Also published in Die Presse: Poschners Gebet für die Seejungfrau: Das RSO im Musikverein
E.Elgar |
E.Chausson |
Much to Sea, More to Hear; Oceanic Soundscapes from the Tonkünstler
The kind of program – and the quality – that the Tonkünstler Orchestra delivered on All Saints’ Eve in Vienna’s Musikverein was something to behold.
It was a concert that would have been worth attending for the program alone. That it turned out to be an intoxicating affair in every respect was an invigorating bonus. Under the baton of operatic superstar Marco Armiliato, whom no one thinks of as an orchestral conductor, the Tonkünstler Orchestra plunged headlong into the surging flood of Wagner’s Flying Dutchman overture: high-drama from the first bar, with the players perhaps eased by the comforting knowledge that the full opera would not follow. The sound was impressively homogeneous and rich across all sections, the tiptoeing pizzicati were delectable – everything fit, everything clicked, promising much for what was to come.
Rightly so. Not only thanks to the music, the orchestra, and the conductor, but also to the soloist. Mezzo-soprano Aigul Akhmetshina, who has conquered the world’s major opera houses in no time at all, sang Edward Elgar’s Sea Pictures before the intermission – five magnificent orchestral songs long beloved by listeners, if only because, sung by Dame Janet Baker, they have shared an LP for six decades with the most famous recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto (Du Pré/Barbirolli). Since you listen with your eyes first: Akhmetshina made her entrance in a dress of shimmering duchesse satin, textured like rippling waves, shading from deep blue to sea-green, adorned with a shoulder flower that might reasonably double as a sea anemone. Very much in keeping with the maritime theme.
No less impressive was what followed sonically. Penetrating throughout the middle register, beguiling in her healthy low range, always intense, always poised. So it was in the Elgar, which explored her vocal depths and was beautifully supported by the orchestra. And so it was after the interval in Ernest Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer – now finding Akhmetshina in an ultramarine gown with a texture suggesting that a painter had liberally wiped his acrylic brushes across it. Even rarer than the Elgar in concert, this work is a prime specimen of French Romanticism: illustrative, luxuriant, effusive, perfectly in line with the likes of Duparc, Debussy, and Dukas. Akhmetshina brought to it moments of high drama but also a deeply sympathetic warmth. The orchestral sound clouds – nearly on the same level of execution as in the preceding works – were a joy; a delicate cello solo at the heart of La mort de l’amour was the proverbial cherry on the top.
One might have feared that after such a highpoint, such glorious excess, the classically restrained Romanticism of Mendelssohn – namely Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage – could only feel anticlimactic. Instead, it became a serene, intimate coda of quiet grandeur and eventual exultation. What Armiliato and the orchestra conjured up here, as throughout the evening, was already one of this Musikverein season’s unforgettable experiences.
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