The Barbican’s ‘Great Performers’
series is of course based around attracting big names, mostly singers,
mostly good-looking, who in turn attract big audiences to see, and,
perhaps less important, hear them. Glamour is number one in the musical
establishment these days, with hordes of critics turning out to drool
over selections of bleeding chunks by the latest consonant-less cutie
whilst passing by serious performances of whole works: whilst this mezzo-of-the-moment
is not consonant-less, (but certainly cute) her offering of bites of
Bach interspersed with snippets of other composers was not, to put it
very kindly, at the level of her Lieder singing and her operatic performances.
It is interesting to note that just about every critic in town was present
for this concert largely consisting of extracts of Bach cantatas sung
by a singer whose voice is unsuited to them, and played by instrumentalists
whose intonation and ensemble might best be described as ragged, whereas
when Matthias Goerne, arguably the greatest singer of Bach around today,
sang the complete cantatas as they should be performed, accompanied
by, amongst others, arguably the world’s greatest oboist, Albrecht Mayer,
barely a critic was in evidence.
I have previously written about
the unsuitability of Ian Bostridge’s voice for the Bass cantatas of
Bach, and the same thing applies to Kirchschlager: Bach conceived the
voice of God to be that of a Bass, and this music, at once world-weary,
deeply affectionate and full of consoling strength, needs a bass voice
to sing it, and no matter how lovely the light tenor or genuine mezzo-soprano,
it cannot compare to the voice for which the music was intended. ‘Schlummert
ein’ is the central aria of BWV82, ‘Ich habe genug’ and it needs to
be sung in the context of its recitatives and of ‘Ich freue mich,’ and
extracting it as a showpiece does no service either to the music or
the performers. Kirchschlager’s voice is undeniably beautiful, and her
intonation very moving, but she simply did not have the vocal heft to
ride the instruments here, and she was not helped by the very soupy
playing. The same was true of ‘Vergnügte Ruh’ where the voice merged
smudgily into the orchestra, and the runs were too faint to be faithful
to the musical line. ‘Herr was du willt’ fared rather better in terms
of the singer’s ability to place her notes where they belonged, but
she did not have enough power behind them to convey the requisite joy.
It was such a pity that the lutenist
was placed at the centre of the staging, as opposed to the singer being
in that position, since this not only exacerbated her merging into the
orchestra but also drew attention to some highly questionable technique
on the part of the instrumentalist: I’m no expert on the lute but I’m
pretty sure that Karl-Ernst Schröder, say, does not wield and pluck
it as though he were a reincarnation of Blind Willie McTell about to
launch into ‘Oh Mary Don’t You Weep, Don’t You Moan.’ ‘Wiederstehe doch
der Sünde’ suffered particularly in this regard.
When it came to the pieces which
Bach actually wrote for her tessitura, Kirchschlager was on much firmer
ground, and she produced some truly lovely singing in ‘Bereite dich,
Zion,’ although ‘Erbarme dich’ was sadly unmoving: as with the cantata
extracts, context is vital here, as in fact is a solo violin of confident,
grand, melancholy power, and all of these were missing.
Of the orchestral snippets the
less said the better. Veracini’s Overture in G minor was polished but
rather turgid, Vivaldi’s G minor Concerto only really came to life in
the Allegro, and the latter’s D minor oboe concerto and Albinoni’s A
minor were toe-tappingly pleasant – but then, that may well have been
the level at which one was supposed to receive this concert.
Melanie Eskenazi
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