Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto “To the Memory of an Angel” is a concerto unlike any other. It’s not just the structure (two movements, each split into two in the order slow-fast, fast-slow) or the compositional method (a hybrid of tonality and serialism). It’s that this music is abstract, but with a very specific purpose: mourning (or perhaps celebrating) the memory of the beautiful Manon Gropius, dead at just 18, and rebuilding Berg’s ties with Manon’s mother, Alma Mahler. It is particularly poignant that the composer met his own untimely death just a few months after completing the composition.
In the hands of Frank Peter Zimmermann, at the Auditorium de Lyon, the solo violin painted the most delicate portrait of Manon. Long-held high harmonics depicted ethereal grace; rapid passagework swooped into the instrument’s lowest register to show more anguished times. The orchestra were delicately restrained in the violin’s quietest passages but then created surging waves of sound, representing, in my head at least, the waves of life’s travails threatening to overcome a fragile creature – with that creature raising her head above the waves again and again until eventually succumbing at the concerto’s evanescent end. This was a performance of absolute beauty, followed by Zimmermann giving us the most appropriate encore possible, the Sarabande from Bach’s D minor violin partita.
The Orchestre national de Lyon are a very good orchestra. You couldn’t fault any of the instrumental playing and the string togetherness has improved by leaps and bounds since Nikolai Szeps-Znaider became the orchestra’s Music Director in 2020. Under the baton of David Afkham, the playing was of impeccable precision, but for all this quality, both Beethoven’s Coriolan Overture and Brahms’ Symphony no. 2 in D major left something lacking. In both works, the string playing may have been technically impressive, but the overall sound was dry. In this repertoire, I would have preferred a rounder, richer sound. In Coriolan, the big, knock-you-into-your-seat crash chords came through with suitable force, but the balance was off in the quieter passages, with the woodwind colour lost under the strings.
The balance in the Brahms was better. It’s a piece full of sunshine and it started well with lovely interplay between horns, flutes, cellos and basses. There were some telling individual contributions, with special mentions for Gabriel Dambricourt’s horn solos and for the cellists’ clear enjoyment of the pizzicato section at the start of the third movement. But there seemed to be little connection between conductor and orchestra. Afkham was acting his part, with little beating of time but plenty of energetic gestures to shape the music. But there was little sign of the musicians actually watching him, and the overall effect was rather too reverent and well-behaved. The symphony made for perfectly enjoyable listening, but this is music capable of stirring the passions far more than was achieved last night.
