Well, I suppose I can start on an unequivocally positive note: by the end, the audience was whooping and cheering with the kind of unbuttoned emotionalism that Mattila herself manifests. Alas, then, that for the rest I hardly know what to say, feeling more like the spectre at the feast than a participant in it. Apart from anything else, I never really know what the purpose is of a pre-performance announcement that the artist concerned has a cold, and therefore craves – or, as here, actually doesn’t crave – our indulgence on that account (a message delivered by the house manager with the kind of presumptive puffery more characteristic of the Royal Opera House: “But she is still going to sing and I’m sure she will sing wonderfully”. Please!). Is this meant to forestall any criticism of vocal form? Is it to accustom us in advance to rough patches that we wouldn’t otherwise expect to encounter? Is it a plea for sympathy? Is it a ploy for sympathy? At times like this I find that I respect rather more the notorious cancellers, or at least the ones whose reason for so doing is simply never to appear in public and perform in less than optimum condition. In the event, Mattila’s form was exactly as I heard it at the Albert Hall last week, and reported on this website. She had no excuses made for her then; one wonders why she had one made for her now.

For most of the recital’s exiguous length – less than half-an-hour each way – the soprano’s voice struck me as much-aged, the breath control compromised, the sense of pitch wayward, and increasingly bedevilled by the kind of scooping up to notes on vibrato-less white tone that used to characterise Gwyneth Jones’s “singing”. True, Mattila’s actual vibrato, when it arrives, is secure and bears no trace of a wobble: but steady as it remains, it bites much more deeply into the vocal tone than it used to, robbing the voice of any real colour other than the grey and flinty, and having more than a touch of hollow rasp about it these days. The opening item – Berg’s Sieben Früher Lieder – confirmed that in her current vocal estate, cold or no cold, she can neither manoeuvre the voice around nimbly enough in fast music, much of which emerged as a vague smear of tone, nor pitch the (admittedly very difficult) fourth, sixth and seventh songs with any degree of precision. Traumgekrönt was in this latter respect almost excruciating, and how this recital is to be issued on the hall’s own label as is, without a deal of X Factor-type post-production tinkering, I don’t know.

It gives me no pleasure to report this, I should add. I’ve closely followed Mattila’s career for well over twenty years now, and been bowled over – at least in the opera house – by the sheer all-in nature of her barnstorming performances, including those of Donna Elvira, Chrysothemis and Elsa that singlehandedly redefined the possibilities of the roles. But the numerous recitals - latterly all conducted as the Barbican: it’s 13 years since she last sang at the Wigmore Hall - have always struck me as more problematic, not least in the unresolved tension between the all-purpose intensity of her larger-than-life theatrical response and the needs of the altogether less histrionic business of lieder singing. Here, in the inner high temple of such activity, I found the theatricality verging on the grotesque, and in Strauss’s Frühlingsfeier – which concluded the programme – well beyond it, a bawled litany of blowsiness, all mad eyes and windmilling arms, raucously (and none too accurately) accompanied by Martin Katz in equally thunderous form, the whole thing ending with the kind of metaphorical clinging-to-the-curtain, “I’ve given my all for my art and look what it’s doing to me” dazed exhaustion that might be more naturally encountered at the end of, say, Elektra, rather than a five minute song. It’s all beginning to look like self-dramatising shtick to me, and thoroughly unconvincing shtick at that. To be fair, I think she thinks it’s real: to be honest, I don’t believe it is. But there we are…

The Berg songs were followed by a quartet of Brahms pieces, the first of which – Vergebliches Ständchen – surely offers more chances for sharp voice characterisation of “Him” and “Her” than was evidenced here, less about vocal character at all than a kind of archly-camp outbreak of very knowing mugging. And the kind of fine-grained vocal control necessary to bring off the lamenting Der Gang zum Liebchen was replaced by stentorian delivery of the plainest sort. Only Von ewiger liebe immediately before the interval found the soprano in the best match of voice to expressive ends. The second half comprised five Sibelius songs, two in Finnish, the other three in Swedish like the vast majority of his song output, and four by Strauss. On home territory she seemed more at ease, though I can’t say I find the songs actually amount to anything much: fans of Sibelius’ symphonic works will look in vain for anything even faintly similar or as dourly effective in these pieces (the second of which was not as advertised or printed in the programme).

Ironically, given what I thought about her Vier Letzte Lieder with the Berliners last week, the Strauss songs – Frühlingsfeier excepted – struck me as much the most successful part of the recital, the rarely-performed Der Stern perfectly pitched – in all senses – and both Wiegenlied and Allerseelen expertly if rather over loudly projected. Given that Frühlingsfeier is quite one of the least known of Strauss’s great songs – and there are at least another seventy and more similarly ignored out there – an opera-inclined audience is bound by to blown away by its sheer scale, quite unlike anything ever written for a polite recital hall before (in 1906, ergo between Salome and Elektra, and it shows) so the clamorous reception it received here was only to be expected, notwithstanding the almost comical overemphasis and overblown theatrics. Ashen with effort and emotion, the diva appeared one more time to tell us that if she had any sense she wouldn’t sing another note, but that she didn’t have any sense and therefore would. This was quite some build-up. “My God!” I thought, “what are we getting? The closing scene of Salome?” Er, no, not exactly. Zueignung, in fact, all two minutes of it, the repeated "Habe danks" offered out to the audience itself which by this time was reduced to liquid putty. One last all-engulfing embrace of Katz, a good foot shorter than her, and she was gone, the blinding but tasteful bling still shimmering behind her (earrings like chandeliers, two different chokers to match the dresses, bracelets, shoulder-straps and dress-piping all sparkling like an explosion in Swarovski’s). There was a time I would have thrilled to all this: but she and I are both older, one of us now knows better, and the other really ought to.



Stephen Jay-Taylor
Opera Britannia