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March, 2003
Recital - Karita Mattila, soprano, 3/2
The popular Finnish soprano Karita Mattila gave a thoroughly enchanting recital in a program of art songs as varied as her multifaceted talent. The five songs by Duparc have a depth of sentiment rarely found in French music. Ms. Mattila’s rich, radiant voice (with a knockout physique to match) proved an ideal vehicle for these highly emotionally charged mélodies. Similarly, the six Sibelius songs benefited from the soprano’s classical poise and impeccable phrasing. Every note, every phrase was precisely pitched, and tossed off with complete naturalness. Just as the songs describe the many wonders of nature, the voice embodies them to perfection. After intermission, Rachmaninoff’s bittersweet songs were given an intensely passionate, at times heartrending, reading by Ms. Mattila. In these songs, she maintained a great beauty of tone while traversing through the music’s dynamic and emotional upheavals. In the song, “What Happiness”, for example, the basic human dignity remains intact even in the face of great duress and loss Finally, Ms. Mattila let loose, kicked off her heels, and tore through Dvorak’s Gypsy Songs with plenty of fire and magic to spare. The program ended as enchantingly as it began, with a golden rendition of “The Songs My Mother Taught Me” Ms. Mattila offered two encores – “Golden Earrings”, sung in impeccable English, and a cheerful Finnish folk song. Pianist Martin Katz proved a first-rate partner who supported and cajoled his diva from one lyrical height to another, even shared a hearty belly laugh at the end.
The March concert featured a rousing all-Beethoven program with musical portraits ranging from a brave Roman general Coriolanus, and Orpheus’s taming the wild beasts (the Fourth Piano Concerto), to the universal symbol of triumph of good over evil (the C-minor Symphony). With Beethoven’s well-known equalitarian sympathies and contempt for dictatorship, the concert hit the right note with the wildly enthusiastic audience that packed Pasadena's Civic Auditorium, as America prepares to wage war against the evil dictator in Baghdad. All political connotations aside, this was an enjoyable, musically highly satisfying concert. For one thing, I have never heard the Pasadena basses thunder out sforzandos and arpeggios with more vehemence and unison of purpose than in the C-minor Symphony No. 5 and the Coriolan Overture. The level of polish and octane was indeed very high throughout. The Pasadena horns and brasses on their worst day easily surpass their L.A.. Phil brethren on their best day. Conductor Jorge Mester deserves big kudos for his accomplishments. The youngish Finnish pianist Paavali Jumppanen brought a welcome touch of magic and poetry in his thoroughly captivating reading of the G-major Piano Concerto No. 4. Jumppanen’s playing possessed crystalline clarity of articulation and imaginative grace. Particularly memorable were the ravishing tone colors and pianissimos he was able to elicit from the keyboard in the famous “Orpheus-taming-the-beasts” slow movement, that would turn a wild beast into a kitten in about five bars. Like his older compatriot Leif ove Andsnes, of whom I am a great admirer, Jumppanen is a genuine talent to watch. Those who like to decry the death of classical music and relegate it to a museum, far removed from any modern, everyday relevance, should attend a concert like this one. Beethoven’s message of universal brotherhood and freedom is today more relevant and potent than ever, as the wild beast of terrorism rears its ugly head and threatens the freedom of all good people around the world. This concert will
be broadcast on K-Mozart, 105.1FM on Sunday, March 16, 2003
As interesting as the instrumental portion of the program, the raison d’etre of this concert was, no doubt, to showcase the glamorous, drop-dead gorgeous Karita Mattila, who on this occasion wore a long sleeveless dress that made her resemble Marilyn Monroe.
Compared to her generous outpourings in the recital last week, her expression here seemed muted and the voice lacked ease in the long, soaring lines of Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs. It was a commendable reading, full of radiance and warmth, albeit without the ‘float’, the rapturous ecstasy that the finest interpreters of the past brought to these songs. The first song, Frühling (Spring), opened lovingly but failed to blossom. Conductor/fellow compatriot Esa-Pekka Salonen provided an ultra-luxurious cushion of sounds that draped around Mattila’s voice like a force of nature. The duo created magic at the end of “Im Abendrot” (At Dusk), with the voice and the trilling piccolo fusing together and slowly dying away into nothingness, a momentary silence, before the enraptured audience burst into a storm of applauses. Lutoslawski’s Symphony No. 4 is a work of nostalgia looking back on a kaleidoscopic past, a Hero’s Life with more harrowing twists than Richard Strauss’s Ein Heldenleben. Salonen and his L.A. Phil players gave a polished, often probing, reading of this rugged score which deserves entry into the standard repertoire. The program opened and closed with the works of Maurice Ravel. Both Ma mère l’oye (Mother Goose) Suite and La Valse (The Waltz) deal with nostalgia in different ways – one innocent, one grotesque. The orchestral playing, especially the excellent woodwinds, was of the highest caliber throughout.
Photo credit: Robert Millard
Richard Wagner's early Romantic epic Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) is unabashedly melodramatic. Many ambitious directors try to make the "Dutchman" into a larger-than-life gesumtkunstwerk that it is not. Julie Taymor's staging for the Los Angeles Opera features just such larger-than-life symbolisms that border on kitsch; i.e., Daland's ship in a skeletal frame, Dutchman's ghost crew carrying a kabuki-style ghost ship. Daland's giant ship gets tossed about in the storm, while the Dutchman's dingy glides smoothly through the air. And if that isn't confusing enough, Senta walks off with the Dutchman into the sea, instead of meeting her demise (and transfiguration) alone in the waves as per the libretto. The hopelessly befuddled production is redeemable only for its fine cast, led by Russian soprano Mlada Khoudoley's indomitable Senta. In his carefully crafted libretto, Wagner stipulated that Senta is not an ingénue role, but a passionate, fully blossomed woman. Khoudoley more than filled the bill with her incisive singing and gleaming, razor-sharp high notes – a few flat notes under pressure notwithstanding. In Senta’s strophic dream aria, each stanza was sung with more fervor than the last, as if the dream is gradually becoming reality. Senta may be obsessed with a phantom lover, but her emotions are all real.
German bass-baritone Bernd Weikl showed restrained singing as the tormented Dutchman. I had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Weikl's deeply moving Hans Sachs in San Francisco in the mid-1990’s. A tormented soul that he is, the Dutchman is no philosopher by any stretch of the imagination. By concealing his outward desperations and concentrating on the cerebral gestations of Dutchman’s monologue in Act I, Weikl risked putting the audience to sleep rather than engaging their sympathies. As Senta’s jolly, bumptious father, Daland is a role tailor-made for Finnish bass Matti Salminen, whose luxuriously rich tone shone like a bright beacon in the dark, stormy sea. The Act I aria and Act II gold trio offered much welcomed comic relief. Tenor Donald Kaasch, fresh from Chicago Lyric Opera's Thais, sang with great ardor and passion as Senta’s hometown suitor Erik. It was not a pale, whitish sound often heard in this role, but a full-blooded romantic tenor that Wagner demanded (but rarely got).
Rounding off the memorable cast were house regulars Greg Fedderly as a clear-toned Steersman, and Suzanna Guzmán as Mary. The Los Angeles Opera Chorus managed the heroic feat of singing while standing on the wooden skeleton of Daland’s ship without falling off. The ghost crew of the Dutchman’s ship was piped in via speakers, which gave it an eerie, otherworldly sound. Klaus Weise’s conducting could only be described as bottom-heavy and body-weak. The strings lacked body in the many quiet passages, chiefly at the start of the Act II spinning wheel chorus; while the bottom-heavy brasses rendered most of the soft singing inaudible. Great singing is the thing in this “Dutchman”. For some, that alone is worth the price of admission. Remaining dates for Der Fliegende Holländer are April 2, 6, 8, 12. Tickets are $30 to $170. (213) 365-3500, Mon-Sat 10am-6pm..
Reviews by Truman C. Wang
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