Coming back to the Royal Albert Hall for the Proms after a few nights at the Edinburgh International Festival’s main concert venue, Usher Hall, can be a discomfiting experience. The “Nation’s Village Hall” has variable and sometimes unflattering acoustics — solo violinists can sound as if they are playing in an adjacent room from my regular seats at 10 o’clock, if the organ is at 12 — whereas all is clarity and light at the Usher.
The transparency achieved there by Mariss Jansons’s Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G (Jean-Yves Thibaudet the elegant and brilliant soloist), and Daphnis et Chloé Suite No 2, was still something to marvel at; and Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s coruscating account of Mahler’s “Tragic” Sixth Symphony had a visceral impact that swept the audience, and nearly me, off their seats.
Fortunately, my return to the great Kensington colosseum coincided with the BBC Proms’s Strauss weekend, the recently departed Roger Wright’s riposte to 2013’s Ring cycle for Wagner year, of which Daniel Barenboim and his Berlin Staatskapelle, and Nina Stemme — the majestic Brünnhilde — were heroes and heroine. Stemme was back last weekend as Strauss’s nymphet antiheroine, Salome, with Berlin’s other international opera company, the Deutsche Oper, under its Scots conductor, Donald Runnicles. The following night, last Sunday, the Proms fielded its “house orchestra”, the BBC Symphony, under one of the world’s finest Strauss conductors, Semyon Bychkov, in Elektra.
Somewhat to my surprise, in Strauss the two orchestras proved near-equals; indeed, the playing Bychkov inspired from the BBC musicians seemed, if anything, the greater achievement, considering that complete Strauss operas rarely come their way, whereas the Deutsche Oper orchestra play them season in, season out. Runnicles underplayed the sensationalist aspects of Strauss’s first successful opera, confident that his orchestra would be note-perfect. Listening again on BBC iPlayer, Salome’s famous Dance of the Seven Veils was miraculously diaphanous and translucent, suggestively evoking the Princess’s erotic striptease, which Stemme did not perform on stage.
These performances will be available on iPlayer for a month (until Sept 28 and 29), rather than the usual seven days. Listening again proved a startling experience. In the hall, I thought Salome had — by a whisker — the edge, but I enjoyed the broadcast of Elektra much more. Stemme, magnetic to watch and unfazed by the size of the hall, has a soprano that does not take well to the microphone, whereas Christine Goerke, the following night’s Elektra, sounded warmer and more consistently beautiful of tone (though her top can be strident).
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With one notable exception, Stemme’s supporting cast did not make much of an impression in the hall. Stemme and Doris Soffel, a wonderfully vivid Herodias, were the only singers who gave entirely convincing acting performances, unburdened by their scores in a necessarily rudimentary “semi-staging” by Justin Way. (In Elektra, the singers were entirely off-the-book: far more effective). Samuel Youn’s stolid John the Baptist experienced a nasty crack at the top of his bass-baritone, and Burkhard Ulrich sounded thin and weedy as Herod in the hall. A heroic tenor such as Robert Künzli, the following night’s strong Aegisthus, would have been preferable.
Dressed in a giant crimson and black lace tea cosy, Goerke cut a less charismatic figure than Stemme, but her huge voice was always imposing, and she sings some passages of this killer role — including the recognition scene with her brother, Orestes (the noble-toned Johan Reuter) — with a juicier tone than any Elektra I have heard. She’s fearless, if not tireless, and she deserved her ovation, as did Gun-Brit Barkmin’s passionate, Louise Brooks-lookalike Chrysothemis. Felicity Palmer’s raddled, haunted Clytemnestra is still a class act, astonishingly well sung for a 70-year-old. But even she, I thought, was outclassed by the Herodias of Soffel, another veteran, who gave a masterclass in character acting. For me, the Queen of Judaea was the queen of the Proms Strauss fest: the only singer as good in the hall as she is on the broadcast.
Edinburgh International Festival’s outgoing director, Jonathan Mills, leaves with laurels for his concert programming — he surely must be a frontrunner to head the BBC Proms — but a more questionable opera record. His last two offerings showed his tenure at its best and worst.
Gianandrea Noseda’s electrifying concert performance of Rossini’s William Tell — sung in Italian and slightly abridged — fielded meticulously drilled choral and orchestral forces from his excellent Teatro Regio, Turin forces. His leads ranged from Dalibor Jenis’s sturdy and reliable Tell, and Angela Meade’s warmly sung, occasionally metallic Matilde, to John Osborn’s excitingly sung Arnoldo. This riveting performance proved a rebuke to the lazy mediocrity of the Mariinsky Opera’s “new” production of Berlioz’s Les Troyens by Yannis Kokkos; unveiled in May, it looked more dated than the same director’s 2003 staging at the Théâtre du Châtelet, in Paris. The company that astonished us all at Covent Garden in 1987 — as the Kirov Opera, under the direction of Yuri Temirkanov — now, under Valery Gergiev, sounds overworked and under-rehearsed. All three principals — Ekaterina Semenchuk (Dido), Sergei Semishkur (Aeneas) and Mlada Khudoley (Cassandra) — sounded tired and unidiomatic on the first night.
It’s possible that these artists can still be world-class in their native repertoire (Barbican audiences will have a chance to find out in November), but in Verdi, Wagner, Richard Strauss and now Berlioz, they are mediocre, worse than provincial. The Mariinsky Opera needs to stay at home and recharge its worn-out-sounding batteries.