Vengeance and Death. Medea and Cleopatra. These were the themes that provided the opening works to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s new season that will be devoted to Moments Remembered which will explore the crossroads of music and memory.
The first half of this concert was a little over 30-minutes long but the quality of the performances made it one of the most searing and powerful I can remember in a very long time. Samuel Barber’s Medea’s Dance of Vengeance, taken from the climactic moment of his ballet Medea (commissioned by the choreographer and dancer Martha Graham) has Medea driven to murderous rage by the infidelity of her husband, Jason. Followed by Berlioz’s The Death of Cleopatra, described by the conductor, Edward Gardner, as a short opera, we have a vast soliloquy of startling originality in which the Egyptian queen resolves to commit suicide. In the former work it is the orchestra which is catapulted into a graphic and enormously tense vision of horror and terror; in the latter everything depends on a singer with an ability to dramatize Cleopatra’s descent into that final dissolving heartbeat.
Neither work is really standard repertoire in the UK these days (I’m not sure I have heard the Barber in concert at all) but it would have been difficult to have imagined better performances of either. The Barber, admittedly, is uneven – as much of this composer’s work is. Its opening xylophone is unusual, but against static strings creates a haunting atmosphere. If Strauss’s Dance of the Seven Veils – with which it has a clear comparison – is so obviously more opulent in its textures, and more originally orchestrated, Barber’s tendency towards boniness in the writing, and a certain leanness, suggests the influence of Bartók. But Medea’s vengeance is savage – a maelstrom of swirling strings, wild brass, and bullet-ricocheting side drum. Gardner painted a picture of Euripidean horror, the LPO laying everything out on a vast frieze of three-dimensional sound.
Cantata, or compact opera, there are differing opinions as to the quality of Berlioz’s work, The Death of Cleopatra. The Prix de Rome – on Berlioz’s third attempt at trying to win the prize – did not award him (or anyone else for that matter) first place. The composer’s biographer, David Cairns, has written of the piece being “unpolished”. There may be some truth to the latter, but I think this largely extends to the kind of performance we get of the work and also the medium in which we hear it. Recordings made in the studio have often, although not always, proved underwhelming because they seem dramatically weak; I have often found live performances the opposite of this, but only if the soloist moves away from the concept of this being a pure cantata.
Joyce DiDonato may have given here the finest performance of The Death of Cleopatra I have yet heard – although in doing so I almost entirely missed details everywhere else so dramatically compelling and magnetic was the singing and sheer magnetism of the thought that went into becoming Cleopatra. I can’t quite recall such an immersive performance, one that melded music and text with such purity and drama.
If there are clear upsides to a singer coming on stage and just not standing there as the orchestra starts playing, then there may be downsides to one who is so mesmerising to watch as they become the part, or the role, they are singing at the expense of almost everything else. It’s rather like going into an art gallery and being so drawn into one painting you leave before seeing the rest of them. Often the mind is just incapable of processing more than one principle overwhelming emotion. When you are pulled into a performance and become entirely transfixed by watching every facial gesture, every arm movement, every psychological and emotional thought being played out before even a word has been sung the captivation is impossible to escape.
The psycho-dramatic brilliance, the narration of the address to the Pharaohs, the religioso terror that is partially invoked, the biting of the asp – all were conveyed by DiDonata in shades of opulence, and breathtaking colour. The voice could be velvety and deep, and dynamics were so pointed and subtle as to sometimes float into the hall and disappear like ether or to move liquidly like poison through the veins. Where the orchestral playing was telling was at the opening of the Méditation, with its mournful and thrumming rhythm so deftly and beautifully played by the strings – that pulse just hypnotic. DiDonato’s last heartbeat – to a dying pianissimo on the double bass – was so fatally breathless, and unfaltering in its dissolution. It couldn’t have been more profoundly different to the violence which is implied in the final word of this cantata, “Caesar”. A tour de force by Joyce DiDonato that will long remain in the memory.
I think I enjoyed the performance of the Eroica after the interval rather more than some people – even if it was not a radical one. This was not an Eroica that hung fire as many can do, and neither was it one that was dense in its textures with Edward Gardner opting for a rather Beethovenian sized orchestra – with natural trumpets, and antiphonal strings.
The opening chords might not have been the most massive one had heard, but the richness of the string tone (which would be a hallmark of the playing throughout the performance) was enough to allow Gardner to articulate accents that were carved with a very sharp edge. Woodwind playing was superb (dynamics just right). The stormy middle section of the first movement had a dramatic power that bordered on the dissonant – as Beethoven rather intended it should do – but it never felt as if textures were out of balance. The Funeral March was more fleet than usual – and perhaps because of this the double fugue lacked some depth of sonority, especially in the double basses (although Gardner’s reduction in string size may simply have made hearing the Czech Phil more recently, with a fuller string section, an unreasonable comparison).
The Scherzo was full of vitality, with buoyancy in the oboe and colour in the flute, and a beautiful interchange between horns and strings full of inner voice details. There was nothing undramatic about the opening of the final movement – a cascade of notes unfurling in vivid technicolour, and an explosion on the woodwind, brass and timpani (using hard sticks throughout the performance). The fugue was thrilling. A dashing final close was fiery as it surged presto-like to a its end.
Marc Bridle
Barber – Medea’s Dance of Vengeance; Berlioz – The Death of Cleopatra; Beethoven – Symphony No.3, Eroica
Joyce DiDonato (mezzo-soprano); London Philharmonic Orchestra; Edward Gardner
Royal Festival Hall, London, 25 September 2024
All photos by Mark Allan/LPO