Fidelio; Samson
The Proms
The visits to the Proms of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra under their co-founder and conductor Daniel Barenboim have become, already, something more than an artistic event — or, this year, four artistic events in two days. It is immensely moving to see young people from endlessly embattled states making music together, and doing it with such panache and precision. By the time of the last concert, an unstaged performance of Beethoven’s Fidelio, with a starry cast of soloists, it was possible to feel, however, that Barenboim’s hyper-Gergievean rate of work was taking a toll, both on him and on his orchestra. Not that they had lost any precision or attack, but there was a lack of drive in the performance, for all its predominantly rapid tempi, which made this wonderful opera less moving than it can be, indeed for long stretches hardly moving at all.
Barenboim had decided — his first mistake — to begin with the Leonore No.3 Overture. That, as Wagner always claimed, tends to make the ensuing drama seem superfluous. The trouble here was that the overture itself was fatally lacking in drama. Barenboim was at his most Furtwänglerian, adopting an incredibly slow speed for the opening, and then moving into the allegro in an almost inaudible pianissimo. The big difference, if you listen to the overture as Furtwängler performed it, especially before the final scene in Salzburg in 1950, is that the tension he generates there is so hair-raising that you nearly scream, and then the release is more than cataclysmic. With Barenboim and his fine players, the first minutes were becalmed, nerveless, and nothing needed release or, if it had, would have achieved it.
Dispensing with the dialogue, every word of which I adore, Barenboim had his Leonore, Waltraud Meier, reciting the narration that Edward Said had written in its place — amplified, and in English. Further lowering of the dramatric pulse. Oddly, it was only when Rocco, superbly sung by John Tomlinson, launched on his little song about the indispensableness of money to a happy marriage that any life entered the score, and fortunately that was maintained throughout most of the rest of the act. Meier is a fine artist, but she has reached the point where her experience has to be called on all too often to enable her to cope with Leonore’s music, especially her great aria, though it was moving. Yet I was constantly worried that the sounds I was hearing were so smooth, as if Karajan had taken over. The trombones were allowed to growl, but the savage, agonised introduction to Act II was merely a series of immaculately played dissonances. Simon O’Neill is the finest Florestan to appear for many years, and gave us a taste of the work’s centre of pain. But what followed — we had the German dialogue in the melodrama, of course, but no further exchanges, which ruins the lead into the quartet and the ensuing ecstatic duet — was anti-climactic. Even the final chorus sounded very civilised, with immaculate singing and polished orchestral tone.
A couple of evenings earlier we had witnessed another prisoner suffering at far greater length, Handel’s Samson. I watched this on TV, where I suspect its impact was far more than I’d have found it in the hopelessly vast spaces of the Albert Hall. Mark Padmore seemed to be in powerful form, and though the drama in this late work is not, for the most part, intense, Harry Bicket ensured that it never lost momentum. As so often, Handel makes his last act the finest, and Samson spends most of it having been a successful suicide pillar-breaker. Iestyn Davies, a glorious counter-tenor, kept up a consolatory commentary, and Christopher Purves, though his voice is not quite ideal for the giant Harapha, enjoyed being evil so much that one could only share his pleasure. That the evening seemed nearly as long as it was is the composer’s fault more than any of the performers. And what a relief it is to have, in one of these huge pieces of Handel’s, a chorus that plays quite a large part, something that we miss in almost all the works officially designated ‘opera’.
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