There are few composers with an innate ability to write so captivatingly for the human voice as Richard Strauss. Towards the very end of his career, in 1947, he offered a bit of personal analysis: “I may not be a first-rate composer, but I am a first-class second-rate composer.” Wherever the debate may settle over such rankings, there is no doubt that Strauss spent an entire lifetime honing his craft. At the age of just six, in 1870, before Wagner had even completed his Ring cycle, he wrote his first song, Weihnachtslied. His Vier letzte Lieder, composed in the aftermath of worldwide destruction and entry into the atomic age, represent a last flowering of German Romanticism. Yet there are two anomalies here. One is that although these four last songs were all written between May and September of 1948, they were not designed to be part of a set and indeed Strauss himself never specified a particular order. The other is that there is actually a fifth song, Malven, written in the same year for the soprano Maria Jeritza, known as The Moravian Thunderbolt, who in 1912 had created the role of Ariadne in Ariadne auf Naxos, and who kept the score hidden until after her death in 1982. The title, Vier letzte Lieder, was provided not by the composer but by his friend Ernst Roth, who published the four individual pieces as a single unit in 1950, having substituted the word “last” for the original “orchestral”.
As part of the diamond anniversary celebrations of the Nash Ensemble, Lucy Crowe sang these four songs in the traditional sequencing in an arrangement by the Australian composer James Ledger. It was the Nash Ensemble that premiered this version in 2005 and staged it again at the Wigmore Hall, together with Lucy Crowe, in February 2019. Now arrangements have a habit of shifting the qualities of a more familiar sound-world. Most of the magical effects which Strauss attained in the version for full orchestra, such as the haunting solo passage for horn in September, the role of the solo violin in Beim Schlafengehen, and the fluttering of the flute in Im Abendrot evoking a pair of larks rising heavenward, retain their structural importance in this chamber iteration for thirteen players. However, this is a work which rather like Brahms’s Third Symphony is suffused with an autumnal glow, and in which the dappling of light and shade often yields shimmering textures, mirroring the waning powers of vision and hearing. For me, Ledger’s version operates with rather too many primary colours that give individual instrumental voices undue prominence, when it is the human voice that should always command attention. Softness too, in the accompaniment shaped by Geoffrey Paterson, was sometimes in short supply.
Lucy Crowe’s voice has lost little of its peachy flavour and coruscating brilliance. She negotiated the challenging tessitura of Frühling, which takes the soprano from middle C to B above the stave, with seamless power and assurance, soaring majestically in the line “von deinen Bäumen und blauen Lüften”. I was struck too by elements of ecstasy with which she coated the textures in this first song, capturing the “miracle before me”, as the poet Hermann Hesse recalls the exhilaration of spring. Here though, and elsewhere too, the words were not always ideally clear, the all-important consonants in German not given full weight.
In these songs a uniform approach rarely repays dividends. They represent a farewell to life, yet encompass considerable emotional territory. Crowe was alive to all the subtle shifts in mood and sentiment, most notably in the concluding line of September, with its dynamic downturn for the reference to wearied eyes. Again, she ascended heroically in the final stanza of Beim Schlafengehen, where the unguarded soul seeks to soar free in flight. The creamy opulence of Crowe’s top register was a constant delight throughout. It was very much an operatic view of the work which therefore sacrificed some of its intimacy and inwardness. Ideally, one would have wished for a deeper colouring of the chest tones for a line such as “es dunkelt schon die Luft” in the final song, in which I also missed a feeling of desolation for “in dieser Einsamkeit”. Yet there could be no questioning of Crowe’s commitment or powers of communication.
Sixty years during which the Nash Ensemble has graced chamber music in London and beyond deserve something of a birthday present. My only quibble is that David Matthews’s Serenade and Tango for string quintet is so brief. At just five minutes in duration, it was over almost in a flash, opening with some beguiling Ravel-like sonorities and moving through contrasts of deeper introspection and forward momentum to a concluding tango-like episode, charged with suitably percussive sounds from the string players. In the final two bars there is a tribute to the founder and guiding spirit of the Nash, where the viola plays the notes A and F to represent Amelia Freedman.
This was followed by the Prelude to Strauss’s final opera Capriccio, which takes the form of a string sextet. It is an unmistakably valedictory work and might almost have been a sketch for the later Metamorphosen. The Nash players took full advantage of the harmonic palette and rich instrumental textures to deliver a satisfying blend of polyphonic colour, the quivers, shivers and shudders of the central section being delivered with particular urgency.
Earlier, Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll had opened this concert. The composer had intended this serenade as a birthday surprise for his second wife Cosima, positioning his thirteen instrumentalists on a staircase leading up to her bedroom. By its very nature the piece should slowly and gently envelop the listener in a warm embrace. Here, it very much sounded as though the players were already inside the bedroom. There was much individual virtuosity on display, although the full-fat treatment proved to be rather like that irritating alarm-clock that tears you away from the arms of Morpheus.
If 1840 was Schumann’s year of song, 1842 was the year in which the composer explored new opportunities for expression through chamber music. His Piano Quintet in E flat, like so many of his other works, was written in a white-hot fit of inspiration and sketched in only five days. It is extrovert and exuberant in character but skilfully marries canonical and fugal passages with the kind of passionate Romantic lyricism so typical of Schumann. Led spiritedly by Stephanie Gonley, this performance satisfied at all levels and was for me the highlight of these celebrations as the Nash Ensemble moves into its seventh decade. In the words of the poet Byron: “Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean – roll!”
Alexander Hall
Wagner – Siegfried Idyll for chamber orchestra; Schumann – Piano Quintet in E flat, Op. 44; David Matthews – Serenade and Tango for two violins, viola, cello and double bass (commissioned by the Nash Ensemble; world premiere); Richard Strauss – Prelude to Capriccio, Op. 85 for string sextet; Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs), arranged by James Ledger for soprano and ensemble
Lucy Crowe (soprano); Members of the Nash Ensemble – conductor, Geoffrey Paterson
Wigmore Hall, London, 11 January 2025
Photos: Nash Ensemble/Lucy Crowe © Wigmore Hall