It almost seems as if Wagner is a persona non grata in Dublin, and Andrew Grams’s latest concert did little to dispel the notion
IT DOESN'T MATTER what way you look at it, Dublin's track record with Wagner is thoroughly shocking. The city hasn't had a production of Tristan und Isoldesince 1964. It hasn't had a production of the Ringin living memory, unless, that is, you want to count the single-night condensation by Nuremberg's Pocket Opera company, which was seen at the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1991. I remember it as a production that was calculated to seem iconoclastic to experienced German Wagnerites rather than quench the thirst of deprived Irish opera lovers.
The Celtic Tiger saw just a single Dublin production of any opera by Wagner, a Flying Dutchmanfrom Opera Ireland in 2001. Apart from that it's been concert performances only, Das Rheingoldor an act of Die Walküre, or a trip to Limerick for the National Youth Orchestra of Ireland's enterprising Limerick concert performance of the complete Ringunder Alexander Anissimov in 2002.
So when the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra chooses to devote even half a concert to a composer who helped change the course of music history (NCH, Friday), it’s an occasion to sit up and take notice.
Conductor Andrew Grams had the music on his side – the Preludeand Liebestodfrom Tristan und Isoldeand the Siegfried Idyll– and his biography has it that he is "one of America's most promising and talented young conductors". What he did, however, was turn Wagner into a dullard. He simply didn't manage to make the music flow, substituted climactic bulges for the ache and longing of the Preludeand Liebestod, and turned the gentle, warm-heartedness of the Siegfried Idyllinto something leaden.
His brashly eager approach to Dvorak's Seventh Symphony after the interval was even more dispiriting, and only the evening's surprise wild card – Rachmaninov's Vocalise– came across with musically persuasive shape.
The contrastwith the Irish Chamber Orchestra under Gábor Takács-Nágy (RDS, Saturday) could hardly have been greater. The evening opened with a Liszt rarity. Angelus! Prière aux Anges Gardiens (Angelus! Prayer to the Guardian Angels)is best known as the opening piece from the third set of the Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage)for piano solo. Liszt made arrangements of the piece for harmonium, and also for string quintet, and the ICO upgraded the quintet version for orchestral strings.
Takács-Nagy was, of course, the founding leader of the Takács String Quartet, and he shaped the music and had it breathe with the fluidity of chamber music. He handled the colouristic possibilities created by orchestral strings with real imagination, and revelled in the possibility of super-charged climaxes. In other words, he reinvented the piece with textures, shadings, nuances and depth that are closed to two hands, however resourceful, on a single keyboard. And in a short few minutes he created more expressive music-making than Grams had in a whole evening.
His approach to the rest of the programme was on the same high level. The beaming exuberance of Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony was irresistible. When the first movement got into gear after the teasing uncertainty of the slow introduction, it was as if the sun had come out. The slow movement was infused with genial gentleness, and the last two movements brimmed over with high-spirited energy.
L'Horloge de flore (The Flower Clock)by French composer Jean Françaix (1912-97) is an oboe concerto in all but name. It was written for John de Lancie, oboist with the Philadelphia Orchestra longtime from 1946 until 1977. It was de Lancie who at the age of 24, while an occupying soldier stationed in Germany, successfully proposed to Richard Strauss that he write an oboe concerto.
L'Horloge de florewas written in 1959, when "new music" tended to mean the works of Stockhausen, Boulez and Cage. But the work is more on the lines of a sophisticated soundtrack for a travelogue, honeyed, witty, garrulous by turn, and oblivious to the cutting-edge musical concerns of its time. Saturday's soloist, Daniel Bates, jazzed it up a little bit, and his colleagues in the ICO gave it the Technicolor treatment in support.
The concert ended with the 10th Symphony by John Kinsella, a former head of music at RTÉ (he retired in 1988 to concentrate on composition), who will celebrate his 80th birthday in April. The composer, who is self-consciously wary about applying words to music, has chosen to describe the piece as being in three parts “which I regard as episodes rather than movements”. It will, I imagine, take more than a single hearing to plumb the full import of the distinction.
The music is in a spare, focused, linear style that, in this performance, fired up to moments of fierce, trumpet-topped intensity. The first part is driven in jagged rhythms, the central, slower part provides a certain amount of relaxation, and the finale moves with foot-tapping clarity. The ICO played it as if their very lives depended on it.
The ICO'sMarch schedule has been changed. There were due to be concerts in Limerick (Thursday 29th) and Dublin (Saturday 31st) with Australian soprano Allison Bell and Portuguese conductor Joana Carneiro. But "budgetary constraints" have intervened. The Dublin concert has been cancelled, and the programme for Limerick, originally to have included Copland's Appalachian Springand Beethoven's PastoralSymphony, as well as shorter pieces by Mahler, Schoenberg and Rachmaninov, has been trimmed. There is now no soloist, and the music on offer will be Elaine Agnew's Twilight, Mozart's Symphony No 29, and Schoenberg's Verklärte Nacht.
The orchestra’s next Dublin concert will be directed by clarinettist Jörg Widmann on April 21st. That programme of Widmann, Mozart and Mendelssohn will also be given in Limerick on April 19th.
