SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Brahms, Prokofiev and R. Strauss: Ekaterina Gubanova (mezzo) / Orfeón Pamplonés (choir) / Basque National Orchestra / Cristian Mandeal (conductor) Palacio Euskalduna, Bilbao, Spain 30.1.2008. (ED)


The three works in this programme all conjour up their own distinct moods and worlds. Brahms’s Alto Rhapsody is the composer’s intimate testament to a voice that he adored and is also his own private wedding song for a doomed love. The Rhapsody's  tone fuses the ethereal and the reverential with beguiling ease. Cristian Mandeal led a performance by the Basque National Orchestra that captured and displayed all of the required emotions. Ekaterina Gubanova’s tonal strength played its part too, and this was provided with a suitable counter-balance by the singing of the Orfeón Pamplonés.

Even without Eisenstein’s film, the stark realism of Prokofiev’s music for Alexander Nevsky provides a seemingly endless supply of raw power and emotion for an orchestra to get its teeth sunk into. Nor did Cristian Mandeal seek to avoid any of the challenges of the work as he plunged headlong into its rhythmic complexities, sometimes adopting tempi which, if faced with a less able orchestra, would be foolish. Thus, the spirit of death and decay was admirably set. A distinctive addition to the orchestral and choral war-torn surroundings was Ekaterina Gubanova’s solo contribution in “The field of death”. Walking with slow purpose and dressed in black she appeared almost spectre-like, her voice though was urgent and emotional, reflecting the searing pain of human suffering and loss all too clearly.

Strauss’s quip that he never found anyone else as interesting as himself might not be taken so seriously if he had not backed it up in the self-lauding Ein Heldenleben. Preferring to take the music  more as straightforward musical argument and less as the composer's self portrait has always seemed to justify the piece  - and its reputation - better   in my view, not to mention Strauss’ personal taste. But, inescapably, there is something genuinely heroic about the piece, whether one likes it or not. At times this performance showed a sense of that, though perhaps  it was Mandeal himself who proved the most heroic  by keeping the orchestra's playing and a sense of interweaving argument closely linked together. Like any true hero,  he relished the opportunities afforded for grand gesture and countered them with discrete contributions of coordination and great care over precise orchestral dynamics. As an aside, it is worth noting the contributions of Anda Petrovici, the guest leader, whose portraits of Strauss’s wife were tasteful and took the work closer to the spirit of Sinfonia Domestica than the composer might have originally intended.

Evan Dickerson


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