As I write, this year's Lucerne festival is getting underway and the performances of Mahler's 6th by the festival's orchestra under Claudio Abbado will no doubt have been greeted with appropriate adulation. In a properly ordered world, Abbado and his orchestra would move on from Lucerne to make a triumphant visit to the Proms before they disband for the year, but once again the "world's greatest classical music festival" hasn't managed to arrange a visit from the world's most exciting orchestra. In the meantime, those of us not rich enough to take up residence in Lucerne for half of August can take more than a little consolation in the films of some of last year's concerts released on two DVDs by Euroarts. Mahler's 7th, on the first disc, is perhaps the most difficult of all the symphonies to bring off, and Abbado is one of the few conductors who has its measure. For anyone who thinks that this is a work which doesn't quite come alive, this is the performance to convince them otherwise. The second DVD contains performances of Bruckner's 7th, as well as Beethoven's C minor piano concerto with Alfred Brendel as soloist. The Beethoven is electric: Abbado's accompaniment is attentive and subtle and allows Brendel tremendous imaginative freedom. When the orchestra returns for the Bruckner, it is vastly augmented, with as huge a cello section as I have ever seen, but which plays the opening theme with a unity of inflection and sonority that would be astonishing even in the most accomplished of chamber orchestras. Abbado also recorded the symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon in the mid-1990s. This is one of the most refined and lyrical performances of the work on record, but perhaps lacks punch. The Lucerne performance is just as refined but has a concentration and tension that make it completely gripping, with the climax to the great slow movement as explosive as one could want. I know that there has certainly been interest in Lucerne in arranging a visit to London, so it will be more than just a serious irritation if they do not feature in next year's Proms programme.
A Zauberflöte to die for
Abbado at least is coming to Britain at the beginning of September to conduct Mozart's Die Zauberflöte at the Edinburgh festival in the production by his son Daniele that they gave around Europe last year. DG have released a recording from performances given in Modena last September and it is one of the great operatic recordings, to be put alongside de Sabata's Tosca, Karajan's Falstaff or Kleiber's Tristan. For one thing, the cast is uniformly first-rate. Productions of the opera are often let down by either the Queen of the Night or by the Sarastro, but both here are exceptional. René Pape brings a now rare nobility to Sarastro, and Erika Miklósa takes the role of the Queen in her stride. Not only is she perfectly in tune throughout—hardly something that can be said of every singer in this role—but one can hear all the words even in the coloratura passages, which may well be unique. Christoph Strehl is an ardent Tamino, and Dorothea Röschmann, if perhaps lacking the extraordinary radiance that Barbara Bonney brought to the role in the Östman recording, nevertheless presents a moving and beautifully sung Pamina. Moving too is Hanno Müller-Brachmann's Papageno: while he is alive to the comic elements of the bird-catcher, he never allows the performance to descend into caricature and his progression at the end of the opera from despair at having lost Papagena to joy at his regaining her is fully convincing. For once, the narrative progress of Act II makes full emotional sense—and for this Abbado's conducting must take most credit. The opera is so often given as a charming pantomime, but under Abbado it is as powerful a drama of human emotion as Così or Figaro. There have been many recordings issued this year to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Mozart's birth, but by itself this is sufficient to make 2006 a vintage year for Mozart on disc.
Schwarzkopf in her prime
The death of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf at the beginning of August provided many with the opportunity to speculate about the depth of her associations with the higher echelons of the Nazi party with a freedom not possible while she was still alive. More to the point artistically was the reminder of her age—she was 90 when she died. Because of the war, and perhaps of her need to reinvent herself afterwards, it is easy to think of her as a younger singer than she was, especially since she continued singing to the end of the 1970s. This makes a difference. In the recordings she made during the 1960s she had a tendency to over-interpret, often to the point of archness. However, this is perhaps best seen as an accommodation to the changes of an ageing voice. It was a testament to her technique and discipline that those changes were in other ways so little evident. For Schwarzkopf's prime, however, one should go back to the recordings she made much earlier—of Eva in the 1951 Bayreuth Meistersinger under Karajan for instance, or, best of all, to the recital of Schubert lieder accompanied by Edwin Fischer, where her poetic intelligence finds a subtlety of expressive technique and a perfection of vocal production that places her unquestionably in the front rank of 20th-century singers.
