Saturday, September 24, 2022
Southbank Centre, London – Royal Festival Hall
The Berlin Philharmonic offering competition, http://www.colinscolumn.com/berliner-philharmoniker-marek-janowski-conducts-robert-schumanns-rhenish-symphony-and-marc-andre-hamelin-plays-max-regers-f-minor-piano-concerto-live-digital-concert-hall-webcast/, and knowing that BBC Radio 3, broadcasting Gurrelieder live, has a thirty-day catch-up facility, I listened to the Schoenberg fitfully, as Berlin starts and interval allowed. So, it was the opening few minutes, the Wood-Dove’s appearance, and the whole of Part Two. Nor was I listening with enough engagement to review, so I am penning a few words to say I look forward to the whole thing one day, either on R3 or, even better, a CD release from the LPO to follow The Midsummer Marriage, http://www.colinscolumn.com/a-heads-up-on-the-london-philharmonics-forthcoming-own-label-release-on-september-23-of-tippetts-midsummer-marriage-conducted-by-edward-gardner/. However, even from a distance, this Ed Gardner-conducted Gurrelieder came across as very impressive, the LPO (138-strong) in top form, fine solo singing, an excellent (combined) chorus … and top marks for Jeremy Sams’s new English translation of the Sprechgesang episode that found actor Alex Jennings in lyrical form. One day then…
Alex Jennings speaker
Lise Lindstrom Tove
Karen Cargill Wood-Dove
David Butt Philip Waldemar
Robert Murray Klaus the Fool
James Creswell Peasant
London Philharmonic Choir
London Symphony Chorus
It was a special concert (as last year’s Tippett). From the front stalls there was a slight sense of the RFH acoustics being an issue for Mr Gardner to deal with, but the singers were outstanding: all of them ideally cast with perhaps Karen Cargill the one who made the greatest impression. Though David Butt Philip could scarcely be equalled in sensitivity and sustained tonal quality in this mammoth role. The strings were extraordinary, notably in the few chamber-like passages of this amazing score. The controversy was having the narration in English: few could cope better than Alex Jennings (I remember his Pangloss nearly matching Lambert Wilson in the ENO/Chatelet production) but it sounded too like Facade for me. The very opening ‘Herr Gaensesfuss’ takes us into a German expressionist world that even Mr Sams’s skilful reworking cannot match and the climactic line (listen to Haefliger or Hotter) ‘Ach, war das licht und hell’ did not work for me in English.
But this was a triumph for the LPO to start another great season (both Elgar symphonies from a fine Elgarian etc) and the audience went as close to wild as the RFH ever does. I rather hope there were many new to the piece as on the website in the morning the hall was only about 50% sold and there must have been a lot of last-minute selling and papering.
post scriptum
There is a recording from 1962 (Edinburgh Stokowski LSO) with Alvar Lidell whose German seems as excellent as one might expect from a man with Swedish parents and, one assumes, bi-lingual. Here was the most famous English voice of the war, apart from Churchill, and I do not think even he could have made the new translation work as well as the original Arnold German version of the Danish.