Under Salonen, Colburn School Orchestra Plays Wagner Like Gods
/By Truman C. Wang
11/5/2019
Esa-Pekka Salonen has a new job title: Professor of Conducting in the Colburn School's new-for-2019 conducting program, in which the aspiring young conductors are called the Salonen Fellows.
In this concert of Hindemith and Wagner, presented by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County, all of us in the audience were treated to an object lesson on how to make the notes come alive from their printed pages and to breath life into each phrase. The performance of the Mathis der Maler Symphony was an inspired one. From the hushed "angelic" opening, to the gravity and the inner drama of the "Entombment", and the cumulative power in the "Saint Anthony" finale -- there was a palpable sense of delight in the playing of young musicians of the Colburn School Orchestra, especially from the winds. The strings, too, had plenty of body and delicacy.
A brief note on the opera Mathis der Maler, from which the symphony is derived: Hindemith used the turbulent world of 16th-century Germany to mirror the Nazi Reich and the artist's relationship to the society around him. But in reality Mathis is a spiritual and historical opera, not a political one. The Nazis banned Hindemith’s “degenerate”, iconoclastic works from the 1920s such as Neues vom Tage, and would have allowed performance of Mathis in 1936 had Hindemith agreed to ‘play their game’. Hindemith refused, and the opera premiered in Zurich, Switzerland in 1938.
The outrage of Hitler, Goebbels, Rosenberg, et al at the “degenerate art” did not extend to Wagner, whose music became an unofficial symbol of the Nazi regime (the friendship between Hitler and Winifred also did not help Wagner’s cause, nor a 1938 performance of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg during the Nuremberg rally to glorify “German art”.) The Teutonic Nibelung saga is equally problematic in its portrayal of Alberich and Mime as greedy, gold-hoarding, evil Jews. Fortunately, one reason for the universal popularity of Die Walküre, the second opera of the Ring Cycle, is that it’s essentially a family tragedy, unsullied by external politics.
The Act I of Die Walküre feels like a blockbuster action movie because of its stormy beginning and ending (Wagner would have been at home in the cinematic medium if he were alive today.) Yet a large part of it consists of narrative. It demands three singers who, together with their conductor, are compelling storytellers in music. The excellent cast, assembled for the November 3 concert performance, told tales of Wälsung distress with imagination and emotional candor.
Tenor Simon O’Neill is the Siegmund du jour who has sung the role around the world. Here he sang with glowing tone and passion, and handled the German text with idiomatic conviction. At age 63, the German mezzo-soprano Waltraud Meier cannot be faulted in terms of her accent or vocal consistency, only nature is to blame for her not sounding like the youthful twin sister Sieglinde. Bass James Creswell, fresh from San Francisco Opera’s Marriage of Figaro as Dr. Bartolo, was a menacing Hunding. It’s a pleasure to hear a genuine bass in this role who could deliver deep sinister low notes.
Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen proved a superb colorist in this music. He reading was dark, tense, brooding in the narrative, and soft, warm, radiant in the Winterstürme ("Spring Song"), ending the act with a shattering sword-pulling climax. The Colburn School Orchestra played like gods, with a glorious brass section augmented by four Wagner tubas.
Truman C. Wang is Editor-in-Chief of Classical Voice, whose articles have appeared in the Pasadena Star-News, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, other Southern California publications, as well as the Hawaiian Chinese Daily. He studied Integrative Biology and Music at U.C. Berkeley.