by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I screened an intriguing PBS concert special, the annual
summer night concert of the Vienna Philharmonic (the actual German name,
emblazoned in white letters on black in front of the orchestra, is Wiener Philharmoniker), which was a
sort-of tribute to Richard Wagner and Giuseppe Verdi, arguably the two greatest
opera composers of all time, since 2013 is the bicentennial of both their
birthdates. The concert was held in the outdoor garden of Schönbrunn, the big
palace of the Austro-Hungarian Emperors way back when, though it was held in a
fierce drizzle and a lot of the audience members brought (and needed)
umbrellas. The concert was conducted by Lorin Maazel, a 70-something American
who began his conducting career as a five-year-old child prodigy and, it’s
estimated, had conducted 7,000 performances of symphonies and operas in his
career. Like Erich Leinsdorf, Maazel is a competent but not particularly
inspired conductor; he gets the musicians to play well and stay together but
one misses the power and emotion this music can have in greater hands. It also
didn’t help that the concert featured only one vocal soloist, tenor Michael Schade, or that he sang on only two of
the nine pieces performed (at least on the PBS telecast; the actual concert
could have been longer). The program began with the Triumphal March from
Verdi’s Aïda — not a piece
that works that well out of context — and then the Act I prelude from Wagner’s Die
Meistersinger (as one critic remarked,
Wagner filled Meistersinger with
good old German counterpoint just to prove he could — he was commonly written
off in his day as an autodidact composer who had never mastered the
fundamentals and therefore shouldn’t be taken seriously as a composer like his
great contemporary rivals, first Schumann and then Brahms). Then Michael Schade
came on for the aria “La mia letizia infondere” from Verdi’s I
Lombardi, which he sang decently enough but
rather raggedly until the final, beautifully floated high note. The orchestra
then played the Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde
— alas, without a soprano to do
the vocal part in the Liebestod.
Instrumental arrangements of the piece bother me — especially towards the end,
when the arrangements generally leave out Isolde’s part and therefore avoid the
stunning dissonances between the vocal and orchestral lines that give the piece
much of its power. (The best instrumental version of the Liebestod I’ve heard was Franz Waxman’s arrangement for the
film Humoresque, in which Isaac
Stern as John Garfield’s violin double played the soprano line and turned the
piece into a quite effective concerto movement for violin, piano and
orchestra.)
Then Schade came on for the high point of the evening, “In fernem
Land” from Lohengrin (the
standard short version, alas), which he sang magisterially; perhaps it
shouldn’t be surprising that as a German singer he’d be more comfortable in
German than Italian opera, but he sang the aria beautifully, keeping mostly in
head tones until the big climax and managing to portray the complex emotions of
the character and the scene: the mystical connection to the Grail order, the
longing for human companionship and contact, the hurt at Elsa’s betrayal of his
trust. (He did the piece well enough I’d like to hear him in a complete Lohengrin sometime.) The remaining selections were the
overture from Verdi’s La Forza del Destino (and the comparison between Verdi’s overtures and Wagner’s proved how
much more bombastic Verdi was; Verdi fans often argue that his operas were
warmer and more humanistic since they dealt with real people and not spiritual
or quasi-spiritual beings, but as an orchestral composer Wagner ran rings
around Verdi, possibly at least in part because the Germans had so much more of
a symphonic tradition than the Italians) and what were announced as encores:
the “Ride of the Valkyries” and two pieces by Johann Strauss, Jr. — the
well-known Wiener Blut waltz
(given a rather bowdlerized translation as “Vienna Spirit” when the title is
really “Vienna Blood”) and a lesser-known light piece called Long
Live the Magic: A Quick Polka. I could have
done without the Strauss pieces — just before the first one, the unctuous
announcer said, “What’s a concert in Vienna without a Strauss waltz?” (though
I’m sure there are many times the Vienna Philharmonic plays in concert in which
it does not play anything by the
waltz-writing Strausses!) — and gone for more Wagner and Verdi instead, like
the prelude to Lohengrin for the
former and the Act I and III preludes to La Traviata for the latter — and I also wished they’d got another
vocal soloist (like a soprano for the Liebestod who could also have joined Schade in a Verdi
soprano-tenor duet) and a stronger conductor than Maazel — who exemplifies the
usual rule that long-lived conductors tend to get slower as they age (though some,
like Mengelberg and Toscanini, got faster); Wiener Blut was taken so slowly it lost all its passion and drive, and only one couple tried waltzing to it on camera! Still, this
was an enjoyable concert, and as Charles pointed out, here, as in the Vienna Philharmonic’s
fabled New Year’s concerts (which are quite popularly devoted to light music in general and the Johann
Strauss family in particular), both the musicians and the audience seem to be
having fun. There isn’t the
deadly-dull way classical music usually gets presented in the U.S., as what
Charles called a sort of musical castor oil: “Here, listen to this, it’s good for you!”
