5 Dec 2010 3:57
Sir Colin Davis led the New York Philharmonic Saturday evening in performances of Beethoven’s Symphony #2 and Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn, with soprano Dorothea Röschmann and tenor Ian Bostrich.
Beethoven’s Second is one of my favorites. Essential Beethoven, it dances and laughs like #7, it sings like #6, it marches like #5, yet without excess, ever elegant and confident. Sir Colin conducted, as he does, calmly, precisely, and without grandstanding, and the performance was delightful.
There’s no agreed-upon set and sequence for Mahler’s Wunderhorn songs, and they don’t comprise an integral song cycle or symphony. Nevertheless, Sir Colin and the Philharmonic made a good case for the choices and order they made.
During the Mahler, I was focused on the voices, so I have little to say about the orchestra beyond that they sounded fine, and perhaps they were outstanding.
Tenor Ian Bostrich, although physically engaged with the songs, didn’t have enough vocal power. In his middle and lower registers, he was barely audible. The orchestra was holding back a bit, it seemed, and it didn’t help that Bostrich tended to project his voice down, not forward, something a man of his considerable height might be accustomed to doing in conversation. What I could hear was beautiful, and I’d like to hear him again, but in a recital and in a smaller hall.
As for Dorothea Röschmann’s soprano, there was nothing to criticize and everything to praise. She commanded sheer power, never harsh, and she delivered pure pianissimos, never unfocused, throughout her ample vocal range, each as the songs demanded, and she demonstrated flexibility as she shifted nimbly from one Wunderhorn “mood” to another.
Lob des hohen Verstandes (In praise of high intellect) is funny and sarcastic. (Synopsis: a donkey, because of his large ears, is chosen to judge a singing competition between a cuckoo and a nightingale. The cuckoo wins.) Here, Röschmann made an ass of herself in the best possible way, and she sang as beautifully as any nightingale has ever done. Das irdische Leben (The earthly life) is tragic. (Synopsis: Starving, crying child dies before the corn can be harvested and baked into bread.) Röschmann was haunting. In the peasant love ditty Wer hat dies Liedlein erdacht (Who thought up this little song?), the long, florid phrases spun forth like silver.
Run, don’t walk, to the Carnegie Hall box office for tickets to hear Röschmann sing Handel’s V’adoro, pupille and more in an April 3, 2011 recital with David Daniels.
Neither of last night’s works features a large orchestra, and the Philharmonic performed without several of its principals. Among the missing were Glenn Dicterow, Carter Brey, and Robert Langevin. Incidentally or not (and probably no fault of Sir Colin’s), the Philharmonic was not in top form. Some sections were as stunning as ever — the woodwinds, flutes in particular, were in fine form (save for the horns, who needlessly reminded us how difficult they are to play in tune), and the percussion were as well. As an ensemble, however, the orchestra wasn’t as tight as it can be.
Orchestral failings aside, Davis is, and was last night, a servant to music. This is the guy who can — no easy task — give us Berlioz without overdoing the grandiosity and sentimentality. It dawned on me hours after the concert that nothing seemed too fast or too slow. I don’t remember the last time I concurred with an entire concert’s-worth of tempos. As one critic said half a century ago, Colin Davis was the best English conductor since Sir Thomas Beecham, and it’s not clear England has yet produced his successor. It was a pleasure to watch him, still spry at the age of 83. May he treat us for many more years.
