fri 29/03/2024

Players of the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Pappano, Cadogan Hall | reviews, news & interviews

Players of the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Pappano, Cadogan Hall

Players of the Royal Opera House Orchestra, Pappano, Cadogan Hall

Intimate Wagner charms, but Schoenberg's miniMahler can't replace the real thing

What a versatile master is the Royal Opera’s resident dynamo Antonio Pappano. On Saturday night, he was in the Covent Garden pit getting big-band sounds and tender elegies from the whole orchestra in Turnage’s Anna Nicole. And here he was again, moving from a surprisingly fine score to a great one, the shadow-of-mortality approach to Chinese poetry that is Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, albeit in its ingenious chamber reduction by Schoenberg. Oh, and with the small detail of a mezzo’s ultimate challenge being faced by a baritone.

That implies two degrees of colour-deafness before a note is even played. The cue for the change of soloist comes from Mahler's note in the score that the alto role "can possibly be undertaken by a baritone", and whenever it's happened, either on disc - Fischer-Dieskau made a famous recording with Bernstein - or live, I've always missed the colours a mezzo/contralto voice can bring, and the matching of the register with the singer's close-knit orchestral counterparts (it's a bit like having an oboe part played by a bassoon). Yet Mahler always valued artistry above voice-type, and there was much about Thomas Hampson's performance last night he might have admired.

The phrasing was rounded, the tone in the big upsurges suitably full. And yet a degree of reserve, and of the detachment with which Hampson took a seat in the crucial funeral-march interlude of the great final "Farewell", made this a performance from which the audience walked away pleased rather than on shaky legs with eyes blurred by tears. It's true that Mahler uses two poems from Hans Bethge's translated Chinese anthology for his lean half-hour finale, which may imply a legitimate breather, but both strike the same note of quietly heartbroken parting as well as a reaching-out to eternal beauty in the stillness, and the last four lines about the earth's eternal renewal are Mahler's own. It was here, alas, that the levitation of a full orchestra had to be replaced in part by the Lisztian swelling of the piano substitute, and though you couldn't have had a better soloist than John Alley, it still verged on the Claydermanesque.


Clearly the start Schoenberg made on a transcription for 16 players in 1920, halted by the collapse of his pioneering Viennese music society and completed only in 1983 by musicologist Rainer Riehn, was a means of disseminating a masterpiece in the absence of full-scale airings. We get plenty of those every season now - in fact there was one last Saturday, with the achingly musical Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the London Philharmonic Orchestra along with soloists Sarah Connolly and Toby Spence. Not everything about that performance worked for me. Yet Spence, not the ideal lyric-heldentenor the other solo role requires, made so much more of the angsty and drunken man in nature than the unrefined, expressively approximate Klaus Florian Vogt, last night's larger-sized tenor voice. And Connolly, meshing inevitably much better with the wan nocturnal creatures in the trees of her lonely vigils (and standing throughout her songs), may not have had the last degree of vocal individuality but did ultimately seem much more implicated than Hampson in one of Mahler's greatest endgames.

There were a few incidental pleasures in the scaled-down version, which incidentally has had quite a few London hearings over the past few decades. Several of those delights were thanks to the forthright poetry of leader Vasko Vassilev - I've not previously noticed the way the first-violin part counterpoints the final verse of the tenor's porcelain fantasy in the third song, and the solo surge in the finale was a convincing alternative - as well as the excellent woodwind and a single horn, Richard Bissill, who stood floridly for a whole section. But I sorely missed the crucial first trumpet of the full score, not to mention the trombones who cushion the final sinking into the earth (though at least we got the last-minute celesta flying into the ether). Curiously it all felt less intimate than the perfectly calculated real thing. Pappano's guidance was a driving necessity in full-throttle outbursts, though a few rhythmic uncertainties provided hiccoughs in the fluidity of the last farewell.

The conductor, modest as ever in mien but not in articulation, had taken to the piano in an insignificant work of Mahler's teenage musical apprenticeship to bring up the Cadogan curtain: a quartet movement far too often played given the dearth of anything in the composer's output but - yet what a but - symphonies and songs. It did at least yield Brahmsian double octaves on the keyboard, convincingly rattled off by Pappano, and one descending phrase from Vassilev to stand out from the rest of the dutiful exercise: no Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov or Shostakovich at that age, our anniversary boy in his mid-teens.

Eclipsing the so-whats of the first work and the unavoidable disappointments of the song-symphony's transcription, though, was a perfect Siegfried Idyll, flawless in its 13-piece argument against the many who find nothing but bombast in Wagner. As performed for the composer's wife Cosima on Christmas Day 1870, it starts as the tenderest string quartet before achieving rumbustious maturity with more of the happiest new themes from the third Ring opera. This time Bissill truly did steal the show with Siegfried's horn-playing, but the woodwind birdsong that descended like benedictions from above before the blissful close also played their parts in this little slice of heaven. Lucky indeed the Sunday-night Cadogan Hall in this instance.

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I can't imagine Vogt being anything but aptly refined as he was for us at the Met in New York a few years back as Lohengrin.

Interesting you say that, because I was discussing exactly the question of Vogt's refinement with one of my opera class students this afternoon. She's a huge Vogt fan and had to admit she was very disappointed. It just wasn't very committed or polished. But she assures me he is indeed a wonderful Lohengrin. We can't imagine his Lieder singing on these terms.

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