RSNO: Wagner and Tchaikovsky
Usher Hall, 14/2/2025
Royal Scottish National Orchestra – David Niemann (conductor), Sunyoung Seo (soprano)
It is over two months since the last RSNO Friday concert, and a full house filled the Usher Hall for a celebration of St Valentine’s Day. The orchestra has been busy in the interim, touring China, touring smaller venues in Scotland with a Strauss Gala, and fulfilling a schools’ project. It’s still worrying though that the core audience in Edinburgh and Glasgow has not heard the orchestra for such a long time.
The concert was billed as a romantic experience to enhance Valentine’s Day, although, as in past years, the theme material was not exactly chocolates, red roses and champagne music, ending with Tchaikovsky’s most gloom ridden symphony, the 6th.
Nonetheless, it was a triumph of superb music-making, conducted by the young German conductor, David Niemann. He was new to me, although he has been conducting the Viennese Gala concerts, and clearly has established a rapport with the orchestra, who played brilliantly for him.
We started with the Overture from Wagner’s early opera, ‘Tannhäuser’, premiered in 1845 in Dresden, when the composer was just 32. This was just before Wagner got caught up in the revolutionary movements of 1848 and began the long journey of exile and travail which was to haunt him for much of his life. He was never truly satisfied with the opera, despite multiple changes and variations, but much of it is fabulous. I was lucky enough to sing one of the Minnesänger in a concert performance with Sir Donald Runnicles and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra at the BBC Proms in the Albert Hall in 2013 and remember the event fondly.
It was interesting to note that David Niemann, like Sir Donald, is a left-handed conductor, something of a rarity on the podium, and although quite different in style and manner, it’s clear that they both have a close affinity to the music of Wagner. The Overture was the last part that the composer wrote before the opening in Dresden, and it encapsulates the whole opera in its 14 minutes of playing. The themes of the Pilgrims’ Chorus and the wildly erotic music of the court of the goddess Venus vie with each other as they do in the opera, and Mr Niemann and the RSNO played it to the hilt. Beautiful violin solos by Maya Iwabuchi and Lasma Taimina combined superbly, and the brass and percussion had a field day.
The orchestra was joined on stage by the sumptuous soprano, Sunyoung Seo, in a fabulous rendition of Elisabeth’s paean of praise to the Minstrel’s Hall in the Wartburg, ‘Dich, teure Halle’, from the second act of ‘Tannhäuser’. This Korean soprano recently had a huge success with Scottish Opera, singing Giorgetta and Suor Angelica, in Puccini’s ‘Trittico’, and although I missed that show, I had heard enough on the grapevine to know that this was a fine voice. Reading her biography, I was slightly worried that very little of her career so far has been in the German repertoire, but I am sure that won’t last long. She has the presence and vocal stature to cope with the enormous demands of Wagner’s music, and she delivered a dazzling account of this great aria, the voice in perfect control throughout the range.
The concert continued with the Prelude and Liebestod from Wagner’s ground-breaking opera, ‘Tristan und Isolde’, premiered 20 years after ‘Tannhäuser’ in Munich. These two excerpts which bookend five hours in the theatre are often played in concerts without a singer, authorised by the composer, but I always miss the voice, and when it is as good as Ms Seo’s, it was a thrill to hear in context. The waves of rapture and erotic passion which Wagner builds through this final peroration, sung by Isolde over the dead body of her lover, Tristan, need to be ridden by a big gleaming voice, and Ms Seo totally dominated the sound world here. I can confidently say that she will sing some of these major Wagner roles, and will have great success. Wagner’s music takes us well beyond the realms of St Valentine’s romanticism, revealing hidden depths of passion which even chocolates cannot reach!
We were treated to an exquisite encore of Rusalka’s ‘Song to the Moon’, from Dvořák’s ‘Rusalka’, where Ms Seo demonstrated the beautiful soft qualities of her voice. Cue warm applause from the packed hall.
After the interval, the RSNO and Mr Niemann treated us to a searing performance of Tchaikovsky’s last symphony, his 6th. Nine days after he conducted the premiere of the symphony in St Petersburg, the composer was dead, officially of cholera. The disease had been first diagnosed in Europe less than 100 years before and had swept across the continent in waves of pandemics ever since. The epidemic in Tchaikovsky’s case had appeared in Russia about five years before, but was generally seen as dying out, and since it had been discovered to relate to contaminated water, it was unusual for a member of the aristocracy to become infected. The composer was said to be fastidious in his habits, drinking mineral water, and so the story of his drinking unboiled water in a restaurant has convinced many historians that Tchaikovsky deliberately contracted the disease, and so committed suicide. The tragic nature of the sixth symphony has been seen as a musical suicide note or a requiem, and certainly this rendition by the RSNO and David Niemann brought out all the pathos and angst that Tchaikovsky is reputed to have poured into his last composition.
Whether one buys into the suicidal nature of the work or not, it is certainly true that this symphony saw the composer producing a musical creation like no other, and, if not quite as revolutionary as the works of Wagner which we heard in the first half, the spirit of the older composer, who had died only 10 years before, is surely to be found. Tchaikovsky was famous for having attended the first performances of Wagner’s ‘Der Ring des Nibelungen’ at Bayreuth in 1876, although his writings suggest he was more interested in finding a table for dinner after the enormously long operas than he was enamoured of the music.
The symphony unfolded before us in a darkly magnificent reading by Mr Niemann, which brought out aspects of the work I hadn’t heard before. He dared to mould the structure in a very individual way, with great hiatuses and moments of stillness as well as pounding rhythmic surges. The orchestra soloists were as usual magnificent, and the superb Paul Philbert on timpani must have shed a few pounds, so dynamic was his playing. Mr Niemann, who cut a slightly dapper figure on the podium, was transported into an action man figure, his reading of the score extremely energetic and thrilling.
As usual, the audience applauded the end of the third movement, which sounds so final and triumphant, but also, surprisingly, the end of the more gentle second movement. Such were the rhythmic variations in Mr Niemann’s reading that simple movement counting was much harder than usual – that’s a compliment, by the way!
All in all, this was not a saccharine ‘Roses are Red, Violets are Blue’ concert, but a performance which took us to the very core of romantic emotion, great music showing us hidden depths which perhaps we cannot imagine ourselves without the overwhelming power of a full orchestra.
