Semitism? Unlikely, to put it mildly. And yet, we read (p.108): ‘The juxtaposition of surface versus depth, the implication that Mahler has nothing to say, and the emphasis on noise or novelty rather than music and ideas can all be traced to beliefs about the inferiority of Jewish music, as articulated by Richard Wagner.’ And so, without presenting any evidence that Max Vansca’s 1907 review of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony was indebted to Wagner or intended anti-Semitically – and both may well have been the case – why should we heed the forthright ‘moral of Vansca’s review …: Mahler will reveal himself eventually as a Jew – by writing banal or second-hand melodies’? Something more than bald assertion is required. On the rare occasion when we learn something a little more about a critic, Robert Hirschfeld, it is illuminating, though I remain unconvinced that Hirschfeld’s likening Mahler to George Bernard Shaw (p.135) in terms of technique and playing with irony reveals anti-Semitism. More needs to be said about other critics: background, influences, etc.

Racialist theories languish unexplored, Knittel near silent even concerning Vienna’s own leading anti-Semites. Georg Schönerer and Karl Lueger are merely name-checked, declining comparison of their anti-Semitism with the critics’. When claiming, ‘in a critical sense, anyone could be a Jew,’ Knittel neglects to invoke Lueger’s celebrated claim to decide who was a Jew. She does not mention even in passing the young Hitler’s fervent admiration of Mahler’s Wagner interpretation. Despite repeated please for contextualisation, anything not incriminating Wagner is excluded. Gustav Klimt is ignored. When dealing with cultural history and its politics, other arts, other discourses, will not only provide important material – no one would claim that music existed in a vacuum here – but also suggest what may or may not have been unusual about music. Perhaps that helps explain why strange claims abound, for example (p.49): ‘While Mahler’s Jewish background may seem unimportant now – or indeed, something to be purposely excluded from discussion…’. No evidence is given for unimportance or exclusion; in reality, the contrary would seem to be the case. Knittel then footnotes a few other studies on Mahler and anti-Semitism, enigmatically commenting, ‘I will not dwell on the limitations of the other studies’, before confusing ‘infamous’ and ‘notorious’.

What remains? An interesting selection of extracts from Viennese newspaper critics. An expanded edited collection of such criticism might have been more helpful than an argument that probably needed more time to be honed. We never approach the nub of why Mahler’s (partial) decision to write programme music was understood to indicate Jewishness, whereas undoubted resolutions to do so by Berlioz, Liszt, and Richard Strauss were not. Must there not have been something more to the matter, given that the genre’s foremost practitioners were certainly not Jewish? Knittel’s reading is not necessarily invalidated, yet complexities require consideration, not evasion. A chapter on Strauss criticism holds out promise, but its argument turns out to be: Mahler was Jewish and Strauss was not, therefore identical criticisms of Mahler and Strauss are and are not anti-Semitic. As for the claim that Strauss turned his back upon modernism because it was perceived as Jewish, it is arresting, but where is the evidence? One can imagine the contrary being claimed, that he was returning to a comfortable classicism akin to that of Mendelssohn. 

It is a tedious hallmark of reviews that they berate the writer for not having included something else. I nevertheless cannot help but wonder at the exclusion of discussions by composers such as Alexander Zemlinsky – Jewish, spurned by Alma – and Arnold Schoenberg, and musicologists such as Guido Adler and Heinrich Schenker. Stefan Zweig is dismissed (naïvely?): ‘it must be said, … a rather naïve and self-centred man’. Such figures would, despite their exceptionalism, have something to say about prejudices of ‘mere’ critics and reasons for hostility extending beyond or illuminating anti-Semitism.

Mahler’s time having come – he predicted to Alma that it would, when Strauss’s had ended – might even signal acceptance, indeed approbation, of ‘Jewish’ aspects to his music. Alternatively, even if they exist, that may have little connection to his present esteem. Our view may depend upon preference for Bernstein’s Mahler as agent of personal redemption or Pierre Boulez’s Mahler as modernist godfather.  We should not, however, decide upon the outcome before conducting the investigation.

 

Royal Northern Sinfonia/Zehetmair: Mozart, 18 October 2013

Milton Court Concert Hall

Divertimento in D major, KV 136/125a

Sinfonia concertante in E-flat major, KV 364/320d
Symphony no.39 in E-flat major, KV 543

Ruth Killius (viola)

Royal Northern Sinfonia

Thomas Zehetmair (conductor/violin)

A new chamber-size hall for London as part of the Guildhall-Barbican complex: Milton Court Concert Hall – which seems already to be abbreviated to Milton Court, though that strictly is the name of a building including a theatre, a studio theatre, rehearsal rooms, etc. – certainly showed its worth in this concert. The acoustic is bright, warm, and detailed. Now if only London could finally get its act together and build a decent large-scale hall… That, however sad and urgent the case, is, though, an argument for another day.

 

Today’s concern is an outstanding Mozart concert from the Royal Northern Sinfonia and Thomas Zehetmair. It opened with the first of Mozart’s so-called ‘Salzburg symphonies’, not actually reckoned as forming part of his listed symphonies, but rather a divertimento for strings. From the very outset, the first movement, and indeed the work as a whole, pulsated with life, Mozart seemingly as much in the bloodstream of this country’s only full-time chamber orchestra as of the Salzburg-born Zehetmair. Unfailingly stylish, apparently straightforward, this performance, impelled by a proper sense of formal dynamism, benefited from a clear sense of harmonic rhythm, the charm and musical sense of antiphonally-seated violins, and a lively sense of characterisation. Minor-mode excursions had a real sense of broaching new territory.  And with repeats taken, this divertimento seemed anything but slight. The slow movement was warm, graceful, again with a sense of ‘rightness’ to Zehetmair’s chosen tempo. Phrasing was again unobtrusive but telling: no ‘period’ traffic-calmer bumps here. At least as important, there was, even in a new City of London concert hall, a crucial sense of the magical outdoor serenade of a Salzburg evening. I was put in mind of Sandor Vegh’s work with the Camerata Academica Salzburg, and there can be little higher praise than that. The finale was alert, witty, fresh: full of the young Mozart’s joy to be alive, a joy already unmistakeably personal in style, whatever its antecedents. Mozart’s counterpoint was conveyed with loving sternness, his orchestral tricks – they ought to be Haydnesque, but they could only be Mozart’s – despatched with loving flair.



Mozart-Divertimento K136 by gpollen

 

If that divertimento is a sparkling, far from callow, early work, the Sinfonia concertante for violin and viola is a towering masterpiece. Zehetmair was joined by his wife and regular duo partner, Ruth Killius. Both turned towards and played with their respective sections in the opening ritornello. The Sinfonia’s wind proved just as warm, rounded, sparkling as its strings. Solo lines emerged from what had gone before as the soloists turned toward the audience. (Zehetmair would turn back to conduct when he was not playing.) There was a true experience of dialogue between all the players, not just the soloists. Though there was plenty of individual ‘character’ to the soloists’ performance, it seemed to be the character of the instruments and Mozart’s writing for them, rather than the product of externally applied – or mis-applied – ‘personality’. Oboes and horns were equally brimming with Mozartian magic. Yet this was certainly not prettified or manicured Mozart; beauty rather emerged through an eminently human performance. Might I find a cavil? If pushed, I suppose there was not much sense to be heard of the autumnal, but Mozart in springtime worked more than well enough. The slow movement was taken quicker than once would have been the case, but at no loss to its tragic songfulness; it still emerged as a son of its counterpart in the E-flat piano concerto, KV 271. Killius’s viola tone sounded, if anything still richer, Zehetmair’s perhaps less silken, more golden. Violin and viola sang to each other as if operatic lovers. Certainly a vital Mozartian erotic charge was present, whether in the tension of the cadenza or elsewhere; so too was the unmistakeable quality of an orchestra smiling through tears. The finale was bright, bushy-tailed, irresistible, and just as full of musical energy as its predecessors. Indeed, it emerged as the miraculous reconciler of the musical tendencies heard in them. We heard as an encore a duo for violin and viola by Heinz Holliger, the second of his Three Sketches, expressly intended as an encore to this work, viola scordatura and all. It benefited from a similar questing, captivating energy.

 

At least as high, arguably higher still, in the masterpiece stakes is the Symphony no.39. Though hardly a Cinderella, it nevertheless occasionally seems a little overshadowed by the two symphonies that follow. Indeed, I plead guilty, in a recent programme note for a Salzburg concert in which the Berlin Philharmonic and Simon Rattle played all three, to having slightly short-changed it. There was no short-changing here, the first movement’s introduction imbued with a grandeur often missing from chamber-orchestral performances. There was already a quality of pulsating harmonic energy similar to that experienced throughout the first half. If, in a somewhat superficial sense of sonority and attack, Zehetmair’s performance might have sounded strikingly modern when compared with recordings by Klemperer and Böhm, at a deeper level, there was much in common, not least its inexorability, harmonic and motivic. And so, the exposition proper emerged as an inevitable outcome of that introduction. One thing I was less sure about was the agogic touches, not especially exaggerated, and quite ear-catching in themselves; however, they worked less well, perhaps, upon the repeat of the exposition and in the recapitulation, sounding both unduly rehearsed and all too expected. Nevertheless, the concision of the development section registered with due shock: the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth seems almost expansive by comparison. The woodwind sounded lovely, perhaps especially so in the recapitulation, whose climax took one’s breath away as it should. The slow movement I was a little less sure about. It says ‘Andante con moto,’ I suppose, but nevertheless sounded a little too much on the fast side, however sensitively phrased. That said, I sensed a kinship with Schubert when he employed a similar tempo marking, so the fault probably lay with this curmudgeon. The minor-key eruption sounded properly furious; woodwind balm never quite rid our minds of its shadow, which, in a turbulent reading, was doubtless Zehetmair’s point. In context, the brusqueness of the conclusion made a good deal of sense. The minuet was taken at one-to-a-bar with a vengeance, probably the fastest I have heard. And yet, this minuet as scherzo seemed to work in practice, perhaps on account of the security of Zehetmair’s harmonic understanding. The trio relaxed slightly, offering delightful bubbling from the woodwind, even a small instance of clarinet ornamentation. Whilst energetic, the finale did not mistake Allegro for Presto; it remained finely articulated and directed, with plenty of room to breathe. Mozart’s helter-skelter twists and turns were followed and communicated with dramatic flair. I was almost convinced by the taking of the second repeat, blaring trumpets and all. It is difficult to imagine any Mozartian resisting – and would anyone have tried?