NSO's Delicate Dreams with von Otter

Schubert, Lieder, A. S. von Otter, T. Quasthoff, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, C. Abbado

One of the hallmarks of Christoph Eschenbach's tenure at the National Symphony Orchestra in the past three years has been the introduction of music new to the ensemble's repertoire, or the reintroduction of music long neglected by it. That trend continued last night with the second of two NSO programs for the Kennedy Center's ongoing Nordic Cool festival. Actually, while last week's excellent Finnish program was truly Nordic, this concert was Nordic only by a stretch, because mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter happens to be Swedish. If it means a second chance to hear von Otter, who performed a concert on Monday night that was instantly one of the year's highlights, you will not hear me complain -- especially since this was her NSO debut, and in pieces heard only once from the NSO, back in 1948.

Von Otter sang a set of exquisite Schubert songs, in evocative and colorful orchestrations by Max Reger and others, all but one of which she recorded live in Paris for a super disc with Thomas Quasthoff and Claudio Abbado (preferring here Reger's arrangement of Erlkönig over Berlioz's). The NSO offered some of its most subtle playing in support of von Otter, who never had to sing with more sound than she needed to dramatize the text, and Eschenbach helped to accompany her with suave support as she sped up or slowed the tempo at points. The winds were little more than a whisper in the tiny echoes of von Otter's melody in the melancholy Gretchen am Spinnrade, a detail not in Schubert's original accompaniment but added by Reger. Benjamin Britten's ingenious, slightly odd arrangement of Die Forelle, with the slippery trout motif in the clarinet but also echoed in other instruments, was loopy and fun, the anonymous orchestration of An Sylvia forthright and blustery, and Erlkönig a spine-tingling narrative. As in her solo recital, the most noteworthy songs were the most quiet and still ones, the tragic Romanze from Rosamunde and poignant, crepuscular Im Abendrot, with the NSO a flexible, murmuring backdrop. A welcome encore provided more of that character, Reger's orchestration of another Schubert Lied, Nacht und Träume, set to poetry by Matthäus Kasimir von Collin (1779-1824). It has been a good month for Schubert -- with an excellent piano recital by Paul Lewis last weekend and a violin and piano program by Alina Ibragimova and pianist Cédric Tiberghien coming up at the at Baltimore Museum of Art -- and one wished that the whole program could have been given over to von Otter.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, National Symphony offers a quirky, diverse and sometimes soaring program (Washington Post, March 8)

Mahler's Blumine, the ethereal slow movement eventually removed by the composer from his first symphony and here in its debut performance by the NSO, provided a glowing introduction to the Schubert set. Eschenbach led a quiet, floating rendition of the work, with elegant trumpet solos by NSO principal Steven Hendrickson. The tempo, it must be said, was extremely slow, perhaps stretching the piece into something other than what Mahler really intended, but the effect of time-suspending stasis was one to which I happily surrendered. Sadly, I was called away from this concert at intermission, for family reasons, so I cannot offer any thoughts on the NSO's first performance of Mozart's Requiem Mass since 1994, on the second half, with the University of Maryland Concert Choir and four soloists, not including von Otter.

This concert repeats tonight and Saturday night (March 8 and 9, 8 pm).

An Exquisite Hour with Anne Sofie von Otter

Grieg, Songs, A. S. von Otter, B. Forsberg [REVIEW] Sibelius, Songs, A. S. von Otter, B. Forsberg Swedish Songs (Peterson-Berger, Stenhammar, von Koch), A. S. von Otter, B. Forsberg

Your critic, and no one is likely to argue with me on this, is not accustomed to writing raves. Most concerts offered at a professional level are generally good, some have particular strengths (and weaknesses) that merit mention, a small number are exceptional, only a few truly extraordinary. Once in a very rare while, I hear a concert that attains that crucial combination of diverting programming performed to an impeccable standard by musicians who seem perfectly matched to the music they are performing. The Monday night recital by mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter and pianist Bengt Forsberg, offered by the Fortas Chamber Music series in the context of the Kennedy Center's Nordic Cool festival in the Terrace Theater (both artists are Swedish), was in that category. After von Otter's last recital in the area, with music drawn from her top-notch Terezín album, we looked forward to great things, possibly inflated expectations that make the achievement all the more remarkable.

One part of the evening's success was the choice of music, full of contrast and range in many courses, like the best meals. The opening pairing, of two songs by Wilhelm Peterson-Berger (1867-1942), was a case in point: the sweeping, epic Intet är som väntanstider (Nothing is like waiting time, from Fridolin's Songs), with Forsberg swooping and swelling on the broad piano part, followed by the dreamy ballad Som stjärnorna på himmelen (Like the stars in the sky -- all singers, go look this song up now, from the Four Songs in Swedish Folktone, op. 5/3), a delicate pastry of delicious consonants and vowels, with Forsberg in both cases knowing just how much sound to provide to support his singer. That Peterson-Berger wrote the opera Arnljot (considered the Swedish national opera, according to the program notes) and was a fierce newspaper critic was icing on the cake. The whole Swedish set -- no "titans," as von Otter put it, but all worth discovering (see her CD of Swedish songs to do just that) -- was like this, with pairings devoted to Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) -- the chromatically enticing In the Maple's Shade a stand-out -- and Sigurd von Koch (1879-1919), whose Debussy-misty Spring Night's Rain and equally wild, thrashing The Wild Swans were both thrilling.

A set of Sibelius songs, also set to Swedish poetry, was almost a let-down after that, with the exception of the gloomy, surprising My Bird Is Long in Homing, quickly surpassed by the Grieg pairing -- the stately and tender Våren (Spring) and the swaggering lover's boast of Midsummer Eve. The strength of the Nordic half was not the size or volume of von Otter's voice, which could be full and radiant but also elegant and contained, but the delectation of the poetry, like the experience of bathing in Ibsen's Norwegian last week. After spending intermission wishing von Otter would stick to these Nordic songs, it was a welcome surprise to be equally taken by her French diction and way with artless simplicity in French songs, especially Reynaldo Hahn's setting of Paul Verlaine's L'Heure Exquise standing out in a generally fine Hahn set. In the same vein of vaguely perverse sensuality was Debussy's Chansons de Bilitis, with Forsberg's hands providing corrupt pastel wisps of sound behind the evocative melody presented with understated eloquence by von Otter.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Anne Sofie von Otter, accompanist Bengt Forsberg beguile with their easy style (Washington Post, March 6)

Forsberg was a consummate accompanist in all of these songs, and he also provided a few brief solo piano moments of vocal rest for his soloist. The best of these was Debussy's prelude Des pas sur la neige, appended without a break to the end of the Bilitis set, to which it provided an apt postlude, continuing from the third song, about a snowy walk to a frozen naiad spring. Forsberg's take on this piece, an animated story-telling incantation, was everything one missed in the performance by Víkingur Ólafsson last week. The other solo selections were less entrancing -- Sibelius's Brahmsian Romance in A Major (op. 24/2), Grieg's murky, unorthodox Rotnamsknut (op. 72/7), Chabrier's restless Idylle (from Pièces pittoresques), unraveled quite beautifully -- but always diverting, unexpected, and perfectly suited to the songs they accompanied. A final set of Canteloube folk songs, selected from Chants d'Auvergne, was perfumed with nostalgia and odd quirks, the whirring wheel of The Spinner (in both piano and the singer's spiralling "Ti lirou lirou" refrain) and cuckoo calls dotting the music hall comedy of Lou Coucut. Two encores brought down the house -- Charles Trenet's Boum!, given a manic and hilarious rendition, and a charming little song by Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, two of the the artists formerly known as ABBA.

Anne Sofie von Otter remains in Washington this week, with some rare Nordic weather nicely planned for her, because she will also sing a set of Schubert songs, in some interesting orchestrations, with the National Symphony Orchestra (March 7 to 9).

NSO and Finland

K. Saariaho, Orion (inter alia), Orchestre de Paris, C. Eschenbach Sibelius / M. Lindberg, Violin Concertos, L. Batiashvili, Finnish RSO, S. Oramo Sibelius, Complete Symphonies, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, L. Segerstam

The opening concert of the Kennedy Center's Nordic Cool festival, given by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic last week, included music from all the major Nordic countries. For his first contribution to the festival, Christoph Eschenbach took a Finnish focus with the National Symphony Orchestra in a concert of music that had mostly not been performed by the orchestra in a long time, if at all, heard last night in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall. It was the conclusion of my intensive, four-night critical stand covering all the major venues of the Kennedy Center.

The first half concluded with the NSO's first performance of Magnus Lindberg's recent violin concerto, from 2006. It would have been all too easy to program the Sibelius violin concerto for this kind of concert, but Eschenbach chose instead to highlight one of Finland's most successful living composers. In my review of the recording of the Lindberg concerto, with its dedicatee, Lisa Batiashvili, as soloist, I asked, "Which brave conductor and orchestra will bring her to the Washington region to play this enigmatic and spectrally beautiful piece?" My wish almost came true, although the soloist here was Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto, who brought a brash, garrulous touch to the demanding violin part, but not the same purity on all the high E string writing as Batiashvili. Kuusisto tended more to growl than float, and his intonation was not always where it should have been. Neither was the NSO always on top of the piece, although there were some beautifully lush moments in the slow sections. Kuusisto took a folk music-like approach to the solo, stamping his feet and bending and twisting the tone, a connection that was made further in his choice of encore, a Finnish folk dance ("Devil's Polska") transcribed by Samuel Rinda-Nickola (1763-1818), which was a rollicking good time. Kuusisto offered it proudly in honor of Kalevala Day (February 28), the annual day of Finnish culture.

The other NSO debut was Orion, a three-movement tone poem (not quite long enough perhaps to be a symphony) by Kaija Saariaho, who was just in town last week and whose music Eschenbach championed while music director of the Orchestre de Paris. Hynotic, oscillating patterns, with crinkles of percussion, especially the shamanistic shiver of shell chimes, set the mythological tone in the first movement ("Memento mori"), with Eschenbach helping to shape the murmuring mass of sound, string glissandi and other soft colors, a turbulent texture that exploded in cacophony. The second movement began with a lovely, folk-inflected piccolo solo, echoed by microtonal bends downward in a recurring wind motif, followed by a treble piano ostinato like a music box. Orion's earth-depleting hunt is depicted in the third movement, active squalls of sound (bird squeal of piccolo, animal baying of the horns) punctuated by halos of starlight in soft interludes.

Other Reviews: Robert Battey, NSO struggles with cold material from Finland (Washington Post, March 1)

Music of Jean Sibelius bookended these contemporary pieces, beginning with the tone poem Night Ride and Sunrise, op. 55, not heard from the NSO since 1982. It does not refer to the Kalevala or have folk music influences, beginning with an obsessive dotted-rhythm motif evoking a jagged, jarring sleigh ride once experienced by the composer, dotted by loud brass and percussion accents. As the rhythm is evened out, impassioned string chords impart a tone of tragic realization, over tense timpani rolls, with the musicians giving plenty of time to the crescendo swells in the score. The sunrise appeared in a beautiful bloom of brass, with a glinting flute solo, expanding with the support of strings and woodwinds under the brass. The coloristic repetition was quite similar to Saariaho's approach in Orion, just more tonal. The NSO had not played Sibelius's seventh symphony, op. 105, since Vladimir Ashkenazy conducted it in 2008, and it still sounded in good form. Eschenbach's ideas were not as much to my liking, since he often seemed to push the piece too fast to allow it to blossom as it could. (Following the recommendations of our Jens Laurson in his Ionarts survey of Sibelius cycles, the Leif Segerstam cycle with the Helsinki Philharmonic is my new favorite, with a seventh symphony that thrills and soars with each vast crescendo.) The chamber string soli section was a highlight, but the fast section seemed a little helter-skelter in its lack of unity. Eschenbach did not quite draw out the calming trombone theme, which Sibelius at one point marked in the score with his wife's name ("Aino"), although it was allowed to grow and become more present.

This program repeats tonight and tomorrow night (March 1 and 2, 8 pm) in the Kennedy Center Concert Hall.

'Hedda Gabler' in Modern Oslo

The Nordic Cool festival is heating up at the Kennedy Center, and while we will be focusing mostly on the classical music events -- the National Symphony Orchestra's program with Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto is this evening -- there are theater and dance events we would love to cover if there were more days in the week. One that fit into my schedule was the Wednesday performance of Henrik Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, staged by the National Theater of Norway in the Kennedy Center Eisenhower Theater. What might have been a negative for some was actually a draw for me: the chance to hear the play (well, most of it) in the original Norwegian, with a supertitle machine providing an English translation.

Norwegian-American director Peer Perez Øian, in his updated adaptatation, has streamlined Ibsen's play, or gutted it, depending on your point of view. To get at the heart of the conflict, he has left intact only the five most important characters: gone is all mention of Jørgen's aunts (both Juliane and the never-seen invalid Rina), as well as the servant, Berta. Some of the content of Jørgen's dialogue with Juliane in the first act is contained in the most substantially altered portion of this adaptation, the introduction that situates the return of the newly married Tesmans -- Jørgen and Hedda -- from their extended honeymoon. Other than some slight altering of later lines, however -- instead of in photo albums, the honeymoon pictures were shown on a smartphone, for example -- most of the rest of the dialogue is straight from Ibsen. The only regrettable addition was the use of a turntable playing 60s tunes, with the characters dancing to it.

Other Articles: Peter Mark, From Oslo, a most eccentric ‘Hedda Gabler’ (Washington Post, February 28)

The updating -- especially the removal of Jørgen's extended family (his two aunts raised him when his parents died) and the convention of a house with servants -- allowed this production to be much more open about the sexual tension at the heart of the drama. Jørgen, played here by the handsome Mattis Herman Nyquist, was much less an obvious target for scorn, perhaps egotistical and less intellectually sharp but far from the vexing loser he is in some productions. Thea Elvsted (Tone Beate Mostraum, pretty but also fragile) and Ejlert Løvborg (lumbering, bestubbled Jørgen Langhelle) were on the same social level as the Gablers, just ruined by a bad marriage and drink. As Brack, the tall, bald Christian Greger Strøm seemed less a legal presence and more of an interloping neighbor, and all the performances were subtle, with volumes of meaning packed into each 'Yes', 'No', or 'Perhaps'.

When the actors were not involved in a scene, which took place on a revolving set with drops resembling parts of Oslo's National Theater itself, they were generally seated at the edges of the proscenium, observing the play. The approach made Hedda (played with an edge by K. Andrea Bræin Hovig, pictured above) -- one of the more complex women ever conceived for the stage -- even colder than she might otherwise be, beautiful, judgmental, cruel, willing to crush her husband's rival even while she is attracted to him, seemingly more than to her husband. One memorable moment came when Bræin Hovig, passing through the house, sat down on the arm of the seat directly in front of me. Perez Øian's direction added reflective moments to allow us to contemplate each degree of her betrayal, and how it leads to her own undoing, with Ejlert allowed to linger on the stage, a silent but condemning ghost.

The next major theater event in the Kennedy Center's Nordic Cool festival will feature Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater in the U.S. premiere of Fanny and Alexander (March 7 to 9), a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman's Oscar-winning feature film. Many other theater events are also on the schedule.

Víkingur Ólafsson, Easy Listening

Charles T. Downey, Pianist presents dreamy, snoozy images of ‘The North’
Washington Post, February 27, 2013

Debut, V. Ólafsson (mp3)

“Nordic Cool,” the name of the Kennedy Center’s cultural festival this year, evokes many characteristics of the world’s northern regions: its vastness, its emptiness, its frigidity, its silence. Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson took Glenn Gould’s cryptically autobiographical thoughts on this “Idea of North” as the basis of an odd recital, “The North Is a State of Mind,” that he performed at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on Monday night.

As it turned out, this wan and bloodless program, consisting mostly of dreamy music dreamily played, was more like “Nordic Mellow.” Olafsson has a delicate touch at the keyboard and chose mostly sedate, less challenging fare to highlight that aspect of his playing, his sense of rubato mostly focused on slowing down. [Continue reading]

Víkingur Ólafsson, piano
Kennedy Center Terrace Theater

Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Opens Nordic Cool

Diplomats and other officials from the Nordic countries gathered at the Kennedy Center on Tuesday night to inaugurate this year's geographically oriented cultural festival, Nordic Cool. The Kennedy Center's halls will host performances by Nordic theater troupes, dancers, and musicians through March 17, a series of events kicked off by a short program -- a sort of musical Smörgåsbord -- performed by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in the Concert Hall. On the outside of the building, the blue lighting -- which I took to be glacier blue when I first saw it -- was completed by green lasers imitating the shapes of the aurora borealis, a light installation called Northern Lights, created by Jesper Kongshaug. On the grounds out front, the majestic wooden sculptures of Juha Pykäläinen's Elk Towers stride towards the entrance.

Fresh off a concert at Carnegie Hall last weekend, music director Sakari Oramo led the RSPO in five pieces by composers representing the main Nordic countries. Finland received the most obvious choice, Sibelius's tone poem Finlandia, to open the concert with a bang. Oramo took time with the ominous opening brass chords, waiting until the fast section to let the piece roll, shaped into a to-the-hilt rendition of cinematic scope. Iceland was represented by the most unexpected selection, the Njáls Saga Scherzo, a movement from the first symphony by Jón Liefs (1899-1968, pictured above). The so-called "Saga Symphony," the piece is a programmatic evocation of characters and episodes from Icelandic epic poetry, and this movement depicts the quest of a hero, Kári Sölmundarson, to avenge the murder of his wife's family. In a rollicking 6/8 meter, the dance is unsettled by metric shifts, burbling winds (delightful bassoons, especially), col legno strikes in the strings, and metallic anvil or sword strokes -- a joyful slaughter.

Sweden and Denmark had more conventional fare, beginning with Hugo Alfvén (1872–1960), representing his native Sweden with his yearning, standard-Romantic song Så tag mit hjerte ("So Take My Heart"), and Edvard Grieg's Solveig's Song from Peer Gynt. Swedish soprano Inger Dam-Jensen brought an ardent and present tone to these lovely songs, only a slightly overactive vibrato not quite suited to floating the long melisma that ends each stanza of the Grieg song, especially its high, fragile final note. Our tour of the north ended in Denmark, with the most substantial piece on the program, Carl Nielsen's fourth symphony ("Det uudslukkelige"). I wrote about the piece extensively when Christoph Eschenbach Thomas Dausgaard brought it back into the repertory of the National Symphony Orchestra in 2011, and frankly was hoping to hear another of Nielsen's symphonies, heard too infrequently in these parts.

Other Reviews: Anne Midgette, Nordic Cool at Kennedy Center opens with potluck (Washington Post, February 21) Zachary Woolfe, A Grab Bag of Sound (New York Times, February 18)

If Asteroid DA14 had come 17,000 miles closer to us earlier this month, so this symphony's program assures us, life would bloom again out of destruction. Oramo's frenetic conducting style informed this somewhat jangling rendition, with its large outbursts, disjointed dotted-rhythm motifs, growling violas, but also super-soft string sounds and tender scherzo, leading to a slow movement that began with what seemed like an ancient incantation. Of course, the insect-buzzing textures that open the fourth movement lead to the most famous dueling timpani passages in the symphonic literature, which did not disappoint in this version. Only some occasional dolorous tuning in the woodwinds detracted from a fine outing for the RPSO. An encore of Alfvén's Vallflickans dans (Shepherd Girl's Dance) capped off the concert, played without intermission so that the well-heeled guests could proceed to enjoy another kind of Smörgåsbord at a white-tie dinner.

The Nordic Cool festival has too much on offer for one person to hear, but we plan to cover concerts by pianist Vikingur Ólafsson (February 25), violinist Pekka Kuusisto with the NSO (February 28 to March 2), and a recital by mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter (March 4), as well as the production of Hedda Gabler by the National Theater of Norway (February 26 to 27).