RSNO: Beethoven and Strauss
Usher Hall - 06/10/23
Thomas Søndergård, conductor | Lise de la Salle, piano
The first concert of any new season is always an exciting occasion, and the programme for this one was mouth-watering: a neglected masterpiece by a virtually unknown English woman composer written in 1919, one of Beethoven’s first mature works, and perhaps the apogee of late Romantic symphonic music.
I can’t have been alone in never having heard of Dorothy Howell, and so the audience settled down both expectantly and curiously to listen to her tone poem, ‘Lamia’, a narrative orchestral work depicting the story, based on John Keats’ poem of the same name from 1820, of the woman Lamia, transformed from a serpent’s body into human form, who seduces a young Corinthian, Lycius, but who cannot allow her former self to be known. Once she is exposed she vanishes, leaving Lycius to die of sorrow. So far, so weird, but Howell constructed a work of deep emotional sincerity that swept us along in the rush of notes and this impressively constructed one movement piece for large orchestra was something of a revelation. After its first performance at the London Proms Concert on 10th September 1919, Henry Wood played it again four times that season, and her star was briefly in the ascendant during the 1920s. However, whether because of her sex, or her subsequent career as a Professor of Harmony and Counterpoint at the Royal Academy of Music from 1924-1970, that star waned considerably, but it is to be hoped that now is a good time to rediscover her music. The RSNO played it for all it was worth, featuring a lovely oboe solo from Principal Oboe, Adrian Wilson, once again showing us what a fine player he is. A contemporary newspaper after the premiere described Dorothy Howell as an English Strauss, and her lush harmonies and soft chromaticism certainly prompt comparisons with the German master, whose music we would hear in the second half of the concert.
Before that, however, we were treated to a scintillating performance of Beethoven’s 3rd Piano Concerto by Lise de la Salle, a young French pianist who is rapidly making a name for herself on the international scene. The RSNO will be taking up a residency in Salzburg later in the month and have programmed this concerto there too. It will be a sensation. Lise de la Salle seemed impossibly young and slender as she came on to the Usher Hall stage, but from her first dramatic chords, after the long orchestral introduction of the Concerto, she utterly captivated the audience, in one of the finest performances I have heard for a long time. Technically flawless, and wonderfully attentive to the nuances of Beethoven’s youthful masterpiece, it was clear from the start that she had established a special rapport with Thomas Søndergård and the orchestra. For one so petite, she was able to dominate the piano part with a muscularity of playing which totally belied what we were watching, coaxing great waves of sound out of the Usher Hall Steinway, and yet in the slow movement, one of Beethoven’s most exquisite Largos, she caressed the keyboard with playing of sublime beauty and emotional depth. I had forgotten just how wonderful the Largo is, with its long solo piano introduction presaging Schubert’s piano music to come and announcing to the world in 1803 a new music unlike anything we had heard before. The rollicking finale, with its extraordinary fugal passage for the strings and dazzling virtuosic writing for the piano, was a tour de force from the performers, and was greeted by a roar of approval from the large audience. I have rarely heard such cheering from an Edinburgh audience outwith the Festival, and the reception was well-deserved. I hope we can hear Ms de la Salle again soon.
After the interval, Thomas Søndergård and the RSNO performed Richard Strauss’s magnificent tone poem, ‘Ein Heldenleben’ (A Hero’s Life), first performed in Frankfurt in 1899. I feel a close affinity with Strauss for several reasons: I have sung major roles in three of his operas over my career and have been singing his Lieder ever since I was at Music College over forty years ago. I studied in Vienna and Munich with Hans Hotter, the great German bass-baritone, who knew Strauss well, and who created the role of Olivier in ‘Capriccio’ in 1942; he and I had many conversations about Strauss, so I feel a real connection with this extraordinary composer, who knew Brahms, Liszt, Wagner and Bruckner personally, and only died in 1949.
‘Ein Heldenleben’ is a glorious orchestral work, through-composed but with six clear sections – The Hero, The Hero’s Adversaries, The Hero’s Companion, The Hero at Battle, The Hero’s Works of Peace and The Hero’s Retirement from this World, and Completion. It has aroused great debate as to whether Strauss meant himself to be the Hero himself, or a representation of a Hero. It certainly contains specific references to the composer’s many critics (“If we must have a Richard, let it be Wagner and if we must have a Strauss, let it be Johann!” was one of the mildest comments!), and the companion is clearly Strauss’s beloved wife, Pauline de Ahna, a soprano who was the composer’s dearest soulmate. There are multiple quotations from his previous works in the score, and there is obviously a major autobiographical aspect to the piece, but at 34 he had hardly written any opera and the great triumphs of the stage were all in the future. I think he probably had enormous fun riling his critics and winding them up. Hotter told me that Strauss was often very funny and enjoyed the good things in life – he was not a stuffy Prussian but a relaxed Bavarian, who loved his home in the Bavarian Alps.
The performance by the RSNO was a triumph from beginning to end, using the full scope of the orchestra, and showing clearly what a fine Straussian Mr Søndergård is. We know how good he is at conducting Brahms (all four symphonies last season), and this demonstrated his fondness for Strauss too. Big sweeping gestures and dynamic cut-offs were features of his conducting. He reminds me a lot of Sir Colin Davis, the best conductor I ever worked with, with a similar fluent style and exquisite baton control. There were brilliant cameos all over the orchestra, with special mentions to First Horn Christopher Gough, First Trumpet Christopher Hart and the dynamic duo of Duncan Wilson and John Whitener on Euphonium and Tuba. Hero’s laurels go undoubtedly to Concert Master and Leader, Maya Iwabuchi, who, as the personification of Pauline Strauss, is given a huge role in the score. She played a virtuosic part in the third movement, with an extended accompanied cadenza thrilling the audience, who gave her a great ovation at the end.
What was noticeable about ‘Ein Heldenleben’ as a live performance was the astonishing complexity of the scoring, and the almost shocking modernity of some of the writing alongside the lush late Romanticism of the majority of the work. There was a delicious irony in Strauss’s personification of the squabbling critics as atonal woodwind! No wonder one of the early critics complained about “the most perverse music I ever heard in all my life” and that “the composer of this outrageously hideous noise is either a lunatic or is rapidly approaching idiocy!” What he made of ‘Salome’ six years later must have been hilarious. We often forget, when we think about Strauss’s later gloriously beautiful music, that he went through a period of experimentation around this time, before rejecting it (happily for most of us) as not for him.
I hate to end a warm review with a caveat, but again I must emphasise how ill-considered was the decision, whether by the Usher Hall or the RSNO, to dim the lights during the performance. With two works which involve a narrative (Howell and Strauss) in the programme, surely someone might have worked out that the audience would find the experience immeasurably better if we could read our programmes to follow the narrative? The lights could be lowered a little but leaving enough to read the words!
Nonetheless, this was a brilliant first concert of the season. Buy tickets for the rest!
