Renée Fleming Recital at the Barbican

9/12/12

with Maciej Pikulski at the piano

Programme:

Hugo Wolf: Goethe Lieder 
Frühling übers Jahr
Gleich und Gleich
Die Sprode
Die Bekehrte
Anakreons Grab

Mahler: Rückert Lieder
Ich Atmet einen Linden Duft
Liebst du um Schoenheit
Um Mitternacht
Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder
Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen

Arnold Schoenberg
Erwartung, Op 2, No 1
Jane Grey, Op 12, No 1

Alexander von Zemlinsky: Fünf Lieder auf Texte von Richard Dehmel
Vorspiel
Ansturm
Letzte Bitte
Stromüber
Auf See

Korngold
Sterbelied, Op 14, No 1
Das Heldengrab am Pruth, Op 9, No 5
Was Du mir bist, Op 22, No 1
Das Eilende Bachlein, Op 27, No 2

J Strauss arr. Korngold
Frag mich oft, from Walzer aus Wien


Encores:
Strauss Zeuignung
Delibes Les filles de Cadix
Korngold Marietta's Lied


A very brave and enterprising programme this, with half the items virtually unknown, and the Mahler and Korngold only occasionally lapsing into crowd pleasing territory. All of the repertoire centres around the boiling cultural milieu of fin de siecle Vienna, with Wolf and Mahler at its neurotic peak, Schoenberg and Zemlinsky capturing its bloated decline into overripe decadence, and Korngold it's final wheezing descent into total kitsch and overwrought, indulgent luxuriance. This makes it sound like I don't like this period of music, but actually it is amongst my favourite times of all, and with the exception of Zemlinsky, I love all of these composers along of course with Strauss, Berg and Schreker. So much intensely beautiful music was being written in this part of the world at that time, though there is a spiritual sickness at the heart of a lot of it which is surely a part of its fascination.

Fleming has performed Mahler's Rückert Lieder quite often over the past decade and like so much of what she sings, has now really made them her own. As ever her attention to the text is intimate, multifaceted and multicoloured, but she also fed Mahler's music with a soaring sense of line and purpose. I think she's much more suited to Strauss temperamentally and vocally, but this was a very lovely performance.

Before this came the set a set of five Wolf songs from the Goethe Lieder which she bravely chose to open the concert with. These didn't suit at all. Fleming declaimed the text with minute detail but at the expense of long line, she never sang above a mezzo piano, and her use of portamento severely got in the way of the music. I usually don't mind and actually like this last aspect of her singing that offends some people so much, but here it really happened far too often for comfort.

Fleming has recorded a disc of music of this era already - and here we see her as a Klimt painting

Luckily things picked up after the interval. It's hard to imagine which other major international singer would programme Schoenberg in a song recital, and Fleming's two selections were revealed as beautiful grey pearls, Fleming finally singing with real freedom, a truly full bodied tone and passionate commitment. More like this please! I was reminded of her CD of Berg Excerpts with Levine (Marie, Lulu), her first big budget recording, one of her least known and one of her finest. (There is also a much more recent and truly exceptional reading of Berg's 7 Early Songs with Abbado that provides yet more evidence for the ideal match of singer of epoch.)

Zemlinsky's Dehmel songs are rather anonymous creations, brooding, darkly chromatic, ugly ducklings, well dispatched by Fleming, though she had to stop and cough heartily in between two songs, humorously encouraging the audience to follow suit. She was struggling with a cold she said, and quietly continued to clear her throat for the rest of the recital (I was sitting very close) - sometimes even snatched between the endless arching phrases in the Korngold songs - a wonder that she got through it, and only one note seemed slightly off kilter as a result.

The Korngold songs played to Fleming's strength of delivering an apparently endless line of yearning legato. They are schmaltzy but the famous Sterbelied from the op.14 Abschiedlieder suited perfectly, as did the rapt love song Was du mir bist ("dedicated... to his mother!" Fleming delighted in telling us) which Korngold recycled in his Suite for Piano left hand, two violins and cello, one of the most beautiful of all his slow movements.



Maciej Pikulski made a deft and sensitive partner, never covering the voice, and always supporting Fleming's rubato. He let Fleming take centre stage, and occasionally it might have been nice if he had seemed more of a collaborator than an accompanist, though his playing in the postlude to the final encore was poetic and beautiful.

(EDIT: Someone has videoed the encores and uploaded them to youtube so I have linked them in the text below. The fuzz of the audio quality allow the ear and brain to "fill in" what one expects in the details of the aural texture, and the sound is compressed giving a false sense of volume, so it maybe sounds a bit plusher than it really was, but it gives a good idea, and the soaring phrases I mentioned are ably captured. The first one has zoom noises, but the other two don't.)

In the encores we finally got some Strauss: Zueignung in a superb performance - this music is absolutely in her bones, and suits her so well - it's not just interpretively that things improve, but amazingly the sound of the voice - I think it probably has to do with muscle memory and relaxation. The same was true of all the pieces that she was more familiar with and has had in her repertoire for a while - the voice actually sounded fresher, more immediate and freer. I wished she had sung some more Strauss, rather than the Wolf or Zemlinsky perhaps, but Fleming has said herself that she doesn't like to repeat things, and is always wanting to try out new repertoire and new projects.

"We've had so much Sachertorte!" Fleming announced before her next encore: Delibes' Les filles de Cadix which was dispatched with shining vocalism, some of the finest I've heard from her over the last year (amazingly this is the 8th time I've seen her live since last year's Four Last Songs with Eschenbach at the RFH). Her legendary trills have largely deserted her along with the gleaming surface of the sound, but this was still vocalising to cherish, and a couple of phrases here soared like the classic Fleming we all know and love from the late 90s recordings. As she said just before, this was a new piece to her, and at one point she started singing the wrong verse, bailed out, made light of it, and completely got away with it - even getting a round of applause during the song. She was on charming form throughout the evening, bantering with the audience about her dress ("I realise it's a bit much. I just wanted you to get the Klimt connection" [see Intermezzo here for pictures]), and introducing each set of songs in the second half with some background information, something which I think is always appreciated and I wish more artists did. (Susan Graham did this in her recent Wigmore recital too).

Finally, Korngold's Marietta's Lied from Die Tote Stadt. This is a Fleming classic, and made a glorious end to a very good recital.

A lovely evening of lovely singing - I was worried in the Wolf that she was having an off day, but each selection she seemed to get stronger, and I really feel that the lieder recital is where her strengths now lie. She got a standing ovation and seemed quite genuinely touched.

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.