Zubin Mehta, who turns 85 this April, and whose long career has been steeped in big Romantic scores, was also director of the Bavarian State Opera for eight years, so it was no surprise to see him at the helm in a programme of Richard Strauss and Schubert given by the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. But without knowing much about the background to this particular song cycle and this particular symphony, which online viewer would ever have thought that more than 120 years lay between their composition? Yet they share a very similar idiom and both composers wrote so winningly and affectingly for the human voice.
One might easily have banished all thoughts of a raging pandemic, given that not a single face mask was in evidence and that the conductor kissed his soloist Camilla Nylund’s hand at the end of her performance. But then the forces assembled on stage were relatively modest (33 strings), and the blue-lit empty auditorium of the Nationaltheater lent a certain chill to the air, almost as though the whole basis of the Romantic spirit was being questioned.
Before she began the Four Last Songs, I did rather wonder whether Nylund was herself sending out mixed messages, clad as she was in a dark blue gown with a pink shawl and matching pink satin shoes. Nostalgia and the remembrance of things past lie at the heart of this metaphysical sunset. Nylund used her voice intelligently throughout, moving from the fresh radiance of the first song through the darker, more subdued shadings in the rest of the cycle. She was always a little on the cool side, her silvery timbre matched by the bright-toned violin solo from Markus Wolf in Beim Schlafengehen, but she opened out majestically at the start of the final stanza of Im Abendrot for “O weiter, stiller Friede!”.
A plaudit for the sensitive video direction by Christoph Engel. Nothing distracted from the singer and her words. No constant switches of camera angle; instead slow steady zooms from the middle distance and a single-minded focus on what mattered musically. Mehta was entirely unobtrusive in his accompaniment, seated throughout, constantly shaping the inner string voices and highlighting the wind counterpoint.
For the Schubert symphony there was an unusual orchestral layout: immediately surrounding the conductor a semi-circle of flutes, oboes (behind which sat the two horns), bassoons and clarinets, and then the strings including antiphonal violins, with trumpets and trombones banished to the back of the platform. All this yielded very transparent textures and gave special prominence to the woodwind choir as a whole, even if there was a palpable loss in heft to the string sound. Yet the trombones, which Schubert uses in all four movements and never only in a supportive role, were often clearly in the picture.
I was less persuaded by Mehta’s tendency to see all four movements as variations of a walking pace. Nothing was ever hurried, yet he moved swiftly through the Luftpause in the second movement without ever exploiting the drama that led up to it. This entire movement emerged as a quite jaunty stroll, bright and songful, recalling the composer’s Das Wandern ist des Müllers Lust, and picked up again in the Ländler-like qualities of the Scherzo. In the Trio section the preceding earthiness gave way to something very grand, like a polonaise at the Russian Imperial Court. The Finale was something of a slow burn, the cumulative power coming from a tempo once set and then adhered to, but with those seemingly endless string triplets picked out as important detail rather than merely chugging away in the background.
This performance was reviewed from the Bayerische Staatsoper live video stream
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