A goodbye to remember forever - Daniel Harding, Fleur Barron, Andrew Staples and the Swedish Radio Orchestra in Wagner, Jolas and Mahler in ADDA, Alicante

 

This was not the last concert in the other season, but it offered a totally valedictory theme. We heard four works, presented as three because the first two were run together seamlessly and, by hearing them together, the theme that was to dominate the evening was established.

The two works that were offered as one were by Richard Wagner. We are familiar with the opinion that the Prelude from Tristan and Isolde changed music forever. Before then, unresolved chords and “confusing” harmonies had been used by composers but usually resolved to something that felt definite. Wagner’s operatic prelude, however, is a succession of unresolved chords and “confusing” harmony. The music marks time, but also stops it, making an audience listen for every detail, of which, in this sparse music, there is a wealth. To run that directly into an orchestral version of the Liebestod marked a transition. Here is Isolde, bereft and alone, is saying goodbye to life by singing a love song. And so the valedictory theme was established.

Betsy Jolas describes how when she spoke to Simon Rattle about Ces Belles Annees, he was conducting Tristan and Isolde at the time. In 2023 and already 95 years old, she thought that this work might be her last orchestral commission, so she wrote a work whose theme was the passing of years by creating variations loosely based on Happy Birthday. The orchestral writing is confused, almost disjointed, but theoretically, not harmonically. Any harmonies are merely passing, just like the passing of time it celebrates. When the soprano enters, this evening Fleur Barron dressed in party frock and bovver boots, she is in party mood and invites the audience to join with her, to come to her birthday party, to celebrate the passing of years. At 95, Betsy Jolas chose to end the work with the orchestra in a tutti of laughter, perhaps a comment on the fact that we take life and time too seriously, perhaps commenting that in the end, nothing matters, despite the conviction and sincerity of the soprano’s words of invitation.

And then, in the second half we heard perhaps the most beautiful performance of Das Lied von der Erde imaginable. This was music-making of such a high-quality, such intensity, such attention to detail that it is hard to describe. The ADDA audience were spellbound by this largely quiet music, which, despite its juxtaposition of drinking songs alongside reflection, is eventually a valediction and an invitation to contemplate eternity.

A note on the performers is essential, especially in this work, which relies for its start on the presence of a Wagnerian tenor, one who has an instrument with the power to sing Seigfried, but with the inherent ability to communicate simply and directly. Performances of Das Lied von der Erde often fall short because of the opening, when the tenor simply cannot bring it off. Not so Andrew Staples, whose voice was not only up to the task, it shone. He managed a perfect balance of power, humour, and lyricism in words that speak a lot of drinking and having a good time, but always with the underpinning idea that the experience will not last.

Andrew Staples, surely in recognition of the fact that the main act in this work is the female voice, chose to sit at the back of the first violins when not singing, rather than take a seat centre-stage. In the alto’s final farewell, he took a seat in the stalls. Perhaps he also wanted to listen to Fleur Barron’s performance, which was nothing less than exceptional. Nominally a mezzo-soprano, she coped perfectly with the soprano-alto range of this part so that nothing interrupted the flow of this beautiful music. It was a performance that was memorable, right down to the last, barely audible, “eternally”.

Last, but certainly not least, Daniel Harding’s direction of the Swedish Radio Orchestra was both masterful and utterly transparent. He clearly has a very special relationship with the music of Gustav Mahler and both the detail that he brought out and the space that he created were utterly exquisite. It was a long goodbye, but a musical experience I would repeat many times, if time were to allow me the chance.

 

Cristina Gómez Godoy and Roberto Forés Veses with ADDA orchestra in Wagner, Strauss and Brahms

There are not many opportunities to hear an oboe concerto in the concert hall. It is surprising that an instrument that has been a mainstay of the sound of a symphony orchestra is so infrequently featured as a solo instrument. The twentieth century repertoire is relatively extensive, and it was one of the most played twentieth century oboe concertos that Cristina Gómez Godoy played with the ADDA orchestra last night.

Richard Strauss’s Oboe Concerto is a late work and, characteristically in the composer’s later style, it is it is a deceptively simple work. In three movements and scored for a moderate orchestra, it presents a neo-classical surface beneath which appear memories of the key changes and orchestral sumptuousness of the composer’s youth. But this is no mere autobiographical retrospective. The three movements are played without a break and, like the Four Last Songs, they make valedictory gestures within a tranquillity which is possibly the composer’s reflection of having just lived through years of war. The music is both a personal statement and, at the same time, a vision of enduring humanity. Richard Strauss was a complex person with a consciously simple public projection. He had to sign documents to support the Nazis and keep his mouth closed. On the other hand... Surely it was in works like the Oboe Concerto that we hear his inner voice, the one that he had by law to suppress.

Cristina Gómez Godoy’s playing of the piece was a complete joy from first note to last. Her total and absolute control, matched with a tremendous feel for phrasing and expression was utterly mesmerizing. Sitting close to the performer, one is reminded of how much effort is needed to play this instrument well. And, it must be recorded, there exist very few breathing spaces for the soloist in this piece’s half hour duration. This is a true musical dialogue between soloist and orchestra, and Richard Strauss’s writing ensures that the soloist is never swamped by the orchestral accompaniment. There is, therefore, nowhere to hide. Cristina Gómez Godoy played the slow movement from one of JS Bach’s concertos as an encore and we thus had demonstrated many of the similarities between Bach’s use of the instrument and what we had just heard. Put simply, this was an utterly memorable performance.

Roberto Forés Veses, guest conductor with the ADDA Orchestra had opened the concert with an orchestral interlude from Wagner’s Ring Cycle. This was the “Rumores del bosque” from Siegfried, when the eponymous hero becomes captivated by nature and birdsong. It was revealing to hear how modern this music sounded, especially in its understated passages where the music was allowed space to register.

In the second half, Roberto Forés Veses directed the orchestra in a performance of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. Memorable was the tempo and excitement generated in the third movement, which for me at least was wholly original. The evening ended with an encore of Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5, which was both rousing and playful.

Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers by Paul Rosenfeld

 

Tastes change. Fashions change. Presumptions, through whose refracting prisms each new age interprets its aesthetics, also change, but usually unpredictably because we absorb the restrictions without being conscious of their control. It’s probably called culture, and perhaps we are all imprisoned by its inherently commercial pressure. And we only rarely perceive change in our ability to respond to stimuli, often surprisingly perceived when we remove our experience into a different culture, a different aesthetic and possibly another time. This is precisely why exploration of criticism from the past can be so rewarding and, in a way that the writing would never have achieved in its contemporary setting, challenging. It was this kind of experience that flowed from every page of Paul Rosenfeld’s Musical Portraits.

These “Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers” were published in 1920, having previously appeared as occasional pieces elsewhere. A hundred years on, of course, the first challenge is the meaning of the word “modern” in its title, especially when the presented list of composers starts with Wagner and finishes with Bloch. Personally, I have nothing against classifying Bloch as “modern” in the 1920s, but the inclusion of Wagner is surely pushing the definition, since he had already been dead for over 35 years.

Reading Rosenfeld’s text, however, one quickly understands Wagner‘s inclusion. For the writer, Wagner’s work created the cusp between the feudal and modern worlds. His stature and influence was still so great, his achievements still considered so monumental, that this work of critical appraisal just had to begin with his name. Rosenfeld sees his music dramas as manifestations of a new industrial age, reflecting the unprecedented might of the new coal-powered civilization.

Strauss, Richard, of course, comes next. Pure genius, he is judged, at least on the evidence of his early symphonic poems, which approached a realization of the Nietzschean dream via colours that suggested impressionist painting. By the time we reach Salome, however, he had become “a bad composer”, “once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure” had transformed into someone “dreary and outward and stupid”. Rosenkavalier is judged “singularly hollow and flat and dun, joyless and soggy”. One must recall that this was 1920 and that Richard Strauss still had over 20 years of creative life remaining.

Mussorgsky’s “marvelous originality” was an expression of the true nature of Russian folklore, culture and peasant life. Liszt, on the other hand, was offering work like “satin robes covering foul, unsightly rags”, “designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, but executed in stucco and other cheap materials”. The impression was vivid, but the substance close to zero.

Berlioz, on the other hand, had grown in stature. His music was judged barbarous and radical and revolutionary, “beside which so much modern music dwindles”. He was the first to write directly for the orchestra as an instrument.

Cesar Franck suffers the ignominy of having a good part of his section devoted discussions of Saint-Saens. He can be gratified, however, that the author judges his work greater than that of this more famous composer, who seemed to seek only an increase in opus numbers. Franck’s own music  is seen as an expression of the silent majority, those who feel “forsaken and alone and powerless”, the army of society’s workers. The basis for this is that Franck had himself to work for a living.

Claude Debussy, by contrast, already seems to Rosenfeld to have achieved the status of a god, so elevated by aesthetic and achievement from the rest of humanity that it could hardly be considered he had ever composed a bad note. The piano of this most perfect living musician, becomes “satins and liqueurs”, his orchestra sparkling “with iridescent fires ... delicate violets and argents and shades of rose”.

Ravel is something of a problem child, certainly impressive, but whose judgment is not quite trusted, no matter how engaging it might sound. “Permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that we all were”, he seems to receive a pat on the head to encourage him to try harder.

Borodin, a true proud nationalist, suffered from “flawed originality”. But his music, like an uncovered, uncut piece of porphyry or malachite is perfect in its natural, unpolished state. Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, is merely decorative and graceful, but also vapid, whilst Rachmaninoff offered product that was “too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, simply too dull”. It was the music of the pseudo-French culture of the Saint Petersburg upper crust.

Scriabine, however, “awakened in the piano all of its latent animality”. He wrote music that “hovered on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering”, probably bitter-sweet to the layman. But Strawinsky was the ultimate realist. A product of industrialization, he produced “great weighty metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks”. So real were the impressions in his music that one might even smell the sausages grilling at Petrushka’s fair.

Four contemporary “German” composers are thoroughly dismissed, Strauss being bankrupt, Reger grotesquely pedantic, Schoenberg intellectually tainted and Mahler banal, despite the fact that only two of the four were actually German. Specifically, Mahler’s scores were “lamentably weak, often arid and banal”. It seems that much of Rosenfeld’s criticism arises out of an inquisitorial distrust of Mahler’s sincerity in converting from Judaism. The music of Reger, the author judges, is unlikely to suffer a revival and the composer himself is described as being like a “swollen, myopic beetle, with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench”. Let us say no more. Schoenberg is a troubling presence, formalistic and intellectual. He smells of the laboratory and exists in an obedience to some abstract scholastic demand. We are still discussing music, by the way.

Sibelius personifies nationalism, Finnish nationalism, of course. As it emerges from its domination under the Russian yoke, Finnish identity suddenly realizes it has a beautiful landscapes, meadows and forests.

Loeffler, surprisingly, gets a full entry. Perhaps it has something to do with his opting to live in the United States. Ornstein will be a name that is perhaps unfamiliar to 21st-century music lovers. At the time he was a brilliant 25-year-old pianist who was embarking on the composition of tough, rugged scores. And finally Bloch is praised for introducing non-European and oriental influences into western music. He is praised for retaining his Jewish identity and culture, which suggests that Mahler might have got off with lighter criticism had he not rejected the faith and thus have allowed they author to note the similarity of that composer’s clarinet writing to klezmer.

Opinion in the words of Paul Rosenfeld often presents a florid display, mixing prejudice and observation, and pre-judgment with insight. He describes his appreciation of these twenty composers through the distorting lens of his own aesthetic, derived from the assumptions of his age. Reading this short, concentrated work, we soon appreciate that we are doing the same. Only the language and the presumptions are changed.

Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers by Paul Rosenfeld

 

Tastes change. Fashions change. Presumptions, through whose refracting prisms each new age interprets its aesthetics, also change, but usually unpredictably because we absorb the restrictions without being conscious of their control. It’s probably called culture, and perhaps we are all imprisoned by its inherently commercial pressure. And we only rarely perceive change in our ability to respond to stimuli, often surprisingly perceived when we remove our experience into a different culture, a different aesthetic and possibly another time. This is precisely why exploration of criticism from the past can be so rewarding and, in a way that the writing would never have achieved in its contemporary setting, challenging. It was this kind of experience that flowed from every page of Paul Rosenfeld’s Musical Portraits.

These “Interpretations of Twenty Modern Composers” were published in 1920, having previously appeared as occasional pieces elsewhere. A hundred years on, of course, the first challenge is the meaning of the word “modern” in its title, especially when the presented list of composers starts with Wagner and finishes with Bloch. Personally, I have nothing against classifying Bloch as “modern” in the 1920s, but the inclusion of Wagner is surely pushing the definition, since he had already been dead for over 35 years.

Reading Rosenfeld’s text, however, one quickly understands Wagner‘s inclusion. For the writer, Wagner’s work created the cusp between the feudal and modern worlds. His stature and influence was still so great, his achievements still considered so monumental, that this work of critical appraisal just had to begin with his name. Rosenfeld sees his music dramas as manifestations of a new industrial age, reflecting the unprecedented might of the new coal-powered civilization.

Strauss, Richard, of course, comes next. Pure genius, he is judged, at least on the evidence of his early symphonic poems, which approached a realization of the Nietzschean dream via colours that suggested impressionist painting. By the time we reach Salome, however, he had become “a bad composer”, “once so electric, so vital, so brilliant a figure” had transformed into someone “dreary and outward and stupid”. Rosenkavalier is judged “singularly hollow and flat and dun, joyless and soggy”. One must recall that this was 1920 and that Richard Strauss still had over 20 years of creative life remaining.

Mussorgsky’s “marvelous originality” was an expression of the true nature of Russian folklore, culture and peasant life. Liszt, on the other hand, was offering work like “satin robes covering foul, unsightly rags”, “designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, but executed in stucco and other cheap materials”. The impression was vivid, but the substance close to zero.

Berlioz, on the other hand, had grown in stature. His music was judged barbarous and radical and revolutionary, “beside which so much modern music dwindles”. He was the first to write directly for the orchestra as an instrument.

Cesar Franck suffers the ignominy of having a good part of his section devoted discussions of Saint-Saens. He can be gratified, however, that the author judges his work greater than that of this more famous composer, who seemed to seek only an increase in opus numbers. Franck’s own music  is seen as an expression of the silent majority, those who feel “forsaken and alone and powerless”, the army of society’s workers. The basis for this is that Franck had himself to work for a living.

Claude Debussy, by contrast, already seems to Rosenfeld to have achieved the status of a god, so elevated by aesthetic and achievement from the rest of humanity that it could hardly be considered he had ever composed a bad note. The piano of this most perfect living musician, becomes “satins and liqueurs”, his orchestra sparkling “with iridescent fires ... delicate violets and argents and shades of rose”.

Ravel is something of a problem child, certainly impressive, but whose judgment is not quite trusted, no matter how engaging it might sound. “Permitted to remain, in all his manhood, the child that we all were”, he seems to receive a pat on the head to encourage him to try harder.

Borodin, a true proud nationalist, suffered from “flawed originality”. But his music, like an uncovered, uncut piece of porphyry or malachite is perfect in its natural, unpolished state. Rimsky-Korsakov, on the other hand, is merely decorative and graceful, but also vapid, whilst Rachmaninoff offered product that was “too smooth and soft and elegantly elegiac, simply too dull”. It was the music of the pseudo-French culture of the Saint Petersburg upper crust.

Scriabine, however, “awakened in the piano all of its latent animality”. He wrote music that “hovered on the borderland between ecstasy and suffering”, probably bitter-sweet to the layman. But Strawinsky was the ultimate realist. A product of industrialization, he produced “great weighty metallic masses, molten piles and sheets of steel and iron, shining adamantine bulks”. So real were the impressions in his music that one might even smell the sausages grilling at Petrushka’s fair.

Four contemporary “German” composers are thoroughly dismissed, Strauss being bankrupt, Reger grotesquely pedantic, Schoenberg intellectually tainted and Mahler banal, despite the fact that only two of the four were actually German. Specifically, Mahler’s scores were “lamentably weak, often arid and banal”. It seems that much of Rosenfeld’s criticism arises out of an inquisitorial distrust of Mahler’s sincerity in converting from Judaism. The music of Reger, the author judges, is unlikely to suffer a revival and the composer himself is described as being like a “swollen, myopic beetle, with thick lips and sullen expression, crouching on an organ bench”. Let us say no more. Schoenberg is a troubling presence, formalistic and intellectual. He smells of the laboratory and exists in an obedience to some abstract scholastic demand. We are still discussing music, by the way.

Sibelius personifies nationalism, Finnish nationalism, of course. As it emerges from its domination under the Russian yoke, Finnish identity suddenly realizes it has a beautiful landscapes, meadows and forests.

Loeffler, surprisingly, gets a full entry. Perhaps it has something to do with his opting to live in the United States. Ornstein will be a name that is perhaps unfamiliar to 21st-century music lovers. At the time he was a brilliant 25-year-old pianist who was embarking on the composition of tough, rugged scores. And finally Bloch is praised for introducing non-European and oriental influences into western music. He is praised for retaining his Jewish identity and culture, which suggests that Mahler might have got off with lighter criticism had he not rejected the faith and thus have allowed they author to note the similarity of that composer’s clarinet writing to klezmer.

Opinion in the words of Paul Rosenfeld often presents a florid display, mixing prejudice and observation, and pre-judgment with insight. He describes his appreciation of these twenty composers through the distorting lens of his own aesthetic, derived from the assumptions of his age. Reading this short, concentrated work, we soon appreciate that we are doing the same. Only the language and the presumptions are changed.