SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Strauss, Metamorphosen, Vier letzte Lieder, Also sprach Zarathustra: Anne Schwanewilms (soprano), London Philharmonic Orchestra, Simone Young (conductor) Royal Festival Hall, London 19.10.2007 (JPr)

I was sorry that I heard this performance after the Mahler a couple of nights ago: I would have liked the very favourable impression of Simone Young that her Strauss programme here created to have been backed up by her wonderful reading of the ‘Resurrection’ Symphony ( see review)  rather than experiencing them this way round. All of Strauss’s music it seems to me needs an important couple of matters to be primarily attended to and that is to set the appropriate emotional tone and to reconcile this with Strauss’s intention for it. The music often veers from the delicate saccharine sweetness of Viennese café society to the most overblown musical rhetoric. You can have romantic grandeur and picturesque beauty in one performance or enormously bombastic outpourings at another. It is possible that his operas are easier to bring off because in these the music is umbilically linked to the libretto. Simone Young just about managed to get the music’s disparate elements into the right balance, and if this evening was not as special as the previous one I heard her conduct it had nothing to do with Ms Young but was entirely the fault of the composer.

The evening began with Metamorphosen, his 1944 E flat Study for 23 solo string players. There are overlapping string parts but the overall impression is of all the players being oblivious to each other and busy with their own lines of counterpoint. The London Philharmonic Orchestra’s musicians were again in fine form and their playing was focussed and controlled through to and beyond an astonishing fortissimo that Strauss put in at about halfway. All praise here to the leader, Boris Garlitsky’s, delicate solos. By Ms Young and her players treating this work like chamber music it meant that they strove not just for clarity but also to give it all a coherent structure. There seemed to be a controlled passion that made it intensely serene and wistfully moving.

I have written on this website and elsewhere comments about the genesis of Metamorphosen. In the spirit of not wanting to bore the reader any more than necessary I just add here the comments of the musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnik who says ‘Recalling how it was the bombing of an opera house (in the Third Reich) rather than the murder of fellow human beings that drew this expression of grief from Strauss, I remain troubled (by the piece).’ I can only agree!

As you might gather your (open-minded) music critic will admit he finds it hard to warm to Strauss’s orchestral music: however his vocal works are another matter entirely. As suggested above with the presence of a text and a singer it seems to provide Strauss a centre on which to focus his creativity and make him curb any excesses in the quest just to serve the poetic truth. Strauss as most of us know was especially fond of sopranos (and he indeed married one), that voice being his inspiration through to the end of his long life and career.

I believe Strauss had Kirsten Flagstad in mind when he wrote the Vier letzte Lieder or as translated, Four Last Songs, and they are more often sung by a lyric than a dramatic soprano, someone who is an Elsa rather than an Isolde. As chance would have it an Isolde, Nina Stemme, cancelled and was indeed replaced by an Elsa, Anne Schwanewilms, a particular Strauss specialist as well. Her approach was simple and dignified, her face remained fairly impassive throughout and she allowed the emotion of the songs to arise organically from the composer’s ever-changing orchestral colours. She only really became animated at ‘tausendfach’ during the last line of the third song, ‘Beim Schlafengehen’ (On Going to Sleep). This is not to say that this straightforward approach does not allow for some beautiful nuances in her singing, and these were plentifully there. It took to the end of the first of the four songs for Ms Schwanewilms to find her true voice (perhaps more the effect of her late engagement), from that point on the clarity of her diction and her ease with the highest notes of Strauss’s vocal exercises showed all her qualities as an outstanding interpreter of this set. Particularly, there was a satisfying finality to her account of the last song, ‘Im Abendrot’ (In the Sunset), Ms Schwanewilms just does not convey despair but there is a very apt feeling of serenity that matches the world-weary resignation of the approach of death as described by von Eichendorff‘s text and as experienced by Strauss at the end of his long life.

After the interval was ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ and we are all over-familiar with the opening section being the main theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey which depicts a sunrise. The gaps between my hearing this work always result in me expect it to continue in a similar triumphant vein but as some of you will remember (better than I did) the work covers a wide range of different moods, and if this was your initial hope then it can be a little disappointing. It is worth persevering with even if your thought is that it is downhill all the way after that start. It is undoubtedly a complex work and Strauss named this tone poem after a book by Nietzsche describing it as loosely based on the book, which itself is loosely based on an ancient prophet called Zarathustra (or in Greek, Zoroaster). Nietzsche used poetry to describe the life and the preaching of this prophet, including the philosophy of the Übermensch (‘Superman) that Man would evolve into. This apparently very turgid book seems to have sparked sufficient interest in Richard Strauss to inspire some impressive music (as it had also in part inspired Mahler). He used some of the chapter headings, teachings and storylines as a starting point to ‘convey in music an idea of the human race from its origin, through its various phases of development …up to Nietzsche's idea of the Übermensch.’ In addition to the sunrise ‘Introduction’, the music sections include ‘Of the Backworldsmen’, ‘Of the Great Longing’, ‘Of Joys and Passions’, ‘The Song of the Grave’, ‘Of Science’, ‘The Convalescent’, ‘The Dance Song’, and ‘The Night Wanderer’ corresponding to chapters of the book.

For all its undoubted philosophically-inspired sincerity, the music, where we experience fugue, multipart solo strings along with exquisite violin solos, and a great variance in style, never quite seems to match these extra-musical ideas. To modern ears some of it must sound absurd – in the middle of all the on-going angst about the ascent of man in ‘The Dance Song’ there is a Viennese waltz for goodness’ sake? If Strauss is being ironic here – he was not widely known for it. Garlitsky was again outstanding here, as were all the first-desk strings. And what about that famous beginning with the deep pedal before the rising motive, maybe it is ‘sunrise’ but the music is also heard similarly in the opening of Wagner’s earlier Das Rheingold.

Under Simone Young’s baton the individual episodes flowed seamlessly one into another; there was introspection and then rapture, murmurings of doubt followed by that apparent joy of the dance. The musical characterisation was lucid and instrumental detail was polished, all the sections of the acutely responsive orchestra made fine contributions. Perhaps some might want a more celestial ending but I think the warmth of her musicians’ approbation for their conductor’s effort during the overall applause after the music ended was genuine. It reflected their appreciation that a real musical intelligence had dissected the work to make it more subtle and understated than Strauss’s potential bombast ever intended, both in this work and throughout the entire programme. Ms Young seems to be a woman who knows what she wants from an orchestra and, for most of the time, she apparently gets its.

Any concerns? Well not over Simone Young whose forthcoming Ring cycle at her Hamburg Staatsoper I intended to follow as it builds in future seasons. More importantly I return to ponder on the audience for classical music at the Royal Festival Music. Perhaps it is just Strauss who has little to stay to any young people drawn today to classical music? Although the Mahler a couple of nights earlier has a good mix of young and old, for this Strauss concert, 4 in 5 were grey-haired and 1 in 5 seemed to have a walking stick. Before I can be attacked by the PC-brigade I am greying myself and have temporary mobility problems so I am totally sympathetic to those even more elderly. I just return to this as part of a debate about whether there will be much of an audience for classical music in 15 to 20 years in this country where the musical education of our young people seems to be of no added value.  

 

Jim Pritchard