Thursday, July 25, 2024
Royal Albert Hall, London
Three works that end quietly, the concert concluding with a song-cycle. It started with a Symphony, Brahms’s Third, here lyrically content from the off if needing the exposition repeat for the BBCSSO to settle fully, although Ryan Wigglesworth’s somewhat precious dynamic variances came across as more so the second time. Yet, if the presentation of the opening F-A-F motto (Brahms’s “Frei aber froh”/Free but happy) was on the cool side it cued a performance, however thoroughly prepared, that was attractively spontaneous-sounding, very expressive, the middle movements especially fine, with the Finale’s purposeful momentum eventually sinking into autumnal fulfillment, yet when Brahms’s ‘winter’ arrived he would compose thirty-odd further works.
Following the interval, Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night; string sextet revised into string orchestra) based on Richard Dehmel’s in-German poem:
Two people walk through a bare, cold grove;
The moon races along with them, they look into it.
The moon races over tall oaks,
No cloud obscures the light from the sky,
Into which the black points of the boughs reach.
A woman’s voice speaks:
I’m carrying a child, and not yours,
I walk in sin beside you.
I have committed a great offense against myself.
I no longer believed I could be happy
And yet I had a strong yearning
For something to fill my life, for the joys of
Motherhood
And for duty; so I committed an effrontery,
So, shuddering, I allowed my sex
To be embraced by a strange man,
And, on top of that, I blessed myself for it.
Now life has taken its revenge:
Now I have met you, oh, you.
She walks with a clumsy gait,
She looks up; the moon is racing along.
Her dark gaze is drowned in light.
A man’s voice speaks:
May the child you conceived
Be no burden to your soul;
Just see how brightly the universe is gleaming!
There’s a glow around everything;
You are floating with me on a cold ocean,
But a special warmth flickers
From you into me, from me into you.
It will transfigure the strange man’s child.
You will bear the child for me, as if it were mine;
You have brought the glow into me,
You have made me like a child myself.
He grasps her around her ample hips.
Their breath kisses in the breeze.
Two people walk through the lofty, bright night.
Wigglesworth and the SSO strings gave a superb account – of scenic description, volatile passion, and romantic reconciliation, a reading of suspense, drama and tenderness. Yet if the child above is suggested as having a bright future, this was contradicted by Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), setting five poems by Friedrich Rückert: he lost two of his children and Mahler several of his siblings. Alice Coote delivered the texts with appropriate edginess, sometimes rawness, that penetrated to Rückert’s sad sentiments, Mahler’s restrained scoring delivered with character and sensitivity, especially solos from oboe and horn.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00214j9