A Wagner Miscellany at the BSO
Orchestra Commemorates Bicentennial
By: David Bonetti - Mar 25, 2013
All-Wagner Program
(Marking the Bicentennial of Wagner’s Birth)
Dawn and Siegfried’s Rhine Journey, and Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March from “Götterdämmerung”
Overture to “Tannhäuser”
Kundry’s Narrative (“Parsifal! Weile!...Ich Sah Das Kind”) from Act II of “Parsifal”
Prelude to Act I of “Lohengrin”
Prelude and Liebestod (“Love-Death”) from “Tristan und Isolde
Daniele Gatti, conductor
Michelle DeYoung, soprano
Boston Symphony Hall
March 21, 22, 23 & 26
The Boston Symphony Orchestra is said to be narrowing down on a choice for a much-needed music director after James “Jimmy” Levine left it dangling. No one seems to be more closely looked at by the orchestra than the Italian conductor Daniele Gatti, who was entrusted to leading two concerts commemorating the bicentennials of Giuseppe Verdi and Richard Wagner, the two opera composers who towered over all others in the 19th century.
In January, he conducted Verdi’s formidable “Requiem,” and this past weekend he led a mixed Wagner program. In addition, the BSO has asked him to conduct Mahler’s Third Symphony next week, and he will take the Wagner and Mahler programs to Carnegie Hall with the orchestra. What could be a more serious test for a potential music director: Verdi, Wagner and Mahler? (Some might say Beethoven, but we’ll let that go.)
So, how did he do? As one would expect of a mature artist, he was remarkably consistent in his approach to the music of the two operatic titans. He is a deliberate conductor, considering closely every phrase, communicating effectively to the players his intentions, which they execute flawlessly. He favors slow tempi and his modern, structuralist approach tends to leach the emotion out of the work. Still, he is able to evoke big emotional pay-offs when the work calls for it, but only if he decides intellectually that it is necessary. Some might call him cold.
Gatti’s microscopic approach paid dividends, especially in the selections from “Götterdämmerung” (The Death of the Gods), the last of the four operas in Wagner’s preposterous, but frequently (but not frequently enough) gorgeous, 17-hour long Ring cycle. The three orchestral excerpts combine to create the semblance of a great Romantic symphony or tone poem. No opera composer before him composed such dense, complex music as Wagner did and it begs to be played by an orchestra of the caliber of the BSO, which responded to it with equal amounts of precision and passion, the balance determined by Maestro Gatti.
The music is familiar, but Gatti made it seem as if it were new. The slow tempi he favors were correct in the opening section, “Dawn.” Surely, no composer has ever captured the sense of the beginning of the day as sensitively as Wagner did in this work, and Gatti brought his vision to fruition. It opens super-slow and quiet – pppp for the French horns that intone the theme. In their own time, the violins enter, raising the volume and increasing the tempo just a bit. This is about the awakening of the world from its nightly slumber and it takes its time. When, after a while, the full horn section comes in loud and even raucous and the kettledrum is insistently beat, the music is orgasmic.
And that’s the thing about Wagner at his best, when he isn’t trying to pedantically redefine the Teutonic myths, his music is erotic, downright sexy – like Prince. So when the late Stephanie von Buchow, the outrageous voice of music criticism in the San Francisco newspapers, reminisced, after some disastrous performance, about how she had to wring out her panties during the intermission after the Birgit Nilsson and Wolfgang Windgassen’s love duet in “Tristan und Isolde,” she was totally right-on. Wagner writes music that makes you come.
Gatti negotiated the transitions between the three excerpts with clarity. The easy eroticism of “Dawn” gives way to the troubled music of “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey,” which in turn dissolves into the funereal “Siegfried’s Death and Funeral March,” the death of the gods promised by the opera’s title indelibly evoked. In the evening’s opening selection, Gatti made me love Wagner in spite of myself.
He was equally persuasive in the “Prelude to Act I of ‘Lohengrin’.” The ethereal opening asks for his slow tempi, and here with the shimmering strings he was able to find a deep visceral passion that digs into the gut.
So, why was the concert such a bust? Two reasons: the program itself and the vocal soloist.
Wagner is an opera composer – he wrote for the voice. Yes, his writing for the orchestra is unsurpassed among opera composers, but he chose not to be a symphonist like his contemporary Brahms, trolling in the wake of Beethoven, he chose to write music dramas, operas, and the voice is essential to his art.
Yet, in the only concert of the year commemorating Wagner, in one of its few concerts ever devoted to the composer, the BSO – or was it Gatti? – chose to focus on his orchestral overtures, preludes and interludes. Fine music, but it did not serve the composer well. (And one wonders what interest the program will elicit in New York City, where there is no lack of opportunity to hear and see Wagner operas in their entirety. Indeed, maestro Gatti has just completed conducting a highly successful series of “Parsifal”s at the Met with one of the female role’s leading singers in the world, Katarina Dalayman. Who wants to hear Michelle De Young after that?) It would have been better to have programmed a complete act – Act II of “Tristan” is frequently done in concert – or why not go all the way and do an entire opera? In 1965 the orchestra did the complete “Lohengrin” under music director Erich Leinsdorf. Was the BSO more serious then than it is now?
Which brings us to our soloist. Michelle De Young is not to be dismissed lightly. She has a big voice and sings the big roles in the big houses. She hits the notes without force and inhabits the roles she takes on adequately enough. De Young is no Maria Callas, but who is? Still, she possesses little communicative power and, more damningly, little beauty of tone. Of all of Wagner’s erotic music, the music for Tristan is the most orgasmic – indeed, the work is structured so that the initial chord is not resolved until four hours later when Isolde sings the famous Love-Death. You got no feeling of that erotic intensity from either Gatti’s conducting or De Young’s singing. Believe me, no one was moved to wring out his or her panties after her tepid reading of Isolde’s rhapsodic aria from Wagner’s greatest work. Which is a crying shame. If the BSO wants to do Wagner, it should do him right. Otherwise leave him to the opera companies. Oh, right, we’re in Boston. What opera companies?