PROM 36: Weber, Chin, Bruckner, Christiane
Oelze (soprano); Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin/Kent Nagano, Royal Albert Hall,
London, 10 August, 2005 (CC)
A welcome visit from the Deutsches
Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under
their almost outgoing Chief Conductor and Artistic Director,
Kent Nagano (neatly, he will be replaced by Ingo Metzmacher,
who conducted the Prom the night after this one).
Weber's Freischütz
Overture is a real test for any orchestra, and one this
visiting orchestra passed with flying colours.
The horns were marvellously and richly Urwaldisch,
pianissimi were actually quiet.
Yet interpretatively there were problems, most notably in
the loss of dynamism towards the end. A rawer edge to the
sound would have been welcomed in these final stages, also.
South Korean Unsuk
Chin's work has impressed me in the past (Barbican review). She is currently working on an opera on Alice in
Wonderland for Los Angeles Opera, and here was the European
premiere of what sounds like chips off her work-bench. The
inspiration for snagS
& Snarls comes, of course, from Lewis Carroll. The
greatest strength of Chin's response to Carroll is her brevity
(just a touch under a quarter-hour). Chin opts for quite
simple settings. Sprachgesang
is used effectively in 'The Tale-Tail of the Mouse' (the
third movement), only in the final song ('Speak roughly
to your little boy') attempting to put an overtly adult
slant on her text in the form of a sinister undercurrent.
Kent Nagano is in the throes
of recording Bruckner for Harmonia
Mundi with this orchestra. His
Third (HMC901817) disappointed me, but Nagano's take on
the Sixth struck me as something worse – a half-performance
of a masterpiece. That we could hear the cellos' initial
semiquaver anacrusis seemed to bode well, but detail soon
disappeared at mezzo-forte and above. Worse, Nagano's take
is too 'Gemutlich' (or to use a more modern term, 'user-friendly'),
all but ignoring Bruckner's legendary structural control
for a leaf-by-leaf examination of any tree that happens
to be around. Many times there was the feeling that the
music was simply not going anywhere – a quick check with
Klemperer's Sixth, easily my top recommendation in this work
(EMI GROC 562621-2), confirmed what we all knew anyway,
that Bruckner is clearly in the right. Nagano missed the
sheer radiance of the slow movement. An oboe solo summed
it all up – excellent individual effort piercing through
and scuppered by nondescript strings. Nagano seems constitutionally
unable to think in paragraphs, leading the finale to emerge
as mere empty rhetoric. Any sense of that vital cumulative
momentum was well and truly lost as the music sagged at
each and every opportunity.
Deeply disappointing Bruckner
then, in a Prom that seemed to specialize in disappointments.
Colin Clarke
