SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL  CONCERT REVIEW
 

Hans Werner Henze -  Opfergang (World Premiere) and Mahler: Soloists, Orchestra dell’ Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, conductor, Antonio Pappano. Parco della Musica, Rome 10.01.2010 (JB)

Henze - Opfergang (World Premiere)
Mahler - Das Lied Von Der Erde

Anna Larsson, contralto
Ian Bostridge and Simon O’Neill, tenors
Sir John Tomlinson, bass.

In Alex Ross’s entertaining and sometimes well-informed survey of twentieth century music, The Rest is Noise , subtitled, Listening to the Twentieth Century, Adolf Hitler has more entries than Hans Werner Henze; appropriate enough if you emphasize the subtitle. But not if you consider opera. There is not a composer alive today who has made –and continues to make - such a contribution to that form. In 1970, having provided the world’s leading opera houses with exceptionally appreciated repertory, he was quoted as saying that he considered opera as an art form was finished. He also mercifully added that the basic idea of putting drama to music is not finished. In brief, he wanted to get rid of some of the trappings of the form in order to intensify the art.

And this is a composer who had had the English language’s finest word-smith as a librettist in W H Auden and the even greater poetic imagination of Ingeborg Bachmann to provide him with texts to stimulate his own undisputed skills. If Keats is the uncrowned Emperor of Poetic Imagination, Bachmann is surely its Empress.

Along with his British friends, Benjamin Britten, William Walton and Peter Maxwell Davies, Hans Henze has always had a great regard for his audiences. That is in sharp contrast to his Darmstadt contemporaries of the fifties: Stockhausen, Nono and Boulez, the last of whom famously walked out of a Henze premiere. Me? Avant-garde? Henze recently shrieked at an Italian journalist, Rubbish! People cry at my operas! I’m a romantic.

After the War, when Henze decamped from Darmstadt to the artistic colony on the island of Ischia, off the bay of Naples, he already found in residence Auden and Chester Kallman as well as Walton and his young Argentinean wife. What has often been said of Walton is equally true in another sense of Henze: from that moment, the Mediterranean sun audibly lit up his music. Henze later transferred to Marino in the wine-growing hills just outside Rome, where he lives to this day. And it was the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia that commissioned the new piece which had its world premiere on Sunday 10th January 2010.

Opfergang is based on the 1916 poem of Franz Werfel (1890 – 1945) and Henze tells us that he has lived with these words since the early fifties; the Santa Cecilia commission brought into being the actual piece –neither opera nor oratorio but something involving the two . A white, well cared-for dog has fled the oppression imposed by his masters (the oppression is only too real, though we never find out the cause of it). Ian Bostridge, who is the latest and most distinguished of the Peter Pears heritage of tenors, was perfect for this role: his voice can easily sound tinged by pain and his production is always informed by an outstanding musical intelligence. For him, as with Henze, music and drama are one, so perfectly interwoven as to be inseparable. John Tomlinson also delivered convincingly the role of the Foreigner, who eventually shoots the dog. The music explores the inner self of these protagonists. There is also a chorus of four policemen which heightens the drama, all set at midnight on the edge of a deliberately unnamed large town.

Werfel’s poem studiedly raises more questions than it answers; some of those answers are provided ingeniously by the composer, and some by the promptings of the composer to his audience. And the first-night audience left one in no doubt as to their appreciative involvement in the proceedings. Looked at in cold blood, the Werfel text does not have the poetic imaginative invention of Bachmann; I confess to have found it evocative of the Mikado’s punishment: All prosy dull society sinners,/ Who chatter and bleat and bore,/ Are sent to hear sermons / From mystical Germans / Who preach from ten till four.

But this is yet another supreme example of a weak poem (Henze would not agree, of course) becoming a strong libretto; the whole success of the work is in the composer’s filling in the gaps –sometimes directly and dramatically and sometimes by subtle suggestion and invitation to the audience. Much of the piece’s success depends on its extraordinary orchestration. On 14 November 2009, Henze wrote in his diary, I started to write a duet for the dog (tenor) and cor anglais, but now I realize that if I put the tenor with the heckelphone, [bass oboe ] I will introduce a more dramatic effect; the heckelphone is not only a fifth below the cor anglais, but it has a more threatening sound, as though it is obstructing something terrible. The large orchestra, complete with Wagner tuba and a very busy, big percussion section, was meticulously prepared with all the dedicated professionalism that we have come to expect from Antonio Pappano, who also played the piano part. Opfergang has a nod and wink towards Berg, albeit the more lyrical Berg. Nodding and winking have always been a key part of the Henze superb compositional technique, always in sincere acknowledgment to the past and never with anything so facile as parody. And even in the drama’s most shadowy moments, rays of that Mediterranean sun break through.

There was not a free seat in the immense hall and the old magician was given a deserved standing ovation, looking frailer but younger than ever. May we please have more from this admirable Pappano / Henze union?

As part of Santa Cecilia’s celebrations of the hundred and fiftieth year since the birth of Gustav Mahler, in which they will programme all his symphonic works, the second part of the concert was dedicated to Das Lied Von Der Erde –another showcase for the superb orchestra of the Accademia, which Pappano has so successfully built up: you would be hard pressed to find anywhere a captain and his team who work so dedicatedly towards such outstanding musical accomplishment. It is as though best is never good enough; they always strive for something better. And naturally, they carry the audience with them in this vitality. Conductor and orchestra are as one in a sense which is unique in my experience.

However, there was a serious blot on this Mahlerian excellence. Knowing that Antonio Pappano is the most considerate of accompanists, I am forced to the conclusion that both soloists were underpowered. The Swedish contralto, Anna Larsson, had some impressive floating pianissimi high notes, but in the dramatic thrust of the work (and there is much of this) her voice disappeared. The New Zealand tenor, Simon O’Neill, similarly failed to meet Mahler’s musical – dramatic demands. His Parsifal with the same orchestra and Daniele Gatti in 2006 had been indeed impressive, but that role –demanding as it is- lies in a more comfortable register for this particular tenor.

Jack Buckley