No Sibelius and no Strauss from the Finnish soprano Soile Isokoski this time. She and her feisty pianist, Marita Viitasalo, had decided instead to present a rare performance of Paul Hindemith’s hour-long song sequence, Das Marienleben (The life of the Virgin Mary), a work they recorded earlier this year.
Hindemith had taken on Rainer Maria Rilke’s long sequence of poems in 1922. But in 1935, in a very different world, he composed an entirely new version — the one chosen by Isokoski. Edgy modernism here gives way to a more ballasted harmonic maturity, and Hindemith at last embraces vocal richness unashamedly.
Having said that, the second version of Das Marienleben can sound laboured unless performed with the grace, subtlety and lyrical strength that Isokoski brought to the music. Like Rilke’s poetry itself, the music doesn’t set out to seduce, or to engage the emotions directly. The reader/listener is moved only through contemplation and inner debate — and so it is with the music.
Lyrical and dramatic, the tough and the tender are not contrasted so much as fused in intellectual paradox. The voice’s supple declamation curves over and around the piano counterpoint, fusing present with past, the intimate with the echo of history. Until the climax of the sequence. The lights were dimmed and darkness covered the earth in Vor der Passion. Here, a stark vocal line levitated over unstable tonality in the spare piano part.
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And in Pietà , Mary’s voice speaks directly, as the being that grew within her now lies across her lap. A single, crushing dissonance uneasily resolves, and the vocal line is slowed, weighed down by grief. One of the work’s very few moments of non-syllabic setting occurs in a melisma of tears, beautifully shaped by Isokoski at the moment of Mary’s death.
It must have been disconcerting for Isokoski to see so many heads inevitably buried in their programme texts. But this is a work that neither seeks nor lives by performer/audience rapport. It yields most of all, perhaps, in private listening.