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The Rosemary Branch Festival 2009: Richard Strauss and Viktor Ullmann: Catrine Kirkman, John Savournin (speakers), David Eaton (piano), The Rosemary Branch, Islington, London, 19.4.2009 (BBr)

Richard Strauss: Enoch Arden, op.38
Viktor Ullmann: Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke (1944)


The Rosemary Branch is a lovely little pub at the northern end of Shepperton Road in Islington. The bar has a fine variety of ales and an especially delightful sparkling and zesty Czechoslovakian Lager which is good enough to seduce even the The Good Soldier Švejk from his seat in his regular hostelry, the Chalice. This is not why I visited the Rosemary Branch, but it was one reason why I stayed later in the evening.

Upstairs, the Rosemary Branch has a small theatre, which seats about 50, where its first music festival is being held – this show was the fifth event. We have come to accept the concept of melodrama, outside the theatre, as being a musical composition for speaking voice and, usually, piano which was much loved in the Victorian era for it meant that members of the household who couldn’t perform on a musical instrument could take part in an evening’s entertainment, after the daughter had sung a few ballads and the son had given some drawing room piano pieces, or vice versa. The modern manifestation of the melodrama is rap, but generally with banal music and poor lyrics. However, the two melodramas given tonight transcended the parlour performance and brought the form fully into the concert hall.

Our three performers are all members of Charles Court Opera of which David Eaton is the music director, and what performers they are! Tennyson’s long poem Enoch Arden tells the story of a man who has to leave his wife to go to sea but whose ship sinks. He  is marooned with two shipmates, both of whom die leaving him alone. After ten years he returns home to find his wife, who thought him dead, has married another man, an earlier rival for her affections. Arden does not make himself known to his wife and ultimately dies of a broken heart. Quite why Strauss should have chosen this poem for musical setting, and why he didn’t so it in a more dramatic, perhaps operatic, way is beyond me. But what he did do was to create a work playing for some 65 minutes with sections of melodrama – where the spoken word is accompanied by music – and long stretches of the spoken word as the speaker tells the story. The whole story. Every word of it. To be honest it’s not a piece one would want to hear too often for it is not Strauss at his best but there is much to enjoy along the way. For a start, the piano writing is better than most of Strauss’s solo piano writing in the early Sonata and the Stimmungsbilder, op.9, not to mention the Violin and Cello Sonata accompaniments.

There’s also some superb Helden music, which just cries out for orchestral colouring, and there's some very tender music too – especially for the young children. However, there is also some terribly mawkish music when Arden/Tennyson starts to ruminate on Arden’s lot. And ruminate he does. But the story is fascinating and I found myself wanting to know how things turned out. This was a very persuasive performance which kept the momentum of the story going, making the most of the many lacunae, both musical and poetical, and almost convincing me that Enoch Arden is a better work than it actually is. Savournin has a rich and fruity voice which he used to good effect, never overstating his part and delivering the story with some passion.

After the interval we had a real masterpiece. Viktor Ullmann was one of the Czech composers who were deported to Theresienstadt Concentration Camp – where the Nazi’s claimed a full and rewarding artistic and cultural life was thriving. Certainly there was much culture – Theresienstadt boasted four Symphony Orchestras as well as chamber and jazz groups, but in reality it was a ghetto and many of its residents were murdered in the gas chambers – Ullmann died on 16 October 1944 at Auschwitz–Birkenau. Ullmann’s setting of part of Rilke’s huge poem Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke was written and premièred in Theresienstadt only a few months before his extermination. It is a brief, a mere 30 minutes feeling much shorter such is the intensity of the work, violent and passionate work, using the briefest of material in a kaleidoscopic composition where we are left emotionally drained yet somehow uplifted at the end – the long silence which followed the close spoke volumes about the audience’s state after our wild ride.

Performed with admirable style – bringing in a real expressionist feel and Brechtian alienation, which worked very well indeed, Catrine Kirkman, in beautifully spoken German, lived the words for us. It didn’t matter that you couldn’t understand everything she said, or even that you didn’t understand the German language, for she lived every syllable. This was a truly great performance which I want to hear again.

In both works, David Eaton played the piano like a man possessed. At times he overpowered the speaker, even though both were amplified, but he was merely playing what the composer had given him, and  was ensuring that the audience was give what the composer wanted.

I have attended over 30 concerts this year so far and this was the most fascinating and unusual of the lot. Full marks to both Charles Court Opera and the Rosemary Branch Festival for giving us this chance to hear these pieces, even if the Strauss didn’t leave one gasping as the Ullmann most assuredly did.

The Rosemary Branch Festival runs until the 6^th of May and details can be found at the website www.rosemarybranch.co.uk. There are  lots of good things still to come - and there’s  the Czechoslovakian lager to sample too!

Bob Briggs


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