Wagner, Berg, Mahler Das klagende Lied (original version): Marisol Montalvo (soprano), Hedwig Fassbender (mezzo), Michael Hendrick (tenor), Anthony Michaels-Moore (baritone), David Christopher Ragusa (Alto), London Philharmonic Choir London Philharmonic Orchestra/ Vladimir Jurowski (conductor), Royal Festival Hall 19.9.2007 (JPr)

 

If Vladimir Jurowski’s first concert as the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s twelfth principal conductor is anything to go by, then admirers of Austro-Germanic music of the Romantic era are in for a treat. The LPO is already possibly the most German sounding of London orchestras, and I believe Jurowski is destined to take them further in that direction, based on an opening concert of music by Wagner (who inspired Mahler), Berg (who took his inspiration from Mahler) and an early work by Mahler, who was influenced by Wagner (and might later have had an effect on Humperdinck) when composing Das klagende Lied.

The 35-year-old Jurowski’s relationship with the LPO began in 2001. It was Glyndebourne that brought conductor and orchestra together, after his surprise appointment as the Festival’s music director. Jurowski comes from a musical family. His father is the distinguished conductor Mikhail Jurowski, who left the Soviet Union in 1990, when Vladimir was 18, moving his family to Dresden and subsequently to Berlin studying conducting, and more intriguing, voice. Berlin is now Vladimir’s home as well.  He recently said: ‘I started living in Berlin at 20, but I have spent a lot of time there since ... My wife is from Berlin, but I hardly work there at all. We came to the West around the peak of glasnost, exactly a year before the anti-Gorbachev coup in Moscow, so that was past the exciting part. For my father, the move was for a mixture of artistic and political reasons. It was a long-time wish of his to leave, and my parents were obviously thinking of me and my brother and sister.’ Like many fellow émigrés from Russia, the Jurowski family has a Jewish heritage, but for musical reasons, they have obviously set down roots in Germany, rather than in Israel. He seems genial enough on the podium and appears to have the full support of his musicians: however it is whispered that his nickname is ‘Vlad the Impaler’!

The opening Prelude from Act I of Parsifal was that rarity these days, a genuine ‘bleeding chunk’. It was a little restrained but a feature of the Prelude (without the add-ons) is that instead of returning to the opening tonality of A flat major, it ends on the dominant and there is no resolution, only hope. The resolution only comes at the end of the entire opera and the tacked on best-bits from Act III spoils the atmosphere just a bit. Nevertheless the performance was certainly sufficiently devotional and had a searching spirituality.

The Three Pieces for Orchestra, Opus 6, is as close as Alban Berg ever came to writing a symphony. It was composed ostensibly for his teacher, Schoenberg’s fortieth birthday but not completed or performed till somewhat after that proposed 1914 date. All three pieces are essentially atonal and arching in structure, a mixture of animated angular music, powerful orchestral tutti and the odd elegant moment that is reminiscent of Mahler. In the first piece there is the hint of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in the portentous percussion in the agitated opening. The second movement is entitled Reigen (‘round-dances’) which employs Viennese waltz and landler time that was another Mahler favourite. Truth be told even though I knew there was a waltz-like influence here I struggled to discern it. The more insistently Romantic music was in the last piece where the  dramatic music appears to be a mix of Mahler and Schoenberg, winding up to a conclusion which seems to conflate Bruckner, Brahms and Mahler’s Sixth Symphony hammer which Rachel Gledhill thwacked down with relish but whose sound was smothered by the rest of her percussion section. Berg’s music clearly is representative of the disintegration of fin-de-siècle Vienna on the eve of World War I.

Mahler’s Das klagende Lied (original 1980 version) is a three movement cantata; in this epic fairytale two brothers set out (Waldmärchen - Forest Legend) in search of a flower that will allow one of them to marry a queen. The gentle blond brother finds it, the evil brown one murders his brother in his sleep, steals the flower and the promised bride. In part II (Der Spielmann) the minstrel of the title picks up one of the slain brother's bones, makes a flute from it, which sings the story of how he was killed in part I ... ’The Plaintive Song’ of the title. There is much lamentation, sorrow and woe! In part III (Hochzeitsstück – Wedding Piece) the minstrel rushes to the queen’s castle and then at the end as the remaining bridegroom-brother plays the fateful flute, the queen slumps to the floor and down come the castle walls to end with even more sorrow and more woe.

In musical terms Jurowski made a very persuasive case that there is no reason why performances of this composition by a 20-year-old should not be more regularly performed, as no doubt it must be during the forthcoming anniversary years as there are only a limited number of Mahler symphonies and songs. Yes indeed it is a youthful work but has much in common with Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the early symphonies, particularly the First. Mahler’s first love, I insist, was opera and it was just the lack of time that prevented him composing one (or more) … and of course he did not live long enough. Had this composition actually won the 1881 Beethoven prize for which it was entered who knows what direction Mahler’s career would have gone in? Das klagende Lied is operatic in character and has huge instrumental and choral demands; it also employs four adult soloists with declamatory interventions but not often much to sing, as well as, an Alto who is the voice of the bone. The original version is supposed also to involve a Treble to share these pronouncements (and one was named in the programme) but at this concert it was all left to the assured ease of David Christopher Ragusa.

Unfortunately he was just about the best of the voices involved, which is a bit of a worry if Jurowski had any role in their engagement. The tenor Michael Hendrick seemed to think it was Tristan he was singing, the mezzo (Hedwig Fassbender) though vastly experienced lacked something in power, the baritone Anthony Michaels-Moore sang with appropriate warm tone but was rather understated and the soprano, Marisol Montalvo was simply weak and inadequate with very poor diction.

This early Mahler work is famously described with little enthusiasm by the soon to be Alma Mahler, in December 1901 in this way ‘At midday he (Mahler) sent me Das klagende Lied, the text is excellent, the melody a little impoverished but, the structure firm and effective, I can imagine some passages sounding quite passable’.

The offstage band (conducted by Thomas Blunt) was very well-balanced and gave the piece an almost ethereal quality, backed up the luminous virtuosity of the main orchestra and the impressively detailed singing of the London Philharmonic Chorus it made the work that probably could be incoherent in lesser hands, seem so much more than the sum of its splendid individual parts. Vladimir Jurowski excelled in controlling all these disparate elements through to the suitable pandemonium at the end and the performance roused an audience that seemed not to have been inspired by the first half to a cheering conclusion for what was a very promising start to Jurowski’s tenure as principal conductor.

 

Jim Pritchard

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