The booklet illustration is by Martin Czinner Gottschalck, a
horn player in the South Jutland Symphony Orchestra. It’s
not titled for us, but it’s clearly a Yorick moment with
the skull firmly held in the centre of the painting, tan coloured
and surrounded by ghostly white. The suspicion of a crown and
spectral face - Hamlet’s father, I assume - wafts to the
top left of the eerie patina. Hamlet, meanwhile, stands in semi-profile,
columnar, to the extreme left hand side of the painting, also
drenched in enveloping white. It’s not looking good.
The premise of this disc is certainly stimulating; a close focus
on musical depictions of Hamlet. The most obvious is that of
Tchaikovsky but it’s a function of well-programmed discs
such as this-however gloomy the music - that novelties emerge.
First, though, there’s a non-specific start in the shape
of Friedrich Kuhlau’s Overture to William Shakespeare
Op. 74, written in 1824. Kuhlau is beginning to emerge from
a period of slumber critically speaking, and this overture reflects
once again how dramatic were his instincts, how sure his sense
of pacing, and how lively his orchestration. This strong and
engaging piece suffers from only one real fault, and that is
a far too early breaking out into an academic sounding fugal
passage, but even this is relieved by the almost immediately
appearing jaunty writing that develops a Beethovenian compound
energy. Kuhlau, writing about the playwright in toto, obviously
has the chance to inflect comedy with tragedy. The other composers
invariably have to plough the darker furrow.
Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet is well played. The orchestra
is not opulent in sound, but its taut concentration is not in
doubt, and the recording engineers catch the gong with real
verisimilitude. Liszt’s symphonic poem is balefully interior,
suffused with urgent, military brass calls, fascinating textures
and a dolce ed espressivo section of real worth. A generation
younger, Joseph Joachim broods like the older Liszt with whose
aesthetic he appears strongly aligned. His overture is powerfully
energised, dramatic and musically apt. What it lacks in genuine
thematic distinction, it makes up for in atmosphere and mood
painting.
Edward MacDowell’s Hamlet and Ophelia, a
double portrait of two symphonic poems, broods in characteristic
fashion, though he manages to infuse Ophelian tenderness into
the Hamlet part of the symphonic diptych so that a degree of
balance is maintained. This means that his portrait of the Dane
is less introspective than those by the other composers; and
the Ophelia poem is warmly textured, though not impervious to
Hamlet’s tempestuous interventions.
Though rather on the glowering side, temperamentally, and thus
perfectly suited as symphonic poems or overtures, this unusual
selection has been well put together. It’s worth a listen.
Jonathan Woolf
see also review by John
Sheppard
South Jutland Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Ziva