Intermezzo

Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra hit London - 1

Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Haitink - Royal Festival Hall, 23 September 2009

This first of the CSO's two-night Royal Festival Hall residency displayed the best and the worst of the American approach. On a technical level, they are consummate musicians, and not just individually. Their intonation is immaculate, their ensemble so precise that lines of bows glide up and down as if attached to the same invisible string. Their vibrato trembles in unison; even the piccolo is in tune all night. They bend as one into any shape a conductor desires.

In the 'Jupiter' Symphony, this translated into a joyless performance of sterile perfection - Mozart by numbers. I'm grateful Haitink spared us the syrup, but this performance needed more seasoning to bring it to life.

But the inexorable tread that sucked Haitink's Mozart dry brought Brahms's first Symphony to life. The tautly responsive CSO let him pull and mould those long lines, leaping and swooping with feline ease. The final movement's famous quotation from Beethoven's 9th became both banal and profound, gloriously uplifting. In less wise hands, this orchestra could become a blunt weapon of meticulously-crafted tedium. In Haitink's, it's magic. Sometimes, anyway.

Dorothea Röschmann at Wigmore Hall

Dorothea Röschmann / Graham Johnson - Wigmore Hall, 20 November 2008

Schumann Gedichte der Königin Maria Stuart
Wolf Nimmersatte Liebe; An eine Äolsharfe; Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens; Denk' es, o Seele!; Im Frühling; Gesang Weylas; Begegnung
Mahler Rheinlegendchen, Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen, Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht, Lob des hohen Verstandes and Verlorne Müh from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'
Brahms 8 Zigeunerlieder

Encores: Schubert Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt; Wolf In der Frühe; Mahler Selbstgefühl from 'Des Knaben Wunderhorn'

Dorothea Röschmann's pearly top notes still emerge effortlessly, but her voice seems to be in a process of transition. It's gaining weight, the centre is dropping, but it's not quite there yet. To speculate how much of this is natural evolution and how much is being hurried along by Röschmann's acceptance of some meatier roles recently and in the near future is probably fruitless (but nevertheless 'interesting'). 

Schumann's Mary Stuart settings are low-lying for a soprano, and Röschmann never sounded quite at ease in the range. It was not a promising start. But the rest of her programme rarely dipped quite as low, and she seemed more comfortable vocally and more freely expressive.

Her recital art is all about nuance and inflection. Although she's capable of grand gesture and bold dramatic expression in the opera house, she wisely leaves that behind in the concert hall.

We saw a small, solid woman in a black lace strapless sheath and matching bolero, her sensible brown bob uncombed, her face makeup-free, like a librarian trying on a party frock. Her comportment has a stillness born of inner calm. Her facial expression is more conversational then stagey. There are none of the diva flourishes employed by the less wise, so distancing in the intimate atmosphere of the Wigmore Hall. Röschmann's effects are achieved more subtly, almost by voice alone.

She explored some of Wolf's most erotically-charged Mörike settings, traversing seamlessly from the sly innuendo of Erstes Liebeslied eines Mädchens to the nostalgic Im Frühling, always conscious of both the words and their meaning.

She was equally at home in the rustic idiom of the second half and its folk song texts drawn by Mahler and Brahms. Here, as if to compensate for the lack of lyrical subtlety, she employed a much broader range of vocal characterisation, peaking with the animal farm of Mahler's Lob des hohen Verstandes, its donkey, cuckoo and nightingale all brilliantly evoked. If the Zigeuner Lieder all had a rather samey feel, despite their stirring rhythms, this is as much Brahms's fault as Röschmann's. The contrast with the first of her three encores, where she completely inhabited the tormented teenager of Schubert's plaintive Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt, showed this only too clearly.

The concert was recorded for broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 25 November 2008 at 7 p.m (that's today!) and available for a week afterwards on the IPlayer.

A double helping of Matthias Goerne

London Sinfonietta / Martyn Brabbins / Matthias Goerne / Thomas Larcher - Queen Elizabeth Hall, 30 September 2008
  and
Matthias Goerne / Alexander Schmalcz - Queen Elizabeth Hall, 2 October 2008

Toru Takemitsu Rain Coming
Thomas Larcher Die Nacht der Verlorenen
Thomas Larcher Antennas...Requiem for H
Toru Takemitsu Tree Line
Thomas Larcher Bose Zellen (Piano Concerto)

Dmitry Shostakovich Suite on poems by Michelangelo Buonarroti, Op.145
Hugo Wolf 3 Michelangelo Lieder
Johannes Brahms 4 Serious Songs

I can only assume London wallets are feeling the credit squeeze. Perhaps that surefire audience repellent 'new music' had something to do with the small turnout for Matthias Goerne's concert with the London Sinfonietta on Tuesday, but I was shocked to see the Queen Elizabeth Hall barely a quarter full for his lieder recital later in the week. Of course many of the target audience hit Wigmore Hall instead for the crazily-scheduled competing attractions of Christian Gerhaher, but even so.....

The centrepiece of the first concert was the world premiere of a song cycle specially written for Matthias Goerne by Austrian composer Thomas Larcher. The perfectly-titled Die Nacht der Verlorenen ("the night of the lost") links fragments of unfinished poetry by the Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann in a single dark stream of song running through a shifting musical landscape.  Modern if not especially novel textures like high whiny violins, rumbling fundamental brass and damped piano are applied to even older forms.

So its not revolutionary, but Larcher's gift is to hug the text to the music with such extraordinary sensitivity that it is both completion and response. It's so exquisitely crafted to Goerne's dark, melting baritone that it's impossible to imagine anyone else singing it, and he delivered it with utter security and searing commitment.

Larcher is also a pianist. Dressed ninja-style in a long black shirt and pants with little skippy rubber shoes, he performed a couple of his own works, Antennas, a short solo piece, and Bose Zellen (sic) a piano concerto. Both involved poking around in the piano with lumps of metal and stone, something I grew out of at the age of about 7, and still pains me to watch trained and talented musicians doing. Although the results were more melodic and less purely percussive than most work of this type, I'm not in a rush to hear either again. I'd rather have had an immediate repeat of Die Nacht der Verlorenen, a work I fear that despite its quality is not going to get many outings (any info about future performances anywhere in Europe, please let me know).

In the middle of the concert, Fraser Trainer interviewed Thomas Larcher, who came across as rather sweet and humble. He covered much of the same ground in an earlier interview, recorded at Larcher's stunningly beautiful alpine home, below:

Matthias Goerne was on top form again for his recital with Alexander Schmalcz at the piano two days later. His Shostakovich Michelangelo suite was a little effortful - technically secure but lacking that last ounce of connection with the Russian text.

But the second half's Wolf and Brahms saw him on firmer ground. Such was the intensity of the first group of songs that the audience, instead of bursting into applause at the end, sat there transfixed and silent, and the Brahms Serious Songs launched without a break. Gripping and thoroughly inhabited, every bit as 'godless' as Brahms would have wished, and a million miles from the dull piety of most interpretations, it was a performance almost embarrassing in its intensity. What a shame so few people got to hear it.

Berliner Philharmoniker - beautiful isn't always best

Proms 64 and 65: Berliner Philharmoniker / Simon Rattle - Royal Albert Hall, 2 and 3 September 2008

Wagner Tristan und Isolde - Prelude and Liebestod, Messiaen Turangalîla Symphony

Brahms Symphony No.3, Shostakovich Symphony No.10

If you've ever seen photos of Simon Rattle in action, you might assume he just stands there with his gob gated open all night, like an angler fish on the ocean bed. In reality, he talks non-stop, or at least mouths. I wish I could lip read. I'm pretty sure I caught a couple of "help me"s but the rest is a mystery.

I was able to study the Rattle platform manner at close hand on Tuesday night from my surprisingly pricy (£23) seat in the choir stalls, tucked behind the Berlin Philharmonic's gleaming tubular bells and pleasingly close to the Berlin motor itself, the tigerish growl of the basses.

Of course a lot of water can be lost through an open mouth. That's why marathon runners keep theirs shut, and overheated doggies don't.

No wonder Sir Simon needed a mini-break halfway through the hour-plus Turangalîla Symphony to chug back some water behind the piano, coaxing the obliging violas into a bit of quite unnecessary 'retuning' to cover.

It was a wonderfully lucid account of this lengthy and problematical, inherently episodic work. If talent borrows and genius steals, then Messiaen could be a musical Einstein. Rattle drew out the direct quotations from Wagner's Tristan more clearly than I've ever heard before - and of course it did no harm to hear the wellspring itself, exquisitely presented, at the start of the evening.

Messiaen's anointed, Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the piano and Tristan Murail at the ondes Martenot, brought a special authority. Where the work could have tipped over into Gershwin-pastiche vulgarity, Rattle wisely settled on festive exuberance.  

There was a more honed predictability about the second concert. Despite the near-perfection of the orchestra's playing - or perhaps because of it - Rattle seemed content to lay back and bathe in the immaculately polished sound.  While there's nothing wrong with loveliness for its own sake, I find this orchestra at their best when they're nearer the edges of their comfort zone, as they were with the previous night's Messiaen.

 

  

 

Daniel Barenboim's Divan returns to Proms

Proms 38 and 39: West-Eastern Divan Orchestra / Barenboim - Royal Albert Hall, 14 August 2008

Haydn Sinfonia Concertante in B flat major, for oboe, bassoon, violin, cello
Schoenberg Variations for Orchestra, Op.31
Brahms Symphony No.4
Encore: Wagner Prelude, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Pierre Boulez Mémoriale (... explosante-fixe ... Originel)
Stravinsky L'histoire du soldat

The surgical-gloved bag checks at the door and the deliberate omission of orchestra members' names from the programme were jolting reminders that for there's more to this mixed Arab-Israeli orchestra than music.

It is I suppose inevitable that the incredible feat of simply creating and sustaining a cross-divide orchestra tends to overshadow the purely musical successes. But gradually, Barenboim has shaped this assortment of musicians - professional and amateur, experienced and novice, young and even younger - into an outstanding orchestra. The fact that tonight's brass section included a few ringers from the Simon Bolivar Orchestra doesn't diminish that achievement.

What is really special about this orchestra is not just that Israeli and Arab sit side-by-side, but that it mixes such a wide range of experience. Tonight one of the Israelis was concertmaster of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Guy Braunstein, and sharing his stand was a ten year old Palestinian prodigy.

When leader Michael Barenboim bust a string in the Brahms, Guy Braunstein, sitting back in the third row, was the one who proffered a violin swap. Playing the last movement on three strings, using every spare moment to unpick the broken string so he could swiftly replace it with the spare in his pocket before the encore, he gave his junior partner a lesson in crisis management he won't forget for a while, on top of all the musical stuff. Where else could a ten year old, however talented, get that sort of training?

And why don't we have something similar in Britain? Bringing together warring nations may be beyond the scope of British orchestras, but putting together a group from mixed musical backgrounds could rejuvenate the approach of the professionals as well as giving the youngsters the sort of practical training they could never receive from any youth orchestra, however good.

They gave Haydn's Sinfonia Concertante an elegant, hard-edged workout, if rather short on charm. Barenboim, with the slightly disdainful air of a man obliged to hold his wife's handbag, occasionally stood back to investigate his pockets or swab himself with a handkerchief. Perhaps he was just demonstrating that the orchestra and soloists were well-enough rehearsed to motor along without his hand at the wheel.

He swung back to full-attention mode and Schoenberg's Variations for Orchestra emerged in luxuriant bloom, at once precisely delineated and expressively glowing, a scorching rebuttal to anyone who claims that twelve tone music is automatically incomprehensible or devoid of all feeling.

A short-breathed opening belied an expansive reading of Brahms' Fourth Symphony.  A balance weighted more toward the formal than the expressive element was perhaps to be expected, and Barenboim's sculptural definition securely contained its romantic sweep. I found myself impressed rather than moved.

It was a shame the enthusiastic applause and cheering had to be accompanied by an undercurrent of booing  - no doubt directed at the political rather than the musical element, but grossly unfair on the musicians.

Having commented that he's usually asked to say what's wrong with the Middle East, Barenboim claimed "you've just heard what’s right with the Middle East” before baiting another tiresome faction of his opponents with a rousing encore of Wagner’s first Meistersinger prelude.

More cheering, more booing, and I wasn't sure if the Palestinian flag unrolled in the Arena was a gesture of support or criticism - either way, it struck a jarringly divisive note next to the hugging and handshaking of the orchestra members.

Most of the orchestra finished for the night at this point, leaving just a handful to return an hour later for the late night concert. This began with the brief shards of Pierre Boulez's Stravinsky tribute Mémoriale (... explosante-fixe ... Originel), followed by the surprise appearance of the composer himself on stage.

Then came another living legend, this time actor/writer/director Patrice Chéreau, reading all the speaking parts in Stravinsky's L'histoire du soldat. This work has too many words and too little music to be improved by such an economically-textured approach, even when the performer is as distinguished as Chéreau. And of course the condensation of all roles into one performer limits spontaneity and removes one layer of engagement. Although Chéreau's performance was powerful and charismatic - or maybe because it was - the music took on the character of interludes to a monologue, illustrative asides. This was far from Stravinsky's intent. It's a difficult work to pull off, and while this performance displayed the content effectively enough, it didn't communicate the essence.

 

 

Krystian Zimerman - one keyboard is not enough

Krystian Zimerman - Royal Festival Hall, 27 May 2008

Bach Partita No.2 in C minor
Beethoven Piano Sonata in C minor, Op.111
Brahms 4 Pieces for piano, Op.119
Szymanowski Variations on a Polish folk theme in B minor, Op.10

A piano is a machine. Sounds are produced when the hammers hit the strings, not when the fingers hit the keyboard, a fundamental fact often ignored when we talk about a particular pianist's 'tone'. If I strike a key, it sounds the same as if any other pianist had struck it. It's quite different from instruments like the violin, where you'd spot instantly whether it was me or Joshua Bell drawing the bow across a string. With the piano, it's only in a sequence of notes, their relative duration, volume, pressure, that the characteristics of the individual emerge.

Most pianists, if they address the inevitability of tone quality at all, do so in generalised ways like selecting a particular piano. Krystian Zimerman's approach is far more interventionist. A recent FT interview reports that he "impregnates the hammers that strike the strings with specific chemicals, works on his piano's voicing and sound, has devised his own method of transportation, and permits no other technician to touch his instrument."

Unfortunately I missed his discussion with Jessica Duchen prior to this evening's concert, so I'm not sure exactly what his special preparations were. But from the bright, pinging tone, almost clavichord-like, of the opening Bach Partita it was obvious that his adjustments had been radical.

I've never heard a piano sound quite like this. The notes popped out hard and round like pearls, each perfectly self-contained. Combined with Zimerman's immaculate technique, each note evenly articulated, his lilting romantic gloss, and idiosyncratic tempos it was quite unlike any Bach I've ever heard. (Unlike any Bach that Bach himself would have heard, too, so not for the purists.)  Zimerman invited us to inspect the brushstrokes rather than look at the whole painting, and I was happy to absorb the sound on a purely sensory level. It was all over far too soon - with Zimerman's Eddie Van Halen arm-swinging flourish hinting there might be a surprising hint of showbiz tart lurking beneath the fearsomely brainy exterior.

Next came the clever bit. Zimerman sloped off for a couple of minutes (no more), and a technician sped on stage, whipped the keyboard out of the piano, and replaced it with another one (see photo right). A quick screw into place, and that was it.

I'm not sure exactly what the swap achieved from a technical perspective, but the sound changed dramatically to a far more conventional tone, the notes velvety and diffused at the edges.

Zimerman's fantastic, near effortless technical control seemed in some ways a hindrance in the final Beethoven sonata, which only truly comes alive when it's stood up to and wrestled down. A pianist like Barenboim who finds it at the limits of his technical capacities can bring a more vivid sense of struggle. From Zimerman, it all sounded just a bit too easy, a mountain that was soared over rather than scaled.

If the piano was tinkered with again during the interval, I didn't notice. Zimerman seemed more in tune with the Brahms, extrovert but intimate, and the luridly spectacular Szymanowski than he had with the Beethoven. He exuded a simple and engaging joy in performing and a ravishingly supple technique, every note precisely at his command. It wasn't quite heart-stopping stuff, but then that's not really the nature of these particular pieces anyway. And it didn't stop him receiving a thunderous reception, possibly as much for who he is and the simple fact that he chose to perform here as for the performance itself. No encore though.

A lengthy and interesting interview here.