Alemania
Musikfest 1: The heart’s disquiet
Jesse Simon
With the end of every summer comes the
beginning of a new concert season and, in Berlin, that transition is usually signalled
by Musikfest, the three-week series of orchestral and chamber concerts
organised by the Berliner Festspiele in collaboration with the Berlin
Philharmonic. This year’s festival – which will feature appearances from most
of the Berlin orchestras as well as guest performances by musicians and
ensembles from around the world – opened with an unsurprisingly fine concert
from the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and Iván Fischer, which paired the
troubled idyll of Mahler’s Seventh Symphony with extracts from Jörg
Widmann’s Das heiße Herz, an orchestral song cycle inspired by the same vein
of German romantic verse that haunted so much of Mahler’s oeuvre.
For the texts of Das heiße Herz, a
song cycle written initially for baritone and piano, Mr Widmann turned to Des
Knaben Wunderhorn – the nineteenth-century compilation of folk poetry that
was such a great influence on Mahler’s early output – as well as poems by
Heinrich Heine, Wunderhorn co-editor Clemens Brentano, and Alfred
Henschke, who used the pen-name Klabund. Between 2013, when the first version
was completed, and 2018, Mr Widmann undertook a full orchestration of the work;
perhaps realising that it would be impossible to create an orchestral cycle
based on Wunderhorn-related texts without drawing direct comparisons to
Mahler, Mr Widmann instead embraced the spirit of the late-romantic ensemble,
bolstering large brass, woodwind and string sections with piano, celesta and
accordion, and giving the percussionists an expanded palette of vibraslap, exotic
gongs and other unconventional noisemakers.
If the forces of the work are recognisably
Mahlerian, the songs themselves pursued their own intriguing post-romantic – and
occasionally post-modern – directions. On this evening baritone Michael Nagy
performed five of the cycle’s eight songs beginning with ‘Der arme Kaspar’ (to
a text by Klabund), for which Mr Widmann created a captivating nocturnal mood
from crystalline masses of high-pitched sounds, a world that bore little
resemblance to the poetic nightscapes of late-romanticism. Against a shimmering
backdrop of accordion, celesta, and harp arpeggios, vaguely disoriented string
passages and icy clusters of muted trumpet wove their way around the quizzical
uncertainties voiced by the song’s narrator.
The second and third songs – ‘Hab’ ein
Ringlein am Finger’ (from Wunderhorn) and ‘Das Fräulein stand am Meere’
(by Heine) – were both brief, seemingly over before they’d had a chance to get going,
but both added heavy doses of rhythmic drive to Mr Widmann’s meticulously
constructed sonic world. ‘Ringlein’ included an unexpected march-like
interlude, while the deranged rustic stomp that menaced ‘Fräulein’ suggested a
group of Bruegel’s peasants crashing a Viennese waltz party. Both songs also
featured Mr Nagy at his most theatrical, veering effortlessly between melodic
line and spoken declamation. ‘Kartenspiel’ (Wunderhorn), although it
ended with a jazzy coda straight from left field, offered a more sustained
dramatic expression: the frequent interjections from the higher-lying
instruments gave unsettling texture to the song’s sombre mood and Mr Nagy
responded with a reading of elegant restraint.
However it was the final song – ‘Einsam
will ich untergehn’ to a text by Brentano – that stood as the cycle’s high
point, both in its complex dramatic sweep and its subtle deployment of forces.
Opening with a disconsolate descending melody, sung unaccompanied, the first
appearance of the orchestra created a mood similar to that of the first song, a
world of high-pitched sounds that suggested a frozen stillness around the
words. But the orchestra, following the example of the melody, soon began a
slow downward slide, eventually coming to rest in a place of middle-register
uncertainty. An optimistic interlude and an ambiguous ending offered little
reassurance, but the warmth of the strings and the lyrical focus of Mr Nagy –
who, by this point, had left all theatrical trappings far behind – yielded a
moving conclusion to Mr Widmann’s fascinating cycle.
Although Mahler’s Seventh Symphony
has a reputation of being comparably neglected – it is the interlude of
uncertain tranquillity between the existential dread of the Sixth and
the monumental ecstasies of the Eighth – it has been adopted as an
opening night centrepiece on several occasions in recent years. Last year it
was performed by Kirill Petrenko as the sole work on the Berlin Philharmonic’s
season opening programme, and Sir Simon Rattle used it to kick off his final
season as chief conductor of the same orchestra in 2016. Yet even for
established Mahler specialists the work can be problematic: it is just as easy
to understate the drama of the first movement as it is to miss the elusive
grace of the two Nachtmusiks, and performances that can find a perfect balance
between the work’s disparate episodes are remarkably rare.
While Iván Fischer’s reading, favoured
brisk, animated tempi, his sense of how the work’s episodes fit together into
larger structures made for a performance that was exciting and illuminating in
equal measure. The opening section of the first movement was taken at a
deliberate pace and there was a subtle accentuation of the lower strings that
gave extra weight to the sound, but beneath it all was an unmistakable sense of
purpose. If Mr Fischer was willing to heighten the contrast in tempi for
dramatic effect, he was nonetheless able to achieve graceful transitions
between the alternating Langsam and Allegro passages that give the first
movement its form. When he arrived at the central interlude the pace slowed
appropriately, but even among the beautifully languid strings, gentle harps,
and eerily calm trumpet calls, there was an underlying disquiet suggesting that
everything could change in an instant.
If the first movement was notable for its
expansive drama, the second was compact and tightly wound, played with such
motivation that it could almost have passed for a Scherzo. Yet for all it
urgency and accentuated rhythms, Mr Fischer maintained a keen sense not only of
the movement’s alpine flavours – the distant cowbells and shepherd’s piping of
the oboes were integrated flawlessly into the sonic landscape – but also its
capacity for grandeur: the full string attack of the main theme near the end of
the movement was especially arresting. In the third movement Mr Fischer
balanced the potential weight of the orchestra with an unfailingly light touch.
And in the fourth – for which the guitar and mandolin took centre stage, one on
either side of Mr Fischer – the energetic pace was offset by a gentle phrasing
that gave the movement its own serenity.
The final movement alone seemed less
intensely focussed than the rest. Although the brisk pace was still in
evidence, there were a handful of passages in which smaller details became lost
in the general excitement. The quality of the playing, however, remained high –
especially the strings, who lost none of their warmth even in the most driven
passages – and Mr Fischer’s reading was genial and affectionate to the
end. But if the finale was unreservedly triumphant in tone, it was the
emotional ambiguities of the earlier movements – and of Mr Widmann’s songs –
that made the evening so captivating.
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