Michael White enjoys three very different outstanding performances.
When music tourists go to Leipzig it tends to be for JS Bach, who lies buried (or seems to: there are disputes about whether it’s really him) by the chancel steps of the town’s Thomaskirche and presides in death over the rich, ongoing musical life of that famous church
But there’s no shortage of other composers whose names attach to Leipzig, one of them being Mahler, who took a job there in the 1880s conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra: then as now one of the most venerable institutions of its kind in existence. By all accounts he was a tyrant on the podium and not greatly loved. But a century and a half later the love has grown; and I was in Leipzig recently for a massive Mahler Festival organised by the Gewandhaus with performances of all his 10 symphonies by a conveyor-belt of orchestras from around Europe.
Of the ones I heard, the standout was perhaps the Bavarian RSO delivering the eerily nocturnal No 7 under Daniel Harding; but there wasn’t much in this Festival that failed to qualify as fabulous. It was beyond impressive. And though Mahler symphonies day after day can be exhausting, they leave you closer to the truth of the composer’s celebrated observation that a symphony must be “like the world, embracing everything”. When Mahler wrote these works, he reached out to the world and took it in: the light, the dark, the elevated, the banal. And though it’s often said that his conversion to Catholicism from the Judaism of his birth was prompted more by social pragmatism than by faith, it isn’t hard to hear in Mahler’s music a response to life that Christian souls will recognise. A sense of wonder qualified by struggle, disappointment, but persistence.
Mendelssohn (another Jewish Christian) also ranks among the stars of Leipzig’s music history, and the house where he once lived is now restored and open as a rather smart museum, with a concert-space and garden. Very much worth visiting. I can’t pretend to be devoted to his output, and don’t often get excited by the prospect of performances. But it’s a prejudice – because on the occasions when I do turn up for something Mendelssohnian, the brilliance of the writing always captivates me. Last month’s Proms at St Jude’s, an annual eruption of festivity in Hampstead Garden Suburb, included his Violin Concerto – and I went, expecting nothing much. But I was swept away by everything about it: the cool, almost offhand mastery of the soloist Jennifer Pike; the excellence of the young Fantasia Orchestra under conductor Tom Featherstonhaugh (of whom I knew nothing but am now keen to learn); and above all the Concerto itself, which shouldn’t be surprising but somehow was.
I came away wondering why it is that I persistently undervalue Mendelssohn. And I asked myself the same thing a few days later after a rare staging of Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream with Mendelssohn’s incidental score. It was done at the summer theatre in London’s Holland Park by the enterprising period-performance group Figure under their founder-conductor Frederick Waxman. And although the hard truth is that if I’m going to see this play with music I’d prefer it to be Britten’s operatic adaptation, I loved every minute of this show. I hadn’t absorbed quite how much music Mendelssohn wrote for the piece, but it somehow manages not to undermine the pace. And anyway, much of it plays under the spoken text – or at least, it did in this production, which had been skilfully edited to make the duration viable.
It worked – my only negative thought being that Shakespeare’s words transcend their time in a way that Mendelssohn’s sounds don’t. The play feels boundlessly contemporary, the music “period”. But that’s OK: it’s still worth hearing.
Pavel Kolesnikov is a pianist always worth hearing. He plays with a wisdom beyond his years, and drew rapt attention to the concerts he gave as resident artist at the Aldeburgh Festival the other month – starting with a solo recital that, in typical Kolesnikov style, attempted to rethink performance presentation. Entitled Celestial Navigation, there was no pre-announced programme – just a list of composers whose pieces were retrieved like a collection of found objects in a box.
As they emerged, without break, in a sort of stream of consciousness, the platform was immersed in video projections that washed over everything including pianist and piano, melting them into absorbent images of stars and waves. And Kolesnikov played with his back to the audience, facing the far wall as a priest might face the altar.
It was an acute analogy because the whole thing had a sense of priestly ritual about it – which I wouldn’t have objected to except that we were in Snape Maltings, not in church, and it became annoying in the second half when the projections were arcane texts put together by the playwright Martin Crimp with self-regarding artfulness. Kolesnikov played beautifully. The visual distractions were, alas, pretentious.
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