You’ll be doubtless relieved to learn that this review is going to be of necessity somewhat brief. Had this event been, as I fondly imagined in advance, an evening-long Straussfest with the Finnish soprano, you could probably have looked forward (?) to settling down for a good long read. As it is, the concert having duly started at 7.30pm, Ms. Isokoski made her first appearance of the evening on the platform at 9.28, by which time a variety of factors, all of them called Schoenberg, had come between me and basic equanimity. The opening item was, as I’d dimly intuited some while before the concert, a piece from Strauss’ last opera, Capriccio, from which I had expected Ms. Isokoski to launch into the closing scene with an assiduous accompanist hacking his or her way through the orchestral undergrowth in the shape of Klavierauszuge as best they could (not ideal, but I’ve heard it done before). But no. Instead, the programme opened with the string sextet prelude from the opera, played by the relevant front desk players from the LPO but without a conductor: and very heavy weather they made of it, too, short on dynamic nuance and quite lacking in dramatic pulse, clocking in at an overlong 11 minutes. We then were plunged, to my horror, into Pierrot Lunaire, Schoenberg’s 1912 monodrama written for the melodramatiste Albertine Zehme. The last time I heard this, Boulez was trying to reorientate the piece towards actual sung declamation (rather successfully, I thought) but this concert went quite the opposite way and gave us what has always struck me as insufferably silly and sea-sick inducing pure Sprechgesang, after 35 minutes of which I can only report that I still have no idea on the strength of it whether Alison Bell – the performer - can actually sing, or even if she has a voice. If she’d been allowed to go down the Jane Manning route and at least give us some form of highly charged theatrical rendition, preferably in costume and stage-lighting, it might have been different: but Vladimir Jurowski, whose tastes I am coming more and more to question, insisted upon a straightforward concert presentation of this least straightforward of non-concert works, but at a lighting level so low in the auditorium that all around me the Hall’s, shall we say, very senior clientele were peering myopically at their programmes for enlightenment throughout. Hopeless and pointless.

After the interval, we then had more Schoenberg, in the shape of his 1906 Kammersinfonie for 15 players, a much more sympathetic and interesting piece, given a reading of blazing, and quite deafening, intensity by Jurowski and his hand-picked crew in town on their night off from Glyndebourne. At which point we finally arrived at the sung Strauss, though even this was very far from what I had originally anticipated, in the shape of a new arrangement for 13 players of the Vier Letzte Lieder by James Ledger, an Australian composer. After yet another eternity of furniture removals on the Wigmore’s picturesque but pokey platform – which usually manages to look pretty full with just two soloists and an accompanist – the assorted wind, brass and strings, plus a piano(!) were marshalled into positions which left me wondering where exactly the soprano was going to stand. Little did I imagine that it would be behind them all, flat against the back wall. Now, Soile Isokoski is somewhat diminutive: and her voice, of exquisitely silvery timbre and evenly-knit texture, is only so big and no bigger; so to (barely) see her, her head just about poking up above the players ranged all in front of her, and to (just about) hear her when not drowned out by 13 instruments all determined and indeed encouraged to sound more like 70, after the better part of two hours wait, can only be described as a monstrous miscalculation on someone’s part. On this showing I also hope never to encounter Jurowski conducting this music again, so brutally fast and lacking in ceremony or atmosphere that – the first two songs in particular – were practically reduced to a gabble. I never thought to live to hear "Frühling" despatched in 2’50’’; and trust I never will again. Even "Im Abendrot" had an element of the sprint about its opening, and whilst I am absolutely no fan of the marmoreal, treacly boo-hooing account of, say, Jessye Norman, I’m no better disposed to this, its polar opposite, lovelessly brisk and offhand. As for the arrangement, I don’t see the point: too tonally spavined for concert use, too thickly noisy for the recital hall, though it’s attractive enough when, as for the most part, it cleaves very close to Strauss’ own prescribed sonorities.

In all this, you may surmise, poor Ms. Isokoski was at one disadvantage after another, and I can only report that, as (half) heard here, she remains in finest vocal estate, observing the tricky niceties of the sung German with exemplary scrupulousness – Bald ist es Schlafenszeit in "Im Abendrot", all the s, z and tz sounds differentiated and enunciated clearly, wholly without the usual slurred elisions that so undermine the acuity of expression – and singing with a concentration of pure, unworn tone that is a delight. And her ability to soar effortlessly aloft remains intact, for all that she is now prone to the usual subterfuge at the ends of the second and third songs of repeating the words after a breath-break, rather than singing the single word in each – "Augen, tausendfach" - through as a continuous melismata. I was hard on her Marschallin at the ROH last year, many thought: but on her day, in the right venue and repertory, she is as great a singer as we have: she is simply not a bête-de-scène, and is assuredly most happily encountered in the relatively intimate environment of a recital room rather than a big opera house. Would then that this programme had offered us all such an opportunity to hear her, at length, and a due.




Stephen Jay-Taylor
Opera Britannia