SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Ives, Strauss and Mahler:  Lisa Milne (soprano), Orchestra of Welsh National Opera, Lothar Koenigs (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 7.5.2010 (GPu)
 

Ives, The Unanswered Question

Strauss, Four Last Songs

Mahler, Symphony No.1

There was an all-pervasive topicality to the programme of this enjoyable concert. In the few days previous to the concert, the correspondence columns of The Times were full of letters about the musical representation of the cuckoo, notably by Beethoven and Mahler (not least in Mahler’s First). Just two days before the concert, Charlotte Higgins’s Arts Diary in the Guardian recalled an episode of Michael Berkeley’s Radio 3 programme Private Passions, in which his guest was a certain Nick Clegg, who spoke of his love for the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss and talked of their “sense of decline, decay, valediction … this extraordinary sense of things slowing down to a halt”. And the general election held the day before this concert certainly provided a prime example of an ‘Unanswered Question’, politically at least. As regards a more musical kind of topicality, 2010 is the 150^th anniversary of Mahler’s birth.

‘The Unanswered Question’ might be regarded as a kind of intensely personal, very Ivesian distillation of the symphonic; a single shortish movement which, in its superimposition of three musical ‘voices’ effectively raises some of the kinds of questions to which symphonists had traditionally addressed themselves at far greater length. The strings reiterate a kind of chorale which in its slowness suggests a context, a landscape (in both literal and metaphorical senses) which is more than merely human in its sense of time; the solo trumpet and the woodwind group are more recognisably ‘human’ in their intonations and significances. The trumpet (finely voiced by, I think, Dean Wright) makes its demands seven times, in a pattern which is a kind of incremental repetition; the four woodwinds offer ‘answers’ in a series of changing tones of voice, beginning in somewhat reserved fashion, but growing increasingly irritated and aggressive until, at the trumpet’s last petition they remain silent. The trumpet, seeking perhaps a clarification of the very nature of human existence, appears to have asked the ‘unanswerable’, rather than the merely unanswered question. The strings of the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera produced some beautifully ethereal and haunting textures, and were very exactly paced by Lothar Koenigs. The four woodwinds offered some striking expostulations (though not entirely without some moments of intonational uncertainty). The whole set up a kind of palindromic relationship with the work that was to close the programme – with such elements as the shared, but different, use of chorale, the suggestions of philosophical and religious searching, the prominence given to the brass and much else; but, of course, where the Ives ends in a fade to silence, the Mahler was to end in a blaze of sound.

Strauss’s Four Last Songs (I am leaving to one side the question of how far Strauss himself really conceived of these four songs as a cycle) are very difficult to bring off in the concert hall. There is such a profound intimacy to their sentiments, such an inwardness in the implied trajectory of thought and its destination that, for all Strauss’s use of a sizeable orchestral accompaniment, there is more than a little that militates against the sense of the ‘public’ and public performance. Though St. David’s may not be the biggest of concert halls, a soprano singing these songs is faced with real difficulties in simultaneously retaining the sense of intimacy and being heard above the orchestra. Lisa Milne did justice to Strauss’s supple and sinuous melodies, and Lothar Koenigs and the orchestra produced some lovely chromatic effects. Just occasionally the balance between the two went awry, just occasionally that even more problematic balance, between the ‘private’ dimensions of text and sentiment and the ‘public’ dimensions of performance eluded their combined efforts. In the opening of ‘Frühling’ the bottom of Milne’s voice was rich and powerful and there were some moments of real incandescence in later pages; in ‘September’ one felt a certain loss of intensity and electricity; ‘Beim schlafengehen’ had a gripping intensity and expressiveness, Milne’s fine singing complemented by David Adams reading of the violin solo; there was a genuinely rapt quality to Milne’s singing in ‘Im Abendrot’ (where the piccolo music of the larks gave us another echo of birdsong), soloist and orchestra alike achieving a reconciliatory quality, an acceptance of “vast and silent peace”, the fulfilment of a “ripeness” that was, indeed “all”. I hope Milne gets the chance to record these songs – the interiority of her singing in these songs might work even more successfully heard in the home rather than the concert hall.

Song is, of course, never very far away from Mahler’s first symphony. In the first movement, the main theme is based on the second of the ‘Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen’; the second song from the same cycle is drawn on in one of the trio sections of the third movement; parodic versions of ‘Bruder Martin’ (‘Frère Jacques’) and Klezmer are powerful presences – like Ives, Mahler was no respecter of the boundaries between popular music and the music of high culture. Koenigs and his orchestra gave a richly evocative performance of the first movement, responsive both to the relatively ‘pretty’ music of the woodland (cuckoos and all) as well as to the chthonic potencies of the music, the language of the primeval Germanic forests; Koenig was adroit in his control of Mahler’s remarkable variety of orchestral colours (throughout the symphony one senses the importance of Mahler’s experience as a conductor). The sense of pace was very well judged – these were decidedly ‘earthly’ lengths. In the Landler that follows, Koenigs relished the rusticity of melody and effect, the strings and woodwinds working to particular effect in the insistent rhythms of the opening. For all the sentimentality of some of Mahler’s musical materials here, there was an incipient emotional ambiguity which prepared one for the third movement. Every time I hear this symphony I am struck by thoughts of how extraordinary, how disturbing it must have sounded in the Vienna of the late nineteenth century. This third movement is a kind of modernist ‘collage’ ahead of its time, materials and modes of startling heterogeneity juxtaposed with astonishing boldness, to the point at which one loses one’s bearings, becomes uncertain of what is ‘straight’ and what is ‘parody’. Some performances iron out this heterogeneity, play safe; Koenigs emphasised it and yet prevented the music from fragmentation. In the final movement, the orchestra launched themselves with apparent abandon (it was, of course, carefully disciplined playing) into an initially despairing lament, before the violins eloquently affirmed the possibilities of consolation.

Mahler doesn’t allow the argument to be settled quite so easily, and the emotional and moral contestation continues, as the struggle to offer some answers continues and Koenig’s conducting drew playing from this orchestra of a quality I have rarely, if ever, heard them produce before on the concert stage (some of their playing in the opera house under the baton of Carlo Rizzi in recent years was also outstanding). An affirmation on the trumpets, supported by percussion and horns, poignantly failed to find final consummation, but a later assertion of the same theme overpowered all resistance and doubt, the horn chorale (standing as required by the score) heroic in its power and assurance, the blaze of daybreak at the end of the first movement paralleled by a blaze of transcendent light. A question has, after all, been answered. Paradise and light are possible. The playing of the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera and the conducting of Lothar Koenigs gave us a profoundly impressive performance of this, surely one of the greatest of all first symphonies. No one would claim that the Orchestra of Welsh National Opera is one of the world’s great orchestras; but their commitment, their refusal ever to settle for the merely routine and competent, their passion and their discipline throughout this concert, above all in the closing performance of Mahler’s First, ensured that they challenged and rewarded an audience which was very vocal indeed in its closing approval. Wales is very fortunate indeed to have, in addition to the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, a second orchestra of such quality, an orchestra which seems to be reaching new heights under its new musical director, Lothar Koenigs.

Glyn Pursglove