Vivid and Entertaining

GIUSEPPE PENNISI attends a
Ravel double bill in Rome

Joseph-Maurice Ravel is known especially for his melodies, orchestral works and instrumental textures and effects. Along with Claude Debussy, he was one of impressionist music's most prominent figures. Much of his piano, chamber, vocal and orchestral music has entered the standard concert repertoire. Active during a period of great artistic innovation and diversification, Ravel benefited from many sources and influences, though his music defies any easy classification. As Vladimir Jankélévitch notes in his biography, 'no influence can claim to have conquered him entirely. Ravel remains ungraspable behind all these masks which the snobbery of the century has attempted to impose'. His two one-act operas have entered the repertoire of major theatres very slowly: they require a large orchestra and rather special voices. More significantly, they have very sophisticated librettos that seldom enthrall a large audience.

Although composed before and immediately after World War I, when Ravel served as a volunteer in the capacity of ambulance driver, L'Heure Espagnole and L'Enfant et les Sortilèges reach Rome as a double bill now in a production successfully staged at the Glyndebourne Festival in 2012 [see 'Fluid and Magical' by Howard Smith, 1 January 2014]. Previously, the double bill had been staged in Rome solely way back in 1947. Regretfully, the debut of this production was tormented by wild cat strikes due to the badly needed restructuring of the theatre, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. The 30 January 2014 opening night was cancelled nearly at the last minute. This review is based on the 2 February afternoon performance.

L'Heure Espagnole is an ironical take off on Italian traditional opera buffa with a very funny libretto about adultery. The opera forms part of a larger group of Spanish works which spanned Ravel's career. The Spanish coloring provides for a virtuoso use of a large orchestra and for underlying exaggerated comic effects. Charles Dutoit was in the pit; he made the audience sense the brilliant orchestration where the oft repeated comments of the clock are — as written by musicologist Rodney Miles — 'more human than the humans'. Also Charles Dutoit made the audience feel the calculated coldness at the opera's heart — an almost icy parody of Bizet's Carmen. Laurent Pelly (stage director and costume designer) and Caroline Ginet (sets) provided a fast moving surrealistic action in a Spain as seen by a Frenchman around 1905.

L'Enfant is based on a very elegant libretto by Colette: a lazy child is locked up in his room by his mother so that he is compelled to do his homework; the child indulges in an orgy of destruction of the objects in the room, but the objects come to life, sing about the suffering they have endured and the naughty brat understands the damage he has done; with a final G major cry of 'Maman', he asks for forgiveness. Ravel himself admitted that there are quotations from Puccini, Massenet, Monteverdi, Strauss (both Joseph and Richard), Handel and even American musical comedies in the score. Nonetheless, L'Enfant and L'Heure Espagnole are unmistakably twentieth century French: a modern fairy tale attempting to exorcize World War I sufferings. Rightly, Dutoit's baton explores the profoundly serious feeling at the heart of this vivid and entertaining work. Here Pelly (stage director and costume designer) and Barbara de Limburg (sets) opted for a visionary, just enchanting, approach.

From left to right: Andrea Concetti as an armchair, Katounia Gadella as the Child and François Piolino as a second armchair in Ravel's 'L'enfant et les sortilèges' at Teatro dell'Opera di Roma. Photo © 2014 Laura Ferrari. Click on the image for higher resolution

The production is very well rehearsed because the same team has performed it several times at Glyndebourne and elsewhere before reaching Rome. A dozen singers interpret some twenty different roles. Khatouna Gadelia, Stéphanie d'Oustrac, Benjamin Hulett, François Piolino, Jean-Luc Ballestra and Andrea Concetti as well as the children's chorus deserve a special mention.
The Sunday afternoon audience warmly applauded this delightful double bill.

Chung vs Pappano

GIUSEPPE PENNISI compares versions
of Mahler's Resurrection Symphony

Italy took quite some time to appreciate Gustav Mahler as a composer, but now the Bohemian is one of the most often performed authors by large symphony orchestras. In Rome, for the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of his birth (2010) and the centenary of his death (2011), two orchestras competed in performing all his symphonies — a mammoth undertaking [see Mahler versus Mahler, 15 May 2010]. In the older, larger and better endowed complex (the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia), Antonio Pappano started the series, on 10 May 2010, not with the first symphony but with the huge second symphony, composed in memory of Hans von Bulow. In this symphony, for the first time, Mahler introduced the human voice, more specifically, the lied, into the symphonic texture.

This week Myung Whung Chung was back in Rome to conduct Mahler's second symphony with the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia from 2-4 February 2014. It was not an ordinary event. Chung, now musical director of the Orchestre National de Radio France, is a past director of the Santa Cecilia Symphony Orchestra, now headed up by Antonio Pappano. More significantly, during his 1997-2005 tenure in Rome, he conducted all Mahler's symphonies. Thus, although filtered through the memory, it is possible to compare two different styles. As I recalled in 2010, even though it sounds very compact in spite of its ninety minute length, Mahler's second symphony had a long and painful birth. The symphony is also an example of program music. Mahler contended that he did not like to be classified as a program music composer. However, he himself wrote the program of this symphony. Also, his symphonic poems are the best examples of late nineteenth century program music.

Myung Whung Chung conducting the Orchestra Sinfonica dell'Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Mahler's Resurrection Symphony. Photo © 2014 Musacchio & Ianniello. Click on the image for higher resolution

In the symphony's first movement, the protagonist is buried after a long struggle with 'life and destiny'. He casts a backward glance at his life, first at a moment of happiness (depicted in the second movement) and then at the cruel hurly-burly of existence, the 'bustle of appearances' and the 'spirit of disbelief and negation' (Scherzo). In Mahler's own words, he despairs of himself and of God. In the fourth movement, 'the stirring words of simple Faith sound' and hold out the promise of light. As for the final movement: 'The horror of the day of days has come upon us. The cry for mercy and forgiveness sounds fearful in our ears. The wailing becomes gradually more terrible. Consciousness dies as the Eternal Judge approaches'. In the eerie silence that follows, we can just barely hear a last tremulous echo of earthly life. The gentle sound of a chorus of saints and heavenly hosts is then heard: 'Rise again, yes, rise again thou wilt!' Then God in all His glory comes into sight. A light strikes us to the heart. All is quiet and blissful. A feeling of overwhelming love fills us with blissful knowledge and illuminates our existence.

In spite of his much advertized conversion to the Roman Catholic Church — a mere tool to become Director of Vienna's main Opera House — Mahler has always been a pantheist (as clearly depicted in the Third Symphony); his upbringing in a Jewish family has no impact on his irreligious tilting to Zen during the last months of his short life.

In 2010 Antonio Pappano read the Symphony as a melodrama. In the first movement, we felt echoes of Beethoven's Eroica and Wagner's Götterdämmerung as well as Verdi, especially in the solemn chorale related to the Dies Irae, introduced by the horns. Pappano made a very sharp contrast with the idyllic second movement. Again, in the third movement, with Pappano's baton, there was almost a balance between the tragic and the grotesque. In the fourth movement, the Symphony became pure opera with the introduction of the alto, Maria Radner, for the Rose Song, which brings the first ray of light and opens the way to the grandiose final movement, where the alto is complemented by a soprano, Nicole Cabell, for a whole series of episodes linked in a way that follows dramatic, rather than musical, rules, and constitutes a vast prelude to the final apotheosis.

In 2014, Myung-Whung Chung, a devout Roman Catholic, gave quite a different reading, a very religious one. In the first movement, the protagonist's death is seen as a passage from human adventure to eternity with the Scherzo seen as a memory of moments of joy in the life he is about to leave forever. Within this overall concept, in the third and the fourth movements, especially the Rose Song O Röschen rot (with mezzo Christianne Stotijn), the approach is very serene, the Peace of afterlife. In the long and exciting fifth and final movement, with the 'Resurrection' anthem sung by the alto, the soprano (Ailish Tynan), and a monumental chorus, Chung gives a strong sense of prayer to the glory of God. Especially, there is no judgment, there are no sinners, just men, nor great and nor small; there is no punishment and no reward. In short, under Chung's baton, we felt more Bruckner than Beethoven or Verdi.

On 1 February 2014, the audience exploded in a fifteen minute standing ovation. The chorus and the orchestra joined the 2,700 spectators in embracing Chung to show how much he is loved in Rome (where he held his last concert in 2009 as a guest conductor).