Simone Young
Saturday, December 7, 2024
Berliner Philharmonie, Herbert-von-Karajan-Straße, Berlin
Two substantial works – Rihm (thirty-five minutes), Bruckner (sixty-five, using this version) – both strong and distinctive in content, opening with the recently late Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Gehege (The Cage; 2005) “a nocturnal scene” for soprano and large orchestra (including piano and harp), music that is impressionistic/expressionistic, dramatic, intensely lyrical, relating to the Berg of Wozzeck and the Strauss of Salome (indeed Das Gehege was commissioned as a companion piece to Strauss’s opera), Rihm’s invention not standing still stylistically or in scoring, as mysterious as it is impassioned, as intimate as it is full-on confrontational. Vida Miknevičiūtė was magnificent, inhabiting the role, meeting Rihm’s demands head-on, and Simone Young secured playing of chamber-music sensitivity and for uninhibited climaxes in a performance that compelled attention.
So too the Bruckner, unapologetically using the 1872 original, flawed but fascinating, personal and honest, uninfluenced by advisors (that would come when the Symphony was revised, the 1877 score). Young believes in the worth of Bruckner’s first thoughts (as did William Carragan, a notable Bruckner editor – maybe his 2005 publication was used here?) and conducted it with appreciation and integrity, spaciously to match the grand design, yet with disarming purpose. The first movement had direction and also its byways, quirks of orchestration relished. The second-placed Scherzo (it would be relocated to third) was rhythmically vital, the songful Trio indivisible, all repeats observed, Bruckner later removing the repetition requests, capped by a thrilling timpani-fuelled coda. The Adagio needed a bit more largesse for all its beauty and forest-legend intimations to be revealed, although the hushed response was spine-tingling, following which the Finale, sprawling though it is – or simply stopping in order to introduce another idea, slower and seemingly unrelated, Young not papering over the cracks (rightly), if dogged by an over-used trumpet motif – did bit-by-bit reach its destination, in sonorous triumph.
“Simone Young prefers to conduct Anton Bruckner’s symphonies in their original versions: “Perhaps these are not as perfect as the later ones. But they have a modernity that the later ones lack.” Here she combines the original version of the Second Symphony with Wolfgang Rihm’s nocturnal scene Das Gehege (soloist: Vida Miknevičiūtė). This sombre one-person piece is about a woman who, on the eve of German reunification, frees an eagle from its captivity, tries to seduce it, and ultimately kills it.
“The subtitle of Wolfgang Rihm’s Das Gehege is A nocturnal scene: a setting of the final scene from Botho Strauss’s Schlußchor. This three-part theatre piece was written for Bayerische Staatsoper as a companion piece to the one-act opera Salome by Richard Strauss based on Oscar Wilde. With ironic detachment, Rihm stages a monodrama interspersed with orchestral interludes, which borrows some of the motifs from Salome and contains many other allusions to German theatre, music and history. There are echoes of the German national anthem as well as Beethoven’s Ninth, which was ever-present at the time of reunification. The protagonist of the play was born in the GDR and is a supporter of the monarchy. On the historic night of the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989, she comes into conflict with herself and her dreams – symbolised by the eagle as the German heraldic animal – full of yearning and anger, until there is nothing left of the erotic, national euphoria of reunification.“