On the face of it music criticism has often seemed to me a very unimaginative profession. Take this BBCSO concert, for example, the programming of which has largely appeared to have eluded some. Three works, each of which in turn explored man’s relationships with God, the afterlife or where he becomes the hero of his own epic journey through life; it became a rather tidy thread – if you bothered looking for it. If not, then you would indeed have found this programme of Joseph Haydn, Samy Moussa and Richard Strauss a bit of a stretch.
In many ways, Samy Moussa’s Elysium was the most interesting piece here. Written for the Wiener Philharmoniker in 2021, this work is appearing quite widely on concert programmes (indeed, Christian Thielemann, who gave the Barcelona premiere, opened his first Staaskapelle Berlin season with this very piece in October). It is not difficult to hear why because it’s a quite superb work.
Elysium is not strictly Homeric; rather, it alludes to the truer Hellenic ideal where all mortals could aspire to an afterlife in paradise. Nevertheless, what Moussa gives us is music that is vast: it shines with a glowing radiance, and yet has monumental impact; it’s magisterial in size and has enormous dynamic range to fill the space around it. It’s music that appears in contradiction: it can seem motionless at times, then restless at others, pulsating beneath the surface. The tonal colours are massive – nowhere more so than in the opening of the work on huge glissandi string chords which might well suggest the undertones of Bruckner but in the sheer radiance of light had more in common with the opening of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. If Hannu Lintu seemed to let the BBC stings free bow here (when Thielemann prefers a more unison approach) this allowed the music to unfold with even more space and “spherical” complexity (perhaps simplicity, too) than one might otherwise have heard.
Elysium has no theme or motive so the work instead relies on shifts in the orchestral colour and tone. Melodies reappear (such as after the first climax), but do so with different instrumentation; from one wave of sound, another emerges, this time the pulse and volume perceived in new ways: small sound units flower from larger ones, in what often appear to be quite simple figurations. When the climax before the coda finally arrives, the glissandi we heard from the opening is magically transformed into a kind of ecstatic vision of paradise.
Lintu and the BBCSO gave a superb performance of the work – one in which, for once, the first and second violins seated to the left worked in favour of this orchestra’s sound rather than against it (indeed, I’m not at all certain divided strings are at all ideal for Elysium – despite the chords needing a certain width as well as heft). Lintu brought out a wonderful nobility in the brass – especially the horns – and the trumpets scuttled in the coda as they should. The percussion playing was full of detail: the chilling xylophone, the resonant tubular bells and thunderous timpani strokes, embedded in the score, but at the same time so magically unfolding through the orchestral space. Elysium sounds like a very 21st Century work and yet it is so clearly rooted in the monumental sounds of Bruckner, early Schoenberg and Richard Strauss. It is rare for a composer today who manages to span the centuries and yet anchor his music so firmly in his own time; even rarer, I think, for that work to leave such a monumental impression. Elysium does exactly that.
Immediately following Elysium, we got Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Hannu Lintu did surprise me here because we ended up with a beautifully played, even at times ecstatic, performance of this tone poem that made Elysium almost seem a prelude to it. There was no lack of surging power to the opening of ‘The Hero’, horns and strings ocean-deep – a vivid contrast to the pointed and acerbic phrasing that Lintu got from the BBC woodwind in the critic’s section of the ‘The Hero’s Adversaries’. Igor Yuzefovich’s violin solos in ‘The Hero’s Companion’ had a gorgeous tone to them; phrased with sumptuous colour, but shaped with such crystalline clarity, it sometimes felt as if he might have been playing Bach to a lover. It inspired the strings of the BBCSO to play a love scene of uncommon rapture.
‘The Hero’s Battlefield’ (with off-stage trumpets coming back-stage rather than side-stage which would have been rather more ideal) felt sluggish at first, but slinging off the mud from their boots the orchestra fired up some exceptionally vivid playing. The percussion were blistering, trumpet fanfares visceral, those cascading string passages thrillingly done. ‘The Hero’s Works of Peace’ I find the most difficult section of Ein Heldenleben for conductors to bring off – and I can’t say Hannu Lintu did this any better (or worse) than most conductors I hear in this work in the concert hall. The long harp accompaniment that weaves throughout this section often comes undone and it did so here – but the great themes we also hear from Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration also felt less compelling than might have been the case otherwise. Much better was the final section, ‘The Hero’s Retirement from the World’ where Lintu really focused on the individual instruments in the orchestra rather than the bigger picture. What a gorgeous cor anglaise solo (Imogen Davies), where such resignation hovered through the air, and then the redolent beauty and glowing radiance of the duet on the horn and violin. It was all remarkably glorious.
The concert had opened with a work composed exactly one hundred years before Ein Heldenleben – Haydn’s Missa in angustiis, ‘Nelson Mass’ (1798). Composed just after The Creation, and written during a time of Napoleonic domination in Europe, inter-nation wars, and political uncertainty the ‘Nelson Mass’ is one of Haydn’s darker sacred works. It’s opening Kyrie is undeniably powerful; the Benedictus inflamed with blazing trumpets. Drums and a solo organ turn the work to a more sombre, even frightening, world that is so clearly a reflection of its turbulence. Performances, however, do not particularly have to be modern in scale to make this work sound effective; Lintu sized down his orchestra and he adopted speeds that were on the swifter side.
You want a performance of this great mass to sound very distinctive – it’s wonderful sonorities, especially in the Kyrie and Benedictus, should almost sound as if they aren’t of this century. I’m not sure Lintu managed that – trumpets perhaps too rounded in tone, just a little too golden, when one wanted a touch more dissonance, with shards of colour that bit with a sharper edge. The strings did feel febrile, almost nervous – and there was a boldness in the cellos and basses that rumbled through the score.
What considerably lifted the performance were some of the solos although some were better suited to this particular work than others. From the outset, Nardus Williams’s soprano was electrifying – a dark-toned voice, and with effortless control, she was breathtaking in the Kyrie and plangent in the Benedictus. The bass of Derek Welton brought a depth and sonority to “Qui tollis” and his phrasing was meticulous. Laurence Kilsby’s tenor, if never low on beauty, was often shallow on volume. The BBC Symphony Chorus were superb: well balanced (sometimes the tenors can seem over prominent in this mass), and their singing was committed and robust.
The ‘Nelson Mass’, of course, is more than just a choral work. Its very turbulence and drama underscore human resilience in times of war and terror as well. Whatever the ideals in the works of Moussa and Strauss, I wondered if Haydn would have been a better end to this concert?
Marc Bridle
Joseph Haydn – Mass in D minor, ‘Nelson Mass’; Samy Moussa – Elysium; Richard Strauss – Ein Heldenleben
Nardus Williams – soprano; Jennifer Johnston – mezzo-soprano; Laurence Kilsby; Derek Welton – bass-baritone; BBC Chorus; BBC Symphony Orchestra; Hannu Lintu, conductor
Barbican, London, 29 November 2024
Photo: Hannu Lintu © Marco Borrgreve