‘We look to music for its healing qualities and for the balm it brings,” Thomas Allen said, addressing the audience ahead of Sunday’s outstanding performance of Gurrelieder, in which he was cast as the Speaker. Schoenberg’s immense work, dealing with themes of renewal after catastrophe, formed the latest in the series of often remarkable collaborations between the Hallé and the BBC Philharmonic. Hearing it in the aftermath of the terror attacks in Manchester and London heightened its emotional impact, even though the performance had been planned long in advance. “We remember all those most deeply affected,” Allen added, with a catch in his voice.
Pitched somewhere between cantata, song cycle and opera, Gurrelieder resists genre classification. Mark Elder clearly believes drama is the unifying factor, offering an interpretation that balanced beauty with intensity and emphasised the work’s Janus-faced nature. The opening scenes between the doomed lovers Waldemar and Tove were all heady, post-Wagnerian eroticism. The later sections – when Waldemar must face the consequences of cursing God for permitting Tove’s murder – veered increasingly towards modernist fragmentation. With the musicians of both orchestras on wonderful form, the playing combined passion with detail. Elder never sacrificed clarity to decibels: counterpoint remained admirably clear, even when chorus and orchestra were at full throttle.
The cast was superb. Brandon Jovanovich’s Waldemar combined heldentenor heft with lyrical warmth, which allowed his voice to carry easily over Schoenberg’s enormous orchestra and address his Tove, Emily Magee, with the most tender of whispers. She responded to his passion with sensual ardour and lustrous tone. Alice Coote gave the Wood Dove’s narration declamatory weight. James Creswell, replacing the indisposed Johan Reuter, was the superstitious Peasant, Graham Clark the tragic, bitter Klaus-Narr. Even though his sprechgesang was closer to song than pitched speech, Allen sounded particularly beautiful in his tale of the world’s renewal through the forces of nature.
With the Hallé choir augmented by the men of the Edinburgh festival chorus and London Philharmonic choir, the choral singing was tremendous. The opening shouts of the spectral ride made one’s hair stand on end, but the most moving passage came at its close, when Schoenberg drops pace and volume and Waldemar’s men, utterly exhausted, sing quietly of their yearning for eternal rest.
