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Wagner, Berg and Strauss: Lisa Milne (soprano), BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Jac van Steen, Brangwyn Hall, Swansea 17.4.2009 and St. David’s Hall, Cardiff 18.4.2009 (GPu)

Wagner: Tristan und Isolde: Prelude and Liebestod
Berg: Three Pieces for Orchestra, op.6
Berg: Seven Early Songs (c1905/1908)
Richard Strauss: Also sprach Zarathustra, op.30


I couldn’t resist the opportunity to hear the same, very interesting, programme performed by exactly the same forces, in two different venues on successive nights. The experience was a rewarding one; this is a combined review of the two concerts.

Jac van Steen’s conducting seems to me to have reached a new level of maturity, of certainty and, simultaneously, relaxation in the last eighteen months or so. In earlier times I thought that he sometimes had a tendency to rush things and a certain stiffness of rhythm. But in recent concerts he has produced interpretations of real subtlety, performances which, though exciting, have had about them an inner calmness. His reading of the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde was impressive, in its shaping of diminuendo and crescendo (particularly in the Swansea performance), in its use of silence, in the expansive string sound and its weight of feeling. In both performances, van Steen prompted playing (especially from the strings and the woodwinds) of real eloquence.

Lisa Milne’s singing of Mahler (and of much else) has attracted plenty of praise and having much enjoyed her work when I have previously heard her live, I had high expectations of her performances of Wagner and Berg scheduled for these concerts. I was not disappointed. Milne has a rich-toned and radiant voice and a considerable power of communication, her joy in what she is doing is constantly evident. Both performances of the Liebestod (which Wagner preferred to call ‘Isolde’s Transfiguration’) had much to recommend them, even if Milne didn’t quite convince one that she is yet a full Wagnerian soprano. The balance between singer and orchestra was generally very good in both performances, and if there was a distinction between the two, it was perhaps that in Swansea there was a greater dramatic intensity and in Cardiff a more consistently beautiful tone to Milne’s singing. But any such distinction was a matter of only the slightest degree.

From Wagner the programme moved to Berg and, first, to his Three Pieces for Orchestra of 1914-15. It was Berg’s first work for orchestra (as opposed to orchestra and singer) and it comes close to being a kind of quasi-symphony, the three pieces always intended to be played together with the central movement (’Reigen’) functioning as, as it were, both slow movement and dance movement, framed by two faster outer movements. There are complex thematic relationships which unify the three pieces. Jac van Steen’s reading of the ‘Präludium’ made clear the symmetrical arc of its movement from and to the rather tenebrous and slight percussion sounds of its opening and closing bars. In between, most sections of the orchestra distinguished themselves by the level of technical assurance with which they met the considerable demands which Berg’s writing places upon them. Brass, horns and woodwinds all played with passionate accuracy at both concerts. In ‘Reigen’, Berg’s transformation of the Viennese waltz, which follows on a repeat of the material for celesta and muted violins from ‘Präludium’ and a number of very beautiful themes of a beautifully melancholy nature, is a passage of extraordinary and resonant beauty and was very well handled in both performances. The pages which preface its appearance were perhaps slightly meandering in the Swansea performance and were conducted with tighter control in Cardiff. In both performances the transition from the three-four of the Landler/Waltz to the four-four of the piece’s concluding pages was a magical moment, beautifully judged by van Steen. If Mahler’s is the name that comes to mind in Berg’s transformed-Waltz (which is not to label Berg as derivative, merely as a composer who integrates a number of influences into his emerging personal idiom), it is Wagner (specifically Tristan und Isolde) one might think of in the distant fanfare at the very end of the piece – another moment handled beautifully (perhaps especially so in Swansea). There are, of course, further affinities with Mahler in the remarkable ‘Marsch’ the last of these three pieces, in which most of the materials have been heard earlier but are now radically varied and metamorphosed. Van Steen directed an immensely exciting performance of ‘Marsch’, full of visionary power, full of a sense both of personal psychological drama and of (one remembers the date of composition) a sense of surrounding violence and its approach. These were performances full of nervous intensity and of startling dynamic contrasts. Brass and percussion sections distinguished themselves especially, but the whole orchestra was on fine form. Pressed to choose, I’d have to say that I found the Swansea performance slightly more exciting, slightly more imbued with a kind of organic shape than the following night’s performance in Cardiff but, again, the differences were marginal at best. 

Adorno, if I remember rightly, described the Seven Early Songs as peripheral to Berg’s oeuvre and worried about the kind of stylistic inconsistency involved in this partially retrospective exercise – Berg was, in 1928, orchestrating a selection of songs originally written for soprano and piano in the years between 1905 and 1908. Those of us less bound to interpretative ideologies can thankfully simply enjoy a song sequence which still seems to me rather underrated, not always recognised as a very significant late-Romantic song cycles, full of that quality of liminality (stylistically speaking) which, pace Adorno, is such a particular feature of Berg’s music. Given Berg’s fondness for symmetrical structures, musically speaking, for palindromic sequences and the like, it is not surprising that the seven songs he chose to recompose from the body of his one hundred or so earlier songs should constitute a kind of textural (as well as musical) arch. Thus the central song (i.e. the fourth of the seven) is Rilke’s ‘Traumgekrönt’ (‘Crowned by Dreams’), which does, indeed,‘crown’ the sequence (like the keystone of the arch) and comes closer to the language of fulfilment and consummation than any other poem in the sequence. Its title picks up the nocturnal imagery of the first poem in the sequence and that of dreams which dominates the later parts of it; its text speaks of how “the night began to sing”, giving utterance to the “stummer Nacht” of the first poem and anticipating the nocturnal song of the meadow in the last song. There are many other symmetries of music and text, the whole making for a supremely integrated sequence. Lisa Milne was at her very best here – on both nights. These were rapt performances in which time seemed to slow down, filled with moments of vocal and orchestral beauty, without any loss of forward momentum. In ‘Nacht’ – which belongs in the company of the very best nocturnal lieder – her voice floated above the orchestra in a manner exquisitely evocative of the distance and the glooms, the “Wunderland” and the moments of revelation of which Carl Hauptmann’s text speaks. ‘Der Nachtigall’ was sung with great tenderness and a radiant sense of burgeoning happiness, or at any rate the possibility, the expectation, of happiness. In ‘Liebesode’ the long vocal lines were beautifully sustained and van Steen’s orchestral accompaniment was exemplary, beautifully judged to fill its roles as support, commentary and much else. These songs were, for me, the highlight of each concert. 

I confess that whereas Berg’s song sequence seems to me to be seriously underrated, I have never been able to warm to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra and, insofar as the terminology means anything, I think it ‘overrated’. There are, of course, some fine passages: notably in its now cinematically famous opening (‘Sonnenaufgang’), in the hymn-like rhapsody of ‘Von den Hinterweltern’ and the transformed Waltz (another!) which makes up ‘Das Tanzlied’. But there is also a good deal that I find rather turgid and bombastic; Strauss’s ‘programme’ (how seriously should one take it?) seems to lead him into intellectual waters which are really too deep for him. Jac van Steen presided over well managed performances which were certainly clearly structured, in which he was willing to give things time to breathe and make their impact and there was certainly some impressive orchestral playing. Since Also sprach Zarathustra is evidently a blind (deaf?) spot of mine, and it still left me fairly cold in both these performances, I can only say that these were obviously very competent performances which others around me enjoyed more than I did. Of the rest of the concert(s) I can speak with far more whole-hearted enthusiasm, especially where Berg is concerned.

Glyn Pursglove


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