First, some delayed business. Having ceded last month's Musical notes in favour of an interview with the new director of the Wigmore Hall, I did not have the opportunity to note Mitsuko Uchida's Mozart recital at the Barbican in early April. It would be churlish not to do so now. In April's column, I worried that Uchida's musical character on stage was becoming increasingly febrile, but the Barbican recital was the perfect riposte, as it was to those who think that the Mozart of the piano sonatas is a less compelling composer than the Mozart of the symphonies or the piano concertos. Here, Uchida's spontaneity never became frenetic and her playing was quite perfectly judged: by turns witty, dramatic, playful and urgent. Never can these pieces have sounded so interesting or so imaginative. In these works, and on this form, Uchida proved herself peerless.
Can the Ring improve by 2007?
Meanwhile, we have seen the culmination of two rather different cycles: of Keith Warner's production of Wagner's Ring at the Royal Opera and of Bernard Haitink's cycle of the Beethoven symphonies with the LSO at the Barbican. Covent Garden's line is that the time to judge Warner's reading of the Ring will be when it is given whole in October 2007, but one may be forgiven for doubting whether this will reveal an interpretation whose stature has so far been obscured by its piecemeal progress. Once again, the staging seemed fussy and incoherent, lightened from time to time by the moments of unintentional hilarity that were afforded by the decision to have Brünnhilde's horse Grane represented by a horse-skull that she and Siegfried lugged around as they travelled. Most winning, and much appreciated by the audience, was when Siegfried arrived at the Gibichung's smart high-rise flat and, having asked where he should put his horse, plonked the skull down on the sofa.
In the earlier instalments, the heaviness of the production was leavened by at least the odd insight into the emotional relations between the characters, but that fund seemed to have dried up. One should, I guess, be grateful for Lisa Gasteen's Brünnhilde. Her voice and singing manner are better suited to the vocal demands of Götterdämmerung than to those of Die Walküre, but even here her undoubted power and general accuracy would have been happily enriched by a greater elegance of phrasing and tonal range. Compared to John Treleaven's Siegfried, however, Gasteen's was singing from the golden age. On the evening I went, Treleaven managed to get through the thing without any major vocal breakdown, but this was often uncomfortably touch and go. Nor had Antonio Pappano yet quite got the measure of the score: Act I in particular seemed to go on forever. This I am sure will change. His direction of Die Walküre in July was immeasurably more sure-footed than it had been just a few months earlier when it opened at the Opera House, and it will be worth returning next year to see how his grip on the cycle has developed, as well as to hear again the glory of Bryn Terfel's Wotan. If something awful happened to the scenery in the meantime, and the house had to present the cycle unstaged as they did Die Walküre at the Proms, that would be absolutely worth queuing for.
A highpoint of the LSO's career
Haitink's Beethoven, in contrast, was compelling throughout. I have heard complaints that it was too inflexible and too controlled, and that this left it lifeless. It is true that the LSO played with a precision of articulation that is perhaps not entirely natural to them, but the sense of the orchestra's playing consistently at the top of their game and with such concentration was one reason why the concerts were so exciting. It is true too that Haitink maintained great stability in his generally swift tempos, but this provided the framework in which he could structure the orchestral textures to great expressive effect. In many ways, the orchestral heroes were the violas and second violins, who were called on to project their parts so as to make the inner voices unusually alive. This was unmistakably virtuoso playing, but with the virtuosity kept firmly in the service of the musical argument. Haitink was master both of the details of the scores and of their architecture, and in the climaxes of the 5th and the 9th symphonies, for instance, this allowed a classical abandon that one perhaps does not always associate with Haitink. The cycle has been recorded for the LSO's own record label and will be released during the coming year. It is difficult to believe that this will not turn out to be one of the highpoints of the orchestra's career.
Revelatory too, at least for me, was the performance of the Emperor concerto with Paul Lewis, who had been drafted in to replace Murray Perahia. I have not always been convinced by Lewis's concerto work, but here both his technique and his musical personality were equal to the work in all its rhetorical variety. Aided by Haitink's very careful balancing of the orchestral textures, he gave a first movement of intelligent grandeur, a second movement of lithe reflectiveness, and a dashingly alert final movement. His phrasing and articulation throughout were sophisticated without ever becoming mannered. He has moved from being a young pianist of great promise and talent to being what they call in other circles a major player.
