Faith is the theme of this year’s Summer Festival in Lucerne. Not that I would have guessed it from the three concerts I went to in the Concert Hall on consecutive evenings last week. But the programme books insist on it, and there are, besides the musical events, lectures and discussions on Faith, with a cardinal and theologians participating. Why the need to justify having a festival, inflated prices for tickets, hotels, etc. being taken for granted by the majority of the well-heeled patrons? And how many of the patrons are led to reflect more intensely than they normally do on the nature of Faith, or of their faith if they have one?
The reason I ask these questions is that the festival organisation seems to believe that the performance of music is an activity in need of some justification, while I’d have thought that the point of at any rate most festivals is that the art itself is sufficient cause for celebration and reflection. That surely becomes all the more evident when one notices that many of the concerts — all the ones I attended — are given by teams who are on the way from Salzburg to the Proms, or something of the kind, with identical programmes.
The Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle gave, in Lucerne, the same concert that they presented two nights later in the Albert Hall, though the sound in the two venues must have been strikingly different. The concert began with Ligeti’s Atmosphères, a marvellous purely auditory affair, the last silence of which Rattle brilliantly extended until the orchestra breathed the opening chord of the Prelude to Lohengrin. In that context, Wagner’s first transcendental orchestral achievement became merely that, with no unearthly connotations; instead, a series of hypnotic waves of sound.
The first half ended with Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, an account which I can only oxymoronically describe as sumptuously austere. Sibelius may have noted in his diary while he was writing this bleak masterpiece that ‘[A symphony] is rather a confession of faith at different times of one’s life’, but in this execution it came across as an exceptionally starkly orchestrated series of jagged fragments seeking a wholeness that they hardly attain, though the final bars were more peaceful than, as usual, exhausted.
After the interval two more pieces that are normally thought of in narrative terms, here musically immaculate and not inviting imagery: Debussy’s Jeux and Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloé, the 2nd Suite. All told, a stimulating evening of music, only one piece of which one associates at all readily with the Berlin Philharmonic.
The next evening was one I had looked forward to for months: Verdi’s Requiem with the orchestral and choral forces of La Scala Milan, under Daniel Barenboim, with the most distinguished line-up of soloists imaginable. Here it might be expected that the matter of Faith would be unavoidable, but it’s one of the remarkable features of Verdi’s greatest work that it isn’t. Invariably referred to, either abusively or in defence, as an opera, that is exactly what it is. It invites us to think about Death in the way that Otello insists that we think about love and jealousy, or that Falstaff gets us to meditate on the shortcomings and possibilities of old age. It makes no serious attempt to envisage an eschatology beyond that of the terrible day that awaits us, when we have to reckon with what our efforts, defeats and occasional victories may have been: the horrifying imagery of the ‘Dies Irae’ is nothing more, for Verdi, than the portrayal of what two millennia of Christianity have done to our requirements of ourselves and the punishments that we inflict on ourselves for failing to live up to them. Anyone who thought that this Requiem was doctrinal could hardly accept that Verdi’s magnificent music was anything other than a tawdry piece of crude literalism.
Barenboim almost succeeded in making me think that that is what the Requiem is. From the super-hushed opening, the exaggerated tempi, the exhaled opening words from the superb chorus, it was clear that this was a Schreckens-stück. Instead of the relentless forward pressure of the many sections of the ‘Dies Irae’, all inspired, we had a concert in which one soloist or more did their theatrical thing, followed by a giant pause. Barenboim, with his hands virtually down their throats, elicited thrilling if sometimes wildly unidiomatic contributions from all of them — Jonas Kaufmann sang wonderfully, but performed the Ingemisco more as if it were a Schubert Lied than an aria of terror — with much musical growling from René Pape; and the two women, Anja Harteros and Elina Garanca, were separately gorgeous and, in the Agnus Dei, with the chorus, breathtakingly beautiful. Section after section offered marvellous things, but I became enraged by Barenboim’s insistence that the whole work should fall apart. The third concert I must leave till next week, when I move on to another and very different festival.
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