Tonight, to Berlin’s lovely Konzerthaus,
for the last of our chosen concerts of the season. Only, it won’t be the last …
because I’m not going out on the least lovely concert of my season.
On paper, it looked great. A youth
orchestra? Always love them. Conductor: David Afkham? I know I like him, from
the MCO concerts. Programme: a new work (hurrah!), the Strauss four last songs
(yes, yes, yes) and a bit of Bartok. Why not?
But between paper and the event, it went
floppy.
We arrived at the hall – which we couldn’t
get into last time – to find it amazingly more than half empty. Why? And yet,
booking on line, we couldn’t get our favourite pair of seats. They were
occupied by a parade of different people during the night. And … who were this
strange, sparse audience. Mums and dads (they clapped between the songs and the
Bartok movements)? For the Four Last Songs?
We started with the commissioned work which
was called “strane costellazione” (e e cummings, please note). I’m not sure why in Italian. Maybe
composer Beat Furrer (Austria) has Italian connections. It was what I’d call a
harmless piece. In fact, once I’d decided that it was depicting ripples and
little waves trickling over the pebbles on a Riviera beach, I got on with it
all right. But the little waves died away, and left me forgetting them.
Then came the Strauss. We all grew up with
the Schwarzkopf record. It was the great love of my young days. The music and
the singer. And it still is. This was to be the first time I had heard it live.
And with a singer who professed to have studied with Schwarzkopf.
I can’t express my disappointment. The
conductor worked his stockings off, the orchestra played the music loyally, and
the singer…
Who hired Christiane Oelze, out of all the
glorious (young?) Strauss soprani that
the world possesses, to sing this music, and why? I have written down
‘accurate, uninspired, elderly’. But it was worse than that. Her opening phases
(and all the lower register) were inaudible over the orchestra, others were cut
to bits by faulty breathing, although at least she stayed in tune. The quality
of the voice was pale English-plummy-covered, fit for a small room but not for
a small Konzerthaus. And you could see the effortful high passages coming. When
I wanted a soar and a shiver … well, enough said. There was no excitement, no
passion, no soaring, just colourless, distant almost-accuracy … in this great music!
Mind you, it doesn’t help when in the
middle of doing what should be a big sing, the lady bends over to turn a page!
Glory is reduced to utter Prose. Which it was.
If I could remember the flood of hurt words
that I poured out in the interval, I’d repeat them. But it’s nearly midnight
and all I remember is my huge disappointment. And the weird grey crochet bodice
the lady wore.
I felt that the second half surely would
get better. Paul had heard the Bartok ‘Concerto for Orchestra’ before, and
enjoyed it.
I didn’t. I found it characterless and
shapeless, and the two children in front of me (who’d hated the soprano) agreed
with me. Everybody played with a will, there were lots more oddities (we’d had
piano plunking already), the ‘Junge Deutsche Philharmonie’, with its sawing row
of oriental lady fiddlers, seemed to have been infiltrated by an elderly
balding bass player … and it all sounded like musical wallpaper. Sorry, Mr
Bartok. But maybe not wholly your fault.
So I came out of this evening with a
feeling that maybe Herr Furrer’s piece was the least unsatisfactory item … and
a mission to ask my musical friends: just who hires the singers for these
concerts.
Now I’m going to you tube to listen to
Schwarzkopf sing that that third song, before I go to bed ..
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