SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Wagner and Bruckner: Katherine Broderick (soprano), Karen Cargill (mezzo), Robert Murray (tenor), Matthew Rose (bass), BBC Symphony Chorus, BBC Symphony Orchestra; Jiří Bělohlávek (conductor). Barbican Hall, London 30.4.2009 (JPr)

Wagner: Parsifal – Prelude to Act I and Good Friday Music
Bruckner: Mass No.3 in F minor 


The title for this concert was ‘Redemption and revelation’ and contained excerpts from Wagner’s Parsifal which the composer once claimed was inspired by ‘A warm and sunny Good Friday, with its mood of sacred solemnity’ … and if you believe that you’ll believe anything! As Barry Millington in his programme note summarised ‘the chief themes of the opera are suffering, compassion and redemption’ yet how important the Christian symbolism was to the composer remains open to debate.

Bruckner’s devotion was certainly never symbolic; he prayed  constantly and he fasted and one of his early biographers, Hans Redlich, commented that Bruckner's prayers  ‘were no mere word-saying, but a complete immersion in a meditative process which took him beyond the confines of the physical world.’  At 13, while studying at the Augustinian monastery in St. Florian in Austria, Bruckner became a chorister. He later taught there and became organist in 1851. His teacher Otto Kitzler introduced him to the music of Wagner, which Bruckner studied extensively from 1863 onwards. Wagner’s influence on Bruckner's music is heard especially in his religious compositions and his supposed first symphony,the so-called ‘No.0’.

Sadly,  fame and acceptance as a composer did not come until the composer was in his 60s but as Petroc Trelawny reminded us in his introduction for the BBC,  he  had gained much fame as a performer earlier and was a great improviser at the keyboard. Bruckner had even travelled to London the same year he became organist at St Florian’s and played for 15,000 at the 1851 Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace. His final Mass, No.3 in F minor, followed his recovery from a nervous breakdown in 1866-7 and he considered it his deliverance ‘from the threat of madness’.

Performances of Parsifal never sound as good anywhere as in the Bayreuth Festival Theatre for which the work was written , but some can be a lot better than the one heard here. It seemed rather perfunctory and uninspired and I longed for the expansiveness and spiritual shimmerings of Goodall, Haitink, Barenboim or Levine whose performances always have that wonderful moment during the communion when the music seems to hang in the air; just a second short of stopping entirely, before releasing the tension built up before. Nothing like that happened for Jiří Bělohlávek and it is impossible to imagine that this performance would have transported Nietzsche ‘to realms otherwise inaccessible’. The Good Friday Spell mixes nature with the necessity of suffering and although the BBC Symphony Orchestra played efficiently, all the correct notes once again, very little of the beauty or sigh and sorrow of this music came across in the concert hall.

At least from where I sat,  the Wagner had begun too loudly and had nowhere to go and for me,  the Bruckner also suffered the same fate. Petroc Trelawny had reminded us that the Mass is still used in ‘the great churches in Vienna’ commenting that some of the parts end abruptly to allow the priests to get on with the service. It seems that performances of this Mass are usually about 60 minutes in length and this one only reached the 50 minute mark  - which   probably says all you need to know about it  - and would certainly  have had any priests scurrying around. Jiří Bělohlávek is a conductor whose work I have much admired in the past but he seemed disinterested in the devotional aspects of the work and its shifting moods, concentrating more on its epic dimensions. Passages marked in the text as Rather slow such as the ‘In gloria Dei Patris, Amen’ churned relentlessly on. The first respite from all this was in the Credo with the entry of the tenor at ‘Et incarnatus est de Spiritu sancto’. Following another thankfully reflective passage at ‘Passus et sepultus est’, as Christ suffers and is buried, there was a wall of sound for when the resurrection passage  ‘Et resurrexit tertia …’. The BBC Symphony Chorus sang enthusiastically enough though its basses did not seem to have a sufficiently dark colour to their contributions such as when intoning the Benedictus.

Once again,  I cannot fault the orchestra except thatin this account much orchestral detail seemed lost in the tumult. The cellos should allow a moment of reflection before the 'Hosannas' in the Benedictus but this had little impact here. Petroc Trelawny made a point of saying that the four soloists were British and I am the first to complain of  lack of opportunities for  home-grown talent,  but this quartet did little to redeem the evening from the weaknesses elsewhere. Bruckner uses them sparingly so they must make the most of their opportunities:  the mezzo Karen Cargill made little impression while Matthew Rose used his bass voice adequately but seemed rather sour-faced on the platform. The soprano, Katherine Broderick, was rather nervous throughout the evening judging by  her shaky exposed first entry at ‘Gratias agimus tibi’ and through to the Benedictus but she has the essence of a very pleasant light and lyrical voice. The most confident and best of the four was undoubtedly the tenor, Robert Murray.

Perhaps the BBC Symphony Orchestra and its chief conductor get dispirited by the small audiences attending their Barbican concerts,  or are the hall’s problematic acoustics the dampener for this kind of music?  This evening never reached the great heights that the incandescent music deserved.

Jim Pritchard


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