SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Beethoven and Mahler: Birgit Remmert (mezzo), John Daszak (tenor), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Tadaaki Otaka, St David’s Hall, Cardiff 8.5.2009 and Brangwyn Hall, Swansea 9.5.2009 (GPu)

Beethoven: Symphony No.4 in Bb, op.60 (1806)
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (1908/1909)

Mahler completed the composition of Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1909 (having started at the same time the previous year) working at his new composing hut in Toblach in the Dolomites. So 2009 marks the centenary of the work (which was famously premiered on 20 November 1911 in the Tonhalle in Munich, conducted by Bruno Walter. The composer had died on 18 May of that year). As such it was particularly gratifying to be able to hear the work on two successive nights, with the same forces. 

On each occasion Mahler’s great work was prefaced by Beethoven’s Fourth, but to say that Beethoven’s symphony functioned as a preface is not – insistently not – to accept the view that one still occasionally meets, that this is a relatively slight piece, less significant than the 3rd or 5th symphonies which ‘frame’ it in the sequence of Beethoven’s symphonies. It may not flaunt a largeness of ambition, as both its predecessor and successor do, but this is a work of real substance, a work entirely worthy of the composer of those two works, but, unlike them, it does not readily lend itself to being summed up in non-musical terms; one might say, perhaps, that this is a work whose subject is the heroism of energy, whose essential dialogue (a dialogue which reaches a beautiful resolution) is between the demands of rhythm and of melody. It is a work over which the presence of Haydn might be said to preside; it was written in 1806, some three years before Haydn’s death, and after his career as a composer had effectively finished.  

Tadaaki Otaka’s reading of the symphony was thoroughly accomplished. The darkness and ambiguities of the opening adagio, full as it is of unexpected digressions, broken cadences and hints at unexplored directions, were articulated imaginatively, their tensions resolved (or at least succeeded) by a persuasive acceleration which both left behind the doubts and, simultaneously, remembered them. Throughout the movement Otaka offered a sharply etched account of its alternations between attacking, incisive rhythms and passages of relaxed gentleness. Most notable of all was the clarity of texture which Otaka and the Orchestra achieved, a clarity which seemed to allow one, at times, to hear a remarkable number of individual instrumental voices without losing track of what united them. This movement went particularly well in Cardiff – where the less resonant acoustic of St David’s Hall perhaps prevented the slight blurring of effect that one experienced in the Swansea performance. In the Adagio there was a vivid response to both the poetic tenderness of some passages and to the unexpected irritation that interrupts the third statement of the main theme. Interwoven with both these moods were recurrences of the hard-driven rhythms with which the movement begins. There is little that remains the same for long in the constantly shifting moods and patterns of this work. The third movement (titled ‘Allegro vivace’ and effectively a scherzo) was a joy in its syncopation and its ebullient energy, full of mimetic patterns which echoed around the orchestra with a playful wit, Otaka fully in tune with the great good humour of the music. There was a humorous dimension too to the (very well played) intervention of the ‘angry’ horn section at the movement’s close. Otaka’s lightness of touch – which maintained clarity without ever sacrificing humour or drive – was very impressive here (this movement had an even more irresistible charm in the Swansea performance). The alternations of insistent semiquavers and legato lyricism in the closing Allegro were complimented by some precisely controlled contrasts of dynamics; the musical ground rarely remained stable beneath one’s feet for very long, transitions and contrasts, metamorphoses and repeats dashing by with a fleet-footed certainty, all distinctions and contrasts finally reconciled at the work’s integrative conclusion. By the time we got there Otaka had demonstrated many of the virtues of this remarkable (and surely still underrated) work – its hidden emotional depths and its playfulness, its wittiness of structure and its celebration of energy, of rhythm, invention and intellect. 

The resonant (but not excessively so) acoustic of the Brangwyn Hall in Swansea perhaps blurred the clarity of Otaka’s Beethoven on occasion, but it was well suited to Mahler’s very different late masterpiece. It was written, as is well-known, soon after the death of Mahler’s daughter Maria (known to the family as ‘Putzi’) in July 1907; it was in the very same month that Mahler’s own very serious heart condition was diagnosed which was to lead to his death just four years later. Such a concatenation of circumstances served, inevitably, to emphasise Mahler’s always strong sense of mortality, to bring to the fore his all-pervading sense of transience and mutability, to encourage him to worry away at problems of meaning in the face of the certainty of death, of death’s nearness. Here in Das Lied that heightened awareness of personal (and general) mortality is complemented by an equally heightened hedonism, a kind of sublime carpe diem to add to the complexities the composer seems sometimes to turn with a disgust and disappointment as great as those which death inspires in him. The resulting work is emotionally very complex and technically demanding. 

In the Cardiff performance, John Daszak was at something less than his very (considerable) best. There were moments when notes were insufficiently sustained, there was often a sense of strain at the top end of his voice and there were even one or two slight uncertainties of pitch. Daszak is a singer I have admired more than once before and I was surprised to feel this way about him on this occasion. But by time of the Swansea performance on the following day, he was in far better voice. He sang – as needed – with an expressive poignancy or rollicking exuberance and his tone seemed altogether more rounded and full. Birgit Remmert was very impressive on both occasions, but perhaps she too was even better in the second of these performances. I shall long remember her interpretation of ‘Der Abschied’, her voice rapt and enrapturing, her serene articulation of the miraculously mixed poignancy and ecstasy of music and text remarkable in its absolute certainty of touch, in its responsiveness both to the song’s passionate celebration of the “earth” and to its profound sadness at the cold fact of human death. Otaka and the Orchestra were also at their very best in the long orchestral sections of ‘Der Abschied’, Otaka’s characteristic clarity of sound well suited to Mahler’s writing here, writing that Deryck Cooke described as possessing “a new, naked kind of harmonic texture and orchestration”, qualities to which Otaka’s sensibility seemed well suited. Elsewhere things were perhaps a little less convincing – ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’, for example, would have been better for a bit more vulgarity, a stronger, more vivid, sense of the drunkard’s “stagger” to contrast more powerfully with the profound longing in other sections of the song. Nor did ‘Von der Jugend’ quite have the necessary lilt to it. In ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’ Remmert’s rich (but never heavy) voice rode the orchestral sounds with a compelling beauty; in ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’ Daszak characterised the words with real colour and persuasiveness and (especially in Swansea) he responded well to the extraordinary range of attitudes and emotions in ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’. ‘Perfect’ performances of Das Lied von Der Erde are not easily come by, and I wouldn’t quite put this one in that category. But it had a great many virtues, most especially in the singing of Birgit Remmert, her sheer beauty of voice married to a precise responsiveness to the details of the text. Tadaaki Otaka’s conducting was (like that of most conductors) more fully responsive to some aspects of Mahler’s complex and contradictory music than to others – but the balance of accounts was, as it were, decidedly in his favour. At his best, John Daszak sang with a pleasing flexibility of voice and obvious intelligence.

A centenary was suitably celebrated. 

Glyn Pursglove

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