The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment (OAE) launched its "Listening in Paris" series at the Queen Elizabeth Hall by inviting the French conductor Marc Minkowski to conduct a 19th-century programme. It moved backwards from Fauré's music for Maeterlinck's Pelléas et Mélisande, through Berlioz's Les Nuits d'été and finished with Beethoven's 4th symphony, composed in 1806 and given its Paris première in 1830, two years after the first French performances of the Eroica and 5th symphonies had electrified the Parisian musical scene. This was a welcome opportunity to hear Minkowski—particularly since the Swedish mezzo-soprano Anne Sofie von Otter, a long-standing collaborator, would join him for the Berlioz. Although still only in his early forties, as founder-director of Les Musiciens du Louvre, Minkowski has been one of the leading figures of the French period-instruments scene for more than a decade, as well as probably its leading exponent of Offenbach.
One of the advantages of writing monthly reports on musical events is that no concert is mandatory. On those surprisingly rare occasions that a concert is so dull, or an opera production so irritating that the life-is-too-short principle kicks in, your correspondent can make a discreet exit at the interval, leaving the critics from the dailies to make their grim-faced return. The cost of such desertion is normally critical silence, but I will confess that having heard von Otter and Minkowski in the Berlioz, I did not stay to hear the Beethoven. This was the first time that I have abandoned a concert halfway because the first half was so good. After a genuinely great performance of the Berlioz, anything else, even Beethoven, would have seemed intrusive.
Berlioz originally wrote his settings of Théophile Gautier's dark poems for voice and piano in 1840-41. He orchestrated one of them, "Absence," in 1843, but did not work on the other five until the 1850s. Earlier this summer, Bernarda Fink performed the original version at a Wigmore lunchtime recital, and demonstrated the importance of the cycle's roots in the intimate forces of the French mélodie, despite the fact that it is much better known in its orchestral version. Fink, perhaps more than any other contemporary singer, is reminiscent of Janet Baker in combining directness of emotional response with unobtrusive technical subtlety, and her performance was as affecting as one might have wished. What it brought home, however, was the fluidity of Berlioz's setting of the poems, and the variety he imparts to their essentially strophic forms. However, while Roger Vignoles, Fink's accompanist, is a pianist with a keen sense of pianistic colour, Berlioz's sense of orchestral colour was even keener, and it was difficult not to feel that a dimension of expressivity had been lost.
What made the performance at the South Bank so great was that von Otter and Minkowski (and the OAE itself) managed to achieve the kind of interpretative freedom that one would not expect from forces of this size. Minkowski turned the orchestra into as responsive an accompanist as the most alert of pianists, and von Otter was able to take full advantage of this. The way she coloured the voice to capture each passing thought and mood was astonishing, and even more so the orchestra's ability to match her. In "Sur les lagunes," each verse ends with the sailor's lament for his fate after the death of his lover—Que mon sort est amer! Ah! sans amour, s'en aller sur la mer!—and each time von Otter found a different delivery that marked, if subtly, an emotional progression. Minkowski's ability to find just the right sound-world was unerring—never can the wind chords in "Au cimetière" have sounded so ghostly or the string writing at the end of "Le spectre de la rose" so quietly ecstatic, which allowed von Otter to sing it mezza voce, so that the preceding climax of J'arrive du paradis was lyrically intense without needing to be overblown. Very few conductors have the instrumental imagination to realise the expressive possibilities of Berlioz's orchestration in this way, and fewer still the ability to follow and support the voice as Minkowski did. This was conducting and singing of the very highest level.
Don't take my interval
No chance to do a runner at the OAE's performance of Bach's St John Passion with I Fagiolini and Mark Padmore, also at the QEH, since it was given without interval. I enthused about Padmore's performance of the Evangelist in the St Matthew Passion in the spring, and he was no less fine in what should be the shorter and more dramatic work. I Fagiolini, a professional group of eight voices, were at turns dramatic and contemplative in their ensembles, but were less convincing as individuals in the arias. There was a tendency for their voices to be less well supported in their middle registers than at the top, and without a conductor to control the orchestral textures, there were too often problems of audibility. I say there was no interval, but in fact the music stopped for a good 30 minutes at the end of part one. Instead of having a cigarette and pondering mortality as Bach would have intended, however, we were kept in our seats for a full reading of Eliot's "Ash Wednesday." This produced many emotions, from surprise through to desperation. It all seemed very sixth form, and reminded one of why everyone so detested those boys at school who "found" late Eliot. It had no resonance at all with the Bach and its instrusion meant only that one started part two in a rage that even Bach's music could not assuage.
