Posts Tagged ‘Berlin Philharmonic’

Newer Entries »

Rocky Seas, a Waltz and a Violin Concerto

Friday, October 26th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

The programming of the Berlin Philharmonic, while reportedly having gravitated away from the players’ specialty in German repertoire since Sir Simon Rattle took the reins a decade ago, not only gives equal weight to post-Romantic repertoire but consistently illuminates connections between works which seem disparate at first glance. Andris Nelsons conducted the orchestra on Wednesday in a program of Britten, Widmann, Debussy and Ravel that yielded a powerful sense of emotional coherence. Jörg Widmann, a prolific German clarinettist and composer whose opera Babylon premieres in Munich next week (also featuring MA.com New Artist of the Month Anna Prohaska), combines neo-Romantic expressivity with avant-garde textures and unrestrained modern angst, much in the spirit of his teacher Wolfgang Rihm, yet in its own impulsive search. His Violin Concerto unfolds in a single, approximately 30-minute movement with a driving, lamenting melody at its center, alternately spurring and diffracting the colors of the orchestra. Structurally, it recalls Rihm works such as Gesungene Zeit, a chamber concerto written for Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Soloist Christian Tetzlaff, who premiered Widmann’s concerto in 2007, brought out the music’s direct dramatic qualities in plangent lyricism that escalates into an existential struggle richocheting throughout the orchestra. The players of the Philharmonic performed in precise coordination and with sensitivity under Nelsons. After a long pause toward the end of the piece the music returns with a violent snap in the low strings until the soloist, supported by the violins, climbs out of its tortured state. A celeste chord and gentle gong crash provide closure. This sense of eerie loneliness also penetrated the final moments opening work, the Passcaglia op.33b from the opera Peter Grimes. The soulful viola solo performed over celeste at the close, foreshadowing the death of the persecuted fisherman’s second apprentice, evokes a deserted beach and grey skies, a struggle already expired. Nelsons intelligently gave the viola section emphasis by placing it downstage in front of the celli. The aching string passages in the body of the work, punctured by anxious woodwinds, were a bit studied in this reading by the Philharmonic, but the fluid communication of the players kept the balance naturally in place.

A more lively vision of the sea emerged in Debussy’s poetic masterpiece La Mer, a series of three ‘symphonic sketches’ whose free structure and painterly landscapes have inspired everyone from Luciano Berio to John Williams. The orchestra found its stride in the second movement Jeux de vagues, capturing the music’s buoyancy with more ease than the surging, mysterious quality of the opening De l’aube à midi sur la mer, although wind solos were impeccable throughout. Nelsons brought sweep and youthful energy to Debussy’s vision of dancing waves which escalates into a battle between wind and water in the final Dialogue du vent et de la mer. The impending turbulence emerged with keen dramatic timing before subsiding into triumphant serenity. Ravel’s La Valse, conceived as a poème choréographique, follows the opposite trajectory, gathering its forces into a Viennese waltz à la Johann Strauß before marching brass attacks and Spanish-inflected castanets force the melody to fragment and spin out of control. Program notes infer that Ravel was not only impacted by the fall of the Hapsburg Empire in the First World War but the death of this mother in 1916. The strings of the Berlin Philharmonic reaffirmed their elegant culture of playing as the demonic dance unfurled with a sense of desperation that had been tacitly present the entire evening.

rebeccaschmid.info

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Musikfest Berlin salutes the Stars and Stripes

Friday, September 14th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Blame it on Cage. Or the Marshall Plan. It is impossible to escape the American canon as the season opens here with the Musikfest Berlin (August 31-September 18), an annual festival dedicated to 20th-century music. The event falls just as Europe’s major festivals are drawing to a close and often struggles for a coherent dramaturgical arc. This year though, the theme is almost too linear. With Porgy and Bess, Moses and Aron, and a new production of Apartmenthouse 1776 on the program, it is hard to ignore the adage Berlin strives to be the next New York. Program notes by Artistic Directors Thomas Oberender and Winrich Hopp even point out that the presidential elections are coming up this year, although one can assume that John Adams would have come to conduct Nixon in China with the BBC Singers and Symphony Orchestra under any other circumstances. Robert Wilson also made a cameo appearance at the Akademie der Künste reading Cage’s Lecture on Nothing; it’s a shame that the event seems so anticlimactic given that the academy began celebrating Cage’s centennial an entire year in advance, exploring his legacy in every possible interdisciplinary form known to man.

It nevertheless must be said that the festival boasts an impressive line-up, with talks by Gerard Mortier and Nuria Schönberg around her late father’s biblical opera and ensembles ranging from the London Symphony Orchestra and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra to the city’s well-groomed local crop. Charles Ives, arguably the U.S.’s most underappreciated composer both at home and broad, has no less than nine works performed, including new orchestral versions of a selection form his 114 Songs penned by John Adams, Toshio Hosokawa, and Georg-Friedrich Haas. At the Philharmonie, Ingo Metzmacher led the Berlin Philharmonic in an all-American program featuring Pierre Laurent-Aimard in a new edition of Ives’ Fourth Symphony. The score completed by Thomas Broadhead hopes to have made the composer´s intentions more clear not only through more legible notation but also a precise outline of the issues a conductor must consider as he develops an interpretation. Metzmacher opted to conduct the symphony without assistants, as it was conceived, relying on the chamber-like communication skills of the Philharmonic while enlisting star oboist Albrecht Mayer to briefly lead the brass and percussion at the start of the second movement.

The symphony, despite its structural complexity, forges a clear path toward spiritual transcendentalism, interweaving church hymns and patriotic marches with Mahlerian obstinacy into a sprawling, multi-dimensional score. Metzmacher and the orchestra held together the music’s overlapping textures with admirable precision and care for balance in timbres ranging from glassy strings to brooding brass. The distant choir ensemble of five violins and harp performed offstage from an unearthly realm, while Aimard’s introspective but animated playing trapped the piano in memory in the dream-like collage of the second movement. The strings of the Philharmonic, led by Daniel Stabwara as concert master, brought smooth expressivity to the rich, neo-Romantic phrases of the fugal third movement, while the chorus (Ernst Senff Chor Berlin) entered serenely above the profane confusion in the finale.

Latin-inspired music of the mid-twentieth century provided the theme for the rest of the evening with Gershwin’s Cuban Ouverture, Antheil’s Jazz Symphony and, the Symphonic Dances from Bernstein’s West Side Story. The dance rhythms could have used more swing in the Gershwin, but became catchier in the final Animato. Metzmacher brought out opaque dissonances with a strong hand, while wind solos reaffirmed the orchestra’s standards for impeccable elegance. While the “Cool Fugue” of Bernstein´s dances was not quite streetwise enough, the “Somewhere” Adagio was meltingly beautiful. Antheil took a more modernist approach to his repurposing of jazz, particularly in his writing for the piano. The musicians remained on point in a collage-like development reminiscent of Ives, while Metzmacher could have brought more spontaneity to rhythmically playful entrances.

Across town on the Gendarmenmarkt, German violinist Isabelle Faust joined the Konzerthaus Orchestra for Feldman’s Violin and Orchestra conducted by Emilio Pomarico. This final piece of a series of works for soloist and orchestra is also Feldman’s longest orchestral work with a duration of approximately one hour, premiered in 1984 with the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Faust was well warmed up to the technical subtleties of her part, having recorded the work with the Bavarian Radio Symphony in 2001. She refracted hushed, fragmented melodies and precisely wrought microtonal glissandi against the intricate atmospherics of the orchestra, which responds to the violin’s inquiries with an understated tension that seems to stretch time out into infinity. The Konzerthaus Orchestra retained quiet focus throughout the work, with all the right tuning in place, although the sections are not able to overcome a certain roughness around the edges. A friend who composes in post-Feldman style also called on Pomarico for trying to be expressive with the tempo rather than just beating out time and allowing the music to speak for itself.

Pomarico’s use of rubato proved more amenable to Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony, which he opened the program in dedication to the recently deceased composer Emmanuel Nunes, but the tempo slowed down too much toward the end of the opening Allegro, and the Andante lacked the steady pace that feels like a slow march into heaven. Technical blemishes unfortunately also detracted from the performance’s Gestalt. The strings entered with fiery attacks but were sometimes marred by a husky sound which cannot quite do justice to Schubert’s soulful phrases. Still, as the understated beauty of the Andante floated in time, one felt an unusual sense of historical continuity.

As Feldman admitted at a seminar in Germany in 1972, “there’s an aspect of my attitude about being a composer that is like mourning…something that has to do with, say, Schubert leaving me.” Feldman later disclosed that he didn’t like to discuss the issue publicly, perhaps because of his determination to overcome the overwhelming presence of 19th-century German tradition, which was to some extent inextricably linked for the composer to the horrors of the Holocaust. That his later works managed to preserve a certain amount of sentimentality as they turned their back on western convention only speaks to the lasting power of the New York School which, ironically, is worshipped with an unparalleled fervor in Germany.

Musikfest Berlin, through September 18.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Claus Guth’s Forest-bound ‘Don Giovanni’ at the Staatsoper; Musikfestspiele Potsdam’s new Pleasure Garden

Friday, June 29th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Few operas in history have gripped the human psyche to the same extent as Don Giovanni. Pushkin, Kierkegaard, and Bernard Shaw count among the literary figures to have written their own account of the daemonic seductor since Mozart and Da Ponte staged their ‘drama giocoso,’ a tragi-comedy, in Prague. Since the 19th century, some champions of the work have further added to the opera’s moral ambiguity by excluding the final sextet, “Questo é il fin di chi fa mal/e de’ perfidi la morte/alla vita è sempre ugual” (this is the end for evildoers/death and life are the same for the villainous) after Don Giovanni is sent to hell. Meanwhile, his female conquests have been increasingly interpreted as consenting perpetrators of his sexual games rather than just victims and continue to provide stage directors with ample fodder. Robert Carsen, in his new production for La Scala last December, sets the Commendatore’s murder by Don Giovanni in the chambers of Donna Anna (Anna Netrebko), leaving her white slip covered in blood as she holds her father’s dead body on the same bed where she frolicked with the murderer. In the final scene, the accursed aristocrat reemerges from hell puffing on a cigarette while his avengers descend into infernal smoke.

Carsen’s vision was supposed to travel to Berlin this month as a guest production of the Staatsoper until it emerged that it would be impossible to adapt sets to the company’s current home in the Schiller Theater (the company’s 18th-century headquarters on the Boulevard Unter den Linden are currently undergoing renovation, recently delayed—again—until 2015). In another strange twist, La Netrebko, the highlight of a live screening that will be broadcast to an outdoor plaza, announced in May that she would withdraw in order to make time for her son. The Swedish soprano Maria Bengtsson was whisked in and Claus Guth’s 2008 production, mounted during Staatsoper Intendant Jürgen Flimm’s tenure at the Salzburg Festival, quietly slated as a replacement. The star appeal was not entirely lost as Netrebko’s husband Erwin Schrott remained on the roster as Don Giovanni’s sidekick, Leporello, while the original Zerlina (Anna Prohaska), her Masetto (Stefan Kocan) and Don Ottavio (Giuseppe Filianoti) provided continuity for an event that has been touted as a highlight of the season.

The Guth staging, seen at its German premiere on June 24, takes a dark, pseudo-cinematic approach to the opera, confining the action to the middle of a dark forest with a rusty bus stop serving as the only manmade shelter. The curtain opens to a beer-chugging, ex-convict like Leporello while Donna Anna rips off the Don’s shirt in the background. In the showdown with the Commendatore, Don Giovanni is shot in the stomach with a plastic gun and walks around through the remainder of the opera with an open wound. During Donna Anna’s aria “Non mi dir,” he has already become a specter. Meanwhile, a business-like Donna Elvira chases after her one-time husband in heels, gets stoned out of her mind with Leporello, and lies on the forest floor with the dying anti-hero during her aria “Mi tradi.” In the first act, Zerlina and her bridesmaids emerge like wood nymphs in the thick of what appear to be real pines (sets and costumes by Christian Schmidt) before the stage turns to reveal a tree swing that will serve as Don Giovanni’s seduction grounds. The rotating stage spins at its fastest when Donna Anna and Don Ottavio pull up in a sedan, although they are ultimately as damned to roaming the forest as much as any other character.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

While it is hard to deny the poetic weight of setting Don Giovanni in the woods—the opening to Dante’s Inferno, “Mi ritrovai per una selva oscura” ‘I found myself in a dark forest’ is the first thing that comes to mind—the production is mired in Regie gimmicks that undermine its psychological depth. Staring at tree trunks for two full acts also proved monotonous. Guth omits the final sextet, leaving Don Giovanni to fall into the earth after the Commendatore returns to a wintry forest (further emphasizing the notion of a terrestrial hell in which the characters cannot find the way toward redemption), yet scenes such as Don Giovanni and Leporello roasting marshmallows and the senseless presence of immaculate, bourgeois dressed characters in the brambles linger irritatingly within the director’s otherwise morbid vision. To be sure, his concept is fully in keeping with the opera’s legendary blend of comic and tragic elements, and his surrealist take on Don Giovanni’s existence, trapped somewhere between life and death, could not be more dead-on in literary terms, yet the production demands a level of intellectual engagement that supersedes its theatrical appeal. 

Nevertheless, Guth was blessed with a cast that largely rose above the quixotic circumstances vocally and theatrically. The audience hardly seemed to miss Netrebko as Bengtsson, a statuesque blonde with natural allure, portrayed the distraught Donna Anna with creamy tones and fine attention to dramatic nuance. Her voice was tearful in opening stanzas of “Non mi dir,” kept painfully slow by Music Director Daniel Barenboim, while she revealed unblemished strength in her swift declaration that heaven may someday forgive her. As Don Giovanni, Christopher Maltman evoked more of a modern playboy than an irresistibly virile predator, yet his high-lying baritone warmed up to give a fine rendition of his aria “Deh vieni alla finestra,” and his fear was vividly credible in the final scene. Schrott nearly stole the show as the riotous buffoon and manipulator Leporello, his booming bass and excellent Italian diction carrying magnetically in the dry acoustics of the Schiller Theater.

It is almost unfair to cast Elvira, often considered a mezzo role, with a soprano as eloquent as Dorothea Röschmann, and yet her acting skills do not always rise to the same level. While her rich tone and technical polish were the vocal stand-out of the evening, her presence more easily called to mind the countess in Le Nozze di Figaro, which she sang earlier this season, than Don Giovanni’s brash consort. As Zerlina, Prohaska (Musical America’s current “New Artist of the Month”) lived up to her usual standards of musical and thespian excellence, effortlessly singing through “La ci darem la mano” as she pumped herself on a swing. Kocan was a convincingly exasperated Masetto, although his voice retains a thick Slavic quality that interferes with the demands of singing in Italian. By contrast, Filianoti, in the role of Ottavio, cultivates a flexible technique that was ideal for the coloratura runs of the aria “Il mio tesoro,” yet his nasal timbre lacks body. He also failed to remain in time with Barenboim on more than one occasion. Ukranian Bass Alexander Tsymbalyuk was an imposing, expressively full-voiced Commendatore.

Barenboim led the Staatskapelle in a performance that never lacked dynamic shape and dramatic purpose, sensitively accompanying the singers at all times with great emotional depth, yet his tempo relations in Mozart were occasionally perplexing. The second half of “La ci darem la mano,” “Andiam mio bene” was twice as fast as the opening. The orchestra, despite its rich, Germanic sound, is also not terribly flattered by the acoustics of its current home, and its attacks could be rounder. Despite the odds stacked against this production, Barenboim proved that his ensemble is the best in town for Mozart operas, even if the composer is rolling is in his grave as Don Giovanni continues to wander the forest.

The production runs through July 6.

(c) Monika Rittershaus

Out at Friedrich the Great’s old stomping grounds…

The city of Potsdam is currently inundated with tributes to the tercentenary of Friedrich the Great, from Das Musical Friedrich to an exhibit of personal items entitled Friederisiko that stretches from the rococo palace Sanssouci to the Neue Palais, built at the end of the Seven Years’ War. While the 18th-century Prussian king may be best remembered for an aggressive military campaign that annexed parts of modern-day Poland and the Czech Republic in an escalating power struggle with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ‘enlightened despot’ was also a great patron of the arts. A flutist and amateur composer who penned 100 sonatas and four symphonies, Friedrich included C.P.E. Bach and Quantz among his court musicians; enjoyed a legendary if tumultuous friendship with Voltaire; and, fittingly for his time, favored the French language above German. Homages to “Old Fritz,” as he has been nicknamed, have extended to a new album released by Berlin Philharmonic Principal Flutist and soloist Emmanuel Pahud, Flöten König. The Swiss musician even dressed up earlier this season on the grounds of Sanssouci.

Potsdam’s annual Musikfestspiele (June 9-24) similarly seized upon the opportunity to transform city grounds into a courtly celebration, including a “Sanssouci Prom Concert” in the garden of the Neue Palais and ensembles as such as the Freiburger Baroque Orchester and the Orchestra of the Age of the Enlightenment in baroque and classical repertoire. The festival also included a “picnic concert” for the first time this year. The setting on Potsdam’s Freundschaftsinsel, a picturesque botanical garden nestled quietly away from the post-war architecture surrounding the main station just minutes away, proved a fitting escape for the occasion, replete with a couple in 18th-century garb pushing a tram that carried a baby anachronistically sucking a pacifier. Locals festively spread out their blankets and picnic fare, some including white tablecloths and prosecco on ice with an eye to winning the competition that was underway for “most inventive arrangement” (Potsdam, while only an hour away from Berlin and Friedrich’s summer getaway of choice, maintains its own brand of provincial flair).

The opening concert, however, represented a decidedly non-continental take on celebrations for the Flute King, featuring the band Fine Arts Brass in an all-British program. As both a visiting journalist from a U.K. publication and one of the group’s members individually commented, it felt “surreal.” The concert fell just on the heels of the Jubilee Weekend in England, and the brass band naturally included an arrangement of Handel’s Water Music. The group’s leading trumpeter Simon Lenton, moderating between numbers with a refreshing blend of humor and informative material, joked that the German native was “England’s finest composer.” Yet the program ranged from arrangements of Dowland and Purcell to a suite by Anthony Holborne that is usually performed for Christmas and Farewell to Stromness by Peter Maxwell Davies, living proof in his position as “Master of the Queen’s Music” that the art of patronage has not died.

In conversation with the festival’s Artistic Director Andrea Palent, it emerged that the event was partly modeled after “Last Night of the Proms,” which moves from the concert hall out into Hyde Park and other outdoor venues. She also mentioned the 18th-century tradition of “pleasure gardens,” which according to Palent spread its influence throughout Europe in Friedrich’s time (although the fact remains that he was Francophile). Palent also grounded the concept in a more general principle of the Enlightenment as championed by figures such as Rousseau—“back to nature”—saying that she hoped the outdoor setting would affect listeners on a sensual as well as intellectual level.

As the Meccore Quartet, a young group of Polish musicians, performed from string quartets by Haydn, Mozart, and Mendelssohn during the second part of the program, the music indeed served to heighten the sensory experience of sitting on the lawn and breathing the summer air rather than become an isolated spectacle. While one of the violinists mentioned afterwards that they had been concerned about acoustics, the music felt as if it were meant to be played in this setting, which in fact camouflaged technical and dynamic details that would have been more apparent to a critic’s ear in the concert hall. In an age of technological oversaturation, the event proved a fleeting reminder of the values that bred 18th-century art, even if a retiree couldn’t refrain from chasing after the musicians to take pictures with her digital camera.

 A gabled sculpture from the garden of the Neue Palais © Holger Kirsch for the Musikfestspiele Potsdam Sanssouci

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Nézet-Séguin performs Epic Romance with the Berlin Philharmonic

Friday, June 22nd, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Conducting the Berlin Philharmonic is no small feat for a 37-year-old, and Yannick Nézet-Séguin—returning to the orchestra’s podium for the first time since his 2010 debut—had no intention to the make the event a small affair. The newly minted music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, seen at the Philharmonie on June 16, juxtaposed Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet overture with the full three movements of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé as sung by the Rundfunkchor Berlin. It took Ravel three years to complete this ‘choreographic symphony’ to a commission by Diaghilev in 1909, and the score is usually reduced to two-part suite arrangement (penned by composer in 1911) for concert performance. The 1912 premiere of the full ballet in Paris did not go down as a success following Diaghilev’s open disinterest in Ravel’s score during rehearsal and the opening of Débussy’s L’Après-midi d’un faune the previous month, featuring provocative choreography by Nizhinsky that usurped public attention.

While Daphnis et Chloé reveals Ravel’s intricate powers of orchestration at their height, with rich impressionist tapestries and pictorial evocations of celestial groves, its subtleties struggle to reign in the listener for its full duration (just under an hour) without the presence of a ballet corps. Much like Stravinsky’s Apollon Musagète, which Sir Simon Rattle conducted last season alongside Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, it is—at least based on the performance I saw—a difficult piece to pull off in the concert hall. Nézet-Séguin had a clear sense of what we wanted from the orchestra and did not let the reins slack on a body of players who often dictate what is happening onstage at least as much as the conductor, and his French-speaking roots certainly worked to the performance’s advantage through the ethereal ebbs and flows of Ravel’s music, yet the Philharmonic’s handsome elegance remained a bit staid for moments of sheer nymph-like grace. The orchestra nevertheless thrived through the score’s transparent textures, such as the rapid flute and harp over muted strings that imitate the sound of rushing brooklets before building into a majestic view over the nymphs’ prairie in the third tableau.

The story, adapted by Michael Fokine from an ancient Greek romance, tells of the courtship between the goatherd Daphnis and the shepherdess Chloé, who is kidnapped by pirates but saved by her father, Pan. Once Daphnis and Chloé are reunited, a tumultuous final dance of the nymphs celebrates their union. Ravel weaves a simple two-note motive throughout the score to designate the pair’s mystical realm, easily evoking the earth’s breaking in the closing scene. The chorus is deployed atmospherically to enhance a sense of rapture, at one point emerging accompanied. The Rundfunkchor, which recorded this work with Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo in 2010, produced glorious tones here, particularly in the soprano section. Concert Master Guy Braunstein delivered his solo numbers with deeply sensitive musicianship, evoking Daphnis’ approach of Chloé and the young Nymph wandering in the meadow with gleaming tone. The flute and clarinet solos of the Lycanion dances emerged with characteristic elegance and fluidity of communication.

Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet, officially designated as a ‘fantasy overture,’ similarly illustrates the stormy Shakespearean love story in a programmatic development of contrasting tableaus, moving from the prescient concerns of Friar Lawrence before yielding to the feuding Capulets and Montagues. The rich cellos and woodwinds of the opening Andante revealed the Philharmonic in top form, and the violins lamented with a well-rounded vibrato under Braunstein. Nézet-Séguin led a tight, fiery Allegro, and the longing wind solos during the couple’s first meeting on Juliet’s balcony left little to be desired. Still, having recently heard the Marinsky, the seas of string pianissimi had a slightly brittle quality. The orchestra redeemed itself with the clean attacks and immaculate synchrony of the whirlwind inner movement. The elegiac homage to the lovers in the final Moderato, punctuated by the theme of the warring factions, burned with tension.

The program opened with Berio’s Sequenza IXa for clarinet solo, a virtuosic yet poetic exploration that Walter Seyfarth, a player with the Philharmonic since 1985, dispatched with impressive technical control and dynamic nuance. The piece takes the form of a structured yet unstable train of thought, evolving through runs across the instrument’s full range into a kind of internal dialogue that culminates in a blaring high note which is juxtaposed with increasingly vehement melodic opposition until it is echoed in resigned resolution. Allusions to the vocalisations of Berio’s spouse and muse Cathy Berberian and saxophone-like motifs expand the clarinet’s dimensions into nearly operatic planes. While the connection of this piece with the rest of the program remained unclear—an unusual occurrence at the Philharmonic—it is heartening to watch Berio become standard fare in the German capital.

The Philharmonie at dusk

The Philharmonie on Potsdamer Platz (c) Schirmer/Berliner Philharmoniker

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Korngold replaces Golijov; Double-Portrait of Nancarrow and Vivier

Friday, May 4th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

While Berlin can boast its share of world premieres, the cancellation of Oswaldo Golijov’s Violin Concerto with Leonidas Kavakos and the Philharmonic last month dealt a blow to what would have been one of the most exciting events of the season. Even though the announcement came as little surprise given that he failed to finish the work for its originally-intended Los Angeles premiere in May of last year, the timing was particularly inauspicious in the wake of an internet debate over the allegation that the composer borrowed too heavily for his orchestral piece “Siderus,” performed by the Eugene Symphony in March.

As proven by Korngold’s Violin Concerto, which replaced Golijov’s mysteriously missing piece in a program flanked by Ravel and Strauss, borrowing from oneself may be a better bet. Korngold, an Austro-Hungarian-born composer whose talent is considered by some to have been in a class with Mozart, wisely left the continent in 1934 to write for Hollywood upon the invitation of fellow Austrian director Max Reinhardt and continued to do so through the end of the Second World War. His Concerto, marking a return to absolute music, recycles melodies from his own film scores to unique effect.

The soaring opening theme is lifted from the film Another Dawn (1937, the same year in which Korngold originally drafted the concerto) and the closing draws from another Warner Brothers film, The Prince and the Pauper (also 1937). Kavakos, seen with Gustavo Dudamel at the podium of the Philharmonie on April 26, opened the piece with a silken tone and expressive line that left little to be desired, yet he revealed an unfortunate tendency to rush as he launched into the music’s rapid, climbing passages, sweeping Dudamel and the orchestra with him through what is intended as a Moderato movement.

The dreamy inner Andante movement was kept transparent and melting, although Kavakos suffered from slight intonation problems through these slower passages. The violinist brought irreproachable technical virtuosity to the daunting runs and stratospheric flageolets of the Allegro finale—in which his rushed energy was less conspicuous than in the opening movement—yet his studied approach detracted from the piece’s dramatic nature. This is after all a score that calls John Williams to mind as easily as Zemlinsky; simply opening his body to the audience with more thespian poise would have made all the difference.

Following the concerto was another work with strong cinematic associations ever since Stanley Kubrick adopted its fanfare for his classic 2001: A Space Odyssey. The rising trumpet theme and rumbling double basses that open Strauss’ tone poem Also sprach Zarathustra has become almost a cliché, yet Dudamel and the Berlin Philharmonic showed how thrilling a live performance of this music can be. The rich, full-bodied strings and gravitas underscored the authority this orchestra still brings to German repertoire despite the international direction Sir Simon Rattle has introduced. The fluidity with which individual players communicate—it is often said that they are a bunch of soloists who happen to sit in an orchestra together—was made particularly clear though the fugal development in “Von der Wissenschaft.” Dudamel did not let the energy slack for an instant. Concert Master Daniel Stabwara brought just the right Slavic grace to the waltz melody of the penultimate episode, “Das Tanzlied“.

Ravel’s Ma Mère l’Oye, a suite based on children’s fairy tales, opened the program on a less gripping note. Despite impeccably pure textures (two horns provide the only brass in the scoring) and elegant melodic flow, Dudamel did not given enough accent to the dramatic vignettes that emerge within these dreamy episodes. The exchange between ‘beauty and the beast’ in the waltz movement—culminating in prancing winds and a brooding bass bassoon—was nearly lost in the mirage-like texture. The strings were also not at their most even in the closing pianissimi of the final “Jardin féerique”; both Stabwara and Dudamel could have led with a firmer hand.

Laboratorium makes Berlin debut in Nancarrow and Vivier

Reaffirming the German capital’s embrace of curious programming, Deutschland Radio hosted the Swiss chamber ensemble Laboratorium with the local conductor Manuel Nawri in a ‘double-portrait’ entitled Ferne Welten (Distant Worlds) exploring works by Conlon Nancarrow and Claude Vivier. The chamber music hall of the Philharmonie was disturbingly empty at the opening concert on May 1, which may have to do with the fact that the event was only publicized with small posters, or that the composers—both Einzelgänger (‘mavericks’ or ‘loners’ depending on your translation), in the words of moderator Holger Hettinger—have yet to enter a wider vocabulary. As Alex Ross points out on The Rest is Noise, attention to the centennial of Nancarrow’s birth this year has been surprisingly scarce.

Empty seats aside, it was refreshing to see the young musicians, who met at the Lucerne Festival Academy in 2004, champion Nancarrow in inventive arrangements of his studies for player piano (written by American ensemble member and trombonist Patrick Crossland). The most effective was Study Nr.7, scored for strings, trombone, trumpet, clarinet, marimba and piano, capturing the frenzied quality and rich polyrhythmic patterns of the original work while assigning much of the jazziness to bass and cello. The brief Study Nr.14 was played in a quartet of bass, cello, viola and violin—almost drawing too much attention to fragmented nature of Nancarrow’s melodies in this slower piece. The tango- and flamenco-inspired rhythms of Study Nr.6, scored for brass, percussion, and strings, were more dance-like and less biting than in the original conception for player piano (which can be heard here).

Nancarrow of course also wrote for humans sometimes, and the program featured two of his three Canons for Ursula (dedicated to the pianist Ursula Oppens). These are not canons in the traditional sense, rather an interplay of the same melody at different speeds. The works include rapid, mechanized patterns that lend live performances a somewhat creepy quality, yet Nancarrow also gives us glimpses into his rebellious personality, such as the mad walking bass in Canon A, or the playful sweep of the hand across the keyboard in Canon B. Artur Avanesov gave a tight, focused performance.

Much as Nancarrow fled the U.S. for Mexico to pursue an independent set of ideals, the Canadian Vivier had an uprooted, nomadic lifestyle that some trace back to the fact that he was adopted at age three. Pulau Dewata (‘Island of the Gods’), performed in Laboratorium’s own arrangement for oboe, trumpet, trombone, marimba, violin, violin, cello and two melodicas, is an homage to the composer’s séjour in Bali, with Reichian-like textures that were inspired by Vivier’s time with a Gamelan orchestra.

The program opened with his theatrical chamber work Greeting Music, in which the players walk on-and offstage “like zombies,” according to Vivier’s instructions. Grief and alienation lurk beneath deceptively simple thirds and octaves, with grating textures such as a scrubbing cello and scraping against a gong. When the cellist (Markus Hohti) laughs mockingly, the listener is infected with a sense of malaise. The ensemble also performed the ceremonial yet ghostly Et je reverrai cette ville étrange, which explores the feelings of returning to a well-known place after having not been there for a long stretch of time. Vivier opens and closes the piece with a meditative melody; in the inner movements, suspended textures of imperceptible strings, piano, celeste and covered trumpet yield to ethereal pentatonic.

Although Vivier forged his own path in a journey of self-discovery through the Eastern world, only to end up tragically murdered in a Paris apartment, it is hard to place his music in the same category as Nancarrow. Whether or not one is drawn to the stubborn persistence with which the player piano prince dedicated himself to what is now an obsolete instrument, few composers have shown the same degree of defiance toward surrounding trends and developed such an unmistakably individual yet highly complex language. Perhaps it was this led Ligeti to declare Nancarrow the “most important living composer” in 1980.

Tags:, , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

St. Matthew leaves the Altar, takes to the Philharmonie

Friday, April 20th, 2012

By Rebecca Schmid

Peter Sellars’ semi-staging of St. Matthew Passion for the Rundfunkchor Berlin and the Berlin Philharmonic, officially called a “ritualization” on the cover of the production’s recently-released DVD, may be one of his most daring enterprises to date. Interestingly though, Bach’s Passion already has a history as a subject of both artistic reverence and unorthodox reinterpretation. When Felix Mendelssohn brought the work back into fashion upon performing it with Berlin’s Singakademie in 1829—approximately a century after St. Matthew’s Leipzig premiere—he made several cuts to the original score, excluding all solo arias but two. “To think that it had to be an actor and a Jew to bring back the greatest Christian music for the people,” he reportedly exclaimed to his actor-friend, Eduard Devrient, who helped arrange the performance.

St. Matthew is officially a sacred cantata on a libretto by Picander, who set two chapters of the Gospel of Matthew in Luther’s translation, yet its episodic nature alternating arias, recitative, chorales, and choruses has been compared to Greek tragedy. If some scholarly articles are any indication, there may also be less compelling reason to confine the work to a Protestant church than one would think. A 1985 article by Rosalie Atlhol Schellhous in Musical Quarterly argues that the Passion is rooted more in a tradition of mysticism than direct Lutheran values, designating the work as a formal meditation or “mental prayer.”

Sellars, in a bonus interview with Rundfunchor Director Simon Halsey, consciously or unconsciously segues right into this discourse by comparing Bach to a “twelve-step process” that is not just about spiritual but physical transformation. It should be “vividly experiential rather than an intellectual proposition,” he says. “We’re opening it and going inside instead of admiring it as a monument from a distance.” Paradoxically, Sellars’ visual representations only emphasize how skillfully the theatrical and spiritual elements of St. Matthew Passion are embedded in the music itself.

The members of the Rundfunkchor admirably learned their parts by heart and were encouraged by Sellars to allow their individual personalities to shine through as they pondered the weight of Bach’s music. Yet their amateurish expressions of Lebensschmerz distract from its introspective qualities. Dressed in all-black, they walk around stage in a forlorn state during the opening chorus “Komm, ihr Töchter.” At the center of the stage is a tombstone-shaped block on which the Evangelist will lie with his wrists tied in invisible rope at the end of the piece, the chorus huddled around him. I struggled not to cringe at such touch-feely gestures.

It is of course hard to judge the effect this Passion had live. The production premiered in 2010 at the Salzburg Easter Festival and subsequently the Philharmonie, where it was filmed on the Berlin Philharmonic’s own label. Sellars, as he explains to Halsey, was inspired by the “360” pentagonal shape of Hans Scharoun’s architecture and sought to absorb the audience into the event by scattering singers throughout the hall. The footage is expertly edited and covers the full range of shots from various angles, but often lingers close to the stage. As is often the case in audiovisual documents, the close-ups prove bothersome.

Sellars grants the soloists a great deal of artistic freedom, which leads to some positively operatic performances. Magdalena Kožená, incarnating Marry Magdalene, let her hands wander all over the body of the Evangelist (Mark Padmore) during the aria “Buß und Reu,” in which she sings of how sin breaks the heart in two and her desire to anoint Jesus with her tears. Her performance in the second part, in which she accosts the chorus and laments Christ’s fate to the audience, is more moving in its directness. The Swedish soprano Camilla Tilling brings a full, pleasant tone but an unusual amount of vibrato to her arias. Sellars was blessed with what must have been an unexpected naturalist touch given that she was eight-months pregnant when they shot the DVD, which makes it quite dramatic to watch Tilling sing of a traitorous child (“es ist zur Schlange worden”) in “Blüte nur, du liebes Herz.”

The male roles are inhabited even more convincingly. The smooth baritone and dramatic restraint of Christian Gerhaher in the role of Jesus convey more spiritual depth than any action onstage. Padmore lives up to his reputation as one of today’s most seasoned Evangelists, exuding modern fervor and a sense of pathos that is at times overstated but generally effective. Thomas Quasthoff is moving in the bass parts, easily expressing personal redemption in the final aria “Mach dich, mein Herze rein.” Finnish tenor Topi Lehtipuu brings a handsome presence and expressive dramaticism without chewing up the scenery. His dynamic as he kneels pleadingly before the viola da gamba soloist (Hille Perl) in the aria “Geduld, wenn mich falsche Zungen stechen” is straightforward and emotionally immediate, as is his performance alongside oboist Albrecht Mayer in “Ich will bei meinem Jesus wachen.”

Sir Simon Rattle, although less known for his forays into early music, gives an elegant, authentic account of Bach’s score with the Berlin Philharmonic. While this recording will not rival that of John Elliot Gardiner or other specialists, the transparent timbre that Rattle has (albeit controversially) cultivated as music director of his orchestra serves the Passion well. It is also impressive that he single-handedly conducts the surround-sound staging and the double-choir (which includes boy singers from the Staats- und Domchors Berlin). Sellars’ concept places the Philharmonic’s world-class soloists such as Mayer and flutist Emmanuel Pahud into the spotlight they deserve, although I enjoy their playing just as much when they are sitting down.

Tags:, , , ,
Posted in Berlin Times | Comments Closed

Newer Entries »