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Because I love you London
Royal Albert Hall
08/29/2001 -
Arnold Schoenberg: Accompaniment to a Film Scene
Pierre Boulez: Le visage nuptial
Béla Bártók: Duke Bluebeard's Castle
Françoise Pollet (soprano), Katharina Kammerloher (mezzo-soprano), Michelle DeYoung (mezzo-soprano), László Polgar (bass), Sandor Elés (speaker)
Pierre Boulez (conductor)
BBC Symphony Orchestra, BBC Singers (women's voices)
Constant Lambert: Prize Fight
Gerald Finzi: Farewell to Arms, Romance
Benjamin Britten: Nocturne
Constant Lambert (orch. Easterbrook and Shipley): Piano Concerto (1924)
Ian Bostridge (tenor)
Philip Fowke (piano)
Nicholas Cleobury (conductor)
Britten Sinfonia Wednesday evening at the Proms was, for those who had the staying power, an encounter with the other, in many of the senses of the word. One obvious apparent otherness was between the first concert, Pierre Boulez and a "continental" programme, and the second, Britten and a selection of high-minded lollipops which thirty years ago might have been the programme for the "English night" (in those days the sole contribution of the home composition team apart from the Gilbert-and-Sullivan night). But Britten's 1970 Nocturne is a study in the uncanny as it emerges from the romantic, a softer, dark mirror of Les illumination de Rimbaud, where dream images create a space for feeling. It is in the same surreal/symbolist field as Boulez' brashly erotic Visage nuptial, and Béla Bártók's ritualistic and emotionally wrenching Duke Bluebeard's Castle, ultimately based a libretto by Maeterlinck and still haunted by echoes of Pelléas. The programme for the first concert illustrated Schoenberg's Accompaniment to a Film Scene with Conrad Veidt as Cesar the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, a perfect match for its spooky atmosphere, hard to pin down but with a relentless drive towards catastrophe and deflation.
In the pre-Prom talk, Boulez (in discussion with Nicholas Kenyon) suggested a source of the intangible but powerful evocativeness of all the works in the first concert. Outlining the way he reworked Le visage nuptial -- to make it playable on a regular basis -- he commented that he always recomposed, never "reorchestrated". Instrumental colour for him is not decor, but an essential part of the structure and content of a composition. Ravel composed then orchestrated; Debussy composed with instrumental and orchestral colours.
The final state of Le visage nuptial, performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra on top form, was an object lesson in structured sound. The texts, surreal poems by René Char, depict the course of a relationship, from the first recognition of attraction, through certainty to passionate enjoyment, disillusionment and parting. The lover's beloved is a woman, but two women's voices sing the text, making the language and music itself an erotic object in the gendered conventions of performance, but the music bursts out of any conventional significance into a mysterious place somewhere between physical feeling and imagination.
Duke Bluebeard's Castle of course has a much more rigorous narrative structure, coded with colours, numbers and ethical themes, a modern but faithful expansion of a folk tale or a folksong narrative. Boulez, perhaps not surprisingly, found affinities with Debussy in the play of light and images behind each of the doors, but he and the orchestra also made the repetitions of the traditional tale truly unheimlich. Michelle DeYoung sounded glorious as Judit, and her hope of warming the castle, and him, up seemed entirely reasonable, though she never quite faded to night. László Polgar as Bluebeard was initially rather bland, resonant but neither sinister nor charismatic beyond his matinee idol looks. But he evoked the unbearable sadness of the end perfectly.
In the second concert, Ian Bostridge was reflective (and perhaps not terribly well prepared) in Finzi's elegiac, pacifist cantata Farewell to Arms, a setting of a sixteenth- and a seventeenth-century poem, both of which use the image of a soldier's helmet that serves as a beehive. The first part is more robust, a catalogue of the instruments of war, while the second evokes an old soldier finally at peace. First performed complete in 1946, it might have seemed a bit old-fashioned then, though in tune with the neo-Purcellian times. In Nocturne, Bostridge was more engaged and thoroughly weird.
The Britten Sinfonia had fun with the instrumental works by Lambert and Finzi, particularly Lambert's student ballet, Prize fight. But the two vocal works would have been enough for a late-night Prom.
H.E. Elsom
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