The London Philharmonic’s new season opened with Schoenberg’s Gurrelieder, fantastically performed by Edward Gardner, and finely sung. Pivoting between post-Romantic extra and modernist experimentation, it’s a piece that in some ways fits Gardner all the way down to the bottom, and all through he was marvellously alert to the complexities of its soundworld, but all of the whereas centered on its dramatic momentum and metaphysical grandeur.
Sensuous textures dominated the opening, because the affair between Waldemar (David Butt Philip) and Tove (Lise Lindstrom) encompassed each an acute consciousness of transience and the insistent nature of a want able to transcending the grave. The clatter and decibels of the later spectral journey had been completely thrilling, although Gardner’s ear for element additionally allowed us to understand Schoenberg’s musical argument at this level relatively than let the passage degenerate into racket. The Wild Hunt of the Summer time Wind, in the meantime, during which the Romantic sonic panoplies fade and fragment as daybreak rises, was marvellous in its translucent evocation of a brand new musical world.
Butt Philip and Lindstrom weren’t fairly ideally matched because the lovers. She could be thrilling, however her tone may also be steely. Waldemar’s opening tune lies cruelly low for any tenor, and Butt Philip appeared just a little uneasy with it. His voice quickly settled, nonetheless, and later he was breathtaking, each within the fury of his imprecations towards God, and the rapture of his unshakeable craving for Tove. Karen Cargill, in the meantime, made a really declamatory Wooden-Dove. James Creswell was the sonorous, credulous Peasant, Robert Murray the humorous, touching Klaus-Narr. The mixed forces of the London Philharmonic Choir and London Symphony Refrain sounded formidable all through.
I’m undecided that we would have liked an interval, which broke the momentum considerably. The narration, too, spoken in English in a efficiency in any other case given within the authentic German felt barely incongruous within the context. However Jeremy Sams’s new translation is each elegant and fluid, and Alex Jennings delivered it with appreciable ardour.
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