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bachtrack,5th September 2012 |
Zwölftöner |
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Verdi: Messa da Requiem, Salzburg 1.9.2012 |
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Salzburg's first spiritual festival closes with Verdi’s Requiem
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Faith and glamour have bookended this year’s Salzburg Festival, a move met
with incredulity in certain quarters and yet one not entirely alien to
Austrian customs, if one looks to the 20 or so most glittering events of the
Viennese ball season, which is promptly curtailed by Ash Wednesday (still
observed by much of the population here with high Catholic asceticism). When
Helga Rabl-Stadler, the Festival’s president, remarked in a newspaper
interview a couple of weeks ago that the contemplative start to the
Festival, a week-long upbeat of sacred music curiously termed the ‘Spiritual
Overture’, legitimized the decadence of a crowning ball, the Lenten
underpinnings of her argument were readily understood if not necessarily
accepted. The question of where Verdi’s Requiem, performed a few hours
before the ball, might lie in this scheme was hardly left ambiguous, with
the Festival’s artistic director, Alexander Pereira, promising in December
that those prepared to cough up steep sums for his new ball would be
guaranteed much-sought-after tickets for this concert. Four star soloists,
the orchestra and chorus of La Scala, and Daniel Barenboim helming would
make for a spectacle fit to match the evening’s festivities.
Naturally this would seem to sell Barenboim rather short, but despite the
haunting sincerity of the work’s many hushed, supplicatory moments, in
keeping with the Festival’s earlier spiritual focus without showing any of
the piety Verdi remained so ambivalent towards, this performance didn’t make
the goosebump-raising impact I had expected. The hairs on the back of my
neck have risen once before upon hearing Barenboim and La Scala’s forces
perform the Requiem, as recently as last November, but because this is a
work where effects, or at least these heavily stylized ones, tend to stay
fixed rather than shift subtly in emphasis from performance to performance –
like the chorus’ rolled Rs of the opening ‘Requiem aeternam’ and the
italianità of the delivery elsewhere, which is wonderful but also doggedly
consistent in its inflection – it relies on things like increased commitment
to make subsequent times seem as rewarding as the first.
That said,
the playing merely matching what I heard last year minus a few weaker
moments (like the trumpet intonation of the call to judgement) was no cause
for complaint, with Barenboim’s gift for building profound climaxes once
more something to marvel at, as well as his ability for showing disputed
material in the best possible light – here the comment by Hans von Bülow
(who also notoriously described the piece as ‘opera in ecclesiastical garb’)
that ‘the final fugue, despite much that is worthy only of a student, and
much that is fatuous and ugly, is a work of such industry that many German
musicians will be greatly surprised by it’ seemed a particularly mean
backhanded compliment. The silvery-blue tone colour to Barenboim’s
Domine Jesu again added greatly to the limpid phrasing of this section, even
if Jonas Kaufmann following suit in his Hostias put Verdi in threat of being
hijacked by Lohengrin.
Earlier Kaufmann had impressed in his
Ingemisco, balancing tenderly voiced opening phrases with an underlying
force that carefully came to the fore, ensuring that the first top B flat
wouldn’t seem to come from nowhere (La Scala’s horns, in the morning’s
single most satisfying moment of playing, swelled perfectly in unison). From
there on out the way he built in strength was flawlessly paced and gathered
in improbable subtlety the louder he sang. René Pape made things a
little more obvious, his repeated notes on ‘Mors’ descending into a William
Shatner-esque stage whisper, though elsewhere his creative way with
consonants was hard to resist. His singing, however, wasn’t as colourful as
his diction, and he voiced his part like a blustery Germont throughout.
Mezzo Elīna Garanča maintains a luxuriant beauty and smoothness throughout
her range, but her failure to define or at least shape a little the parts
she sings beyond occasionally employing the most generic expressive devices
has caused my eyes to glaze over a good few times now; here I’m afraid to
say I simply zoned out on her. Soprano Anja Harteros was a great deal less
passive and achieved that rarest of things in a Verdi Requiem – delicately
floating an unscooped and utterly exquisite rising B flat before the final
fugue, and later pulling out a fierce top C which rode effortlessly above
the orchestra and chorus. At times earlier in the performance her singing
had seemed a little too composed, too proper, but she responded well to the
turbulence of Barenboim’s Libera me and sang her most important number in
the piece with compelling presence.
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