Sydney Symphony, Ashkenazy, Grimaud, Royal Albert Hall

Interesting disappointments are more compelling than uninteresting ones

To be interestingly disappointed isn’t bad - it’s being uninterestingly disappointed that is. This was an intriguing Prom with a full house, possibly because of Hélène Grimaud’s presence in the Ravel piano concerto, as well as Vladimir Ashkenazy on the podium. Surely it wasn’t for Scriabin’s Third Symphony, unheard here for almost 80 years? Or perhaps Richard Strauss’s Der Rosenkavalier is so well beloved that even a dubious orchestral suite made from it lures the thousands?

Salome, Royal Opera

Angela Denoke's mercurial Salome shimmers in Strauss's monstrously beautiful opera

The first time I saw David McVicar's production of Strauss's hypersensuous shocker, I gaped in horrified wonder at the Pasolini Salò-style mise en scène but didn't find the action within it fully realised. When it came out on DVD, the close-ups won greater respect but there was still the problem of Nadja Michael's singing, hardly a note in true. Now it returns with Angela Denoke, an even more compelling actress with a far healthier soprano voice.

Capriccio, Grange Park Opera

Lively staging, stylish singing and a welcome intrusion of wartime reality

By far the most uncomfortable – perhaps the only uncomfortable - thing about Richard Strauss’s last opera is the date of its first performance. In October 1942 the battle of El Alamein was raging and the British were bombing German cities while the Munich opera audience were entertained by a rambling disquisition on the respective merits of poetry and music as art forms, set in an eighteenth-century French château. What modern director could resist this provocation? Stephen Medcalf positively draws attention to it in his new staging for Grange Park Opera by transplanting it bodily to – wait for it – 1942, and having the singers arrive in forties gear before climbing into their rococo outfits.
 
Crude maybe. But the idea has interesting consequences. Capriccio is a costume drama about staginess and artistic effect. At one point, after seemingly endless arguments about words, music and the theatre, Strauss’s heroine, the Countess Madeleine, instructs the participants to collaborate in an opera; and what will the opera be about? Naturally, the scenes we’ve been witnessing – in other words, Capriccio. The apogee of all this meta-play-acting is reached when two of the singers playing the German forties performers dressed as rococo Frenchmen act out a scene-within-the-scene composed by Olivier, Strauss’s poet figure. By the end of a long evening of such stuff, it’s rather a relief when the characters reappear one-by-one in their original wartime clobber, and the Countess delivers her punishing final monologue about art and love in a bombed-out house (designer Francis O’Connor) with a backdrop of Dresden in ruins.
 
There are different truths about Capriccio. One is that it is simply unendurable. Another is that it was an extraordinary comfort in 1942 to be reminded that there was music as beautiful as Strauss’s and higher things in life than Lancaster or Dornier bombers, just as the men in the trenches in 1917 had read Prufrock to be reminded of toast and tea. I’m somewhere in the middle on this. Strauss (and his librettist, Clemens Krauss) made a mistake, in my opinion, to get bogged down in disputes about prima la musica, dopo le parole – music or words first - when the real core of his music is sensual passion. Capriccio comes to life when the Countess and Olivier, who is in love with her, launch into an emotional exchange allegedly about the composer Flamand’s having set Olivier’s sonnet to music, and in the trio that follows, in which Flamand (also in love with the Countess) sings it. For much of the rest the piece meanders self-indulgently and at length, the old master brooding over past costume romances and soprano aristocrats and operas-within-operas. Strong theatre it rarely is for long.
 
Lively staging and stylish singing can invigorate it, and Grange Park provides them here. Susan Gritton’s Countess is outstanding. The role has grande dame written all over it, but Gritton plays it with freshness and wit and persuades us that she is, as Flamand raves, young and radiant, though a widow. She has just that silvery sheen on the voice, without edginess, that Strauss seems to have liked in the first Countess, Viorica Ursuleac, and her line is superb until the monologue, where traces of tiredness perhaps show, understandably. Andrew Kennedy’s Flamand and Roderick Williams’s Olivier are likewise nearly faultless, well-observed portraits of characters whose differences reflect more than those of their trades – at least one hopes so.
 
The third personage in these disputes, the theatre director La Roche, is finely taken by Matthew Best – a suitably raffish figure but majestic to excess, as required, in his big solo about the birth of Athene and the fall of Carthage, musically the most original pages in the score. I also enjoyed very much Sara Fulgoni’s larger-than-life Clairon, the Count of Quirijn de Lang, an interesting and promising young baritone, and the inevitable Italian tenor and soprano, Wynne Evans and Sally Johnson - the most factual image of musicians down the ages, battling for their fees and meanwhile stuffing themselves with cake and sherry.
 
Stephen Barlow conducts, stylishly enough, though the performance takes time to get into its stride and the playing of the English Chamber Orchestra has its rough edges early on but soon improves. I wonder, also, whether keeping the German text was a helpful decision. Krauss’s libretto is wordy, to put it mildly, and needs to be heard, precisely for reasons that supply one tier of the drama being played out, ironically, in the music.
 

 

MORE RICHARD STRAUSS ON THEARTSDESK

Elektra, Gergiev, LSO, Barbican Hall

Felicity Palmer's Clytemnestra takes honours in a pulverising performance

Richard Strauss’s 1909 opera Elektra is a diabolical piece of work - less an opera than an event determined to cut its mark. A vast orchestra of 112 players unleashes a two-hour tsunami of sound across the stage, on which female voices are buffeted like pieces of driftwood, shrieking of mothers who murder husbands, daughters who want to murder mothers, rivers of blood, flayed horses, dogs, bodies. Subtle it isn’t. Loud it is. In the hands of Valery Gergiev and London Symphony Orchestra this week, pulverisingly loud.

Christine Brewer, Roger Vignoles, Wigmore Hall

Unqualified rapture - Strauss songs find their voice

Wigmore Hall does not always take kindly to big voices; it’s an easy hall to over-sing. But when the singer is the American soprano Christine Brewer and the sound so open, so rich and effulgent, hall and voice become one resonance. It’s almost as if Wigmore is selective in its response. It warms to the right voice in the right music. Brewer in Strauss is about as right as it gets. And besides, regardless of the venue, Brewer has never sung to be heard; she sings to be understood.

Der Rosenkavalier, Royal Opera

Uneven Covent Garden revival of Strauss's comic masterpiece

Seeking the snows of yesteryear, I remember a time when John Schlesinger's Covent Garden Rosenkavalier filled every moment of Hugo von Hofmannsthal's rococo libretto and Richard Strauss's jewel-studded score with life and meaning. 25 years on, its creator is no more, a revival director (Andrew Sinclair) fails to pull a dramatically variable cast together and many startling new productions have shown more readiness to engage with the opera's Viennese time machine - that's to say, any era between the 1740s and the present day - and with greater panache.

A strictly period setting can still be managed (David McVicar worked humane wonders with a stylised 18th century for Scottish Opera, Opera North and ENO). Schlesinger has bequeathed a wealth of Hogarthian detail, and the late Maria Bjørnson's startling costumes hint at the hyper-real (as well as the aspirations of nouveau-riche Faninal, within William Dudley's pointedly over-the-top Vienna townhouse). It's just that despite the mostly fiery pace of Kirill Petrenko's conducting, stage energy needs to fill swathes of the action and several experienced singers turn in unfocused characterisations.

0032-KOCHISOKOSKI_This ought to be an opera thrusting home the cruelty of passing time, woman's powerlessness in the face of man the hunter, and above all what an affair with a teenager means to a grand lady coming to terms with the ageing process. But as neither of these two characters, the thirtysomething Marschallin and the 17-year old Octavian, was convincingly inhabited by Soile Isokoski and Sophie Koch (pictured together right in Act 1), the work could well have reverted to the title Strauss and Hofmannsthal originally intended for it, Ochs auf Lerchenau, stressing the city shenanigans of an aristocratic chancer from the Upper Austrian countryside. It could also have taken its name from an old French romantic novel, The Misfortunes of Sophie, for it was unique in my experience to end up caring more about young Sophie von Faninal than for the older woman.

This was down to an extraordinarily active and deeply felt performance from Lucy Crowe. Her awestruck reception of the silver rose before she has even had a chance to fall in love with its bearer floated effortlessly in the ether, bringing tears to the eyes as the rather stolidly presented predicament of Isokoski's Marschallin at the end of the previous act had not. In the famous trio, it was Crowe's voice which rode the horn-laden waves of orchestral sound, at least from where I was sitting (Royal Opera acoustics can be capricious).

0833-ROSE_CROWEIn terms of filling in any of the revival's potential blank spaces, Crowe was equalled by Peter Rose (pictured with her, left) as the lord of misrule who comes to claim her for her family fortunes, Baron Ochs. Rose has now sung this enormous role all over the world, accepted even in notoriously hard-to-please Vienna as the real comic article. Not only is his discreet dialect spot on, as an Austrian assured me; he actually sings the part, as many older basses do not, rather beautifully, with the occasional aristocratic aplomb. He has learnt to fill the characterisation with a thousand gestures, and his shtick in the famous waltzing letter scene is just on the right side of robust - though the low money note at the end eluded him, just as Crowe faltered in the test of her perilous final ascent. Notewise, both singers were otherwise flawless.

You couldn't really fault Koch's music-making either. The French mezzo has the flaming top for the impetuous youngster - written as a soprano role - though the rest can sometimes be too trumpet-like for silky comfort. Dramatically, though, she expressed little if anything of this second Cherubino's insecurity or deeper tenderness, and her masquerade as the Marschallin's chamber maid - girl plays boy plays girl - was unfunny; it often is, but it needn't be.

Isokoski provided the most disconcerting blank of the evening. Civic sophistication had clearly not left its mark on the Feldmarschall's once-inexperienced wife. Projecting the text with rather adenoidal emphasis in the lower register, not quite matched to a luminous if sometimes fluttery top,  she just about got away with the humour of the opening scenes but missed all the emotional targets in the soliloquy and later the monologues of passing time. That the end of this great scene was moving at all could only be ascribed to the chamber-musical sensitivity of Petrenko's orchestra. As the final dilemma of compromise and disappointment took over from the Viennese farce of the third act, we felt sorrier for the dashing of Ochs's dreams as sombrely suggested by Rose, and then happier for the success of Crowe's Sophie. The Marschallin's less than gracious and hardly emotionally charged exit raised no frisson by comparison.

Among Hofmannsthal's gallery of supporting grotesques, Faninal hardly came across as a father with dangerously high blood pressure in Thomas Allen's surprisingly muted portrayal. Yet while Wookyung Kim made an unItalian tenor, the Latin intriguers were well etched with the experience of Graham Clark and Leah Marian Jones. The truly small parts were taken by a mixture of sleek young singers and unruly oldtimers (the Marschallin's footmen, disorderly as so often). Ultimately, nothing on stage knitted as well as it did down in the orchestra. This was a fine night for Petrenko, Crowe and Rose. Unfortunately, since the public's sympathy must move with the rose-bearer of the title and ultimately with his reflective older mistress, that wasn't enough.

OVERLEAF: MORE RICHARD STRAUSS ON THEARTSDESK

Prom 74: Vienna Philharmonic, Mehta

Zubin Mehta coasts at the Proms

One sure (but expensive) way of luring Zubin Mehta to London is to hire the Vienna Philharmonic, too. He and the orchestra go way back to a time when the Indian-born superstar’s smouldering good looks might have suggested Bollywood as a more likely destination than the Vienna Conservatoire. But only the most precociously gifted 20-something conductor offers up Bruckner’s 9th Symphony for his first recording with the illustrious Philharmonic. And quite a fist of it he made, too. I still return to it from time to time.
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