The Liebestod from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde is one of music's most famous celebrations of eroticism and joy, an unmistakable emblem of radiance and resolution. But in pianist Thomas Adès's concert with tenor Ian Bostridge at the Aldeburgh Festival, the piece was turned into a consecration of death.
It was the strange alchemy of Adès's programme that transformed the expressive world of Wagner's music. He played Liszt's transcription of the Liebestod, for solo piano, between fragments and songs by Gyorgy Kurtag and Liszt's own Funerailles. The effect was to create a multi-faceted reflection on death and mourning, from Liszt's morbidly obsessive music to the dark tragedy of Kurtag's settings in his miniature song-cycle on Hölderlin's poems. In this context, instead of offering a vision of rapture, Wagner's music was no more than a spectral apparition, a temporary reprieve from an atmosphere of tenebrous intensity, embodied in the brooding power of Bostridge's performance of Kurtag's songs.
The concert was framed by two larger song-cycles: Britten's Sechs Hölderlin Fragmente, and Schumann's Dichterliebe. Both brought performances from Bostridge and Adès of concentration and insight, and both conjured images of the necessity and hopelessness of love.
The emotional trajectory of Britten's settings culminated in the last song, Lines of Life, in which Hölderlin's final image of "peace eternal" was ironised by the bitterness of the music, which refused to resolve and created an ambiguous emotional limbo. In Dichterliebe, Adès's slow, languorous speeds and incisive articulation inspired Bostridge to his most impassioned singing, creating a devastatingly complete portrait of a poet's doomed love, from the heights of erotic infatuation to the desolation of the final song.
There was a notable new song-cycle in another Aldeburgh concert: baritone Chistopher Purves and pianist Andrew West performed the world premiere of Richard Baker's Slow Passage, Low Prospect, to texts by Lavinia Greenlaw. It was music of bejewelled brilliance and clarity, whose glinting piano writing provided a rippling counterpoint to haunting, lyrical vocal lines.
