Neither fish nor fowl, oratorio nor opera, Gurrelieder is undeniably first pick for a parlour game of “guess the composer”. When Schoenberg began work on it in 1900, his experiments in ascetic serialism lay in the future; by the time he'd finished 11 years later he was deeply into atonality. Interestingly, the final third of this two-hour monster was composed in the wake of taut masterpieces like Erwartung and the Five Pieces for Orchestra,. In places, Gurrelieder seems to slip into self-parody, as though the composer had struggled to reconnect with an old style.
The choice of text is revealing: it’s a collage of slabs from Jens Peter Jacobsen’s epic poem that only vaguely relay the tale of an ancient king who loves and loses. However, Schoenberg’s music suggests that he was less interested in the words’ meaning than their poetry. The narrative disappears into stylistic episodes that borrow from composers as disparate as Wagner and Tchaikovsky. The result is the apotheosis of late Romanticism by a composer ready to renounce tonality altogether. It's as if he were saying “I’m going to throw the kitchen sink at this then have done with it”.
I fancy I spotted a kitchen sink among the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s percussion smorgasbord, but I can’t be sure since the Royal Festival Hall platform was simply groaning. Happily, Edward Gardner wrangled his musical army with aplomb and with one exception, his reading was close to ideal, a keenly thought through interpretation.
Cast from the A list, Gardner’s soloists were a powerful team but not a world-beating one. As King Waldemar, who carries so much of the material, David Butt Philip sang like a bat out of Heldentenor school with a near-baritonal timbre, although perhaps with less penetration than usual. He is a formidable artist but on this occasion, at least from my seat in the rear stalls, he was (uncharacteristically) inaudible in big tutti. Lise Lindstrom, the leading Turandot of our time, seemed less under the skin of her role here as Tove, the doomed object of Waldemar’s extra-marital infatuation. Hers was an ordinary performance of what should be an extraordinary soprano role.
It took the arrival of Karen Cargill to steer the work’s vocal lines into brilliance. The Wood-Dove is a gift of a part – she enters, steals the show and gets an early train home – but it takes a mezzo-soprano with nerves of steel to navigate the 13-minute drama of her mournful song. Cargill was magisterial, like a haloed Erda, her voice now mournful and veiled, now ablaze and piercing, every moment freighted with textual import. Gardner and the LPO were her boon companions every step of the way, right down to the brief but miraculous bass clarinet solo.
James Creswell as the Peasant matched Cargill for pinpoint clarity and communication while Robert Murray hammed up his intervention as Klaus the Fool (not to excess; just enough) and sang with stentorian confidence. The combined London Philharmonic Choir and London Symphony Chorus sat obediently for most of the evening before letting rip with shattering accuracy at the work’s apogee.
Only once did Gardner trip up in his reading, but it was a near-catastrophic misstep. The interpolation of an English version of the climactic spoken Melodrama was his idea and it stumped both Jeremy Sams, who translated it, and Alex Jennings, who declaimed it. Neither Sams not Jennings can be blamed for the bath of sub-Edith Sitwell nonsense that ensued, for the composed text is embedded in the orchestration and allows little sway, On the excellent surtitles, we were able to read as well as hear the Façade-like word-bending about “fluttery butterflies and hoppity frogs – but we’d have managed that equally well in German.
