Birmingham Symphony Hall, 25 August 2014
Klaus Florian Vogt is probably the finest Wagner tenor we have today. There may be one or two other contenders for the position but few who have the heady lyricism combined with the sheer power to thrill the largest of venues.
His strongest characters over the last few years have been Lohengrin and Parsifal, and the evening drew on these. After a very subtle reading of the Good Friday Music from Parsifal under Andris Nelsons, he sang Amfortas! Die Wunde! and Nur eine Waffe taugt, the first so fresh and vulnerable that the pain of Kundry’s kiss seemed eminently real and the final narration radiated nobility as well as the cleanest of diction.
Changing the mood rather drastically we heard the concert version of the Prelude to Act3 of Lohengrin followed by two narrations also from Act3. Hochstes Vertrau’n proved to be heroic as well as deeply human, but it was the glorious outpouring of In fernem Land that galvanised the evening. His lingering over eine Taube, the high clear tones seeming to melt into the air around him, was breathtakingly beautiful. If only we had been able to hear at least the whole of one act, rather than these truncated sections.
Unfortunately this was the one slight draw-back of the evening. I had thought that we had disposed of bleeding-chunk concerts almost fifty years ago, and Wagner is now normally performed, if not whole, then at least in significantly large units and without sudden-death endings. Surely it would have been possible here to have created segues between the items to allow at least the three Parsifal pieces and the two from Lohengrin to be linked without the trauma of sudden endings and bursts of applause?
No such problems after the interval where we heard Elgar’s Second Symphony. The opening movement had great urgency with the music coming to us in warm waves of sound which made the quieter sections all the more poignant. Throughout, Andris Nelsons drew attention to the militaristic under-pinning of so much of the score, with its hints of violence and destruction beneath the potential for celebration. The second movement took this in its stride with a sense of both nobility and loss, looking backwards rather than dare to look ahead. However the future stares us in the face in the driven fury of the Rondo where odd moments of calm don’t last and the military percussion is ever present. The final movement brought some relief but often seemed on a knife-edge as if everything could still go wrong at any moment. A fascinating reading which made much of the wide dynamic range of the hall.
Before the Elgar, Andris Nelsons spoke to us about harpist Robert Johnston who, after 42 years’ service with the orchestra, was giving his final performance in this country before retirement. Alongside the anecdotes, he praised not only Robert’s long service with the orchestra but the sense of community within the orchestra itself which has seen a large number of conductors over nearly half a century while managing to retain its own sense of continuity and integrity.