das Ding an sich

Christoph von Dohnányi, guest conductor
New York Philharmonic
Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center
Friday, December 11, 2009 at 8:00 PM

MOZART | Sinfonia Concertante, K. 364. Soloists: Glenn Dicterow (violin), Cynthia Phelps (viola)
BRUCKNER | Symphony No. 4

I dream of the day when a full cycle of Bruckner’s symphonies can come to New York. The way that Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler cycles can be expected to happen now and then (and have happened within this year or will next, with Barenboim/Boulez and the Berlin Staatskapelle, Rattle and the Berlin Philharmonic, Fischer and the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment as well as his own Budapest FO, Botstein and the American SO). Sibelius and Shostakovich deserve such studious treatment, too, of course—perhaps Tchaikovsky also?—though it doesn’t even happen as regularly as one’d want and expect for the symphonies of Schubert and Dvořák. For someone like Haydn the very dreaming is hardly tenable, and the experiencing might in fact become tedious, whatever one’s receptive stamina, under conditions of such serial completism.

But among all these master-workers of symphonic form, Anton Bruckner remains the least performed in the US. In New York he appeared on the programs of only three major orchestral performances in 2009—two at Carnegie Hall and one at Avery Fisher: the Ninth with Mehta and the Vienna Philharmonic in February, the Eighth with Haitink and the Chicago Symphony in May, and the Fourth with von Dohnányi and the New York Philharmonic in three iterations this past weekend. (Last month the Bruckner Orchestra Linz performed the original 1874 version of the Fourth at Avery Fisher as well, but Bruckner is what that ensemble mostly does. Next spring here there is only one program I’m aware of: the Seventh with Masur and again the NY Phil, with a four-night run.)

I attended both of those American orchestras’ Bruckner concerts in NYC this year. Bernard Haitink did lead the CSO to a heroic all-out effort, drawing out some harmonies that exfoliated the piece of its (relative) familiarity, and there were especially stirring contributions from the cello section. But the Chicago’s venerable brasses often pummeled out of the way or trammeled underfoot other crucial textures. These observations vaguely particularize because the performance did as well—rather than bringing to life the cascading cathedral of the whole. Still, all hope for Bruckner in America will likely have to remain with the CSO, for heritage’s sake and because it still programs the composer several times a year. (Offering some foretaste of his imminent reign there (not here), Muti actually did the Second Symphony with the CSO in October. Spurned from the start by Wagner and by the VPO, which refused to perform it until Bruckner got his own financing and hired them to, when does this work ever get played nowadays?)

Though led by another European conductor long-familiar with Bruckner’s oeuvre, a familiarity documented by respectable if not revelatory recordings, the NY Phil’s Fourth was more disappointing. Despite considerable perseverance on the part of the musicians and collective excitability during climactic moments, this performance fell well short of welding and swelling as one. Problems of internal rhythm were audible throughout. Strings in the first movement sounded hesitant, as if waiting for those annunciations Bruckner gave to the brass before daring to join in as written. Consequently their crucial tremolos did not keep pace with and keep pressure on the ritardando of the five-note descending motif. Things got better in the second movement but coordination remained fuzzy during barer textures, and here it was the brass that stalled. The dance of the Trio sounded stiff, swingless. The orchestra was at its best when the score crescendoed to summits of volume and fervor. The ability to rally under these circumstances saved the Finale. The only thing one can do during an unsatisfying Bruckner performance is to trace along mentally what mechanically transpires—using the listening to internalize the score a little better. This performance managed to break up my inner hum-along all too rarely.

One cannot necessarily tell much from a conductor’s gestures—so much having already been rehearsed, one assumes, so much having gotten tacitly understood—but given the worrying proceedings it was perplexing to see von Dohnányi issue gestures that looked by turns lackadaisical and inconsequentially surgical. Had he not come with a strong idea of how things should go overall? Or—speculating from his occasional shuddering of hands that seemed to request a thicker rumbling of sound (a rare conspicuous manifestation of intent), and from the fact that none then followed—had he given up on this orchestra? Or, given the NY Phil’s reputation for holding back when led by conductors it doesn’t take to, had this orchestra given up on him? Or did getting Bruckner this far actually feel, for anyone involved, good enough?

The Sinfonia Concertante was great to hear as always, and made for canny programming, as its lively beauty could always be counted on to focus an audience’s attention, here readying it for Bruckner. Soloists Glenn Dicterow and Cynthia Phelps, who emerged from their usual roles as the Philharmonic’s concertmaster and principal violist, were admirable for their individual gifts—Phelps’s playing was contemplative and had a lovely velveteen tone, Dicterow’s was blither and fluent (though a very few high notes got a teensy tinny)—as well for as their meticulous synchronization. What their collaboration lacked was the sense of inexorable conversational relay that is the motor of this work’s momentum. Mozart’s writing virtually guaranteed, between the two instrumentalists, spirited scoopings up of phrases and gracious deliveries back of phrases. Friday night’s performance cruised along, but suggested a more binary procedure of dutiful (perhaps habitually collegial?) turn-taking.

[The NYT review was 70% conductor intro, 30% uninvested praise.]

Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall
Thursday, December 10, 2009 at 7:30 PM

Peter Serkin, Piano

SCHOENBERG | Three Piano Pieces, Op. 11
DEBUSSY | 6 épigraphes antiques
KURTÁG | Selections from Játékok: Pen Drawing, Valediction to Erzsébet Schaár; (…and round and round it goes…); Portrait; The mind will have its freedom…
WUORINEN | Scherzo
CHOPIN | Polonaise in C Minor, Op. 40, No. 2; Impromptu in A-flat Major, Op. 29; Etude in A-flat Major from Trois nouvelles études; Nocturne in E Major, Op. 62, No. 2
SCHOENBERG | Suite for Piano, Op. 25

Encores:
BACH | Prelude & Fugue in B-flat Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book I
CHOPIN | Etude in G-flat Major, Op. 25, No. 9, “Butterfly”; Nocturne in F-sharp Major, Op. 15, No. 2

Serkin’s hands were fascinating to watch: the rippling sprawls, the feathery glides, the sniper-like dartings, the instant bounce-backs to midair arrest before the next dives in. Throughout the Debussy there was a magical lightness of touch that never came at the expense of clarity or warmth. These pieces, though only about 15 minutes in all, offered a sense-gallery of tautness and tenderness. Notes grazed, lingered, softly crumbled. Deft pedaling aided with subtle, not sentimental, hazes. These épigraphes were evocative independently, then, as well as effective for their original function: accompanying the recitation of Pierre Louÿs’ fin-de-siècle Sapphic verses, Les Chansons de Bilitis.

The four micro-selections from György Kurtág’s seldom performed series of exercises were charmingly willful (Játékok = “Games”). Particularly memorable for this listener: the brightly skittish, trill-intensive “Portrait.” Wuorinen’s Scherzo, written for Serkin and premiered last year, offered densely intricate, animated textures that upped their stakes (and raised the technical bar) along the way. Rigor and vigor defined the two Schoenberg sets that book-ended the program, in the form of focused intent and (again those) leaping hands.

Encore number one, the Bach, was taken at an unusually rapid pace; partly due to Serkin’s magic, and partly to the aural afterimage of Wuorinen and Schoenberg, perhaps, this prelude-fugue pair became scintillatingly enigmatic. It made me want to hear more Bach from him. To the Chopins—six in all, thanks to generous encores—he brought everything from everything above. In sequence, mere impressions, impressionistic for having been too engrossed to be alert registrar: sober, penetrative intensity, broken by lush quiets; fluid lyricism as well as muscularity; simple, lush blots and dapples; dreamy reverie from which it felt barely possible to recover; featheriest-ness.

Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater at NY City Center

Sunday, December 6, 2009, 7:30 PM

Festa Barocca (2008), choreographed by Mario Bigonzetti; music by G. F. Handel; costumes by Marc Happel.

This is a big, ebullient, full-ensemble piece that captures the spirit of the baroque—as its title and Handel soundtrack properly assert (and as its detractors have seemed oblivious to). Music apart, moreover, we see Baroque and baroqueness everywhere: in the wild abundance of color, in the generous undulations of silk, in spines’ swiveling slopes and limbs’ curlicues, in the mutability yet precision, extravagance yet playfulness overall. Amid the ornate, boisterous choreography here—especially lovely in the three duets—there are touches of flamenco, of courtly mannerism (at one moment a dancer’s stretch becomes a fancy curtsy), of hip-hop, of tango, of capoeira, of breaking, of voguing, of queeny righteousness. Where there’s baroque, there is exuberant attitudinal flaunting; so, too, here.

The piece begins with Hope Boykin dancing center-stage to the minuet from Rodelinda in front of a bright array of nearly still dancers, who move out little by little, step-wise and on beat, collectively like the slow-motion expansion of some impossibly colorful underwater plant. Boykin is MC-cum-sorceress, igniting the proceedings with each snap, conjuring forth movement from her still marionettish crew. When conscripted—or freed—into motion, the dancers in their larger formations soon reveal a choreography that is particularly upper-body-intensive. Arms coil, thrust out, frame the body at big angles, weave before the face in quick flourishes like a magician before the reveal, hoop around the partner’s body at great speed and varying heights—but without touching—like a game of tag for desiring adults.

Having now seen this performance, one cannot but find the two New York Times reviews of Festa Barocca’s debut this time last year wildly—perhaps willfully—out of touch. Alastair Macaulay complained of too much that is “acrobatic”—any trace of stunty mass entertainment clearly heretical—as well as “foot fetishism.” But what he deemed “foot fetishism” was Bigonzetti’s attempt to consider for feet in dance some role other than points of gravitation, tips of leg extension, deserving tangency only with the ground. Why not use the foot’s flexed firmness to hook and hang from, why not let the curves of that neglected ticklish surface between toes and heel run over and find rhyme along the partner’s body? Two of the most affecting duets in Festa Barocca—between Constance Stamatiou and Clifton Brown, and then between Linda Celeste Sims and Glenn Allen Sims—do just that. One gets the impression that feet—the biped’s workhorses, after all, the body parts that affirm our earthliness with every use, precisely by keeping the rest of our bodies from touching the ground—are for Macaulay, who writes so superbly on ballet, still the bloodied, bruised embarrassments to be tucked up in shapely satin.

In a less protracted dismissal, Roslyn Sulcas in her review marveled of what she deemed “no kind of refinement” that “The audience loved this, as though they were privy to some sort of insider joke.” One might marvel instead, however, that such a disdainful and uninformative sentence, along with non-descriptions such as “fake-intense, semi-sexy, semi-anguished duets,” can get by as dance criticism. That it has might even lead one to presume some telltale demographic gap between NYT readers and Alvin Ailey ticket-holders that does not in fact exist. It is Sulcas’s problem, in other words, not the audience’s. To imply that “refinement” should be dance’s sole ambition, sole criterion, is to amputate from dance’s universe a majority of its cultures and epochs. And indeed there were jokes throughout Festa Barocca. And that was the point—this transmutation and elaboration of recognizable vocabulary (recognizable from neighborhoods, from clubs, from television if nothing else) into abstracter forms, more complex formations. One need not have been any insider to revel in them, or to find splendor and take joy in the whole.

[Anita Rachvelishvili before her admirers]

If I were to reduce to a single word Anita Rachvelishvili’s La Scala debut yesterday as Carmen (the HD simulcast of which I saw at Symphony Space), it might be “sovereignty.” She reigned supreme. This Carmen was the center around which all else could only hope to hold and the sole circumference of her own self. Men in heat fanned themselves and fell aside. Women melted toward her like heliotropes to the sun. During the Habanera, elevated atop a mere water trough outside her factory, she was a radiant and pungent Venus, rising out of the blander foam of humanity. That is, even if one would want from the Carmencita of one’s dreams more slithery a seduction dance during the “Je vais danser en votre honneur” bit—done here without castanets, freeing her hands for much skirt-play—than Rachvelishvili’s potently self-possessed rendition.

Too many ideas can spoil an opera, and this may have been the case with Emma Dante’s staging, wherein cloth and fiber figured prominently as the materials of inspiration. Act III opened to a shifting formation of trees played by actors completely cloaked in heavily pleated cloth and topped with thickets of fir—definitely not a bad way to spike a Pleats Please runway with a gothic touch, but distracting here as a visual demographic once joined onstage by smugglers and black-veiled, death-messaging wraiths. A translucent white cloth spanning the entire middle of the stage, slowly stretched over Micaela during her first visit to Don José, made a point well-taken—she in her pale cocoon of love and purity, oblivious that Don José is already lost to another—but one felt a bit sorry for Adriana Damato, who had to push her arms about and sing on in that gauze (too like a mosquito net?). Micaela endures another illusionistic gag in Act III when, returning to beg Don José to leave his wicked life, a giant pillow and giant billowing bed-sheet (supplied by “invisible” stage-hands) suddenly render her an apparition of Don José’s dying mother and no less helpless. Her head and upper torso swimming in this sea of white, the effect had the scale-jolting strangeness of Alice in Wonderland—an interesting idea but wasted in this opera. More effective creativity with fiber gave us two long, thick ropes tied to Carmen’s wrists during the Seguidilla, each rope hanging from each upper corner of the set. The rope tenses and slackens as she sways and leans, such that the precise position of her incarcerated body, all extremities stretched, understandably makes Don José lose his wits at just this moment. All these outstretchings of cloth—including also a brilliantly choreographed bit with banderillos spinning in and out of taut swathes of red silk that are by turns banners and cummerbunds—had a way of activating the stage as highly tensile and flexile space.

In addition to some heavy-handed Catholic iconography—e.g., a giant swinging thurible bisecting the upper stage in Act IV, lots of big tilted crosses, and assorted uses of chiaroscuro and vanishing-point symmetries straight out of Dan Brown’s film adaptations (the author was in attendance)—Dante’s staging also offered commentary on the effects of the adult world on children. In the “Avec la garde montante” scene, the children who mimic the soldiers really march about in uniform—a troubling sight. When Don José gets out of prison, Carmen welcomes him with an indoor picnic setup that “Papi” Presidente might call “the big bed.” Around the edge of this blanket several young girls from the gypsy band sit watching as their default role-model dances her “Je vais danser en votre honneur” aria, at once seducing Don José and educating her prepubescent audience.

[Jonas Kaufmann as Don José]

There’s lots to say about the interpretive liberty in the final scene—rape—and the downright bestial band of teeth-gnashing, hair-pulling gypsy women as Dante chose to depict them, but probably not much that hasn’t already been said.

Jonas Kaufmann captured Don José’s earnest ardor as well as desperate infantilism with pathos and a beautiful voice he certainly knows how to sculpt. I’d be especially eager to hear his recording of Schubert Lieder, and to see his Lohengrin, which premiered in Munich this summer, as that seems a great role for him. Erwin Schrott, not only lovely to look at (as Anna Netrebko knows), made for an irresistible Escamillo—his voice rich and commanding, his expressions and gestures full of heartbreaker antics. Frasquita and Mercédès were honey-voiced and acted with care by Michele Losier and Adriana Kučerová.

Among the peculiarities of the HD presentation is a frontal view of the conductor during the overtures. Barenboim, fidgeting with what did seem a precariously diminutive high-chair, produced some endearingly comical expressions. More importantly, of course, the La Scala orchestra under his leadership made the proceedings musically exciting all the way through, too, especially the woodwinds and strings so crucial for this score.

[the first Grandioso motif from Liszt's B Minor Sonata]

Friday, December 4, 2009 at 8 PM
Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage

Vladimir Feltsman, Piano

SCHUBERT | Sonata in B-flat Major, D. 960
SCHUBERT | “Der Müller und der Bach,” S. 565, No. 2 (arr. Liszt)
SCHUBERT | “Wohin?,” S.565, No. 5 (arr. Liszt)
LISZT | Sonata in B Minor

Dreamy programming and thrilling pianism made this a night to behold. Fairly quiet on the scene, though established in his celebrity for more than two decades since emigrating from Moscow, the 57-year-old Vladimir Feltsman may have earned himself a new army of devotees with this recital.

Recalibrations of rhythm and inspired incursions by the left hand—to be initially reductive—contributed much to what was an unusually stirring, oxygenating account of the Schubert D. 960 sonata. Simply put: last night I experienced this keystone work anew. Feltsman’s protracted fermatas and liberal rubatos had the effect of sliding the composition apart from within, giving rich pause and air to its still elusive, always still explorable interiors. From each lull, new glow. There was thoughtful love here that shared with us its intimate discoveries—neither obscure idiosyncrasy nor showy mystification as I imagine some Schubert aficionados in the audience might protest. But what purists decry as exaggeration is so often empathy more courageous than theirs. The classical Feltsman (his reputation steeped in Mozart and Bach) emerged with all crispness, anyway, upon arriving at the triplets section of the first movement. If there was Bachian lucidity and Mozartian elegance, however, throughout one could also hear ghostings in mood of Scriabin, Debussy, even (I hallucinated) Ligeti, and a chord or two near the end of the first movement took on the air of tone clusters. (These last were not finger slippages, though there were a forgivable few in this concert.) A principle of dilation continued to illuminate the second movement, made all space for its meditative hesitations, murky withdrawals, near-vanishings. In the Scherzo Feltsman’s way of shifting between scintillating fluency and richer, stranger musing became particularly notable. The Allegro evinced a committed interest in the particulars of agitation, and in this concluding movement’s moments of self-collecting unto cheer Feltsman delivered both sparkle and wistfulness. I hope he will record this work. It was a truly memorable interpretation that one’d want to savor again and keep learning from.

After performances of Liszt’s transcriptions of Schubert’s “Der Müller und der Bach” and “Wohin?” from Die schöne Müllerin that threaded the vocal lines of the original Lieder through the piano scoring with gorgeous lyricism, Feltsman descended as if inevitably into the great Liszt Sonata—with the minutest of pauses, none at all for applause to the foregoing. His approach to this work, completed 25 years after Schubert’s 1728 sonata, was concentrated and undaunted intensity—amounting to a dramatic unveiling of yet another order of his formidable abilities. I cannot remember the last time I heard such a gripping rendering of the Grandioso development. Nearly every appearance of it last night felt like the slow, reverberant unlatching of a giant vault ceiling until one began to see sky. In the fugue section, method was clearly there to keep at bay the encroachments of madness, and of course Feltsman made sure that madness nonetheless burnt through and eventually surged into the open. In driving up Lisztian frenzies to a perilous pitch he was fearless. The quieter passages offered delicate simplicity but also sinuous nestling in nooks of lyricism, e.g., the Andante sostenuto that begins to draw toward an end. The final iteration of the descending motif, a descent of no return whatever the lingering final notes, left in its wake all time and barely breath.

Liszt’s Liebesträume No. 3: the perfect encore.

[the trash collectors]

Leoš Janáček, From the House of the Dead
[Z mrtvého domu]
Wednesday, December 2, 2009, 8PM

Production: Patrice Chéreau
Associate Director: Thierry Thieu Niang
Conductor: Esa-Pekka Salonen
Main Cast: Willard White (Alexandr Gorjančikov), Eric Stoklossa (Aljeja)
Stefan Margita (Filka Morozov)

How to make a narrative of so relentless yet monotonous, time-ravaging and exitless an experience as life in this Siberian prison camp? Janàček’s oneiric, episodic opera—a very selective adaptation of Dostoevsky’s memoir-novel Notes from the House of the Dead [Записки из мертвого дома]—does not err that way. What does happen here: a death, an education, an unredemptive recognition, an evanescent collaboration. Only one of the men has a definite future outside. Other prisoners sing songs that refer invariably to their lives before, what landed them in the hope-shorn present. That one of them falls dead during this lean duration, hardly 100 minutes and sans intermission, gives us but an accidental glimpse into the men’s collectively terminal prospects. (And when Filka/Luka dies while Shishkov insistently, obliviously keeps singing, story-song takes on a Scheherazade effect.) Save the sparse chance encounter, enmity or complicity with one another from the outside—we’re never sure just how long ago—they are joined only by their common condition. Save sympathy for and sublimation through a winged animal they tend back to flight, they seem barely related in feeling. These are men who have wronged and are wronged. Dostoevsky’s stand-in, political prisoner Gorjančikov—whose entrance launches the drama but whose own past stays unknown—is the only character who attempts meaningful action within the prison, but his attempt to give young Aljeja a future (by teaching him to read) occurs only at the very margins.

Patrice Chéreau’s set of minimalist but hulking geometries and gunmetal grays in the prison yard, sparse thin-frame beds in the barracks, lends an industrial air to the premises. Over the course of the overture, materializing one by one from darkness, thirty-some prisoners slowly tread onto stage—lifeless, lumbering figures in search of space. We see the joyless swinging of buckets, hear the cold crackling of ankle shackles. One man in a corner lights a cigarette—retrieving something like personal experience thereby—and in the darkness, by default, the spark and smoke mark him as almost individual. A brawl suddenly erupts between two men for no apparent reason, because in this place there’s every reason, and the way their peers immediately converge at that wrestling knot to break it up reveals at once this group’s self-regulation and, such bare and by now habitual restoration of equilibrium apart, disaggregation as its default. In this meticulous opening scene Chéreau shows two other circumstances under which these men will readily self-assemble: the rough but swift lining up for sop ladled from buckets; the game to be had of kicking around a shoe as a ball.

The eagle, about which there’s been much discussion, soon suggests another, more poignant and more promising coming together. Upon discovering this wounded bird fallen into their midst, one prisoner starts running around with a blanket cape and stew-pot helmet in wishful mimicry. But other prisoners try raising the bird into the air. This image of arms raised aloft, the bird the high vertex of their bodies and their longings, was absolutely unforgettable. Having now seen this in person—from the nearness of the tenth row in orchestra—one can judge as moot the controversy surrounding the intended verisimilitude of this bird. Whatever Janàček’s vision, I’m not sure Chéreau intended this moment to constitute an event any more singular than the characters’ cycling through of twice-told tales. Indeed, when eventually freed into flight—to cries of “The eagle is czar!”—the bird is furtively tucked back, wings folded, into the old man’s coat.

My favorite directorial moment in this staging comes during the transition between the First and Second Acts: an avalanche of paper rubbish crashing in from above onto the vacated stage, leaving the entire set smoking with dust and debris like some aftermath of war. Not manna from heaven but an injunction to useless labor, this mess draws the men back to slowly repopulate the stage with clean-up baskets and a heavy work-song. In an affecting use of real time, the stage by the end of the scene has been entirely cleared.

In the libretto, between personal histories and two pantomimes, some solitary lines cut through. “A prisoner owns nothing.” “My dear children—I’ll never see you again.” “You’re my father!” cries Aljeja when bidding his mentor and friend farewell, while Gorjančikov can only reply, “My child! I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again.” But of all the heartbreaking truths surely this is the most tragic: “My eyes will never again see the land where I was born.”

There is much to be written on opera’s treatment of prison life. The pertinent scenes in Fidelio and Don Carlo would be richest next to From the House of the Dead, although in both of those works the inevitable individuations of romantic love get in the way of more radically exploring the possibility of populous camaraderie, while here the possibility proves precarious even when no other relation can suffice to surrogate.

On the issue of the supertitles: shifting placement helped them to melt into the set, and these projections could even have implied a quiet acknowledgment of the drama’s textual origins. I’d love to see the Met incorporate this method into other productions.

Seeing Lang Lang twice this season at Carnegie Hall brought to mind a remarkable clip from his Carnegie appearance back in November 2003 — a piano-erhu duo with his father that has since become an occasional set-piece. For all the childhood-obliterating pressure Lang Guoren put his son through—recounted by the latter, corroborated by the former—their musical chemistry emerges affectingly in this performance, along with something perhaps both reconciliatory and vying — this classic for the erhu called, after all, “Racing Horses” [赛马].

[program for the New York premiere of Mahler's 7th, from the Carnegie Hall archives]

Wednesday, May 13, 2009 at 8 PM
STAATSKAPELLE BERLIN, cond. Daniel Barenboim
Thomas Hampson, Baritone

MAHLER | Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen & Symphony No. 7

I will never know the Seventh well enough, but strongly suspect that Barenboim could know it better, too. At least he took a score with him to the podium this time. His Fifth had seemed to me ‘indefatigable,’ and it was true enough last night as well that the musicians kept going, and going. But rarely did the music, amid all that music-making, much soar, or move, or shape. I almost haven’t the heart to review the memory thereof, and since coming home have had to listen to a few recorded accounts (Bernstein, Tennstedt, Abbado) just to revive a sense of this work’s revelations.

With his reading of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, which opened the program, Hampson proved the more satisfying of the two Thomases this series, if not the most memorable Mahlerian wayfarer one can imagine. His voice settled into the songs with assured familiarity, and issued notes richer and most robust than those we’ve been hearing from Quasthoff. Occasionally, though, perhaps in an interpretive affect of simplicity, he moved from note to note with a strange discreteness that seemed to prioritize note-intoning over line-contouring. This, too, entirely differed from Quastoff’s way of sliding toward a note then skimming upon its surface. The alarming exception to Hampson’s mastery was an alteration to the first verse of ‘Die zwei blauen Augen’ that switched a crucial craning note to one several notes lower—an untoward, if helpless, falsification. This bizarre moment aside, he remained a trusty presence, and it was a pleasure to see him perform as capably and comfortably in-role here as I’ve seen him at the Met, whether as Don Giovanni or Amfortas or Onegin.

[Sextner Dolomiten in Südtirol, where Mahler completed his Sixth Symphony]

Tuesday, May 12, 2009 at 8 PM
STAATSKAPELLE BERLIN, cond. Pierre Boulez

MAHLER | Symphony No. 6, ‘Tragic’

Of the four concerts in this series I have attended, last night’s account of the Sixth has emerged as the most impressive. A world plunged deep and deeper unto itself, this is a difficult symphony to get right. Nature’s traces of bells and birds are here more distant than ever; culture’s phantasmagorias of marches and waltzes waft through only to become abstraction. It is a work that gazes through to the abyss and is eventually flung headlong into it. It knows better than to believe in redemption, yet must still seek out means of survival, forms of farewell.

Under the direction of Boulez, the Staatskapelle Berlin met the thrusting rhythmic demands of the opening movement with force and precision, delineating its martial theme as a logic refusing to be discarded or derailed. Despite the lyrical surge of the ascending ‘Alma theme’ in the strings, despite its compelling resurgences, despite this or that pizzicato-and-winds interlude, despite even moments when the theme itself almost melts into formlessness, the orchestra emphatically ensured that the heaviness always beat back into life unabated—with a life of its own and back to battering into the life of the hero. A last attempt at the ‘Alma theme’ shattered into calamity and, chillingly, was absorbed by it.

In the Scherzo following, rhythms that first seem to reassert those of the prior movement soon slide away from each other, each disbanded set struggling to find its own development, sometimes degenerating thereby. For Adorno, this movement conveyed ‘the hell of absolute space.’ Such hell was finely articulated: Boulez secured a remarkable translucency throughout that allowed layers to persist in a kind of palimpsest, precarious yet trembling onward. When the movement came to a close, the orchestra receded deftly to a faded tone, evoking the last fallings away of surface appeasements.

The symphony itself cannot fall away, however, without nestling in one last lasting pang of beauty, a kind of extended Orphean gaze. The Andante, into which floats many a wistful interval or melisma from Mahler’s earlier work, was given as pellucid an account as one could hope for. One realized here that Boulez executes Mahler’s disintegrations with exceptional fineness; one hears each grain and shred of the elemental debris (in the bleaker world of this symphony, alas, no longer stardust).

The Staatskapelle’s violin sections have not especially impressed in the performances so far, but in the opening octave motif of the Finale they at last attained a lovely, almost courageous sheen—one that would last the motif’s recurrences as well as the growing turmoil. Spare yet potent in its gestures, sprawling in length, this was the longest single movement Mahler ever wrote. Fanfare may strut through and more expansive vistas sweep in, but the essential terror of ‘absolute space’ remains. Sheer duration is the music’s (is life’s) only means of defiance throughout, but we are forced to realize that duration does not save. The hammer blows devastate from a realm of regulation wholly beyond our reach. This Finale gained much from Boulez’s distilled, almost cautious handling, while eliciting playing from the orchestra that was more densely symphonic than in their previous showings.

Boulez’s 1994 recording of this work with the Vienna Philharmonic clocks in at just under 81 minutes; last night it lasted about 84 minutes (including the extended pause, for late seating, after the first movement). Much of this significant extra time seemed to have been invested into the Finale. Call it not a notable discrepancy for the famously self-consistent Boulez, then, and rather a conscious rethinking with tremendous payoff—for audience and orchestra alike.

[the Scherzo from Mahler's 5th in ms at the Morgan Library]

Sunday, May 10, 2009 at 2 PM
STAATSKAPELLE BERLIN, cond. Daniel Barenboim
Thomas Quasthoff, Bass-Baritone

MAHLER | Rückert Lieder & Symphony No. 5

Daniel Barenboim resumed the podium this afternoon for an indefatigable account of Mahler’s Fifth, following Pierre Boulez’s three-night vigil through the Second, Third, and Fourth symphonies (just reviewed in the NYT). Opening with the five 1901-1902 Rückert Lieder, the program also brought back Thomas Quasthoff, whose delicate phrasings were again affecting, if in an abated capacity compared to his Kindertotenlieder Wednesday night.

In contrast to the common tragic theme in Kindertotenlieder, the wayfarer persona persisting through Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, and the shared chinoiserie source-material of Das Lied von der Erde, any principle of unity among the Rückert Lieder is less obvious or organic; they comprise rather a sort of medley, diverse in moods and meanings. A self-possessed humility and taciturn ardor are revealed through the lingering lines of “Liebst du um Schönheit,” for instance, whereas the brisk “Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder” cajoles in a spirited, almost impish manner. And while the hymn-like resolution of “Um Mitternacht” feels confirmed by the score, however hard-won, the final tranquility of “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen” may still suggest resigned receding more than beatific transcendence, the protagonist having found no real refuge either from or in his Weltschmerz. If one feels compelled now to sketch some such contours of difference, it is because Mr. Quasthoff’s restrained handling of these Lieder did not do enough to. Due to occasional pitch pressures met in the upper range, moreover, and given what seemed to be general constraints on upper volume, the songs rarely came alive. What did become still clearer today is Quasthoff’s admirable sensitivity to minute gradations of quiet. This gift is not without its perils: in the final moments of “Um Mitternacht”—timpani and brass joining sung declaration of faith in chorale-like apotheosis—it became uncertain whether human voice could here survive, much less be buoyed by, the rising architecture of concomitant sound. But it was precisely this gift, too, that lent affecting subtlety to the stillnesses and subdual of the final song, “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,” aided by the excruciating attentiveness of the orchestra. Barenboim and the Staatskapelle are to be commended for taking noticeable care in supporting and tracing Quasthoff’s phrasings overall—a few discrepancies of timing notwithstanding—and they achieved particularly beautiful results during the attenuated, gleaming passages concluding “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen.”

The reception of Barenboim’s opening effort this cycle, Mahler’s First on Wednesday, ranged largely from scolding to skeptical (at least among those who’ve written about it). But what was sacrificed in scrupulousness that evening, in my opinion, was more than made up for in vigor and exhilaration. Today’s account of the Fifth certainly came off more cleanly, and at its best moments acquired inexorable propulsion. At times, though, the orchestra would have benefited from a clearer unifying directive. In both Mahler appearances thus far, Barenboim has demonstrated that he has definite ideas about beginnings: almost each movement under his leadership begins with a sense of concentration and with promise. He has also proven much energized when carrying momentum toward an ending, and this infuses additional energy into the orchestra. Many a middle stretch of this Fifth, however, seemed left to the musicians themselves, with Barenboim throwing himself into what was transpiring rather than administering the events or even much influencing them. The default license thereby granted to the players, or the implicit faith placed in them, by turns benefited the music and cost it. During the Trauermarsch and Scherzo sections, for instance, the strings sometimes seemed hastened and the woodwinds pressed by the broad gestures issued from the podium, whereas the orchestra’s collective efforts in the Rondo-Finale came together in glorious summation—in no small part due to today’s dependable brass showing. The crucial, consistent highlight of the concert was the meticulous Adagietto, at moderate tempo and unsentimental, yet shimmering in self-evident beauty.

Midway now through a demanding cycle, and so understandably, the spectre of fatigue began to haunt this performance, even as the struggle against it was steadfastly heroic and always sufficed. (Pauses between movements this time were less interpretive effects than necessary, visible breaks for breath-taking and brow-wiping.) This week the musicians will have two nights off from performing, though not likely from rehearsing. One is heartened by their fortitude, and hopes for a renewal also of focus.