Carmen, Royal Opera, 6 February 2018

Royal Opera House

Carmen (Anna Goryachova)
Images: Bill Cooper

Moralès – Gyula Nagy

Micaëla – Kristina Mkhitaryan
Don José – Francesco Meli
Zuniga – David Soar
Carmen – Anna Goryachova
Frasquita – Jacquelyn Stucker
Mercédès – Aigul Akhmetshina
Escamillo – Kostas Smoriginas
Dancaïro – Pierre Doyen
Remendada – Jean-Paul Fouchécourt
Voice of Carmen – Claude de Demo
 

Barrie Kosky (director)

Katrin Lea Tag (designs)
Joachim Klein (lighting)
Otto Pichler (choreography)
Zsolt Horpácsy (dramaturgy)
Alan Barnes (assistant director)


Royal Opera Chorus (chorus director: William Spaulding)

Orchestra of the Royal Opera House

Jakub Hrůsá (conductor)

At least Francesca Zambello and her donkey are gone. The Royal Opera’s previous production of Carmen worked in its way – not entirely unlike Meyerbeer at less than his best – yet it offered neither ambition nor insight; indeed, it appeared not even to try. Barrie Kosky rarely lacks ambition; insight is often more hit or miss, though. Kosky is a frustratingly inconsistent director: he is capable of outstanding work and something not far from its opposite. This Carmen is neither. First seen in Frankfurt in 2016, it offers an apparently arbitrary mixture of abstract grand opéra – surely the Intendant of Berlin’s Komische Oper should have a little more respect for, or at least understanding of opéra comique – and the irritating silliness of ‘look at us’ variety show routines. A few visually arresting moments, courtesy of Katrin Lea Tag’s designs, notwithstanding, it amounts to substantially less than the sum of its parts, not least on account of its perverse apparent lack of interest in characterisation.



I am not at all opposed to the idea of something adventurous being done with, even to, Carmen. It will always survive. Dmitri Tcherniakov’s recent, superlative Aix staging showed what can be done with a fundamental rethinking of the work. Not the least of its interesting insights was how, if we decentre Carmen, look at the action, in this case already very much in the realm of metatheatre, from the standpoint of, say, Don José, Carmen might actually become a far more interesting character. Kosky seems at times to inch towards the metatheatrical. ‘Don’t we all?’ one might well ask. However, it is only, ultimately, with the insight, if one can call it that, that Carmen is a show, all singing, all dancing – except when, occasionally, it is not. And so, the steps, certainly a fine edifice in themselves, and suggestive both of an amphitheatre and a bullring – are they not often the same thing in any case? – offer a way for the action to look at us, and for the characters not to look at each other. That is pretty much it, though. The loss, moreover, in never really knowing who anyone is – or rather knowing, but not on account of anything the production is showing or suggesting – is great. One can imagine the pseudish Christof Loy doing something like this; indeed, he did in his dreadful Lulu. Kosky is capable of much better than that, though.

 

The lack of realism – as an æsthetic: I am certainly not insisting that one ‘must’ see a romanticised Seville – inevitably hampers the musical performances too. In this weird abstraction, especially when punctuated by lengthy, breathy, soft-porn-style readings from the ‘Voice of Carmen’, over loudspeakers, we lose sight, aural sight too, of connections in the score as much as on stage. Again, it is not that I have a problem in principle with attempting an alternative to the dialogue, ‘edited by Barrie Kosky’ or not. However, the loss of a true sense, whether ‘then’ or ‘now’, of opéra comique, is not compensated for by any other gain. Further misguided performing choices, ‘after the critical edition by Michael Rot, adapted by Constantinos Carydis for Frankfurt Opera, 2016)’, conspire to the general ‘effect without cause’ of making heavy weather indeed out of so ‘Mediterranean’ a work.

 

I have never heard a poor performance from Jakub Hrůsá, a conductor I admire greatly. Here he certainly proved suggestive, in an admirably anti-Nietzschean way, of a ‘symphonic’ Carmen, Beethoven and even Wagner often coming to mind. Whether that really might be what Carmen needs, let us leave on one side; I had my doubts, but there are possibilities here worth exploring. In this context, however, it seemed more another confusing strand. Whilst Hrůsá often drew fine playing from the orchestra, in terms of colour, precision, even harmonic motion, there were perhaps a few too many slips, not least from the brass. Likewise, whilst choral singing was generally good, there were also passages in which stage and pit fell noticeably, disconcertingly out of sync. Such problems I can well imagine being ironed out in subsequent performances.

 

Escamillo (Kostas Smoriginas)

Anna Goryachova sang well enough in the title role, with clean command of line. I could often make little sense of her French, however, without the titles. Moreover, I had the strong sense she would have made more of an impression, if not in a smaller theatre, then at least in a more intimate production. The same could be said of most of the cast: hardly their fault. Francesco Meli’s all-purpose Italianate style had its moments, and in some senses might have been better suited to the staging. One surely wants something a little more idiomatic for Don José, though, and surely less coarse on top. Kristina Mkhitaryan’s Micaëla sounded curiously undifferentiated from Carmen, but again that was not necessarily the fault of either singer. The production offered her little opportunity to show who she was, but again she sang well enough. Quite why Escamillo was turned into a figure of mere camp is anyone’s guess; Kostas Smoriginas did what he could in the circumstances, and yes, you have guess it, did that well enough. Indeed, there were no causes for complaint amongst any of the cast. Ultimately, however, for all the production’s increasingly attempts, somehow both desperate and smug, to ‘entertain’, proceedings quickly became more tedious than anything else. That is an achievement of sorts for Carmen, but a sad one. Carmen’s shrug at the end – it had all been just a very protracted game – said it all really.

Ensemble 360 - Janáček, Mozart, and Beethoven, 3 February 2018

Wigmore Hall

Janáček: Concertino

Mozart: Quintet in E-flat major for piano, oboe, clarinet, horn, and bassoon, KV 452
Beethoven: Septet in E-flat major, op.20
 

Juliette Bausor (flute)

Adrian Wilson (oboe)
Matthew Hunt (clarinet)
Amy Harman (bassoon)
Naomi Atherton (horn)
Benjamin Navarro, Claudia Ajmone-Marsan (violins)
Ruth Gibson (viola)
Gemma Rosefield (cello)
Laurène Durantel (double-bass)
Tim Horton (piano)
 

Ensemble 360 appeared here in its full complement of five string players, five wind players, and pianist, although never (quite) all at the same time. I have no idea why we do not hear Janáček’s Concertino all the time, but then I might say the same about all the music performed here, none of which suffers from over-exposure. Maybe it is just a matter of the slightly unusual ensemble, although it would hardly be difficult to put one such group together from time to time. At any rate, this proved to be a delightful, varied concert of delightful, varied, and yes, great music.

 

The commanding nature of the opening piano figure, both in work and in Tim Horton’s performance, ensure that it lodged itself in the memory securely, ready for what was to come. Soon one could hardly help but imagine oneself, whether musically or even scenically, in the world of The Cunning Little Vixen. The obsessive, obstinate quality of Janáček’s music shone throughout the first movement, and indeed beyond, with splendidly big-boned playing both from Horton and Naomi Atherton on French horn. Vixen-like scurrying announced the second movement’s well-matched partnership between Horton and Matthew Hunt on E-flat clarinet. Music and performance seemed almost to suggest a chamber fantasia on the opera – save for the fact that your common-garden operatic fantasia might seem somewhat vin ordinaire compared to this. (So, to be fair, would your common-garden opera to Janáček’s’s masterpiece.) It is a truth almost universally acknowledged that most chamber writing of this period will reveal a debt, a comparison, or at least a contrast with Stravinsky’s Soldier’s Tale; the third movement in particular did so here, without ever jettisoning a strong, true voice of Moravian modernism. Resolutely unsentimental as before, it and the final movement proved as colourful as they were rhythmically taut, a sense of joy in the ‘purely’ musical, however illusory, shining still brighter than any partial association.

 

No one with an ear would ever deny the masterpiece status of Mozart’s Quintet for piano and wind instruments. It is difficult to imagine anyone having done so after this performance, again big-boned, more Klemperer- than Böhm-Mozart, if that makes any sense, and certainly none the worse for it. Not that it was old-fashioned, hesitate though I may to use the dubious word ‘timeless’ here. Perhaps it is better simply to say that it was certainly Mozart – and what could be better than that? The grandeur of the first movement’s introduction was certainly communicated. So too, though, was the chiaroscuro of what followed. The work emerged as something close to a predecessor of the Berg Chamber Concerto – and, again, what could be better than that? The import of the development section’s modulatory plan seemed especially keenly felt, occasional very minor slips notwithstanding. I wondered to begin with whether the Larghetto might have yielded, even smiled, a little more, yet it certainly had, in its own way, the virtues outlined for its predecessor. Solo wind playing was delectable from all, likewise the Harmoniemusik as a little band. Any slight reservations I might have had evaporated during the course of the movement. Crucially for a finale, and however obvious they may sound, the final movement worked as something very much more than music that just happened to be placed last. Objectively, whatever that might mean, it was perhaps rather on the fast side for Allegretto, but I did not mind; and, if I did not, I doubt that anyone else would have done. Its character was well judged, a slight loss of tension in the approach to the cadenza notwithstanding, and that ultimately is what matters.

 

I am not sure that I can come up with a single minor reservation concerning the performance of what may well be Beethoven’s sunniest work, the Septet. The first movement, echoing Mozart’s in more than mere tonality, again benefited from an introduction on the grand scale, followed by an especially rhythmically alert performance of the exposition and indeed the rest. Not that, as sometimes, regrettably, happens with Beethoven, an emphasis on rhythm emerged in isolation; melody and harmony were equal partners, at least. Above all, though, this glorious music, which I love more than words could ever speak, made me smile and even shed the occasional tear. In abstracto, I might have thought the second movement again taken a little too quickly. There is, however, no in abstracto when it comes to Beethoven. It worked, flowing in utterly ‘natural’ fashion. The balance, once more, between detail and the longer line, between melody and harmony, could hardly be faulted, and I certainly have no wish to try.

 

Swifter than I can recall hearing, the Minuet likewise worked – with thrilling affection, as it were, in no sense sounding rushed. And yet, at the swift tempo, certain wind notes sounded intriguingly, indeed revealingly, close to Webern. (Maybe we should hear some of his music from these players; I do not doubt they would have something to say about it.) The Theme and Variations unfolded relatively quickly again, yet again without sounding rushed. I loved the viola and cello solos in the first variation for the real sense of the instruments they imparted, if that does not sound too nonsensical. The physicality of playing an instrument was certainly imparted, albeit by musical rather than distracting visual means. Wind instruments taking the lead in the following variation proved an equal, if different – is that not what variations are for? – delight. Every variation possessed and spoke of its own character, whilst retaining a strong, generative sense of relation to the whole. The scherzo proved, in tempo broadly understood and thus in character too, a step on, if only a step on, from the minuet, but that was quite enough. As for the finale, one might simply have asked ‘finale problem, what finale problem?’ The grandeur, again, of the introduction and the sheer joy of what ensued, taking daringly fast – it is, after all, marked Presto – registered with a keen sense of fun. The movement’s sterner moments and procedures, quite properly too; yet, however ‘symphonic’ we may consider this work, its place in the serenade tradition remained unchallenged.

Hagen Quartet/Widmann - Webern, Widmann, and Mozart, 30 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

Webern: String Quartet (1905)

Widmann: Clarinet Quintet (2017, UK premiere)

Mozart: Clarinet Quintet in A major, KV 581

Lukas Hagen (violin), Rainer Schmidt (violin)

Veronika Hagen (viola)

Clemens Hagen (cello)

Jörg Widmann (clarinet)

 

The Hagen Quartet opened this concert with Webern’s 1905 String Quartet, not a work I can recall ever having heard ‘live’ before, although it has been well treated on disc. (Yes, I remain old-fashioned enough to say that and indeed to listen to recordings.) I was quite taken aback by the frozen, starkly modernistic opening in the Hagens’ performance: not only arresting in itself, but not quite what I should have expected from them. The music certainly warmed; yet, in that warming, it became more, not less, febrile, this fascinating early piece sounding almost as if it were sped-up and, later, slowed down early-ish Schoenberg. It does not – and did not – have the consistency of, say, Schoenberg’s own unnumbered quartet, let alone his four ‘official’ ones, nor indeed his fragments. The Hagens, however, captured very well its unsettled strangeness of style and method, whilst still pointing to those aspects, more than one might initially suspect, that look forward to Webern’s mature works. The unisons, quite rightly, did not ring true, nor the somewhat contrived cadences at the ends of sections. With equal justice, though, the final cadence did, as if a flickering reminiscence of Verklärte Nacht. This seemed to me an object lesson in performance of a problematical work, neither making excuses for it, nor running away from its difficulties.

 

Jörg Widmann joined the players for the rest of the concert, first in his own Clarinet Quintet, here receiving its first British performance, and then in Mozart’s supreme masterpiece of the genre. It is, according to the composer in a programme note, ‘a single 40-minute Adagio in which the initial tempo marking Lento assai could stand as a programme for the entire work. (I say ‘according to’, not because I disbelieve him, but simply because I did not consult my watch.) It is, not unreasonably for a clarinettist composer, something he had long wanted to write, yet, ‘in 2009, my humility and admiration of these masterpieces [the ones you would expect…] brought my life project clarinet quintet to a temporary halt. … Eight years later, in 2017, I returned to my plans.’ Immediately, Widmann continues, he ‘sensed that the long wait had been worth it.’ Without claiming any knowledge of what it would have been like had he continued earlier, I suspect that he was right, for what we heard proved to be a typically accomplished and absorbing reckoning with tradition.

 

That febrile quality heard in much of the Webern performance seemed to continue, indeed to be intensified, in the opening of this long slow(ish) movement, whose overall conception often brought to mind a Brucknerian conception of time, although not, I think, a remotely Brucknerian method. Perhaps, though, there were elements of deformation of an imaginary Bruckner Adagio, for, as is often the case with Widmann’s music, one perceived – or at least I did! – all manner of refractions of ‘original’, Classical-Romantic music, which had most likely never existed in the first place: at least not for us. Mozart, Brahms, perhaps Reger too, also hovered as ghosts in our musical consciousness: sometimes in a phrase, sometimes in a progression, sometimes goodness knows how. Interestingly, in context, some of the results of what appeared to have been a very different conception and process, did not sound so very different from Webern either. Or was that all a matter of my own historical baggage? We all have our Vergangenheitsbewältigung to do, after all, even if some countries are rather more advanced than ours in doing so. (It would hardly be difficult.) Haunted and haunting, just when the music might have seemed in danger of coming too close to a past, even if that past had never been, more recent, even living ghosts, or angels perhaps – Lachenmann, Stockhausen, Rihm? – appeared to join our musical host.

 

Then, through a performative virtuosity that sometimes we are in danger of taking for granted, Widmann suggested (again, at least to me) a glass armonica, perhaps even something older, a mediaevalism. Dactylic meter seemed to evoke Beethoven and Schubert, but did it? You can call that postmodernism if you like, but I do not think it is, not here, not straightforwardly. For there is an overall conception of form, of purpose, that is quite different, to my understanding anyway. At any rate, extended techniques, both in composition and performance, spoke both of a reinvented past as much as present and future. ‘Zum Raum hier wird die Zeit?’ Not really, or not at any rate, as the anti-historical Schopenhauer might have understood Gurnemanz’s words. Wagner, ever a student also of Hegel, knew better, though; so, I think, does Widmann. Ruptures intrigued, as, I fancied, they might have intrigued Adorno. Might a caesura bring back the past? Of course not, but why should it, or rather its composer, not try, knowing, like Mahler with a Luftpause, that he was bound at some level, to fail? The violence of such a rupture nevertheless remained: again, haunted and haunting.

 

A great performance of Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet will, in different yet not mutually opposed ways, possess some of that haunted and haunting quality to us, as twenty-first-century listeners. This did, and I think may genuinely be accounted as ‘great’, or very close thereto. The utter perfection of Mozart’s work shone through. Even if there were occasional things one might have done differently oneself in the abstract – and if so, they were so minor, I have forgotten them – then there was nothing that jarred, nothing that screamed ‘look at me’, nothing that spoke of ‘reassessment’ for the mere sake of reassessment. We seemed, at any rate, to return to an Elysium from which we knew we should soon be expelled once again; or rather, we beheld it, in some sense partook in it, whilst knowing that it was never straightforwardly ours. Such is the particular pain of Mozart’s music, perhaps ever more so with the passing of every year (and his every January birthday).

 

This was as attentive a performance as anyone might have hoped for. Beauty of tone was certainly present, yet expressive, not a mere end in itself. Mozart’s formal concision as well as dynamism shone through, Webern in a sense remaining. And yet so did his command of the longest of lines and the way he plays with expectations: Widmann remained too. The first movement’s development section sounded as rare, as fantastical, as anything in Così fan tutte. Its recapitulation – with apologies to the Guardian journalist who recently declared, ex cathedra, that such talk should be banished from her brave new world of quinoa for all – functioned, or rather was experienced, very much as a second development, a new, wondrous world of wordless dramatic exploration.

 

Hushed equipoise characterised much, although not all, of the slow movement. There was nothing remotely sentimental to it. We were, however, called, drawn in to listen; and listen, I think, we did. Mozart’s music sang as if this were the only way to sing it. It is not, of course, but a sense of absolute ‘rightness’ is no bad thing, however much we know it, in retrospect, to have been relative. The minuet, alive, alert, in some sense again unattainable, contrasted duly, wondrously with its in turn contrasting trios, the one stern, without rupture to kinship, the other breathing the world of a remembered Salzburg serenade. The finale concluded and unified our experience without apparent effort: just as it should sound, however great the actual effort. Its profusion of melodic and, later, harmonic variation were relished with, again, that sense of ineffable ‘rightness’. How did anyone ever dare to write another clarinet quintet after this? We should nevertheless be grateful that some composers have. For if we are to believe in tradition at all, it must never stand still, always develop. Mozart will remain.

Arcayürek/Lepper: Schubert, 28 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

Frühlingsglaube, D 686; Lied eines Schiffers an die Dioskuren, D 360;  Rastlose Liebe, D 138a; Abendstern, D 806; Der Jüngling and der Quelle, D 300; Am Flusse, D 766; Der Jüngling auf dem Hügel, D 702; Der Schiffer, D 536; Der Doppelgänger, D 957; An den Mond, D 193; Über Wildemann, D 884; Nachtstück, D 672; Der Einsame, D 800; An die Laute, D 905; Der Musensohn, D 764; Sehnsucht, D 879; Schäfers Klagelied, D 121; Die Liebe hat gelogen, D 751; Romanze aus ‘Rosamunde’, D 797/3b; Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt, D 478b; Wer nie sein Brot mit Tränen ass, D 480c; An die Türen will ich schleichen, D 479b; Schwanengesang, D 744.

Ilker Arcayürek (tenor)

Simon Lepper (piano)

The first thing that struck me in this Wigmore Hall recital was the palpable sincerity of Ilker Arcayürek’s artistry. Sincerity is not everything, of course; what we think of as such may even be carefully constructed artifice, although not, I think, here. Stravinsky may or may not even have been correct to call it a sine qua non (before, in imitable style, demolishing the claim that it was in anyway enough). Whether there is sincerity in the deliberate presentation of insincerity and in irony is, perhaps, a dialectical question for another day. (For what it is worth, I think the answer is probably ‘yes – probably’.’ Artistic sincerity is surely, however, a good starting-point, a fine way to draw the listener in. And so it was here from Arcayürek, ably accompanied by Simon Lepper, in a wide-eyed (wide-voiced?!) Frühlingsglaube, properly vernal.

 

The programme’s progression made sense too. Without overt didacticism there were paths, musical, verbal, thematic to follow, to make one’s one way through this Schubert recital. Musical – in this case, rhythmic – discipline enabled Mayrhofer’s song to the Dioscuri to take us further on our way, whilst the sadness of his Abendstern shone through in voice and piano alike. In between, a rastlose (restless) account of Goethe’s Rastlose Liebe likewise relied upon the freedom born of such discipline. The same poet’s – and, of course, composer’s – Am Flusse flowed nicely, without a wearisome attempt to make it into something it is not.

 

The Jüngling auf dem Hügel (youth on the hill) could then look down upon what we had seen, heard, experienced so far, the music the key to the words and vice versa, Schubert and his present-day collaborators winningly attentive to the alchemic balance of Lieder-performance. The death knell rang out on the piano perhaps all the more clearly, at any rate movingly, for the lack of underlining. We were trusted to listen for ourselves. Impetuous relief, then, came at just the right time with Der Schiffer, prior to a wan and worldweary Doppelgänger, Arcayürek’s voice rising to encompass fear, anger, and defiance, although never to the neglect of more ‘purely’ musical values. That such moonlit drama could shade into reminiscences of Beethoven’s moonlight in An den Mond spoke well not only of that particular performance but of the thought that had gone behind its placement. Winds and mists brought the first half to a Romantic close, vocal tone and mood their agent, yet precision too. It takes art to evoke rather than fall into the imprecise.

 

Der Einsame brought piano onomatopoeia (the crickets at night) from Lepper and an apt lightness of approach from Arcayürek, making me think he would be a dab hand at first-rate operetta: Offenbach, or occasional Johann Strauss. There was nothing tedious to the performance of a song which, in the wrong hands, can sometimes become just that. Pristine neoclassicism and a little second-stanza naughtiness enlivened Die Laute and its solitary lamp: a different yet related vision of night-time. Likewise Sehnsucht: another well-judged change of mood. A well shaped account of another Goethe song, Schäfers Klagelied offered typically Schubertian smiling through tears, as well as the vivid drama of actual (and metaphorical?) storm. One began to appreciate the sadness that had underlay even the earliest songs in the programme, in part retrospectively.

 

It may sound obvious, but to perform the Romanze from Rosauunde as, well, a romance, offered the key to its success, especially as relief after a darkly romantic indictment of ‘love’ in Die Liebe hat gelogen. Again, the clue proved to be in the title for Wer sich der Einsamkeit ergibt, Schubert extending, as perhaps only music can, Goethe’s conception of loneliness. Particularity of mood characterised both of the following Goethe songs too; so did able voice-leading: in piano, tenor, and both. The quiet dignity of Schwanengesang – the 1822 song, not the song-cycle! – and its unforced Unheimlichkeit brought genuine, not contrived silence at the close. Which returns us to sincerity: an ideal for us as listeners too?

 

Das Rheingold, LPO/Jurowski, 27 January 2018

Royal Festival Hall

Images: Simon Jay Price

Woglinde – Sofia Fomina

Wellgunde – Rowan Hellier

Flosshilde – Lucie Špičkova

Freia – Lyubov Petrova

Fricka – Michelle DeYoung

Erda – Anna Larsson

Froh – Allan Clayton

Loge – Vsevolod Grivnov

Wotan – Matthias Goerne

Donner – Stephen Gadd

Fasolt – Matthew Rose

Fafner – Brindley Sherratt

Mime – Andrew Thompson

Alberich – Robert Hayward

Malcolm Rippeth (lighting)

Katie Thackeray (deputy stage manager)

Ted Huffman (consultant)

London Philharmonic Orchestra

Vladimir Jurowski (conductor)

It is, of course, quite an achievement in itself for a symphony orchestra to perform Das Rheingold or indeed any of the Ring dramas. It does not happen very often, not nearly so often as it should; for given Wagner’s crucial musico-historical position, this is music that should stand at the very centre of their repertoires – just as Beethoven should at the centre of opera orchestras’. One can envy the practice of many German orchestras, which play for both opera house and symphony hall, but envy does not necessarily take us very far. (Actually, as Alberich will show us, it does, but perhaps not in the best direction.) In a closer-to-ideal world, admitted Vladimir Jurowski in the programme, there would have been a theatrical production, but the Ring ‘would be the end of Glyndebourne as a venue – it would simply fall apart if we tried to squeeze the orchestra into the pit!’ Why an achievement to perform it, though? Because Wagner’s dramas offer a standing rebuke to neoliberalism. It is not that there is any lack of ‘demand’; look how performances, especially in Wagner-starved Britain, will often sell out within a few minutes. But however great the demand, they will not ‘pay for themselves’. They are a communal undertaking, explicitly intended and functioning as heirs, political, social, religious, and dramatic – the distinctions make no sense – to the Attic tragedy of Aeschylus and Sophocles. (For more on that, please click here.)

Moreover, for the London Philharmonic Orchestra to give such an outstanding orchestral performance, in what must be the first time many of its players will have performed the score, is again cause for thanks and rejoicing. The LPO strings could hardly have proved more protean, the variegation of their tone a challenge to many an opera orchestra, that variegation surely born in part of Jurowski’s strenuous demands. Detail was present and vivid to what sometimes seemed a well-nigh incredible decree. For instance, the brass spluttering as Alberich floundered in the Rhine, for instance, looked forward suggestively to Strauss’s critics in Ein Heldenleben. If the anvils did not sound as they might in one’s head, when do they ever? That was no fault of the excellent nine players on three sides of the stage. The Prelude sounded – and, given the pipes behind the stage – unusually organ-like: not just the timbres, but also the insistence on the E-flat pedal, quite beyond any I can recall previously having heard. Such was the revealing side of Jurowski’s tight leash and rhythmic (harmonic rhythm included) exactitude, Bruckner coming strongly to mind.

Fasolt (Matthew Rose), Freia (Lyubov Petrova), and Fafner (Brindley Sherratt)

And yet, as so often, Jurowski himself proved too unyielding, almost Toscanini-like, if on a lower voltage. His again was quite an achievement, given that this was the first time he had conducted the score. There is no reason to think that subsequent performances will not reap rewards. By the same token, however, it would be idle to think that this compared to a Daniel Barenboim or a Bernard Haitink, although it certainly knocked spots off the incoherent incompetence Wagner generally suffers under Haitink’s successor at Covent Garden. To Londoners who hear little or nothing else, this would rightly be a cause for rejoicing. Moreover, the sometimes almost caricatured formalism of Jurowski’s approach – I wondered at times whether he had been reading Alfred Lorenz! – was not without its rewards. Was structure, however, too clarified, even simplified? For every revealing instance of opposition between different varieties of thematic material – Fricka’s disruptive, recitative-like ‘Wotan, Gemahl’, for instance, amidst Wotan’s orchestral dreaming of Valhalla – there were at least two passages that were distinctly subdued, almost as if concerned that the orchestra would threaten audibility of the singers. (It never did, by the way.) It was wonderful to hear so much harp detail as the gods crossed the rainbow bridge, and there is certainly good, Feuerbachian dramatic reason to emphasis the unreal beauty of the fortress and the path thereto. It need not, though, and surely should not come at the expense of its sacerdotal power. Novelistic, almost domesticated narrative sometimes threatened, in a dialectical turn, the integrity of musico-dramatic form. Yes, this is epic, yet it is anything but undisciplined. Das Rheingold, however, is a very difficult work to bring off: in some ways more so than the subsequent Ring dramas. Even Barenboim has sometimes erred a little too much towards Neue Sachlichkeit here. That there was a good deal to engage with critically, however, the foregoing merely illustrative, suggests that Jurowski’s Wagner is and will continue to be something to take seriously.

Alberich (Robert Hayward) and the Rhinemaidens (Sofia Fomina, Rowan Hellier, Lucie Špicková)

Vocally, as will almost always be the case, the bag was mixed. I could not resist the sense that, to a certain extent, at least Matthias Goerne’s Wotan was a little too much reliant on stock emotionally stunted sociopathy. Only towards the end, after the arrival of Anna Larsson’s typically excellent Erda, did he seem more truly ruminative. That is a crucial moment, of course, in his road towards Schopenhauerian conversion, but Wotan is never merely a figure of force. ‘Nicht durch Gewalt!’ is, after all, his injunction to Donner.  Robert Hayward’s Alberich went awry a few too many times; at his best, however, he proved darkly impressive. The giant pair of Matthew Rose and Brindley Sherratt also duly impressed as Fasolt and Fafner, the lovelorn brother genuinely moving, the sheer malevolence of Fafner at and after his death chilling indeed. Vsevolod Grivnov and Adrian Thompson offered detailed, dramatically alert ‘character tenor’ portrayals of Loge and Mime respectively, Allan Clayton’s light, bright-toned Froh a proper contrast. Michelle DeYoung’s Fricka, often imperious, was sometimes a little on the wobbly side, but there was little harm done in that respect, nor in the not dissimilar case of Lyubov Petrova’s cleanly sung Freia. Above all, there was a fine, almost Mozartian sense of conversation in passages of much dramatic to-and-fro. If only there had been a little more conventional drama. There nevertheless remained much to admire – and far from only because it happened at all.

Loge (Vsevolod Grivnov)

Tiberghien/LSO/Roth - Debussy, 25 January 2018

Barbican Hall
 

Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune

Fantaisie, for piano and orchestra
Jeux
Three Nocturnes


Cédric Tiberghien (piano)
Ladies of the London Symphony Chorus (chorus director: Simon Halsey)
London Symphony Orchestra
François-Xavier Roth (conductor)

 

Pierre Boulez, whom the musical world seems to miss more with the passing of each month, once noted that, as modern poetry had grown from the roots of Baudelaire’s verse, so had modern music been awakened by Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. As the voice and indeed the conscience of new (modern(ist)) music for considerably longer than half a century, Boulez should have known. Whilst he would have been – and was – open to other suggestions, for this is no zero sum game, it is difficult to argue with the truth of his observation. I certainly have no desire to try, least of all this year, the hundredth anniversary of Debussy’s death, when I fear we shall have far too much wishy-washy talk of ‘Impressionism’ and far too little of modernism – or, more to the point of its modernist substance and import. If the former brings people to the latter, all well and good, but it too readily becomes an easy-listening thing-in-itself, obscuring so much of what truly matters in this most radical of composers.

 

Nor, it seemed, did François-Xavier Roth have any desire to try to argue with the claim made by a composer whom Roth himself has consistently championed, not least in the Berlin hall that bears Boulez’s name. Here he is in London as Principal Guest Conductor of the LSO, a welcome appointment he has held since September of last year. The celebrated opening phrase of Prélude à l’après-midi, beautifully, enigmatically floated by Gareth Davies, immediately offered a sense of fantasy, even of magic, furthered by responses, whether from other soloists or the orchestra as ensemble. Roth led the work with a fluidity familiar as much from Boulez’s musical works as Boulez’s conducting, the apparent lack of bar lines well nigh wondrous. Debussy’s Prélude sounded all the more radical, ultimately all the more confrontational, for its apparent lack of overt confrontation, Languor – yes, I know, we all overuse that word when it comes to Debussy – and concision seemed somehow to coexist, even to awaken one another.

 

I can live with the concert title ‘Essential Debussy’ if it attracts more people to the music, but surely it is stretching ‘essential’ beyond breaking point to include the Fantaisie for piano and orchestra. It is a fascinating work, at least as much for its atypical qualities, even its skirting (at least) with vulgarity, as for foreshadowings of the later, ‘essential’ composer. One can play spot the influence and inevitably does, to a certain extent, but perhaps it is better simply to take it, as much as one can, ‘as it is’. Such seemed to be the method of the musicians here, now joined by Cédric Tiberghien, in a piano performance both hammerless and directed. In the second movement, Debussy’s melodic and harmonic twists constantly surprised, without any need for underlining, an affinity with the piano Arabesques clear and revealing. In context, one also heard similarities to – I hesitate to say ‘anticipations of’ – Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune in the closing ‘Allegro molto’. I cannot say, though, that I was left regretting Debussy’s turn away from Franck, d’Indy, et al. A splendidly sec encore of ‘Minstrels’ followed.

 

Jeux, which opened the second half, shows Debussy at what is surely his most classically modernist. Its opening marriage of timbre and harmony proved almost melodic in itself, without quite becoming Viennese Klangfarbenmelodie; it certainly had me think again of Boulez. Roth did not neglect, though, the sense of ballet, even of (thin) sporting narrative, the musical to-and-fro evocative and unrestricted, up and until the final drop of the ball. This extraordinary score remained as enigmatic as ever, its form seemingly generated before our ears, inviting and yet resisting ad hoc analysis.

 

If we had heard in Jeux fragments that might – or not – have come from Pelléas et Mélisande, they were more obvious, more frequent in the less kaleidoscopic Nocturnes. In ‘Nuages’, they were especially apparent in that passing between darkness and light without ever quite jettisoning the one for the other. Roth kept the score moving with great skill, almost imperceptible and thus all the more impressive. This is certainly not Debussy that invites a display of ‘personality’. ‘Fêtes’ proved a welcome contrast with bright, almost primary colours delivered and relished by the LSO. Marriage between detail and bigger ‘picture’ was finely judged. I found it irresistible. That, of course, is precisely what sirens should be, and so they were in ‘Sirènes’, the wordless female chorus imparting a sense of something akin to secular plainsong in summer – which returned us, in a way, to the opening work. The ‘cyclical’ takes many paths and forms.

Quatuor Diotima - Szymanowski, Saunders, and Schubert, 18 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

Szymanowski: String Quartet no.2, op.56

Rebecca Saunders: Unbreathed (world premiere)

Schubert: String Quartet no.15 in G major, D 887

Yun-Peng Zhao, Constance Ronzatti (violins)

Franck Chevalier (viola)

Pierre Morlet (cello)

Bracingly modernist Szymanowski opened this Quatuor Diotima concert. Tremolandi in the first movement of the Second String Quartet sounded almost as if presentiments of Ligetian swarming. Clarity was striking too; there was nowhere to hide, almost as if this were Mozart. (It would have been very odd Mozart indeed, but anyway…) And when Ligeti bowed out, there was a Schoenbergian violence to the string-writing, married in performance to a very Gallic abrasion. Harmonics sounded other-world – and not in a sentimental way. There was palpable fury in the precision of the second movement, not unlike Bartók, although certainly not to be reduced in that way. Tonality sounded just as ambiguous here as it had in the first movement; one ‘knew’ it, yet did not always experience it. If there were a little less of such ambiguity in the third movement, there was at least as much emotional ambiguity to its unfolding. This was some of the least gorgeous Szymanowski I have heard, but was none the worse for it; it seemed to speak with, even of, truth.

If the shock of the new infused the Szymanowski performance, and would do so still more the Schubert in the second half, Rebecca Saunders’s Unbreathed, here receiving its world premiere, was performed with all the confidence of an established repertory work – which surely it will become. The title comes from her own poetic inscription:

Inside, withheld, unbreathed,

Nether, undisclosed.

Souffle, vapour, ghost,

Hauch and dust.

Absent, silent, void,

Naught beside.

Either, neither, sole,

Unified.

Written in a single movement, it seemed to me to be divided into two sections, the second initially perhaps suggestive of a slow movement that is not a slow movement, before turning out to breathe – or perhaps to unbreathe – if the reference will be forgiven, the air of another planet beyond the more familiar ‘another planet’. A destination of sorts, I think: but how had the music got there? Phrases, arguably ‘gestural’, yet certainly not only gestural, seemed to incite one another: consecutively, overlapping, even simultaneously; rhythmically as well as melodically. As often in Saunders’s music, the illusion of an electronic penumbra proved melodically fascinating, indeed constructive; it was no mere ‘effect’. Was that perhaps even an approach to Stockhausen in a frenetic, hard-won upward passage? I found myself preoccupied by the relationship between vertical and horizontal that yet, almost contradictorily, seemed to play itself out through time, in a dramatic form creating itself in modernistic fashion. Then the relative calm of much of that second section, eerie and not at all still, suggested ghosts in a reinvented, reset machine, anything but dualistic.

Schubert’s G major Quartet, D 887, sounded quite unlike any Schubert I had ever previously heard, although I am not sure I can really put my finger on how, let alone why. As in the Szymanowski, there was something truly menacing, coldly so, to the tremolandi, but it was much more than that. Likewise it was more than a matter of febrile energy, although that too played its part. It was not that the performance was fragmentary; it had a strong sense of line, at least in certain ways; nevertheless, sometimes phrases, again as in Szymanowski, seemed on the verge of taking leave of their tonal moorings. Passages of relative stasis sounded all the odder in this context, at least to begin with all the more unnerving. However, by the time we reached the second movement, which, like its predecessor, sounded slower than it most likely was, I was missing a little too much a sense of harmonic motion. Was it I who was merely missing it, though, or was it not there? I genuinely do not know, especially since it seemed to be restored somewhat in the scherzo, if only on account of the nature of the material. Its trio, though, sounded especially weirdly distended, all the more so on account of generally glassy tone. This was strange, even wearing Schubert. Should it (not) have been? Again, I do not know.

Modigliani Quartet - Haydn and Brahms, 14 January 2018

Wigmore Hall

 

Haydn: String Quartet in G major, op.54 no.1

Haydn: String Quartet in G minor, op.74 no.3, ‘Rider’

Brahms: String Quartet no.1 in C minor, op.51 no.1

Amaury Coeytaux, Loïc Rio (violins)

Laurent Marfaing (viola)

François Kieffer (cello)

 

It was good to be back at the Wigmore Hall, by any standards the jewel in London’s musical crown, after almost a year away. No hall or house can maintain identical  standards, night in, night out – in this case, often day in, day out too – over an entire season; even if possible, it would be quite undesirable to do so. Nevertheless, the level of musical excellence heard here far more often than not only exceeds any other venue in London, but surely withstands comparison with any in the world. The Modigliani Quartet had much to tell us in performances of Haydn and Brahms: never merely ‘different’ for the sake of it, yet, by the same token, all possessing points of particular interest to differentiate themselves from others.

 

Haydn’s G major Quartet, op.54 no.1, opened with cultivated tone and considerable, although far from unvaried, vibrato. One should always be wary of imputing too readily ‘national’ or other stereotypical characteristics, but the group’s sound seemed to me very much to speak of a Franco-Belgian string heritage. My ears took a minute or so to adjust, having perhaps become more accustomed recently to other schools of string playing. (I have also probably listened to less in the way of string quartet music in my time away from London.) Whatever the characteristics of the sound – or Klang, as the German in me wants to say – the important thing was that, from this first movement onwards, formal process and dynamism were apparent, attentiveness of mutual listening equally clear. Modulatory development witnessed a relative, although only relative, withdrawal of vibrato, as it subtly to underline Haydn’s questing. Its concision was breathtaking, almost Webern-like. Rightly, everything had changed in the recapitulation, its material played and heard anew. Nothing was taken for granted in the slow movement either. Without any unnecessary underlining, phrasal, harmonic, and almost Schubertian modulatory qualities were made, or perhaps better, enabled, to tell. Haydn’s startling originality and ‘rightness’ of form were rendered immanent. Beethoven was but a stone’s throw away in the minuet and trio, yet a stone’s throw away he remained; this was still very much Haydn. Motivic integration nevertheless looked forward far into the future, at least as far – with the rest of the programme in mind – as Brahms. Rigour and fun proved inseparable in the finale: a properly Haydnesque combination. Both work and performance evinced sheer delight in musical argument: an object lesson in navigation of the overarching tonal universe and of the particularities of this work.

 

The opening bars of the Rider Quartet immediately announced that Haydn will always do things differently, in every quartet as in every symphony. Material dictated, or suggested, the terms of performance, and rightly so. Here, the composer’s transformations, all lovingly, intelligently handled, proved worthy of Beethoven or Liszt, permitting the work’s opening G minor sadness, close to yet never to be identified with, that of Mozart, to give way to other, quite different forms of musical expression. In some ways, the music seemed to assert its status as heir to the Sturm und Drang Haydn – without, again, being merely identified with him. Harmonic and tonal rarity, in every sense, were apparent in the slow movement; it was difficult not to think already of late Beethoven. The central turn to E minor offered a dignified, noble sadness all its own. The third movement was taken as a not-quite-scherzo, which seemed spot on; it might have been in three, yet was not really. Intensification in the trio was especially well judged. Haydn’s finale surprised with every twist and turn, even when, perhaps particularly when, one ‘knew’ it. The composer’s genius of motivic development and transformation could hardly have been granted more subtly dramatic life.

 

It was interesting, indeed enlightening, to hear Brahms’s First Quartet in the motivic developmental light of the Haydn works. If initially I found the first movement somewhat hard-driven, I tried to ask myself whether that were my problem rather than that of the performance; most likely it was. The music in any case relaxed for the second group, without loss to dramatic tension. Crucially, there were throughout this performance no compromises with the difficulty of the work. I have heard it played with richer tone, but so what? Tellingly, greater tonal richness was to be heard at points of developmental climax, prior to post-Mendelssohn passages of exhaustion. Voice-leading came very much to the fore in the Romanze, an heir to Schumann as much in sensibility as in method. Mediated simplicity was something to be worked at, by players and listeners alike; the effort was unquestionably worth it. A concision that spoke of Beethoven was to be heard in the third movement; again, one had to listen, and rightly so. There were, moreover, surely echoes of Haydn to be heard and relished in the trio, in tandem with a keen sense of ghostly, even corrosive questioning. The finale offered highly wrought intensity: a conclusion in every sense. Brahms never offers easy answers; there was no attempt to pretend that he does here.

 

Puccini’s Crisantemi proved an inspired choice of encore. Craftsmanship and elegiac sensibility alike proclaimed the composer far more ‘German’ than his often regrettable popular reputation might suggest. Not for nothing would he and Schoenberg so greatly admire one another.