Page 136 - FINAL_Guildhall Media Highlights 2019-2020 Coverage Book

9 January 2020

LSO/Nathalie Stutzmann – Richard Wagner’s Overture and
Venusberg Music from Tannhäuser & Johannes Brahms’s First

Symphony – Alina Ibragimova plays Felix Mendelssohn’s E-minor

Violin Concerto … LSO Platforms: Guildhall Artists

Thursday, January 09, 2020 Hall, Barbican Centre, London

Reviewed by Alexander Hall

In programming terms, Wagner and Brahms might appear to be ideal stablemates. Full-blooded German
Romanticism, you could argue. In fact, in Vienna, the hub of the musical world in the latter part of the 19th
century, they were polar opposites, with their respective supporters all daggers drawn. What was it that had
the two camps seething with scarcely contained mutual contempt? One of the many ironies of this particular
episode is that Wagner, Brahms’s senior by more than twenty years, was actually the leader of the musical
avant-garde, whereas the younger composer was regarded as the more conservative figure. Experimentation
was pitched against tradition.

We heard a lot of the originality in the older composer’s writing in this performance of the Overture and
Venusberg Music from Tannhäuser, given by the London Symphony Orchestra and Nathalie Stutzmann,
making her debut appearance. She certainly has a keen ear for orchestral colour, relishing the varied
sonorities and bright flashes of pigmentation from wind and brass, especially the will-o’-the-wisp effects in
the Venusberg Music. Although there was plenty of youthful élan and no absence of momentum, I felt that
too often Stutzmann’s head seemed to be ruling her heart. This is music in which the sensual is contrasted
with the spiritual, the carnal with the metaphysical. The opening chorale from horns, clarinets and bassoons
was too loud to suggest moments of inward prayer, and I became increasingly troubled by her predilection
for insistent timpani (a problem in the following concerto too, less so in the symphony). Despite the
admirable clarity of textures, a little magic – and sensual indulgence – was missing.
It was Mendelssohn who first conducted the half-hour long Wagner piece as a stand-alone item in 1846, so it
made good sense to have Alina Ibragimova perform his most famous fiddle concerto as the musical
sandwich here. She started off as swiftly and urgently as I have ever heard it played, making me wonder if
we were about to hear an unusually dramatic and pressing interpretation. In fact, she soon relaxed: this
contrast became a feature of her reading, pushing this concerto away from strictly classical proportions and
towards a more indulgent Romantic vein. She was often quite daring in her choice of dynamics and speeds,
aiming for a maximum degree of flexibility, living entirely in the moment. Towards the upper end of the
dynamic scale her instrument became steel-edged, almost to the point of fierceness, but it was in those
moments of hushed and mellow reflection that Ibragimova was at her most affecting, not least in the warm
and gentle embrace of the slow movement. Despatched with a fine combination of panache and husky
sensuousness, the cadenza offered an impressive display of her sure-footed technique. Perhaps the Finale
could have sparkled a little more, though the main melody was quickly airborne, with intermittent touches of
impishness, Stutzmann providing attentive support throughout.

Living up to expectations is tough at the best of times. As Jane Austen puts it in Sense and Sensibility, “To
wish was to hope, and to hope was to expect.” Quickly seen as the heir apparent to Beethoven, this imposed
an impossible burden on Brahms. The composer was already forty-three by the time the gestation period for
his First Symphony came to an end, and partly because of a perceived thematic resemblance to the Choral
Symphony, it was quickly dubbed ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’.