Two Tributes

Berlin, viernes, 6 de diciembre de 2024. Philharmonie Berlin. Rihm: Das Gehege for Soprano and Orchestra. Bruckner: Symphony No. 2 in C minor (First Version of 1872). Vida Miknevičiūtė, soprano. Berlin Philharmonic. Simone Young, conductor

Simone Young’s recent guest appearance with the Berlin Philharmonic was not the first time this season that a Bruckner symphony was paired with a work by the late Wolfgang Rihm: one of the first concerts of the season, conducted by Kirill Petrenko, used the percussive volatility of Rihm’s IN-SCHRIFT as a prelude to the epic grandeur of Bruckner’s Fifth. Ms Young’s programme, however, was arguably the more compelling: in presenting Rihm’s monodrama Das Gehege – with Vida Miknevičiūtė as soloist – alongside the original 1872 version of Bruckner’s Second, Ms Young created an evening of two equal but opposing halves in which the intense darkness of the first part was counterbalanced by genial warmth of the second.

Wolfgang Rihm had been announced as the Berlin Philharmonic’s composer-in-residence for the 2024/25, but his death in July of this year transformed the residency into a memorial tribute. Das Gehege (the enclosure), described as a ‘night scene’ for soprano and orchestra, was written initially for the stage, and while its most obvious precursor is Schönberg’s Erwartung, its intoxicating mixture of sensuality and violence has arguably more in common with the final scene of Strauss’ Salome. The text, derived from Botho Strauß’ play Schlußchor, concerns a woman who, on the evening of the fall of the Berlin Wall, breaks into an enclosure at the Zoo and attempts to free an eagle, only to end up killing it.

If the play offers an obvious metaphor for a country attempting to confront its own past, Rihm’s setting makes the encounter more elliptical – and arguably more fascinating – by removing much of the political context and focussing on the woman’s ultimately futile attempts to communicate with something that will never be able to hear or comprehend her words: despite its shifts in mood and its occasional orchestral interludes, the monologue plays out as an extended rebuke of increasing desperation. The chance to hear the work in concert performance only enhanced its strange symbolic logic: in the absence of sets, costumes and other visual distractions, one was free to construct mental scenarios based on the text’s imagery of decay and disgust, and the fearsome intensity of the music.

The uncomfortable language of the libretto was brought vividly to life by Vida Miknevičiūtė, who, without resorting to an excess of dramatic gesture, remained locked into the character for the duration of the piece. Despite the technical demands of the vocal part – which calls for sudden shifts not only in pitch and dynamic but also in mode of delivery – and the dramatic demands that arise from being the sole speaking-role in a forty-minute monologue, Ms Miknevičiūtė had no trouble crafting a performance that placed outbursts of emotional immediacy within a patiently-constructed narrative arc. While she was able to deliver passages of considerable beauty, she was equally unafraid to embrace the score’s capacity for ugliness; but it was the convincing authority she brought to the work’s most manic sections – occasionally clamping down on a repeated word until it resembled something as abstract as bird-song – that gave her performance its compelling edge.

Although the score was necessarily less concerned with explosive contrasts and timbral exploration than some of Rihm’s purely orchestral works, the orchestration was nonetheless notable for its density. But if one had the sense that every pause, every shift and every subtle gradation of mood had been carefully considered, Ms Young was able to give a broad narrative sweep to the score’s component parts, offering a reading rigorous enough for the concert hall, but with enough dramatic momentum to have worked equally well in the opera house.

Ms Young’s recent recorded cycle of Bruckner’s ‘complete’ symphonies was notable for its inclusion of the two unnumbered works , but also for its insistence on using the original and unrevised versions of the scores wherever possible. In keeping with this practice, she devoted the second half of the evening’s programme to the Second in its first version of 1872; however the textual differences – which included, among other things, the inclusion of repeats in the Scherzo/Trio and the re-sequencing of the two central movements – were less remarkable than the performance itself, which emerged as one of the most delightful of the Bruckner bicentenary.

From the opening string figure, taken at a lively pace, Ms Young seemed intent on challenging the consensus that Bruckner’s real maturity can be measured only from the Third symphony onwards. Both tempo and lightness of touch were central to her argument: by downplaying the solemnity and monumentality that form such an integral part of the later symphonies – and that so many interpreters attempt to tease out of or graft onto the earlier works – Ms Young was paradoxically able to reveal a Bruckner fully formed, less serious, perhaps, than he would later become, but no less attuned to his own particular conception of symphonic form.

Admittedly, nearly any symphony would have sounded light in spirit after the intensity of Das Gehege, but the understated rhythmic verve of Ms Young’s direction – and the orchestra’s responsiveness to her approach – yielded a first movement of uncommon gaiety: rarely has the arching figure in the low strings that forms the foundation of the movement’s key episodes sounded so full of excitement. Even more striking was the lack of heaviness in the orchestra: without sounding in any way insubstantial, the balance of sound and detail seemed to look back to the symphony’s classical precursors rather than towards the apocalyptic severity of Bruckner’s own later works. Even the most emphatic full-orchestra climaxes were never made to sound disproportionate to the presiding mood of geniality.

Nor did Ms Young attempt to overstate the thrust of the Scherzo (performed in this version as the second movement): although unmistakably Brucknerian in its rhythmic force, it emerged far more youthful and carefree than similar movements in the later symphonies. If the third movement – perhaps the most beautiful of Bruckner’s early slow movements – was taken at a slightly more animated pace than is usual, its internal energy did not interfere with its presiding serenity. The lucid, quietly magnificent playing from the strings suggested a musical vision in which mood and melody were held in roughly equal balance.

If there were occasional reservations, they came more from the score than the performance. Although the longer version of the Scherzo/Trio gives greater formal unity to the work as a whole, the Trio itself came across as somewhat diffuse; and Bruckner would certainly go on to write more convincingly structured conclusions to his later final movements. Nonetheless, Ms Young’s advocacy remained persuasive: in the face of such an inspired reading and such committed playing it was impossible not to emerge from the concert with an increased appreciation of Bruckner’s early symphonic style.