About us / Contact

The Classical Music Network

London

Europe : Paris, Londn, Zurich, Geneva, Strasbourg, Bruxelles, Gent
America : New York, San Francisco, Montreal                       WORLD


Newsletter
Your email :

 

Back

Easy listening

London
Barbican
03/03/2001 -  
Franz Schubert: Non t’accostar all’urna, La pastorella al prato, Mio ben ricordati, Da quel sembiante appresi, Vedi quanto adoro
Jouni Kapainen: Runopolku
Henri Duparc: L’invitation au voyage, Phylidé, Chanson triste
Richard Wagner: Attente, Tout n’est qu’images fugitives, Les adieux de Marie Stuart

Karita Mattila (soprano), Malcolm Martineau (piano)

Karita Mattila’s recital, part of the Barbican’s Great Performers series, was always going to have a bit of a problem. The Barbican Hall, where it took place, is too large for an intimate programme, but a full evening of operatic bleeding chunks is hard on both the audience and the singer. The resulting compromise, concert arias by Schubert (in Italian) and Wagner (in French), surrounding a modern Finnish song cycle and three of Duparc’s warhorses, was a fine showcase for Mattila’s voice, but sold short both her communicative and her dramatic skills. Mattila, of course, has a glamorous presence and great charm (think of an extroverted Anne Sophie von Otter or Renée Fleming without the hairspray) and is perfectly able to hold a large audience on her own. Few of the audience, who had after all shown up to see and hear her, would have been disappointed. But she is far too intelligent a singer to make something out of nothing, and most of this programme was nothing much.

Still, it all went down easily enough. The five Schubert Italian songs were neatly done, starting with a gently acerbic elegy, Non t’accostar all’urna, though an upbeat but implicitly elegiac pastoral, La pastorella al prato, to two undramatic texts by Metastasio and a final scena by the same poet, Vedi quanto adoro, Dido begging Aeneas not to leave her. This was the only piece in the set with any character, and Mattila sang it with passion. But this Dido is two-dimensional compared with Purcell’s or Berlioz’s, and there was never space for her Mattila to do more than express a single emotion. Suicidal heartbreak is quite serious, of course, but you kept hoping that she would be able to break out beyond classical rhetoric and vocal intensity into something fully human. Though that’s not what Metastasio is about, and his text doesn’t push Schubert to the complexity of feeling in the music that he achieves in his Lieder cycles.

It’s hard to say very much about the cycle by Jouni Kapainen (born in 1956) on a single hearing. It is in an idiom that looks in overall form to the German Lieder tradition, and in detail and texture to Sibelius (slowly transforming broken chords at various speeds and a general sense of Nordic romanticism, plus the runes implicit in the title) and to some of Kapainen’s Finnish and Scandinavian peers. The texts are poems by Lauri Otonkoski, a major Finnish poet, and they evoke the modern poet’s life, pulling at the tension between the enormity of the world, with war and pain on the one hand and the grandeur of nature on the other, and the fine grain of everyday life. Mattila sang and performed dramatically, dropping her gold lamé cloak at the end of the first number -- a kind of inverse invocation to the muse confronting the poet with blank urban walls to write on -- to reveal a Luluish outfit. Her singing was often brightly abrasive, reinforcing what might have been alienated abstraction in the music. She deserves enormous credit for making you want to hear it again.

The Duparc songs, in contrast, are all about showing off the singer’s voice. Mattila’s singing had the smallest edge to it, avoiding complete blandness while still retaining its beauty, at times to the detriment of the consonants. But there was little drama, and she was right not to try to add any. The Wagner songs, written in the year when he was planning The flying Dutchman were full of drama, two genre pieces, including L’attente more famously set by Saint-Saéns, and a scene, Les adieux de Marie Stuart which is full of promise of Senta. This at last gave Mattila something to fill the hall with, and to fill out a character with.

Malcolm Martineau, the accompanist, was never unobtrusive, but never upstaged Mattila. He probably made the piano part in the Schubert and Duparc at least sound more interesting than it was, and provided a dynamic context for Mattila’s singing throughout. It was entirely appropriate (though he didn’t look entirely comfortable with it) that Mattila leaned on him as she sang a final unaccompanied Finnish folksong as an encore.


H.E. Elsom

 

 

Copyright ©ConcertoNet.com