Wagner’s better without words, especially on humans and nature

Alastair Macaulay reviews last night’s Philharmonia concert at the Royal Festival Hall:

Philharmonia Orchestra Human Nature Strauss and Wagner

The Philharmonia Orchestra, under its new principal conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali, is sounding truly noble in this autumn’s concerts: distinguished, lucid, heroic, eloquent. On Thursday 4, at the Royal Festival Hall, its home auditorium, it played familiar late-Romantic music by two great German composers, Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss with marvellously fluent precision.

In both cases – the concert was part of the orchestra’s “Human/Nature: Music for a Precious Planet” cycle – we were taken into music as rapturous thought. Strauss’s Four Last Songs opened the concert; this orchestra that performed this score’s world premiere in 1950 at the Royal Albert Hall, with Kirsten Flagstad as soloist and Wilhelm Furtwängler conducting, eight months after Strauss’s death. Last night’s double bill concluded with Lorin Maazel’s 1987 seventy-minute “symphonic synthesis” of Wagner’s Ring cycle, The Ring Without Words.

Where’s the human/nature theme? In Strauss, poems address times of day and year in the natural world as if experienced at the end of human life. Wagner’s Ring Cycle is profoundly concerned with ecology: with the perversion of the natural world for the pursuit of political and economic power.

Miah Persson, in deep blue, sang the Four Last Songs with the silvery timbre associated with Strauss’s writing for sopranos. Although she doesn’t have the vocal heft to make every line carry over the orchestration (as Flagstad did – there’s a live recording of the premiere), she caught their meditative quality, moving between ecstasy and seraphic calm. She has – just – the chest tones to make the lowest lines register over the orchestration. Rouvali’s conducting suggested that Strauss often meant the orchestra to surround her voice like luscious fabric.

For many people, these Four Last Songs rank high among Strauss’s masterpieces. I wish I could agree. Although I love their sensuous and expressive effects – there are several affecting moments in each song when sudden harmonic effects register like quiet epiphanies -.their overall excess generally makes me feel I’m hearing Rhinemaidens endlessly going down the drain.

The opposite, of course, is true in The Ring without Words. It’s Wagner who, in the Ring, immortalised the Rhinemaidens as enchantingly natural ondines, both innocent and perilous, luring men to their doom while guarding the fateful Rhinegold. They’re perfect symbols of the ambiguity of nature, even of human/nature. So are many of the panoply of mythological creatures who people the four Ring operas. Wagner’s music, while vividly evoking different species and races (gods of Valhalla, Nibelungs, Valkyries, and more), also functions as scene-painting, memory-card, subconscious complexity. Whereas Strauss’s songs wallow lusciously without much alteration, Wagner’s thought is fast-moving: he’s always opening new ideas, like doors in the mind.

But I’m too devoted to his Ring to enjoy much of Maazel’s abbreviated Ring Without Words. This orchestral précis rushes from crisis to resolution, again and again, often with preposterous haste. It races, for examples, through the first act of Die Walküre (the Ring’s second opera), in a jiffy, charging from poignant desire to orgasmic excitement. Yet it simply omits several of Wagner’s most glorious wordless sequences, especially the sublimities of Siegfried Act Three. Sure, the Forest Murmurs of Siegfried Act Two make their full effect as an ideal depiction of nature at its most innocent, a realm of unpolluted potential. Sure, the finale of Götterdämmerung proves a miracle of complex expression, as one form of transcendence follows another. Wagner’s music, however, is too organically structured for this collage of disparate highlights.

Even so, Wagner’s vast spectrum of colours became newly thrilling on Thursday. The Philharmonia’s strings and woodwind are superb – now serene, now febrile. And though the the playing of Philharmonia’s brass section is not quite immaculate – the Ring particularly exposes its brass players – it’s invariably alert, vigorous, subtle.

It became impossible not to hope that Rouvali and the Philharmonia will soon present concert accounts of the complete Ring. Rouvali refreshes Wagner, pervading these excerpt with energy that’s exact, decisive, youthful, and spontaneous.

‘I am a rock’