thu 28/03/2024

Stemme, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Dausgaard, Royal Albert Hall | reviews, news & interviews

Stemme, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Dausgaard, Royal Albert Hall

Stemme, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Dausgaard, Royal Albert Hall

Schumann transformed; Berlioz falls flat

“The curse of Schumann,” remarked Prom director Roger Wright to me before Monday’s concert, bemoaning the fact that only (only!) 2,000 seats had been sold for the Swedish Chamber Orchestra’s concert under Thomas Dausgaard - whereas Dausgaard's earlier Tchaikovsky/ Sibelius Prom had been jam-packed. But he was right: the Albert Hall is more than half empty with those numbers, and looks it. A pity. I can’t recall a better, more spirited, or indeed more interesting performance of any Schumann symphony than Dausgaard’s of the C major, No 2, and it absolutely deserved a full house.

Schumann was 35 when he wrote this symphony, and it counts, with him, as middle period. He was trailing around with his wife, Clara, on her piano recital tours, holding her wrap, explaining to her admirers that he, too, was a musician. The contemporary, informed view, on the other hand, was that he had gone dull and domestic by this time, had lost the spark of eccentricity which had invigorated his early piano works, was trying too hard to be a “classical” symphonist; and this opinion has persisted till now, along with the more specific judgement that he couldn’t orchestrate.
Dausgaard disproved it all at a stroke. The Schumann orchestral problem is the modern tendency to overload the strings. But Dausgaard’s is a genuine chamber orchestra; he sits only four cellos, three basses, violins and violas to match, and he makes his wind sections articulate crisply and with a bright, edgy sound. This does Schumann a power of good, and suddenly makes his music dance.
The Scherzo and finale of this marvellous C major symphony sprang to life in the most vivid, sparkling fashion, and though there were a few balance problems, they were nothing compared to the impenetrable thickness of the traditional, but obviously incorrect, Schumann sound. The slow movement, one of the most exquisite inventions of early Romanticism, also for once breathed, without the sobbing vibrato that modern violinists like to ladle on to it. All this was wonderfully stimulating and enjoyable.
Dausgaard’s style is, perhaps, too fussy for such a great big hall. His nuancing is ultra-refined, and not everything tells in the wide open spaces, whatever may have been the effect on the radio. This was particularly the case in the single surviving movement of Schumann’s early G minor (so-called Zwickau) Symphony, which opened the concert, also in a lively, thoughtful, utterly non-routine performance. Here the rhythmic twists and turns, the sidesteps and silences, were sometimes elusive, albeit in an intriguing and captivating, not alienating way. Whether one can argue from this music that Schumann would have written great symphonies before his marriage to Clara if he had had the confidence to abandon his beloved piano more often is an open question. I suspect so. But 3000 empty seats say that others need convincing.
The orchestra also played a mercurial single-movement piece called A Freak in Burbank, by their 38-year-old compatriot Albert Schnelzer. The freak in question started out, it seems, as Haydn, but ended up as the American film director Tim Burton, who was born in Burbank, Los Angeles, and had a tempestuous, “moderately destructive” childhood that conjured up images for Schnelzer. It’s appealing, colourful, very mobile writing, a bit too much, perhaps, like a film score – background, that is, to some unspecified Californian urban montage, engaging but insubstantial.
The audience loved it none the less. But then they also loved Nina Stemme’s singing of Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été, though nothing in her performance suggested an affinity with the music. She sang without focus, with a disagreeable wobble, with poor control of phrase-ends, and with the score discreetly to hand, a revealing necessity for a singer who sings Isolde and Brünnhilde on the stage. She made these lovely songs dull, which, with such un-dull accompanists, was something of an achievement.

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