ONE of the most haunting moments in all opera occurs when the Marschallin, in Der Rosenkavalier, literally makes time stand still. She reflects on her rising in the middle of the night to stop all the clocks, even as time itself streams unchecked through the hour-glass. It’s a huge imaginative and vocal challenge for any soprano. But on Tuesday, it had a resonance all its own, as Dame Anne Evans had let it be known that this would be her last public performance.
Whether her resolve turns out to be as strong as that of the Marschallin who, equally movingly, steps aside for the young generation to move forward, remains to be seen. And, besides, it just didn’t seem possible.
There was a youthful bloom in the great soprano’s voice and stage presence, a brightness of eye and of enunciation, a sweetness and refinement in her shaping of Strauss’s melodies which surpassed that of many a younger Marschallin.
Sir Charles Mackerras, who had made his own selection of excerpts from Der Rosenkavalier for this Prom, conducted the BBC Symphony Orchestra, drawing the most subtle tones and half tones from Strauss’s score, without a trace of the sentimentality which can clog its pores.
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Two of the extracts — the opening bedroom scene, and the great Presentation of the Rose — were difficult enough to bring off in the physical detachment of concert performance. Yet, by the mere inflection of a woodwind solo, the slightest turn of a singer’s body, the emotional life of every moment was vividly projected. With Katarina Karneus as Octavian and Rebecca Evans as Sophie, there was an outstanding trio for the opera’s lyrical finale; and it led to rapturous applause.
Earlier in the evening, Mackerras had raised the curtain with a lithe performance of Clemens Krauss’s arrangement of Strauss’s symphonic fragment, Die Liebe der Danae. Then, after the stage had been cleared of every orchestral vestige, Stephen Cleobury took over the baton for an enterprising performance of Strauss’s rarely heard choral cantata, An den Baum Daphne, a spin-off from the original ending of his Daphne opera.
The women’s voices of the BBC Singers sounded over-shrill in their high melismas of wonder at the arboreal metamorphosis; and it was something of a relief when the Choristers of King’s College Cambridge were able to refresh the ever-transforming harmonic textures of this remarkable work.