“You can, more often than not, tell how good a performance of Mahler’s Fifth will be from its opening trumpet call. Here, the Philharmonia’s principal, Alistair Mackie, struck just the right balance between stridency and tragedy. Daniele Gatti’s direction of this symphony was not, however, one of balance, still less one of compromise. London audiences have heard a lot of Mahler over the last two or three years, but this performance was surely one of the greatest. Violent and febrile, its journey from darkness to light was thoroughly convincing, the kind of performance one lives through rather than simply watches.”

C’est moi, on last night’s performance of Mahler 5 from Daniele Gatti and the Philharmonia Orchestra. You can read the full thing here. I might have got a bit carried away with the adjectives, but this performance deserved it. I think I’m just about getting over it, but I’m not quite sure (and I think my review is the first, so I await the thoughts of others, particularly Boulezian). I was still bouncing even after the two hours it takes me to get home from the Festival Hall. Unpredictable inevitability at its finest, I would venture to suggest, and a performance I’ll carry with me for a while.

Although I knew of Gatti’s enviable  Mahlerian credentials, I actually went to this concert to hear his Bayreuth-infused excerpts from Parsifal. Sadly, the Philharmonia were rather tentative in that, but still, an unforgettable concert. Take note, Bostonians….

UI is hard at work on his dissertation, but managed to find time to head down and hear the Jerusalem Quartet and Alexander Melnikov on Wednesday night. I was all ready to write about the politics of protesting concerts, but thankfully I didn’t have to. You can read my review here.

The programme of Schumann’s Op.47 Piano Quartet and Op.44 Piano Quintet was a little bit short, but the concert promoted their new CD of the same works. Bachtrack isn’t the place to write about that, but I can confirm that it is even better than was the concert. It’s highly recommended as the Quartet is utterly sublime, even if the Quintet doesn’t quite reach the heights of the strongest recordings of that work.

Sir John Eliot Gardiner conducts the Monteverdi Choir in Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV 225 (SDG716).

It’s a recording taken from live performances last October – given five-star reviews from both The Times and The Guardian – and it contains some of the most glorious singing you are ever likely to hear. It cannot be recommended strongly enough as a tonic for this May drizzle. Click here to see more and purchase a copy direct from the Choir’s own label.

Rachmaninov: Étude-tableau in A Minor, Op.39 No.6
Rachmaninov: Étude-tableau in B Minor, Op.39 No.4
Rachmaninov: Elegie in E Flat Minor, Op.3 No.1
Rachmaninov: Étude-tableau in E Flat Minor, Op.39 No.5
Beethoven: Sonata No.13 in E Flat Major, Op.27 No.1
Scriabin: Sonata No.5, Op.53
Prokofiev: Sonata No.6 in A Major, Op.82

Yuja Wang (piano) 

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London
1 May 2012

Yuja comes with a reputation. Aside from being a protégé of Claudio Abbado, she’s been the victim of a great deal of fuss over her fashion sense on stage, and other such irrelevant crap. It’s a pity, really, because she shows signs of becoming a very formidable pianist indeed, and her technical skills already outshine most. Hands, surely, can rarely have moved so fast. Born in Beijing and Curtis-trained, that kind of thing is expected. Much less so is her sensitivity of phrasing, her innate sense of propulsion, and her degradation and purity of attack. This was not, of course, a programme heavy with intellectual load, though attention to structure in the Beethoven and Prokofiev promised much. She has clearly come a long way already at 25, more so than other pianists of similar training who shall remain nameless. But there was – here at least – a fury of interpretation and a ferocity of drive, coupled with a willingness to step back and a twenty-first century sense of rhythm.

The Rachmaninov shorts open Yuja’s new album of encores and semi-encores – ‘Fantasia’ – and they pretty much work as a suite, even if the first key change from A minor to B minor is a bit steep. The rolling thunder of the A minor Étude-tableau is a great way to open a concert, growling into life and snapped away again here with a bite that’s lacking on the disc. This first piece was notably militaristic, looking forward to the Prokofiev later on. The second juxtaposed staid rhythms against the precipitous neatly, flowing well despite its pauses. (Curses upon the chap who decided to begin – alone – thumping applause between the second and third pieces.) The Elegie was played exactly as it was written – a late adolescent’s work, full of bleak hopes and overblown emotionality, and therefore I loved it. When the first theme returned, its shattered state of mind was harrowing. The shift into the E flat Étude-tableau worked brilliantly, and this again had its elements of searing loneliness, a torrential passion. This was genuinely tingly stuff.

Beethoven’s first ‘quasi una fantasia’ sonata represents a much different challenge, and one that foxes much more experienced pianists. With strongly characterised playing once again, Yuja revelled in Beethoven’s accents and his stark contrasts from the start with a stillness to the right hand and a precisely articulated left. A particularly rapt third movement led into a blisteringly madcap fourth, its phrasing insistent. If the rapier intellect of a Pollini or a Barenboim is years off, there was a charming sense of architecture to Yuja’s performance, the return of the opening material bringing a watery, Mozartean smile. Still, there was more of an inkling that Beethoven was still very much in charge here, the pianist’s mastery not quite there. If Yuja is serious, Beethoven can wait, but this was a creditable performance.

More so, much more so, was an astonishing Scriabin fifth sonata. Yuja has particular talents in Scriabin (as do others of today’s younger pianists, like Melnikov and Sudbin), and this had typical attack, the notes pounced upon unsuspectingly. Fragments of mysticism were almost Messiaenic, and if it sounded at times as if Prokofiev was threatening to burst through the music’s surface, it was an utterly gripping ride.

Prokofiev has never been UI‘s cup of borscht, though it’s much more palatable in concert. This sixth sonata, the first of the ‘war’ sonatas, can be performed dripping in irony, but not here, and it was all the more horrifying for that. Yuja constantly pointed up the distortions and grating dissonances of this piece, tonality at times seeming to go beyond breakdown. There was a quality to this that suggested Yuja was playing on the edge whilst fully in control. The second movement had the venom the first had lacked, and a lackadaisical languidly to its more reflective passages. The brooding moodiness of the waltz-like third movement led to a finale taken at a pace at one too quick and just right. Here was astounding virtuosity to be sure, and if we could not expect the electricity or philosophical depth of a Richter, rhythmic intrigue and a surprisingly long sense of line more than made up.

The encore, incidentally, was a rapid-fire version of Horowitz’s variations on Carmen.

Rachmaninov’s piano roll of his own Elegie in E flat minor: 

We had three soloists. Benjamin Hulett, a young tenor blessed with clarity, duetted for most of the evening with James Gilchrist, and their voices matched well. There were gorgeous open spaces in ‘Zefiro torna’, quivering anxieties at ‘E non temer’ in ‘Se vittore si belle’ (‘… do not fear the mortal wounds of love’s arrows’), and some fine word painting in ‘Ardo e scoprir’. Gilchrist was magnificent in Il combattimento, his shaping of the narrative timed well and the text delivered with such passion and diction that a translation was almost unnecessary, the emotions as clear as in Schubert.

The star, though, was the bewitching soprano Anna Prohaska. This young lyric soprano du jour has already worked with Sir Simon Rattle, Claudio Abbado, Mariss Jansons, and even Daniel Barenboim, and one can easily see why. Committed to early music, Prohaska’s voice takes UI, at least, back to recordings of the golden age of singing – there is such colour and flexibility at her disposal, and extra power will surely come with time. Sensuous in these ditties of love, she was happy to push boundaries to inflect individual words with emotional power, but her ineffable control kept things from going too far. Her Melanto in Il ritorno was an all-too-brief triumph, her knowing resistance to flattery quickly eroded and her tone heading through pungency to lightness with an obvious delight in the opportunities presented by the Italian language. The nobility brought to Clorinda’s final transfiguration – ‘S’apre il ciel, io vado in pace’ – was shocking, so full in tone that the mere fact of the character’s death disappeared, as it should. It was the cap to an excellent concert.

Prohaska was quite the coup for the AAM, and UI sincerely hopes to hear her again soon, preferably in Mozart (as Susanna, perhaps?). Although her debut album for DG – ‘Sirène’ – appears not to be easily available in the UK (it is not, for instance, on Spotify or iTunes), her fans have accumulated a delectable Youtube catalogue, evidence of which is below. I’m not sure about the video for ‘Des Fischers Liebesglück’, but still…

The superlatives for Daniel Barenboim‘s ‘Bruckner Project’ have been flying around for days now. UI reviewed two of the concerts here. Some reviewers, like Barry Millington, have chafed at the reverence, but most have raved. The project continues on to Vienna in June.

But it has already been to Berlin, and all the concerts were recorded live. We already have a DG recording of the Seventh – are we to receive the entire set, on CD or DVD? Let us hope so. For now, here is the complete Eighth, in meagre compressed sound… but you get the gist.

Rather less impressive is an interview in the New York Times with the Met’s Ring producer Robert Lepage (brought to my attention by lietofinelondon). It is important to remember, a friend pointed out today – she having chuckled her way through the final act of Götterdämmerung last night, much like Alex Ross – that this Ring is the product of many minds, thousands of work-hours, and a great deal of money. That’s a spirit of generosity we would do well – UI more than most – to remember. But what is startling in this interview is the insight Mr. Lepage gives regarding his thought processes. The cycle seems not to have been considered properly as a whole, for instance. Lepage’s conception of the opera world is one based on ideas of elitism and even discrimination that many opera-goers certainly recognise but do not subscribe to. He defends The Machine by arguing that it’s way ahead of critics who should have accommodated themselves to such technology (which he also argues is now well-worn) – rather than the idea that the set is an admirable bit of construction that doesn’t add anything to our understanding of Wagner, or even respond to the music and/or text. People dedicated to Wagner are dismissed as ‘cranky operagoers’ (Daniel Wakin’s words, but Lepage’s sentiments) who should ‘go see a concert version of the Ring.’ His Ring, he claims in perhaps the most notable paragraph, is about stripping away Wagner’s accretions and getting back to basics:

‘“The first ‘Ring’ in Bayreuth was about the poetical world, the mythological world,” he said. In many recent productions the “Ring,” is “always dipped in these layers and layers of socio-political stances,” he added. “People in Europe have to try to get even with Wagner: ‘He said all these wrong things about the Jewish people in his days. One of his greatest fans is Hitler.’ We know all that. Europe is trying to get even with him.

“I said: ‘That’s all your stuff. Let’s strip all of that from the 20th century and go back to the 19th century.’”‘

Oh dear. Wagner’s use of mythology was political allegory – and that’s what’s fundamentally missing from this Met produciton. Europe is not trying to get even with Wagner, to extract revenge by discussing him politically – although some of us do understand that the past is not to be escaped from, and some opera directors like Stefan Herheim attempt to deal with the past in a sensible and ground-breaking way. When people talk of Wagner, they are not necessarily talking of Hitler (or vice versa), although it is clear that many productions, especially those immediately after the war, did deal implicitly or explicitly with the Nazi inheritance. But there are levels of politics and philosophy that Wagnerian theory and the prose-poem itself intended to be put across by productions of the Ring – and without them a Ring is just not the Ring. ‘Stuff’ can’t just be wished away.

So what we have, with Mr. Lepage’s production, is in essence a HIP Ring. Lepage is attempting to escape from performance traditions and the spectre of Hitler just like the tyros of the 1970s were trying to escape from Furtwängler and Wagner himself. This Ring attempts to take us all back to a past that is no longer accessible… and then to update it with spurious ideas about how Wagner would have liked his dramas produced… in the future, and after all that history.

But HIP has brought much that is good, and whether this production does is a matter yet to be determined. I have written before that this Ring is unaware of its own ironies: spending vast quantities of money on an idea-less production is one rather too close to the Wagnerian bone. We should indeed be grateful for it, for the artistic effort put into it, not because it gives us a great theatrical experience – but for the questions it raises about American art, about America itself, and the current state of Wagner.

Here’s Nikolai Lugansky playing his own paraphrase of Götterdämmerung, which is really very cool indeed. It reminds me of Glenn Gould – and then quickly dispels those memories.

We’ve been hearing a lot of Beethoven recently on disc and in the concert hall. After Riccardo Chailly’s heavily promoted and HIP-influenced cycle with the Gewandhausorchester Leipzig and Christian Thielemann’s resolutely un-HIP recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic which cannot compete with the older readings they attempt to emulate, comes a deeply appealing prospect tied in to the Proms: a new cycle from Daniel Barenboim on Decca with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Released in June, it will doubtless be a recording heavy with political (and musico-political) implications, even if playing standards cannot be quite as high as those for Chailly and Thielemann. That, however, is not really the point. And if it helps us reacquire the deeper meaning of Beethoven so often lost beneath attempts to make his music sound up-to-date, relevant, or ‘modern’, then all the better.

For UK readers, the cycle can be pre-ordered here. And here’s the slightly schmaltzy trailer Decca have put together.

The contrast with Sir Colin Davis’s performance with the LSO at last year’s Proms could not have been greater. (See here for Boulezian’s review.) For reference, this is how things should be done.