Elgar Impresses Once More in Germany
19th July, Kurhaus, Baden-Baden
Brahms Songs and Elgar Piano Quintet
Joyce DiDonato: Mezzo-soprano. Yannick Nézet-Séguin: Piano. Marieke Blankestijn: Violin. Maia Cabeza: Violin. Nimrod Gurtz: Viola. William Conway: Cello.
While London was enjoying the first night of the Proms and grappling with a worldwide collapse of digital services, Germany was rediscovering Elgar’s greatest chamber work and realising how good it is. Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra and New York’s Metropolitan Opera, has championed the Piano Quintet on both sides of the Atlantic by playing with the principal string players of whichever orchestra he is conducting, in this case, the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
Hearing Elgar’s music played entirely by non-English players instantly frees it from the fetters of preconception. This work especially benefits. Written in the grim final months of World War I (when his music was banned in Germany), the Piano Quintet is Elgar’s complex response to reaching his sixties amid global chaos, reaching back to his memories of studying and being in love in Leipzig in the 1880s, and modelling his most extended chamber work on Schumann and Brahms.
Nézet-Séguin directs a week-long festival in Baden-Baden called La Capitale de l’Été, reflecting not only the spa town’s closeness to Strasbourg across the River Rhine but also its nineteenth-century reputation as the favoured summer holiday retreat for fashionable Parisians. In the Kurhaus (Cure House), celebrating its bicentenary this year, they could take the waters, lose money at the casino, and listen to top performers in the concert room next door. Brahms played there (and finished his first and third symphonies in the town). So did Johann Strauss, but Mendelssohn was not asked back because his concerts were so successful the casino’s takings went down.
The present-day audience in the Kurhaus was initially suspicious of the Elgar, audibly scornful when Nézet-Séguin called him the English Brahms. Forty minutes later, they were convinced and looked rather stunned as their assumptions crumbled. The complexity of its counterpoint, the energy and passion, and the beautiful but deeply troubled melodies won everyone over—helped by the emotional investment of the players. That was true too of the way Joyce DiDonato sang the two Brahms songs with viola, Op. 91, and the late Four Serious Songs. She was so compelling that the words “oh death” in the penultimate song were too much for one elderly lady who made for the exit.
The next evening DiDonato and the others made their way along the stream to the modern Festival House, the concert hall built on the back of what was Baden-Baden’s railway station in Brahms’ day. There they and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe gave performances of Mahler’s Rückert Lieder and Fourth Symphony that were, in my view, the finest and most intricately sensitive I have ever heard. My opinion was coloured by following the rehearsals closely, but there were enough similar remarks from those nearby in the audience to convince me that I was fully justified. DiDonato had never sung Mahler before. Nézet-Séguin, who conducts with supreme insight, persuaded her, and with her voice at the best moment of maturity, full of strong colours, it was an inspired decision.
