Holliger, Beethoven, Strauss:  Andreas Haefliger (piano) / BBC National orchestra of Wales / Thierry Fischer (conductor), St. David’s Hall, Cardiff, 1.6.2007 (GPu)

Holliger: Tonscherben

Beethoven: Piano Concerto No.3

Strauss: Ein Heldenleben

The 2006-7 season of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales’ subscription concerts at St. David’s Hall in Cardiff came to a close with this interesting concert. This has been Thierry Fischer’s first season as Principal Conductor of the orchestra, and he has shown himself to be both an excellent conductor with wide-ranging sympathies and an inventor of adventurous and intriguing programmes – such as this season-closer.

In a few words spoken before the concert began, Fischer told us that Holliger had always been an inspiration to him and that he had been in the audience at the first performance of Tonscherben, 22 years ago in Geneva. He had recently visited Holliger at his home in Basle to study the work with him, prior to this performance. Without Holliger’s knowing the programme of which Tonscherben was to be part, the composer had told him that one way he had thought of the piece was as the efforts of an orchestra intending to play one of Richard Strauss’s orchestral poems and finding that it couldn’t! Certainly Tonscherben, like Ein Heldenleben, requires a very large orchestra – Holliger’s score is written, for example, for 14 first violins, 4 flutes, 3 oboes, piano, harp, a huge percussion section and much more.  A study in instrumental sounds often produced in unorthodox fashion – the cellists bowing the back of their instruments, wind instruments inhaling, the piano played beneath the lid – the sound worlds created are very various in mood, the transitions very sudden. One moment the strings are delicately bowed, the next the pizzicato is explosive; one moment there are oceanic breathing sounds, the next there are scurrying interchanges of complex phrasal patterns. This is essentially a series of miniatures, of which many passages are very beautiful; some are austere, some are lush. At a single hearing it was hard to detect a clear structural pattern, but the piece felt unified and ended – it was written in memory of David Rokeah, the Israeli poet and scholar – in a passage of exquisite elegiac delicacy. I didn’t know the piece previously, and haven’t seen a score; even so, I thought I detected a few moments of uncertainty, and I did wonder if every member of the orchestra believed in the piece as fully as Fischer evidently did.

We were on more familiar ground with Beethoven’s third piano concerto – although the orchestra suddenly sounded very small! We moved from a Swiss composer to a Swiss soloist, in Andreas Haefliger (son of the distinguished tenor Ernst Haefliger) – and, of course, Fischer himself is Swiss! Haefliger seemed to be at his best in the outer movements of the concerto. In the opening allegro the clear indebtedness to Mozartian idiom were evident in Haefliger’s playing, though he certainly wasn’t willing to allow himself to be limited by such debts. His phrasing was crisp and well articulated, with reserves of percussive power occasionally hinted at. (From where I was sitting the sound of the piano’s upper end was a little odd – but that may have been a trick of the – generally good  – acoustics). The conclusion of the first movement worked particularly well, with a nice air of aristocratic power. In the third movement there was an infectious joyousness, with further nicely handled allusions to Mozart, an assured, confident wit in the playing of soloist and orchestra alike. The central slow movement was a little less compelling. Beethoven’s writing here has an ethereal quality, a kind of sublime ease of soul, which this performance never quite captured. It was almost as if Haefliger’s nervous energy, which served him well in the outer movements, was an inhibitory factor here, preventing that kind of ultimate relaxation (though that is too trivial a word) that the movement requires. Still, with fine orchestral playing throughout, characterised by the skill with which Fischer balanced section against section, this was a good, if not quite great, performance of the concerto.

After the interval we were back to a stage very well-filled with musicians and instruments. Strauss apparently told Romain Rolland “I do not see why I should not compose a symphony about myself; I am quite as important as Napoleon or Alexander the Great” (admittedly he later claimed that the work represented the idea of heroism, rather than himself; but the extensive self-quotation makes that an implausible claim). One notes the implied analogy between the artist and the heroic man of action. Strauss thinks, as it were, of the symphony (which, of a sort, Ein Heldenleben is) as the musical equivalent of the epic. One way of identifying true Romanticism, whether in music or literature, is to say that it is that art in which the artist himself becomes the hero. Where Homer’s hero was Odysseus, Virgil’s Aeneas, the hero of Wordsworth’s epic poem, The Prelude was himself. Wordsworth described his epic as “a long poem upon the formation of my own mind”. It was in such romantic traditions that Strauss was writing in Ein Heldenleben. Keats described aspects of Wordsworth’s work as an example of the “egotistical sublime” and it is, of course, tempting to see Ein Heldenleben as excessively egotistical. Certainly it carries to an extreme that self-consciousness of himself as a composer that characterises most of Strauss’s music. Its epic aspirations are clear in its recourse to the imagery of war. The hero of Ein Heldenleben, invigorated by the love of his ‘lady; (in Strauss’s case his newly married wife, Pauline de Ahna) fights and overcomes his enemies (the critics) in a grand battle, and then celebrates his “works of peace” (in this case his previous compositions), before achieving a kind of “release from the world”. There is an intensity of self-regarding contemplation in the whole work which isn’t always easy to take. For reasons I’m not entirely sure of, musical autobiography on this scale seems harder to accept than say, Rembrandt’s painting of a whole series of self portraits; for some reason it seems more immodest, more self-serving. I’ve often wondered whether there wasn’t some kind of irony involved in the way Strauss undertook the whole exercise?

Thierry Fischer seemed to have no doubts about the seriousness or power of the work. He is a persuasive manipulator of orchestral colour and Ein Heldenleben certainly provided him with a rich working palette. The declamatory first section (‘The Hero’) was grandiose, the bold figures in horns and violins compelling attention, demanding respect. There was an expressive scorn in ‘The Hero’s Adversaries’, the mean-spiritedness of the critics portrayed as a kind of trivial chattering which yet had ominous overtones. There was some top class orchestral playing here, the control of rhythm and dynamics beautifully judged. In ‘The Hero’s Helpmate’, the playing of violinist Lesley Hatfield was ravishingly tender and lyrical, enraptured and yet with the spirit of the dance upon it. The interplay of solo violin and lower strings was strikingly beautiful, matters of balance beautifully judged by Fischer. The relentless intensity and harshness of ‘The Hero’s Battlefield’ was played with unqualified commitment – though I am not sure that I don’t still agree with George Marek’s view, in his book on Strauss (Richard Strauss: The Life of a Non-Hero, 1967), who writes that “all that brass behind and on stage, all that battery of percussion, make up in noise what the music lacks in thought. It is cheap music”. Still, it certainly has a clear structural function – it prepares us for the hero’s (Strauss’s) presentation of his musical C.V., the mass of self-quotation – woven together with skilled contrapuntal craftsmanship, played here with love and attention, and leading into the closing apotheosis – music of great peace, free of the bombastic self-assertion of much of what has preceded it. Ein  Heldenleben is not, for me at least, an easy work to come to terms with. Fischer’s powerful, deeply engaged reading of it certainly made more sense of it than many have done in the past.

Fischer’s intelligence and range of interests, and the now very high instrumental standards of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales make one optimistically eager for the next season of concerts.

 

Glyn Pursglove