Hall of St Botolph without Bishopsgate
7 November 2013
This is the first of two extremely enterprising – and free! –
lunchtime song recitals from Song in the City dedicated to these great musical dramatists, both born
200 years ago.
Focussing on their songs, rather than aria arrangements, displays
integrity but also presents problems. Neither composer is at his best in the song
form, which is more peculiar for Verdi than Wagner, whose orchestral mastery is
a greater part of his appeal.
The theme of this concert was love and/or obsession, and
stressed the similarities of these contemporaries. A series of dramatised readings
from their letters helped, interspersed with the songs. In these readings, both
composers emerged as an intense Romantic, with Wagner prone to poetic excess and
Verdi crustier but still passionate.
The first two songs even had the same verse, from Goethe’s
Faust, Part One, Gretchen’s spinning song, set most memorably by the young
Schubert, and perhaps set most effectively by Carl Loewe. Against such
competition neither opera composer comes out well.
If this were a competition, it shouldn’t surprise anyone
that Verdi comes off worst, for Wagner wrote the Wesendonck Lieder at a point
where he had achieved miracles within opera, far beyond Verdi’s ambition. Verdi’s songs, and most of Wagner's, are much
earlier.
Surprisingly, the gap between the songs of the young-ish
Verdi and the fully mature Wagner are not as great as we might think. Although
the selections of those Wesendonck lieder heard here were definitely the highlights, the
Italian’s similarly evocative settings around night or longing were also very effective.
We're used to hearing the Wesendonck songs in their orchestral versions, mostly by Mottl, but employing Wagner's advances in orchestration. The piano-accompanied originals, then, are not as interesting, at least on this showing.
Ironically, the concert ended with a song that pianist and
director Gavin Roberts called an Italian approach to love, rather than the heavy ‘Wagnerian’
themes that had gone before. Ironic, because both composers were extremely
high-minded, and if anything Verdi was temperamentally more serious than Wagner. That he
also managed a soubrettish song says less about him being Italian and more
about his interest in depicting a wide range of types of people.
The performances, in this small pretty hall, were uniformly
excellent, singers admirably scaling down to meet the acoustics.
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