Rosenkavalier with Schwanewilms, Connolly, Crowe, LSO, Elder

With Glyndebourne's new Der Rosenkavalier not yet opened, and the Birmingham performance just around the corner, this concert acted as a wonderful taster menu of this opera, taking all the most delicious cuts of that score, immaculately prepared with the finest ingredients. The good music of Der Rosenkavalier is so great that the opera always comes to mind if I'm asked to list my favourite ten operas (or whatever the latest twitter game might be.) In a great performance with three great female voices, there is little to match it for sheer sonic beauty. The whole thing is made even more moving by Hofmannsthal's wonderful libretto, and again in the hands of an artist who can respond to its nuance and gentle colours, there is little like it in the repertoire. But the appalling languors of the opera, the huge stretches of routine, always stick in my throat, and make the piece exceptionally difficult to stage effectively in my experience, that is, to make it a fully convincing, engaging evening.

These concerns don't arise in a concert performance of highlights, and this generous selection, lasting well over an hour, was pure pleasure from start to finish. We first got the opening sequence - the sex/orgasm overture, afterglow, morning light, Mohammed's interruption, and coffee. The chemistry between Anne Schwanewilms' Marschallin and Sarah Connolly's Octavian was so believable and tender, that I'm not sure I've seen anything more erotic on an operatic stage this year. Funny how the acting can be so much more natural, intimate and engaging without all the other trappings of grand oper: sets, wigs, 'realistic' period costumes, and perhaps most crucially without a long rehearsal process which can kill spontaneity. A 50 year old woman trying to look like a 17 year old boy isn't sexy. A 50 year old woman playing male teenage passion and frustration is. I often find opera singers' acting to be more moving in concert performances, perhaps also because one is often so much nearer (other people on twitter were quick to blame nefarious directional interference (read: regie theatre directors) for this discrepancy when I mentioned it there.I think it can be a straw man - how many of those sorts of productions are there really? In my experience, singers are just as often disengaged and just "walking a part" in traditional productions).

Then with the same two singers, we got the Marschallin's monologue, the final half hour of the first act. Where in the first act Schwanewilms had been all smiles and hand caresses, here she was preternaturally still, and barely even looked at Connolly, who looked not just upset, but destroyed, her eyes red lakes of fear and sadness. Text book being an obstacle to your fellow actor from Schwanewilms! She has one of the most interesting and strangely beautiful soprano voices on the stage today, and chooses to access an enormous palette of vocal colours so that each phrase, each word, is delicately but precisely shaded. Though she can spin a shimmering legato line with the best of them (Her "Da drin ist die silbernc Ros'n" and "Hab' mir's gelobt" were both exquisite), in Strauss she more often chooses to utilise an intimate parlando, and the gentle strength and resonance in the middle and lower register means that this approach works. Her great forebear in the infinitely nuanced vocal line is of course Schwarzkopf, and though the approach is similar, the effect is very different - with Schwarzkopf you get the feeling that every single detail was sculpted and polished in advance, immaculately prepared, but animated in the moment by her smiling spirit. With Schwanewilms it all feels much more spontaneous, that she "lets" the voice do what it will in that moment, whilst playing the intention that she has. This has benefits and drawbacks. On the one hand she is able to truly react physically and vocally to anything her stage partners might throw at her, which means she is always engaging and always "on"; on the other hand, the voice can occasionally do something quite unexpected and unbelcanto - one of her mannerisms is a single bell like note that is totally disconnected from the line, especially for a sudden leap above the stave. I often get the feeling with her voice that she is masterfully, but constantly, navigating a fundamentally 'bumpy' vocal topography that is intrinsic to the voice. Again there is a similarity here to Schwarzkopf (though with Schwarzkopf the feeling is much less acute as the basic vocal technique was so exceptionally well controlled), who one also feels sometimes has found a creative technical or expressive solution to a fundamental, intrinsic unevenness in the vocal mechanism, however beautiful the timbre is. The opposite would be say Tebaldi, whose vocal registration has an absolutely smooth topography as she moves up and down the scale. I personally enjoy the colours and quiddities of Schwanewilms's voice because the expressive intent is always so clear, the connection with text is immediate and nuanced, and the voice has just combination of shimmer and depth. She will often do something quite unexpected with a familiar phrase which means one can hear this much loved music afresh.

This is all to say that she is an exceptionally accomplished and moving Marschallin, and now that Fleming, the greatest Marschallin since Schwarzkopf, is declining and only inconsistently at her best, Schwanewilms may well be the finest exponent of this role on the stage today. Refined, noble, wistful, thoughtful, beautiful: I certainly don't know of anyone I would prefer to hear in this role currently.

Sarah Connolly is still surely the most handsome performer of travesti roles around, and one hopes that she will continue to sing them into her sixth decade, when traditionally mezzos start giving them up. The voice and approach is very different from Schwanewilms' which makes her an excellent partner in this opera. Connolly has a much more traditional, consistent vocal production, capable of delivering Octavian's glorious, powerfully soaring outbursts without strain or compromise. One hears in the timbre that the voice is beginning to age, but the line remains firm and the voice in control. Though her German pronunciation is very good, one senses that the words are not being lived one by one in the moment - the whole phrase has the right emotional colour, but it doesn't sound like she has fluent German. The same was true of Lucy Crowe, whose pronunciation was also very good, but lacked that hard to define sense of true fluency and nuance. Perhaps this is expecting too much, but in Strauss of all composers, I miss that last degree of textual acuity because Strauss often composes word by word rather than by phrase, so any loss of specificity in the response to the text notices far more than many other operatic composers. I'm being insanely fussy perhaps and that this was even in question is partly an indication of the high standard of the whole performance.

Lucy Crowe was very nice as Sophie: a lovely shimmery vibrato, just right for her fach, and a very slight hoarseness in the sound that adds colour and bite. Her musicianship and vocal solidity in the lower registers means she can more than tackle an oft underestimated role. What is slightly uncomfortable is a pronounced wobble above the stave, the vibrato widening and relaxing at just the point when it should be most gleaming and vibrant. I don't know if this was a one off problem or a recurrent issue, but one hope it will be addressed soon, lest the voice decline before its time. The collection of tenors and baritones that made up the Marschallin's coachmen and then Faninal's single phrase in the last scene were true luxury. I have never heard these parts better sung, ever. Unfortunately I can't find my programme, and they're not on the Barbican website, so do comment below if you know who they were!

The LSO under Mark Elder played with great vigour, utilising a big boned, lustrous tone - appropriate for the Barbican's acoustics, but I can imagine that it might have covered the singers a little too often had I not been sitting so close to the stage. What was missing was that refined Viennese glow in the sound and lissome flexibility in the rhythm, but with playing as accurate, juicy and confident as this it's hard to complain. The final trio, which is somehow more special in live performance even than on record, was superbly delivered from all. From my seat, seeing and hearing every nuance from these singers, in the most glorious sections of maybe the most sumptuously beautiful opera ever composed, this was one of the most enjoyable concerts I've been to this season.

Renée Fleming with Gergiev and the LSO

15/07/2012

A rather disheartening way to end the season for me. The two orchestral showpieces on offer, Debussy's La Mer, and Stravinsky's Petrushka were perfectly acceptably played (the LSO rarely plays truly badly) but both felt a bit by rote, and Gergiev didn't offer anything particularly personal with either of them. I must admit that I've never seen the LSO be as responsive or play with as much energy with Gergiev as I have seen with Previn or Colin Davis. I found out recently from personal anecdotes that they feel very affectionately towards both Previn and Davis, so I wonder whether there is just a fundamental personality mismatch with Gergiev. Difficult to know if I've just caught a lot of off nights, or whether there's something in this...

The main draw of the evening was surely Renée Fleming, who sang two French song cycles that she has recently also recorded. My comments on the pieces and a review of that disc can be found here. She started with Dutilleux's song cycle Le Temps L'horlage, a poignant and quirky song cycle about time and yearning (shades of the Marschallin, Rusalka?) written especially for her. This is not a cycle that allows for much vocal display until the last song, and this was a softly shaded reading aiming mostly at text. Though always just about audible, Fleming was just hardly giving out any sound, and her trade mark endless legato seemed compromised and hard fought for. The lower notes occasionally became quite unstable timbrally and occasionally also with regards to intonation, traditionally also strengths. The last song at least brought some more fortitude in the voice, but never for sustained periods. Lacking in the voice now is the extraordinary vibrancy and beauty of timbre that it used to have, and also its rock steady technical security; all the time we feel strongly that she is shepherding her resources. She fared slightly better in Ravel Shéhérezade, but again this was a very small scale reading, and it just sounds like a completely different voice from the one it used to be. Very sad. She was quite good in her Ariadne's earlier this year, but I am now worried for her Munich Rosenkavaliers that I will be attending.

It pains me to write this because I really do believe that Fleming is the greatest singer of her generation, and certainly she is the singer (along with Callas) who has given me more listening pleasure than any other. She has talked throughout her career of the mystery of the voice, how it can just leave a singer in a very short time, and about early retirement and knowing when to retire. She has been very careful and prudent with repertoire selection for this reason, to keep the voice young and avoid damage at all costs, but age catches up with everyone sooner or later. I am sure she is only too aware of her current vocal condition, but I imagine it is much harder to actually stop singing than talk about it - emotionally, psychologically and not least financially.  Farewell dates at the Royal Opera House are being mooted for the 2016-2017 season (when she'll be 58) but I wonder how much voice will be left by then and I wonder also whether these next few years of singing will damage her legacy. Leontyne Price was still singing with unbelievable beauty at 58 (see here), but every soprano is very different - it doesn't just come down to careful vocal management, but also to genetics, hormones, mental health, self confidence, luck, and innumerable other factors.

Ultimately I can only express my unending gratitude to Renée Fleming for her voice and artistry, mercifully captured for posterity on so many wonderful recordings, which have afforded me so many hours of extraordinary pleasure. Beauty is a very fragile and ephemeral thing and one must be supremely grateful for the times it touches our lives and the ability it has to lift us above the mundane and into the numinous.

Gianandrea Noseda and LSO with Angela Denoke

21/06/2012

I love this music and chose to go to this concert before I had heard Denoke in Salome. I'm amazed she still gets hired to do stuff. She can just about sing Marie, but there's no aspect of her voice that the decline hasn't touched. Isolde would be a disaster at this stage. Very sad as her acting in Salome was so good - her stage presence in opera is remarkable (even if here on the concert platform she looked ultra tense and awkward).

Still, those Berg excerpts just fill me with pure rapture whenever I hear 'em, so was worth the risk. Also we heard a bonkers version of Beethoven 5 which other people loved, me not so much, but was cool to witness, I guess. I reviewed it for Bachtrack:

http://www.bachtrack.com/review-lso-angela-denoke-wagner-berg-beethoven

Der Freischutz at the Barbican

19/04/2012
Colin Davis, LSO

Seriously enjoyed myself at this one. As I say at the end, I just watched the thing ufold with childish glee and any slight problems with ensemble or vocal quality just fell away. Such a joy. Basically it's not as serious a work as it wants to be, and there certainly are perfunctory patches (the ending for instance), but overall the good patches more than outweigh the bad. It's obvious what Wagner took from Weber when we hear Lohengrin and Tannhauser next to Weber's works, and obvious too that Wagner is a much greater musical and dramatic mind - the symbolism resonates, the characters possess far greater depth, the drama unfolds with far greater surety. That said, Weber is often the more beautiful aurally, certainly if we compare it to these early works of Wagner, and there are times when I might very well say I prefer the music of the lesser talent.

I reviewed it here: http://www.bachtrack.com/review-der-freischutz-lso

Here's a preview:

While Weber is widely acknowledged as being of historic importance as the link in the German operatic tradition between Beethoven and Wagner, his operas are still rarely staged in England, and even in concert remain a relative novelty. Curious because this is music of the utmost vitality and beauty and at times he surely borders on genius. Not the same level of genius as those two masters that flank him, but an extraordinary ear for sonority, a very pleasing classical sense of form, and an unquestionable gift for vocal writing make him a very interesting and likeable composer.

Robin Ticciati and the LSO play Strauss, Mahler and Brahms (with Christopher Maltman)

Barbican
15/03/2012

A disappointing concert this as in theory I very much like all artists involved.

I wrote about it for Bachtrack. I asked other people sitting around me to check that it wasn't just me feeling the fundamental disconnect between orchestra and conductor.

Strauss's Tod und Verklärung is the work of a young man seeking to impress with his profundity and modernity after his early success with the wildly exuberant Don Juan. It is often said that the "death" part is more convincing than the "transfiguration" part, and this is largely true - while the former comes off beautifully, the latter is far too prosaic musically for the exalted subject matter. It's not really a question of age (Strauss was just 25 when he composed it), but a matter of compositional strengths, proclivities and weaknesses revealing themselves early - Strauss' musical genius is best expressed by sentimentality, extremity, vulgarity, stylisation: he is simply not capable of Wagnerian profundity, weight and depth. Robin Ticciati went a long way towards papering over these cracks, and slowly the huge symphonic arc of the tone poem was revealed with a glistening sweep. But there were balance issues - the brass and percussion generally far too loud, the little woodwind fragments in the beginning not cutting through the gloriously lush string textures. Something too wasn't connecting musically - there was a curious lack of passion or commitment even although all concerned were making all the right motions.

Well, can't win em all...

LSO Review: Mahler and Shostakovich

Mahler/Shostakovich
2nd March 2011
Barbican Hall
Valery Gergiev conducting the LSO with Mario Brunello, cello.

This interesting program of heavyweight material - Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto, followed by Mahler's 9th Symphony left a rather bitter taste in my mouth. Something about the entire evening was quite unsatisfactory. Not the LSO, who were as ever on very fine form indeed, and firmly remain for me the best orchestra that these shores have to offer. The concert with Previn a few weeks ago with Tim Hugh as the eponymous hero of Strauss' Don Quixote followed by Vaughan Williams' most personal symphony, the 5th, was one of the best concerts I have ever been to.

Shostakovich's Second Cello Concerto is for me the finest piece of his later years, and remains my favourite work of a composer whose oeuvre contains many favourites for me (and so much that I'd gladly never hear again!). Relatively little known, and completely eclipsed in the concert hall by the histrionics of the more traditional, showier first concerto (also a masterpiece of course), the second cello concerto of 1966 is a brooding, mysterious work, but one in which Shostakovich manages to integrate his conflicting musical characters as successfully as he ever did - the agony and the ecstacy, the sublime beauty and violent coarseness, reckless irony (oh, that overused word!) and real emotional depth. Crucially there's no posing like we find with the manipulative emotional fakery of the war symphonies, and here we seem to see Shostakovich for who he is: nervous, damaged, suffering, numbed but also deeply sensitive and loving - the glimmers of hope offered by the ecstatic beauty of a few passages offering some respite from the greyness that threatens to consume all. Most importantly the music: all of the highest order and nothing feels by rote as it can sometimes feel with Shostakovich ("suffering by numbers") or just plain shoddy as is equally often the case.

This line that Shostakovich treads so well between pained grimness and aching beauty is for me his principle achievement in a century which has so many lesser examples of composers attempting a similar thing (his musical children Schnittke and Pettersson being the most famous, and most irritating examples). Though Mahler is of course the most apt comparison here the seed goes back to the 19th century with Schubert's "laughing through tears" and Wolf's depressive glimmering with Schutz and Bach distant figures in the background if only because they convincingly expressed deep pain with such beautiful music.

The soloist was Mario Brunello (who he?) apparently a Tchaikovsky competition winner when it still mattered (that is pre 1989). The basic approach was extremely mannered - long stretches of no vibrato with nothing else of note to make such an effect expressive, full glissandos between all intervals greater than a third (not tasteful portamenti - slow glissandos), all over the playing rather colourless and expressionless. It's true that at times the work inhabits a curious limbo, impassive and unfeeling - but it's the music that expresses this - nothing extra needs to be added (or taken away) - Shostakovich works best when played as a romantic rather than as a modern (because really that's what he is). Overall it was just rather subpar cello playing - the LSO cellists displaying much finer gifts both in this concert and in previous ones I've attended (notably the recent Don Quixote). The note from Brunello in the programme should have raised an eye-brow (beware the artist too eager to offer explanations of their art!) - he relates a story of how he met Rostropovich when studying the score, who offered an illustrative example in a parallel art form to discuss the work - in this case Nikolai Gogol's story "The Overcoat". Brunello then goes on a huge flight of fancy about how each aspect of the plot is illustrated in the score, an undertaking both utterly tedious and completely unnecessary. Rostropovich's suggestion would have been a spur of the moment inspiration, a sudden connection which seemed to illustrate his point at the time - another beautiful example of this being the time he compared the first note of Bloch's Schelomo to a pantomime act by Marcel Marceau which depicted an entire life in a single movement. The uninspired artist takes this at face value and tries to literally link the two, rather than see the image for it's didactic purpose. Gergiev seemed to have little grip on the score, with neither the huge arch of the first movement or the granitic episodes of the last making any long range impact - the whole thing felt bitty and unsatisfying.

So then from Shostakovich to Mahler, that other suffering genius. Mahler's problematic oeuvre suffers from the same inconsistancy as Shostakovich's although by no means to the same degree; those Mahler "fanboys" who swallow it all up with such uncritical fervency (a depressingly commonly experienced attitude - the ones who will give any and all performances of a Mahler Symphony a standing ovation) are doing the music a disservice by devaluing the true greatness of that portion of his output which really is of the first rank. For me Mahler's principal value and appeal lies in his Symphonies no.4 and no.10, almost all his lieder (above all Das Lied) and then isolated movements from the rest of the symphonies (most have considerable high points).

The supreme example of the latter is surely the first movement of the 9th symphony - maybe the most perfect single movement he ever wrote, so perfect in fact as to make the rest of the symphony seem redundant because so unnecessary (as Robin Holloway points out). The second movement and to a certain extent the third are just bad music, especially when contrasted with the first movement, a comparison which Mahler himself compels us to make. And the last movement paradigmatic of all that is good and bad in Mahler - on the one hand, the opening is about as beautiful a thing as Mahler ever wrote, superbly scored, wistful and powerful, but at the same time so overwrought and OTT! The music make all the right gestures at hyper-expressively, a reflection of his hyper-sensitive character but we are always manipulatively held at a distance and we truly never see the real man - Mahler is just as much a virtuoso of the emotions as he is a master of the orchestra. But then he can't properly consummate it, the weepily sighing death of the ending just not coming off at all; it whiffs of tackyness, already hinting at a century of composition that was to take sincere, heartfelt tackyness to heights and depths never before witnessed in music.

Although his cycle of symphonies is undoubtedly very great qua music, Mahler is not a great symphonist per se and his achievement in this very particular discipline (as distinguished from writing music for orchestra) pales when held up to the previous generation of masters (Brahms, Bruckner, even Tchaikovsky) or his successors (Sibelius, Nielsen). That perfect jewel, the "little" 4th, is the only one amongst the completed symphonies that fully convinces in the longer range (and also completely throughout), and no.10 or what we have of it, would clearly have been the best thing he ever wrote had he had time to fully complete it - again the large scale architecture always clear and completely compelling, as well as the actual fabric of the music of blazing quality and inspiration almost throughout - everything that the 9th should have been in other words.

Gergiev's account of the 9th seemed quite strange - the unholy fire that seems to drive him through the music, uncomfortably energetic, rebarbative and just too aggressive - he plays it as if it's Shostakovich! This approach is well documented in his series of recordings which might thrill minute to minute but soon become exhausting in the wrong way. The impact of the first movement was lost to some extent - everything too loud, the climaxes truly vulgar in their blaring muscularity. My attention was drawn to Mahler's scoring - always sublime and completely faultless in the chamber like quieter passages where the extraordinary contrapuntal strength of his music can be seen to best effect. But in louder passages, Mahler can often miss fatally and added volume just becomes noise, strangely lacking in true power and impact; Strauss, his contemporary and only equal from this period for sheer skill and suavity in handling of the orchestra (Debussy and others are also very great, but in a narrower range), is a world apart in approach, and when he whips the orchestra up into a stentorian frenzy (as is his wont!), he virtually never disappoints.

The problem in approach was even more acute in the second and third movements, here so aggressive as to be barbarous and hysterical rather than sentimental and parodistic. The last movement was truly gorgeous, the LSO strings sounding voluptuous and glowingly intense, with so many beautiful points of solo colour that I felt like I was drowning in silky luxuriance. But after this aural feast I left the hall feeling rather empty, that this had been some kind of show piece, a display of extremes, which, if the piece is to make any kind of effect from it's already dubious material, is truly fatal.