penultimate one on Monday that – barely - featured either Soile Isokoski, or even the composer himself. Tonight’s dose of Schoenberg was strictly limited to a set of four early songs dating to around 1900 which not only sound highly Straussian both melodically and harmonically, but are also settings of Richard Dehmel, a poet who often stimulated the most characterful settings from Strauss himself, such as the powerfully intense Befreit (not, alas, on the menu tonight). The Schoenberg pieces, all in the first half, were framed by two groups of Strauss songs, the first comprising two of the Opus 21 set of Felix Dahn’s Schlichte Weisen as well as Nachtgang and Geduld; the second the once-derided Drei Lieder der Ophelia settings Op.67. After the interval, it was Strauss all the way, with a quintet of songs three of which belong to the important – and imposing, 8-strong set – Opus 49 of 1901 as well as Winterweihe and the barely-performed Blindenklage, actually the second of the stupendous Op. 56 set that also comprises the similarly vast and barnstorming (and to this day virtually unknown) Frühlingsfeier and Die Drei Heiligen Könige aus Morgenland. On this showing, Blindenklage – a blind man’s searingly bitter reproach to and curse upon the world of light – is arguably the finest of the lot, though the sheer scale of the piece, vocally and structurally, is plainly beyond the resources of most sopranos to sing (I once heard a famous soprano get in such a state, both emotionally and technically, trying to deliver the evermore wild and distracted repeated cries of “Adonis” in the companion-piece Frühlingsfeier that she broke down completely and couldn’t carry on. To have an entire set of six such pieces all together is doubtless asking for trouble, and it no coincidence that they date from the period of Salome and Elektra, needing something of the size and stamina of both protagonists to put them across). The final group comprised the other two Op. 29 songs of which Nachtgang forms a part; O wärst du mein! and the first of the Op 49 set, Waldseligkeit (another Dehmel setting).I think the first time I heard Schwanewilms sing Strauss was in Rattle’s LSO concert performance of Ariadne auf Naxos at the Barbican many moons ago. I was impressed then, and subsequent exposure to the soprano – Euryanthe and Elettra at Glyndebourne, a flawless, spellbinding Vier Letze Lieder at the RFH under Simone Young, a blazing Chrysothemis at Covent Garden (though no Marschallin there, tsk, tsk, tsk), last year’s extraordinarily ethereal Desdemona under Colin Davis – has only served to strengthen my conviction that she is one of the very finest singers currently before the public, combining flawless musicianship, superb technique, exquisitely refined sound and imaginative insight in almost ideal proportions. She is not, in truth, a stage natural: there, she seems to occupy a quite private space several degrees to the cool and to the left of any colleagues she’s performing with. But put her on a recital platform, and a most unexpectedly sharp and droll sense of both character and situation emerges very clearly, with fine distinction drawn between the wistful regret that underpins so many of Strauss’ slower songs, and the various high tragedy and low comedy that is to be found in most of the longer and/or more animated ones. The voice, when fully warmed up, has an entirely effortless, “floaty” quality – verging on the spookily disembodied, so accurate is the placement in high soft singing, without a trace of attack or vocal “approach” - absolutely ideal for Strauss, and if I ransack my memory, the nearest equivalent to her I can think of in the past is Gundula Janowitz, though both Lucia Popp and Margaret Price had a similar timbre, albeit slightly fleshier. I’m not sure that Schwanewilms doesn’t have the edge on all of them, because her technique is stronger than Janowitz’s, the manner less fretful and diffident than Price’s, the voice fuller and stronger than Popp’s. I dare say that if your idea of a good time in Strauss is listening to Schwarzkopf, then you might have faults to find: but since my idea of hell on earth is to have to listen to Schwarzkopf in anything, but especially Strauss, then for me an evening of Strauss Lieder sung by Ms. Schwanewilms is as near Heaven as I – regrettably, but there it is – will ever get.
Perhaps the first two songs found the soprano still settling in somewhat: not unusual, and not unacceptably so (and, these things always being pretty marginal anyway, probably not even generally evident). But with Nachtgang the magic started to work consistently, a firm, even line, supported on seemingly endless supplies of breath, combining to conjure up a perfect sonic analogue to the moonlit silvery night filled with emotionally charged souls. Yet this timeless rapture was immediately followed by the angst-ridden bitterness of Geduld, brilliantly sustained across all six verses of beady-eyed frustration. The tortuous chromaticism of the Schoenberg songs was paradoxically rendered all the more painful by the extreme precision of Schwanewilms’ tuning, so unnervingly accurate, pure in timbre, and squeezed upwards like a thin silver tube that it’s almost disorientating to see such sounds emerge from a person rather than an instrument (a long, glittering glass harmonica, perhaps). This purity also paid dividends in the very tricky – and only recently re-assessed favourably – mad songs sung by Ophelia, pieces dismissed for generations because of the admittedly very inauspicious nature of their creation (Strauss wrote them in 1918 effectively under threat of litigation for already having provided a cycle of songs rejected by his publishers – the so-called Krämerspiegel – and was determined only to provide even stranger, unpublishable specimens by way of defiant riposte). But in the fractured, fragmentary, tonally far-flung vocal lines, and accompaniments that peter out into stuttering silence, the Strauss who feared madness more than anything else (his mother was institutionalised for much of his early adult life) confronted its symptoms with typical artistic fearlessness – this was the man who had already written Elektra – and Schwanewilms, blank of both eye and voice, brought them to remarkable, if uncomfortable, life.
After the interval, she settled into what I can only describe as a complete purple patch, the voice at its most lustrous and exquisitely polished, with a kind of soft glowing sheen right at the top of the range spun out effortlessly from one end of the programme to the other that I found absolutely ravishing. On form like this, there’s no-one to match her, not even the more tonally sumptuous Fleming, or the more urgently theatrical Mattila. Winterweihe was simply perfectly realised on what sounded like one breath, the hushed interiority of the utterance all the more striking for its reticence; yet the jokey, self-censoring hand-wringing of "Ach, was Kummer, Qual und Schmerzen" – with its knowing refrain of repeated “Hm Hms” – was funnier than I have ever heard it, live or on disc. And then came Blindenklage, which struck me like a thunderbolt, far more than on the second volume of Roger Vignole’s Strauss Lieder series on Hyperion where, with both this evening’s performers, all of tonight’s repertory can be found. The piece is huge, impassioned and intense, sounding for all the world like a dry-run for the Empress’ big outburst in Act II of Die Frau ohne Schatten. The last line of this “song” (in reality, a full-blown operatic scena) is “Todt ist mein Fluch, und todt ist auch mein Segen” and Strauss sets it with the most colossal climax on, naturally, “Fluch” (shades of Elektra) which Schwanewilms unleashed with such concentration of tone and dramatic ferocity that I feared for my hearing, only for the song to fade away almost tonelessly on the blessing of death. Stunning, both as a piece of music and as a piece of singing, and a rare privilege to encounter at all.
The last quartet of songs gave us perfect exemplars of all that had gone before: elegiac regret in Traum durch die Dämmerung; lynx-eye social comedy in Schlagende Herzen; the wide-ranging operatic scale of O wärst du mein! (which, for a song written in 1891, covers a tonal territory Schoenberg wouldn’t attempt for another twenty years); and the lambently beautiful Waldseligkeit, fittingly dedicated by Strauss to the woman whose voice sits behind virtually all his 200-odd songs, his wife, the soprano Pauline de Ahna. The sole encore completed the compositional picture: Das Rosenband, which, though written in 1897, presents an amazing conspectus of Strauss’ skill at harmonic dipping and weaving in and out of keys ever more remotely related to one another only to come together in a fully consonant close (the very essence, in fact, of his “late style” as exemplified by the Four Last Songs, but heard here, fully formed and in all its glory, fifty and more years before them). A perfectly fitting ending not only to a wonderful recital, but to an even more wonderful series, devised, accompanied by and presided over throughout by Roger Vignoles, to whom all credit and deepest thanks.
Stephen Jay-Taylor
Opera Britannia
thing to say about this recording is that one needs to put out of one’s mind most of the famous recordings that have preceded it since what one is accustomed to hear from the Callas, Sutherland, Caballé recordings or even further back excerpts from Cigna or Ponselle is a radically different work of art. Giovanni Antonini, Riccardo Minasi and Maurizio Biondihave spent years scraping away the barnacles of dubious performance tradition and updated instrumentation and restoring hundreds of small cuts that have become part of the standard performing edition. As with a restored oil painting the removal of years of accumulation has revealed a very different work of art. Indeed I would say that it redefines the work both in terms of sound and in appropriate casting.
attended Sunday’s “Flórez and Friends” concert at the Barbican – as opposed to sitting through oceans of orchestral filler in the RFH in order to dribble over the unfeasible length of Jonas Kaufmann’s ‘Wälse’ – you may be forgiven for wondering how an audience already in a state of chronic, uncritical delight could possibly be pleasured any more. In which case, you needed to be at tonight’s solo recital, the latest tranche of Juan Diego Flórez’s Barbican residency, which comprehensively proved the time-honoured adage “it ain’t over until the sooty-lashed one sings at least four encores”. The nubile bounced around, whooping; the mature squirmed with satisfaction in their seats, emitting the odd low moan; I shouldn’t be at all surprised if the lame weren’t seen dancing in the aisles, and the dead – always a fair percentage of any opera audience – weren’t newly-risen. Indeed, anyone suffering with scrofula could well have been cured merely by touching his immaculately tailored trousers (though I’m still working out how to explain this to the police).
In a pivotal scene in Verdi’s early opera, Pope Leo squares up to the defiant Attila, causing the Hun to turn tail. Here, two leading Slavic basses – Russian Ildar Abdrazakov and Bulgarian Orlin Anastassov – go head to head in the title role, but it proves to be something of an uneven contest due both to their supporting casts and the conditions in which the two performances were captured on film. Both are fairly traditionally staged and costumed, which should satisfy those pining for the days when Huns looked like Huns, but a few minutes viewing of each disc is enough to separate the wheat from the operatic chaff. In the blue corner, Arturo Gama’s production from the Mariinsky Theatre, released on its own label; in the red corner, a rudderless affair laughably attributed to director Plamen Kartaloff, recorded in the ruins of the Bulgarian fortress of Tsaverets.
